San Antonio Express-News Music Writer
http://www.mysanantonio.com/entertainment/music/
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
/ SA
Joe Ely has done a pretty good job of keeping track of his movements.
"I got my first band together right at 50 years ago when I was 14 in Lubbock, Texas," Ely said in a phone interview on the eve of his latest tour. "Two or three years after Buddy Holly died, there was a huge increase in the number of bands in Lubbock. The only requirement was you had to have at least one Stratocaster in the band."
Ely left Lubbock to work at the Cellar Club in Fort Worth, then the Cellar Club in Houston.
"In Houston, I had a disagreement with the proprietor, and he pulled a big old gun on me. I hit the back door, never went back for my last pay check and wound up in Venice, Calif."
When Ely returned to Lubbock a few years later, he fell in with fellow West Texas musicians Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. A short-lived collaboration, the Flatlanders, led to one album that was barely released at the time but worked its way into Texas music history. Subsequent Flatlanders projects and tours have gone more smoothly and further. Ely put together a hot West Texas band, signed with the MCA label and released a string of inspired albums that mixed roadhouse rock 'n' roll with twang and more for a quintessential Texas sound.
"Butch and Jimmie were a few years older, and they were writing their own songs. That inspired me to keep a journal and put down my thoughts," Ely said. "That inspired me to do what I'm doing today."
What Ely is doing today is celebrating the release of a new CD, Satisfied at Last, on his own Rack 'Em Records label. Satisfied at Last includes seven original songs, two Hancock numbers, Leo and Leona and Circumstance, and Billy Joe Shaver's Live Forever
"I kind of look at it as a record of where I'm at right now," Ely said. "The first song, 'The Highway Is My Home', is about what I've been doing for years, running up and down the road bumping into things and then coming full circle, coming home and writing down what I learned. People would tell me parts of a story, and then I'd make up the rest. It's my observations and philosophies."
Songs such as the title track, "I'm a Man Now and Roll Again" sound as if they're built as much on reflection and personal experience as on observation and the overheard.
"The songs that wanted to be on this record are on this record," Ely said. "Used to be I wrote all the time whether I had anything to say or not. It takes discipline to write. Sometimes you just have to sit down and write. The difference now is I don't force it. It's still hard work. I'm a lot more of an editor now. I'm harder on myself now."
And the songs on Satisfied at Last that were penned by Hancock and Shaver?
"I don't even think of them as covers," Ely said. "I just think of them as finding their ways onto the album. A few years ago, Billy Joe called me and said he was being inducted, well, he said he was being indicted, into the Songwriters' Hall of Fame in Nashville and asked me to sing a song at the ceremony. I was honored. I chose to sing "Live Forever", and it's been in my set since. Butch's songs just came up, knocked on the door and said, 'I want in.' Of course, they're on there because they just fit that circular thing."
Satisfied at Last features a large crew of guitarists - Lloyd Maines, Teye, David Grissom, Mitch Watkins, Jeff Plankenhorn Rob Gjersoe, David Holt, Fred Stitz, Keith Davis and Ely - along with a cadre of long-time collaborators: Davis McLarty and Pat Manske (drums and percussion), Joel Guzman (accordion, keys), Glenn Fukunaga (bass) and Little Johnny Fader (bass, keys).
"Different songs demanded different players, so I called all my old buddies," Ely said. "Some of the stuff we did in the studio. All of a sudden I'd be in the middle of something and say, 'Wouldn't it be great to have Lloyd here on steel?' So I called Lloyd. All the guitar players add different textures."
At this point in his career, Ely spends four months writing, four months recording and four months on the road.
"It used to be 80 percent on the road, 10 percent in the studio and 10 percent lost somewhere," Ely added, laughing.
See, he's pretty good, not perfect, at keeping track.
jbeal@express-news.net
Joe Ely's latest reflects on long, winding road of his life
By John T. Davis
SPECIAL TO THE AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN
http://www.austin360.com/
June 8, 2011
Or the next thing to it. He was calling a reporter from a gas station, muttering imprecations at the self-serve pump that refused to recognize his ZIP code. "My little gauge said 'Range — Five miles'," he said.
Ely, of course, has made a decades-long career out of extolling the joys and temptations of the open road. The first line of the first song on his first album, from 1977, was all about lighting out for the territory: "Well, I left my home out on the great High Plains/Headed for some new terrain"
As a bookend of sorts, the first song on his newest and 18th-or-so album, "Satisfied at Last," is a two-edged love song to the two-lane blacktop, "The Highway is My Home."
But if Ely's vehicle was running on fumes, the man himself is still firing on all cylinders. After a long interlude that saw him releasing a book culled from his road journals, a handful of archival recordings and two live albums, Ely is back at last with an album of new original material, leavened by one Billy Joe Shaver classic ("Live Forever") and a pair of tunes from his fellow Flatlander, Butch Hancock.
As the title suggests, "Satisfied at Last" finds the peripatetic Ely in a rare contemplative move, looking back at the landscape and land mines he has traversed while pondering what's left of the journey.
"It's a bit about mortality," said Ely who, unthinkably, will qualify for Social Security next year. "We ain't getting any younger, and you've got to look that in the eye. I'm having probably as good or better a time making music as I've ever had in my life. I've got a bunch of new mountains to climb, but I've made it through the first part. So the record is kind of a celebration."
Musically, the album continues Ely's trademark fusion of rock, country, flamenco, blues and Tex-Mex influences, propelled by a cast of longtime cohorts that includes, among others, guitarists David Grissom, Rob Gjersoe and Mitch Watkins; bassist Glenn Fukunaga; steel player Lloyd Maines; drummers Pat Manske and Davis McLarty; and accordionist Joel Guzman.
The tone of the album, to hear Ely tell it, springs from a tale of journey and return chronicled by the first two songs, "The Highway is My Home" ("I wanted to show where the struggle came from my early life, living on the highway and hitchhiking around the country, through the rain and bad roads") and "Not That Much Has Changed," a knowing, fond look back at the immutable small West Texas towns that shaped Ely's early world view. "Everything sort of looks the same," he said. "But there's that weird, different vibe about it. And then you realize that the difference is that you've changed."
Consequently, songs like the title track and "I'm a Man Now," "You Can Bet I'm Gone" (in which the protagonist arranges to have his ashes fired from shotguns as a final farewell) and Shaver's "Live Forever" all reflect on the years and miles, choices made, and roads not taken.
Ely recalled a time when all his choices were in front of him, but he was at his lowest ebb. "I was sitting in the Lubbock County Jail in about 1968," he said (he and some friends were arrested for possession of psychedelic mushrooms, he said, adding that the case ended with probation).
"Things were looking really bleak. I never thought I would actually go out and do something with music.
"But then I moved down to Austin and hooked up with (artist) Jim Franklin who took us up to New York City to help him paint a mural. And there, I joined up with an off-Broadway theater troupe because they needed a guitar player. And that ended up taking me to Europe for six months. I was in heaven — I had a job, I was playing guitar and getting paid for it. All of a sudden, I went from the depths of despair to having one of the greatest times of my life!"
So what would Joe Ely, circa 2011, have told the skinny youth moping in the county lockup?
"I'd tell him to change the radio station," he said, laughing. "'Cause I was listening to Merle Haggard singing 'Branded Man.'"
Then he added, "I think I would have told that kid in jail to hang on. Everything's going be all right. And that might be what this record is about."
Joe Ely: Satisfied at Last
By Lynne Margolis
http://www.americansongwriter.com/
June 7th, 2011
For this album, Ely collected a hot list of Austin-area musicians to lend their chops, sometimes in surprising ways. Who knew accordionist Joel Guzman also could play some funky bass, as he does on the opener, “The Highway is My Home”? The song, which visits one of Ely’s favorite themes (he is, after all, the guy who published the journal Bonfire of the Roadmaps), is full of ‘70s-tinged instrumentation, including Pat Manske’s congas and Ely’s own electric riffs. It’s an interesting directional shift, one that might bear more exploration.
By now, Ely’s established a pattern of themes, many of them road-related. On “Not That Much Has Changed,” he sings about going home again, using somewhat well-worn imagery. Yet, as familiar as some of his phrases sound, lines like “the watertower has more names” are still striking in their simple evocation of what revisiting the past can be like. (If there is one gripe with this album, it’s that story-songs like “Mockingbird Hill” and Butch Hancock’s “Leo and Leona” do sound similar to others he’s already done.)
On “Satisfied at Last,” Ely had four different guitarists lend electric licks to his acoustic twang. They provide a dramatic finale to his declaration, “I didn’t come here with nothin’/just a slap on the ass/You can bet when I’m leavin’/I’ll be satisfied at last.” (Betraying his Texas pride, he also injects a sly dose of humor with the line, “I traveled the country/Oklahoma, too.”)
It’s natural for a guy looking in the rear-view mirror of life to write songs like “You Can Bet I’m Gone,” another reflection on mortality. In his charming style, Ely sings about his preferred funeral: “When I die, don’t toll no bells/Just put my ashes in some shotgun shells/Get all my friends some windy day/to say goodbye, watch me blow away.” This one is a Texas twanger, with David Holt’s tasty guitar and a cool changeup at the end.
But it’s the beautiful bittersweetness of Billy Joe and Eddy Shaver’s “Live Forever” that truly speaks to the issue. Eddy Shaver’s overdose death gives the song a poignancy its father-son authors could never have imagined, and Ely imbues it with every ounce of the heartache Shaver and those who loved his son have known since. Accented by Guzman’s accordion, the song is almost the antithesis of the bravado-laced “You Can Bet I’m Gone.” It’s a nice balance, from a guy who’s been able to keep his throughout years of the craziness that comes with a musical life. The Stones can keep singing “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” in their 60s, but hearing Ely say life is good is actually more satisfying.
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