The Flatlanders had gone their separate ways by then, after one recording session in Nashville led to a release that only saw the light of day — briefly — on eight-track tape. (In 1990, the sessions would be released on Rounder Records as More A Legend Than A Band.) Three decades after they disbanded, the Flatlanders resumed their career with a song on the soundtrack of Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer and a pair of albums of new material, along with the release of a live 1972 set recorded at the One Knite in Austin. “A complete lack of ambition” is how Ely jokingly dismissed the long hiatus in Texas Monthly. “Each one of us has a small lack of ambition, but together we have a monstrous lack of ambition.”
One night in 1974, Ely put together a band for an impromptu fill-in gig at a Lubbock watering hole called the Main Street Saloon which wound up being the nucleus of an ensemble that rocked with a legendary ferocity for the next eight years. It was the first of at least four crackerjack bands that would flesh out Ely’s growing repertoire over the years. His music would shade from honky-tonk country to full-throttle rock ‘n’ roll to a beguiling border/gypsy fusion informed by norteno music, the no-man’s-land fiction of Cormac McCarthy, and the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca.
Over the years, Ely made at least sixteen albums on his own, four with the Flatlanders, two with Los Super Seven, and a cast album from the play Chippy (which starred Ely, Jo Harvey & Terry Allen, Robert Earl Keen and Butch Hancock, among others). Everyone from the Clash to Bruce Springsteen sang Ely’s praises, but his record companies and commercial radio never had a clue what to do with him.
These days, after all those albums for other people and the millions of miles of touring (he claims he once sent his booking agent a map for Christmas), he finds an immense satisfaction in simply working on his own projects at his own pace in his home studio outside of Austin.
But right this minute, Ely is back out there, on the road as part of a songwriters’ tour with Lyle Lovett, Guy Clark and John Hiatt. It’s a continuation of an on-again/off-again onstage collaboration that has occupied about a decade at this point.
He’s out there somewhere. Maybe in a hotel coffee shop, mulling over the events of the day and jotting down a scrap of lyric on the torn corner of a paper placemat. Maybe it’s late at night, and he’s circling a pool table somewhere downtown, looking for the perfect three-ball combo.
Perhaps he’s tuning his guitar in a dressing room before tonight’s show, eyeing the deli tray and wishing he had a cigarette. Outside the door, he can hear the murmur of the audience outside, and perhaps he is reminded of the soft rumble of surf on the shore of an ocean he could barely have imagined as a boy.
He might be sitting in a hotel room late at night, vaguely pissed off and lonesome, missing his wife and daughter and decent Mexican food. Wondering why he ever got into this racket. There’s a rerun of “M*A*S*H” on the television, or an infomercial promising him washboard abs, or a Pentecostal preacher with hair like a Dubuffet sculpture. Restless, wanting to be somewhere else, the night over, this city — what city is it again? — behind him.
It could be he’s rolling down the road at ten past three in the morning, fast asleep in the belly of a tour bus, another iron monster on the interstate, rolling past the exit ramps and small dark towns dreaming their small town dreams. He’s dreaming, too…
Maybe he’s drunk somewhere, though he really doesn’t drink that much, laughing with friends and old compadres, making up new lies and making all the old lies sound true one more time. Someone pulls out a guitar and says, “Hey, here’s a new one…” He’ll be hungover in the morning, but the morning is very far away…
He’s out there. Tonight. Just like he always dreamed of being. “I never set out to go and do anything on a grand scale,” he says. “I just happened to be able to go from city to city and play shows. There’s a kind of fulfillment in just being able to stay on the road and play music every night.”
He’s out there tonight…
ND contributing editor John T. Davis lives in Austin, but he hails from a long line of Lubbock-born school teachers and football coaches.
