Joe Ely – Still running the tables
“I haven’t had time to pay much attention to it,” he says, running his fingers through his hair. “I’ve just kept moving. At different times, I move quicker than at other times.”
Pool, by the way, is Ely’s game. Always has been. Way back in 1978, Sharon Thompson, the impossibly statuesque beauty who would go on to become Sharon Ely, swiped the cue ball off the table during a hot game in the back room at the original Stubb’s Barbecue in Lubbock. Undeterred, Ely went into the kitchen and returned with a white onion, whereupon the game continued. Songwriter Tom T. Hall, who was on hand, documented the epic match in “The Great East Broadway Onion Championship Of 1978”.
Anyway…billiards, pool. Where there’s a honky-tonk stage, there’s usually a pool table or an all-night pool hall in close proximity. It’s handy.
And it suits his temperament. Golf, with its leisurely strolls (“a good walk spoiled,” groused Mark Twain) and Zen-like interludes, was never going to be Ely’s cup of tea. Texas Hold ‘Em demands the participant sit in — horrors! — a chair for hours on end. Tennis…uh, well, no. (Picturing Ely in tennis whites simply bankrupts the imagination.)
Pool, on the other hand, demands mental and physical dexterity, a keen eye, a certain insight into psychology and human nature, and a high tolerance for constant movement. Ely has probably logged a thousand miles just walking around the edges of a pool table.
The study of Joe Ely is a study of motion, of a kaleidoscopic swirl of ideas and projects and endless miles and midnight rambles caroming off each other like a rack of balls blasted-to-hell-and-gone by God his ownself.
Only two things are better than milkshakes and malts
And one’s dancin’ like the dickens to the West Texas Waltz
— Butch Hancock, “West Texas Waltz”
There are Joe Ely’s two new records, for instance (and an accompanying book, of which more later). They are unlike anything Ely has ever released — which is precisely the point, at this point. Taken together, they serve as bookends of a peripatetic career. One, Happy Songs From Rattlesnake Gulch, is subtitled “Pearls From The Vault, Vol. XX”; the other, Silver City, is labeled “Pearls From The Vault, Vol. 1”.
Rattlesnake Gulch is a collection of what might be called Ely’s Basement Tapes — a multi-year chronicle of songs that never quite fit into his official canon. Some of them began as scraps of lyrics on bar napkins, others were fleshed out in the studio and discarded, some were experiments or larks or late-night detours. The most recent, “Baby Needs A New Pair Of Shoes”, is a rocker that references Hurricane Katrina. Another, “Miss Bonnie And Mr. Clyde”, is a mirror image (right down to the melody) of one of Ely’s most popular songs, “Me And Billy The Kid”. There’s a hitherto unreleased cover of a Butch Hancock song, “Firewater” (featuring the wonderfully Hancockian line, “Don’t you know firewater seeks its own level”), and a song called “Sue Me Sue” that sounds like Doug Sahm might have stolen it out of Buddy Holly’s guitar case.
Its companion, Silver City, is an acoustic album of the first songs Ely ever wrote, tunes that predate the Flatlanders era, which most folks mistakenly think of as Ely’s musical genesis.
The title track first appeared on the 1987 HighTone album Lord Of The Highway, and “Indian Cowboy” has been covered by both Guy Clark and Tom Russell (after forgetting about the song for several years, Ely says he had to re-learn it off of Clark’s recording). Otherwise, these vintage songs, circa 1968-72, are seeing the light of day for the first time.
And yes, you guessed it, Ely envisions eighteen more discs to fill the gaps between these two volumes, fleshing out the whole of his career, including some compilations and a couple of spoken-word projects. Four albums, he says, in 2007 alone.
“In the pre-Flatlander days I had a small body of work,” he says, referring to the folk-tinged compositions on Silver City. “Then after the Flatlanders, I got the honky-tonk band together and dropped all the folk songs. And when our band started playing faster and harder, I dropped all the honky-tonk songs. So in the last couple of years, I’ve gone back and found all this material that I’d dropped, and I vowed that I would just catch up.”
In order to facilitate the mammoth project, he has formed his own label, Rack ‘Em Records. After tenures with MCA, HighTone, South Coast and Rounder, it was, he said, the only way to see the effort through.
“I talked with a couple of different labels about doing special projects, but none of ’em knew how to grasp it,” he says. “They were used to, ‘Record an album, go out and push it, wait two years and record another album…’
“I thought, that’s what I’ve done all my life, and at this point in my life I could not care less about that particular way of working.
“That’s not the way I work. Period. I work on projects, I work in spurts, and I work on things I have no reason to work on.