And, in short order, that was it for the Chicken Box. “When my band started getting better,” he told Evan Smith, “the nightclubs started hiring us, so I dropped the day job and took on a night job. Which, of course, annihilated my grades, but they were pretty much annihilated anyway.”
The Twi-Lites opened for Ace Cannon and Jimmy Reed at the Koko Palace, and it must have been a Road-To-Damascus experience for the boys.
Or, as Rolling Stones saxophonist Bobby Keys, a native of nearby Slaton, phrased it upon getting a taste of the rock ‘n’ roll high life at the tender age of 13, “It beat the shit out of Pony League baseball and the Methodist Youth Fellowship.”
On the Strip kids get lit
So they can have a real good time
Come Sunday they can just take their pick
From the crucifix skyline
— Dixie Chicks, “Lubbock Or Leave It”
The flatter the land oh yes the flatter land but of course the flatter the land and the sea is as flat as the land oh yes the flatter the land the more yes the more it has may have to do with the human mind.
— Gertrude Stein
We grew up with two things pounded into our brains from the day we were born. One is, God loves you, and he’s gonna send you to Hell. The other is that sex is dirty, evil and nasty and filthy and sinful and bad and awful and you should save it for the one you love. So it’s no wonder we were all schizoid maniacs.
— Butch Hancock
It’s impossible to appreciate the arc of Joe Ely’s life and music without a parallel appreciation for where they are rooted. Ely was born in Amarillo in 1947, in a house set equidistant between the BNSF switching yards and Route 66. When he was 11, his parents moved 120 miles south to Lubbock, the “Hub City,” situated in the heart of the South Plains, in the southern end of the Texas Panhandle.
The area was — and is — characterized by an almost unalloyed, oceanic immensity. Distant, ruler-straight horizons bisect the earth and sky in every direction. As Butch Hancock, Ely’s fellow tunesmith, has famously remarked, “You can see 50 miles from anywhere in Lubbock, and if you stand on a tuna fish can you can see 100 miles.”
“The wheel must have fallen off the wagon,” people have remarked upon considering Lubbock’s seemingly arbitrary location.
To the east, the limits of the country are marked by the Caprock, a dramatic escarpment that runs down the spine of the Panhandle. To the west, the land blends seamlessly into the enigmatic vastness of the Llano Estacado. Spanish conquistadors crossing the Llano had to drive stakes into the earth periodically so they could retrace their steps across the featureless expanse. Even though Lubbock boasts over 200,000 citizens today, it’s still possible to have the slightly disquieting experience of standing in a neighborhood street and being able to look past the city limits out to the horizon beyond.
There is no insulation from the elements in west Texas. You can see the weather coming for miles. Frigid blue northers, torrential thunderstorms, equatorial heat and murderous hailstorms are all part of the package. As is the dust. The red-and-umber-colored dust has found its way into the craws of generations of west Texas musicians, and into their songs as well. Ely still remembers as a boy seeing Jerry Lee Lewis pounding the keyboard on a flatbed trailer outside a Pontiac dealership in the midst of a howling dust storm.
And then there is the ceaseless, insinuating wind. (One of Ely’s earliest songs, included on Silver City, is a bubbly little tune called “Windy, Windy, Windy”.)
“The wind was always blowing,” Ely told writer Richard Gehr. “There was something kinda really eerie about it. There’d always be a branch scraping on the window all night and the screen door would just go bam! bam! bam! You’d be in bed and hear this scratching and moaning going through the house. The air was full of dirt and static electricity.”
The air was full of other things as well. Two of the most celebrated events in Lubbock’s civic history (given far more notice at the time than a local-boy-made-good named Buddy Holly) were the Lubbock Lights, the UFO-like phenomena that buzzed the plains in the early 1950s; and the massive 1970 tornado that ripped through the heart of the city. (“Some said it was the ghost of Buddy,” sang Terry Allen in his song commemorating the catastrophe, “Some said the ghost of Cain/Some said the soul of the Prodigal Son/Is just comin’ back home again.”)
Today it’s hard to imagine the isolation in which Ely, Hancock, Allen, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Waylon Jennings, Bob Wills, Roy Orbison and the rest of generations of west Texas musicians grew up.
There was no internet, of course — no MySpace, YouTube, iTunes, Playstation and all the rest of the modern media rattle and hum. No fax machines or cell phones or FedEx. Cable TV meant watching the news from Amarillo and Albuquerque. Radio was either the local DJ who broadcast from Mackenzie Park out by Prairie Dog Town or the big clear channel stations such as XERF down on the Mexican border. Even telephone communication was spotty if the lines went down out on the llano. The only reliable connections to the outside world were the highways and the train tracks.
