Living in cultural isolation, under the shadow of the Miracle Mile of Lubbock’s collection of massive churches, kids had to make up their own fun or else go quietly mad. It was a risky proposition. “Any kind of erratic behavior is considered not moral,” Terry Allen told author Christopher Oglesby. “And the list of what is considered deviant behavior is incredibly long in that part of the country.”
“When we were dating,” playwright and actress Jo Harvey Allen told Oglesby, “Terry would pick me up and say, ‘Run for your life!’ Our whole date would be just total make-believe, running and hiding all night long!”
“At night the city was ours, because it all closed down,” songwriter Jo Carol Pierce told Richard Gehr.
The sense of play, and the homespun notion of possibilities that have always been central components to Ely’s music, were born out of hardscrabble necessity.
Kids who could drive would park their cars in a circle out in a distant cotton field, and everyone would tune to the same radio station and dance in the pool of the headlights. Boys would dare each other to jump between the boxcars of the trains that rumbled through town. Girls would lay out their best clothes when tornado season rolled around in case they met any cute guys in the city storm shelters. Teenagers cruised ceaseless peregrinations around the Hi-D-Ho Drive-In, and kids like Ely, their eyes fixed on distant horizons, drank endless cups of coffee at Broadway Drug and at the IHOP on 19th Street. Sharon Ely recalls making an ensemble of life-sized dolls to keep her company during an interlude when all of her friends had moved away.
Creative people in Lubbock tended to congregate, as much out of a need for reinforcement as anything else. Ely, Gilmore and Hancock — who would go on to form a lifelong musical brotherhood — hung out with kindred free spirits at a rent house on 14th Street. “It was one of those houses where there was always somebody asleep and there was always somebody awake,” Butch Hancock recalls.
The Flatlanders coalesced out of a similar scene. Gilmore (the country guy) introduced Ely (the rock guy) to Hancock (the folk guy). One day in 1968, Ely picked up a bedraggled hitchhiker out on the Tahoka Highway. His name was Townes Van Zandt and all he was carrying in his backpack were copies of his first album. Ely put the disc on the turntable and he, Hancock and Gilmore promptly devoured it. The trio’s shared affinity for a life beyond the circle of sky and prairie, and their inherent distaste for the walls between musical genres — they couldn’t break the rules because they didn’t know there were any rules to begin with — led to one of the most celebrated collaborations in Texas music.
And music was the escape hatch. Once Ely found out he could make music, and make money doing it, the world expanded exponentially.
“I probably would have been in Huntsville [penitentiary] if I hadn’t discovered music, because Lubbock can be such a desolate and desperate place,” he reflects. “Meeting Butch and Jimmie and going across the ocean and finding these other worlds…it really set me free from having to deal with that kind of depression. All of a sudden, it was like, I guess I’ll go back to Lubbock sometime, but it’s not the only place there is.”
In the late ’60s, as the decade turned, Ely was awakened to possibilities. He had just escaped being drafted and sent to Vietnam. Remembering when he walked out of the Army induction center after being given a 4-F, he still remembers the air seeming clearer and the leaves on the trees looking greener. “It was like you were surrounded by a firing squad,” he reckons, “and everybody missed.”
He was a free man, he realized. And there was something else: If he knew anything on God’s green Earth, he knew it was time to get out of that town.
He lived more in an hour than most men in their lives
He never preached a sermon, and an angel he ain’t
But anyone can tell you he’s a hard luck saint
— Joe Ely, “Hard Luck Saint”
And he did. And he kept going. He rode his thumb and jumped on boxcars, following the routes of Woody Guthrie and the Delta bluesmen, just to see what they saw. He hitchhiked out to Venice, California, and bought a beat-up old Gibson from a surfer speed freak “who needed speed worse than he needed a guitar,” Ely recalls. The guitar had seashells glued on it; Ely pried them off and busked for spare change on the beach and in the bars. (He still has the guitar; you can see it on the cover of his second album, Honky Tonk Masquerade.)
He slept on the Staten Island Ferry and lived in a basement full of theater props off Astor Place in New York City, then toured Europe as part of an experimental theater cast. He hitchhiked from Texas to New England just to watch the fall leaves turn. He was as carefree as Moby Dick’s narrator Ishmael, who would follow funeral processions because they made him feel so alive.
Ely is still the only guy I know who ever, no-shit, really did run away and join the circus. Back in Lubbock for a short sojourn in 1974, bored out of his mind after only two days in town, he signed up for a season with the Ringling Brothers Circus, where his duties included tending the llamas and the World’s Smallest Horse.
“I hated that goddam horse,” he recalled decades later. “Little bastard would bite me on the kneecap.”
(There are pictures of Joe and his animal pals inside the cover of Silver City, which also includes the song “Indian Cowboy”, inspired by his circus tenure.)
