Jimmie Dale Gilmore – Defying gravity
But from Gilmore’s numinous tenor, to the band’s Zen-like originals and musical ecumenism — which encompassed Western swing (Gilmore’s “Not So Long Ago”), Cajun and old-time music (covers of “Jole Blon” and of Jimmie Rodgers and Carter Family favorites) — the album was positively mind-expanding. Add to that the dayglo mystagogy of their cover of Ed Vizard’s “Bhagavan Decreed” — replete with tropes such as “You can burn your brain cells out just trying to get higher/But you’ll find the highest place is underground” — and the proceedings qualified as a bona fide natural high.
Despite the record’s preponderance of surreal imagery, Plantation saw fit to ship “Dallas”, Gilmore’s portentous personification of the Texas city, to country radio. With next to no promotion, the single stiffed, but that turned out to be the least of the Flatlanders’ problems. Plantation released the album only on 8-track tape, under the title Jimmy Dale & the Flatlanders (misspelling Gilmore’s first name). Ely claims his copy of the record didn’t even have the band’s music on it; the label copy listed the Flatlanders, but the tape itself contained the latest Jeannie C. Riley collection. “I think they manufactured maybe 50 copies of the vinyl album,” Gilmore recalls. “It was really sad and stupid. I’m still mystified that somebody would go about doing their business that way.”
The Flatlanders’ debut finally received a proper hearing in 1980, and then mostly only overseas, when English label Charly Records licensed the tapes and released them under the title One Road More. Rounder eventually put the disc out stateside in 1990 (minus four of the 17 tracks that appeared on the Charly release), under the all-too-apt title More A Legend Than A Band. Yet even these reissues, as well as a subsequent repackaging by Shelby Singleton opportunistically dubbed Unplugged, didn’t reflect the full extent of the Flatlanders’ music.
For starters, Gilmore, Hancock and Ely all sang lead when the group gigged out (according to Gilmore, he sang about half the time, his pals about a quarter each). But on the album, Gilmore handled all the lead vocals, and Plantation billed the band as Jimmy Dale & the Flatlanders, largely because Jimmie was the only member of the group who signed the recording contract. Furthermore, Ely was so hesitant about the deal Singleton offered the band (Hancock smelled a rat as well) that he didn’t bring any of his originals to the table at the Nashville sessions. Hence the absence of such early Flatlanders staples as “Cornbread Moon” and “Because Of The Wind”, except on Ely’s solo albums or, in the case of the latter, as a somewhat art-damaged cover on Gilmore’s 1996 album Braver Newer World.
Nevertheless, the three men are happy that at least a partial document of the band’s legacy exists. “Everybody asks, ‘Aren’t you mad about Shelby Singleton screwing y’all,'” says Ely. “You see, nobody ever got paid for the sessions. Nobody’s gotten a penny from the recording or anything — not one cent. So everybody’s asking that and I’m saying, ‘Of course not. I’m just glad that this was captured. Without the record, there wouldn’t have been a starting point to go back to.'”
At this late date, Gilmore’s only real beef with Singleton, whose holdings in the early ’70s included the vast Sun Records catalog (Unplugged can still be found on Sun Records, in fact), is that the band can’t go back and remix the document that did survive, especially the not exactly judicious use of the musical saw. “I love the saw in the right places, but they used it all over the album, and that was never the intention,” he explains. “So when they put out the Rounder version of the album, I contacted the label and, through them, Shelby Singleton — because we’d had no communication for 20 years — and I said, ‘At least let us remix the record.’ But it turned out that the masters had been destroyed many years before. All they had was the mixed version, so there was nothing we could do about it.”
Even so, the Flatlanders’ one and only album to date has enjoyed an enduring and undeniable mystique. Evoking the windswept plains and endless horizon of the Texas panhandle, as well as the feelings of isolation that went with living there — alienation that Ely likens to being “in a concentration camp on the moon” — the record brilliantly captured both the band’s geographic and social location.
“The album’s got a lonesome West Texas quality — Jimmie’s high lonesome moan, my terrible dobro playing, a saw playing through the whole thing,” says Ely, who had been playing dobro for just three months when the Flatlanders made the album. “It sounds like flying saucers landing. You couldn’t copy it if you tried.”
“It’s an amazingly weird little album,” says Hancock. “It’s real listenable after all these years. It’s kind of got that West Texas atmosphere in there. You can kind of hear the air and the wind in there somewhere. The thing has almost been a missing link in the music world.”
Indeed, and although rarely touted as such, the Flatlanders’ debut has exerted as profound an influence on subsequent generations of twangsters as the legacy of the Byrds, the Burritos, or Buffalo Springfield — doubtless even more in Texas, where vestiges of the band’s transcendental ethos persist today. “The waves our album made just got delayed,” observes Hancock, alluding to the principal difference between the Flatlanders and their fellow country-rock progenitors.
After their Nashville fortunes went bust, the band returned to Texas, each of its members going their separate ways. Hancock built up his prodigious catalog of songs. Among other things, he also pursued painting, photography and architecture and, in 1976, started the Rainlight label as an outlet for the release of his own records. Ely took a more commercial, though hardly less worthy tack. In the mid-’70s, he assembled a crack roadhouse band (including Ponty Bone, Lloyd Maines and Jesse Taylor), signed with MCA Records, dipped into the Flatlanders’ songbook, and released a series of records that became country-rock touchstones. Ely’s “discovery” by UK audiences (while out touring with the Clash) led to the Charly label’s 1980 reissue of the Flatlanders album.
Gilmore, meanwhile, wound up moving to Denver with Tommy Hancock to study meditation and metaphysics with the Guru Maharaji. Mistakenly, he says, many thought he had renounced music altogether. “To this day the view persists, even among some of my friends, that I was so disillusioned with the music business that I just left in disgust, but that’s not what happened. I quit the music business, but I never quit playing music. Prior to the Flatlanders, I had already begun delving into Eastern philosophy and, just by happenstance around the same time that things went sour with Plantation, I met this guy from India, Mahatma Fakiranand. He was the representative of Maharaji and, after hearing him lecture in Austin a couple of times, I traveled around with him and ended up in Denver.”
After a few years in Colorado, Gilmore decided to get back into the music business, or at least to start playing in public again. He moved to Austin in 1980 and found the town’s familiar faces and thriving club scene much to his liking. “Butch was already living in Austin,” he says. “I had lots of old friends and connections here. Butch had become a cult figure at that point — you know, with his various little bands, but mainly for his songwriting.