Joe Ely – Still running the tables
“The times when I’ve actually had to sit down and work on an album were the most miserable periods of my life,” he says with a disarming chuckle. “It’s like being in school and having to write a report.”
Pack up after Amarillo show for a 2 a.m. drive to Lubbock
I argue with crew; I’m at the end of my rope
Like horses in a pasture everyone can smell the barn
‘Fine,’ I say, ‘I’ll just ride on the roof!’
And this tour ends, at least this leg
With a carload of crazy musicians on Highway 87
And me, riding on the roof of the van screaming with glee
On the Amarillo Highway with the wind in my hair…
— Joe Ely, Bonfire Of Roadmaps
School reports notwithstanding, Ely has always written. Notebooks and sketch pads filled his guitar case and, over the years and decades, they accumulated like drifts of snow. As the road spun out in an endless ribbon and his migrations took him across the country and then across the sea on myriad tours, his observations — captured in the raw and on the fly — filled the pages of his notebooks, and scraps of paper, old receipts, hotel stationary, bar napkins, you name it.
As time went by, many of the notes took on the template of four-line stanzas, like blank verse. They were written, Ely belatedly came to realize, in the 4/4 tempo of tour bus wheels on a late-night highway.
So, by way of accompanying Ely’s “Pearls From The Vault” project, University of Texas Press is publishing Bonfire Of Roadmaps, a distillation of his quicksilver chronicles of thoughts, random graffiti, scraps of conversation, observations, fever dreams and reminiscences, all filtered through the hallucinatory prisms of Road and Stage.
“All along the line, especially starting in Lubbock about the time the Flatlanders broke up, I started writing a journal of times and places and things that were going on,” he explains.
“I would just go from page to page. Looking back, I could hardly read some of them — really stupid stuff. But,” he continues with a chuckle, “I kind of subscribe to the William Blake theory that if a fool persisteth in his folly, he will become a wise man.
“I kept writing stuff down and working with it. Sometimes a song would come up — early songs like ‘I Had My Hopes Up High’ and ‘Because The Wind’ were written like that. I never expected anybody to read this stuff, but I found it a wonderful way to just watch the road go by.”
Terry Allen, who had just published a book with UT Press, lobbied the imprint to publish a book-length collection of Ely’s chronicles.
“It was an excuse to look at these periods of time and different bands and different eras, and doing something that I wouldn’t have done otherwise without the book deal,” Ely says. “So I look at these three pieces [the two albums and the book] as sort of a beginning trilogy.”
Ely, for what it’s worth, was the recipient of Billy Joe Shaver’s proverbial “good Christian raisin’ and an eighth-grade education.” His dad passed away early on, and Joe had to take an after-school job working in a greasy spoon called the Chicken Box, which was probably just about as haute couture as it sounds. He never did finish high school.
But he was the possessor of an avid, quick curiosity and a keenly receptive intellect, as well as a certain loosely-jointed sense of fate. “I kind of had the feeling that I was gonna play music all my life,” he says. “I started playing violin when I was about 10, playing in the school orchestra — which was not real fulfilling, but I enjoyed it.”
He recalls a guy selling steel guitar lessons door-to-door stopping by the house one day. The fellow’s amplifier had a palm tree painted on the front. Ely was enchanted. “That steel guitar sounded like what it looked like outside,” he told Evan Smith of Texas Monthly. “Dusty and windy. It had kind of a lonesome howl…”
Around the same time he found out a neighbor down the block had an old Fender Strat and an amp for sale and, well, that was it for the violin. He took guitar lessons in the house, he learned years later, in which Buddy Holly had lived. Ely’s family had moved to Lubbock not long after Holly was killed and, as Ely recalls, “there were a lot of twangy guitars around.” Lubbock (as a municipal entity) didn’t get around to celebrating Holly until decades after his death, but he was a patron saint to the local teenagers of the day. If he could do it, they reasoned, so could they.
From there it was a short step to teenage groups such as the Twi-Lites, a combo whose members outfitted themselves in baby-blue cardigan sweaters and mock turtlenecks. “A combo that furnishes the finest in musical entertainment,” boasted the copy on their business card (which lists “Joey Ely” among the band members). “Whether prom, night club or private party, we will render the type of music most enjoyable. For engagements, contact us at SW9-4201, Lubbock, Texas.”