Driving across West Texas can feel a little like piloting a Mars rover: life signs minimal save for the stray prairie dog, an endless sky suffocating overhead. The cities of Amarillo and Lubbock appear like distant waystations on the horizon, first as hazy mirage and then as reality. Even within those denser zip codes, a profound alienation hangs in the air, a truly physical awareness of how distant your existence is from the rest of the state. Yet the isolation of West Texas has served as an incubator for a distinct kind of futurism, one best symbolized by the Cadillac Ranch installation outside Amarillo: a slash of modernism cutting against a landscape that’s flatter than Hank Hill’s ass.
This barren country gave birth to early rock pioneers like Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison, whose electrified guitars were signal conductors connecting remote listeners to the big city, like telephone wires across an empty highway. As a teenager in Lubbock in the early 1960s, singer-songwriter Joe Ely proved particularly receptive to the transmissions of rock’n’roll. Though his music might be branded Americana, Ely has always had a rockabilly soul, emphasizing the shared rhythm-and-blues roots that country and rock sprang from. In a career that stretches back more than 50 years, Ely found success as both a regional superstar and international cult favorite, even if mainstream American recognition often seemed to elude him—a songwriter’s songwriter, as they say.
New remasters of Ely’s first three solo albums—Joe Ely (1977), Honky Tonk Masquerade (1978), and Down on the Drag (1979)—by engineer Dave Donnelly blow the dust off a rich body of work. It was these records in particular that made Ely—alongside artists like Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark, and former classmate Terry Allen—a pillar of the progressive country scene that revolved around public television’s Austin City Limits. Their audience may have been the same, but the West Texas sound had a few crucial differences from the “gonzo” music brewed up at the Armadillo World Headquarters. Where Jerry Jeff and friends brought the folk and jazz of the West Village down south to Austin, Ely went south of the border, borrowing from the sounds of Tejano music and Mexican norteño. The result is pure Tex-Mex fusion, with a penchant for waltz time and as much accordion as steel guitar. It’s the soundtrack of a region that’s always been a cultural crossroads of blended influences—by way of norteño, Ely’s songwriting especially highlights the polka and waltz traditions that German and Eastern European immigrants brought to Central Texas, a region where the Czech kolache remains a long-standing breakfast staple.
Much the way the Panhandle exists between the Southwest and the Midwest, Ely’s music straddles countless lines. He’s a hardcore honky-tonker clearly influenced by the western swing of Bob Wills, but not someone you’d consider a country neotraditionalist; a rockabilly revivalist, but not a nostalgia act like the contemporaneous Stray Cats; a cowboy poet who keeps his tongue slyly tucked in his cheek but never gets too clever. Honky Tonk Masquerade in particular is as revelatory as an oasis in the desert, a midway point between the rough-and-tumble party of outlaw country and the more self-consciously literary “alt-country” of lyricists like Lyle Lovett and James McMurtry.
Ely’s musical career formally began with the Flatlanders, a group filled out by high school pals Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock. The trio would become something like the Velvet Underground of Texas music—“more a legend than a band,” as the title of a compilation would describe them years later. Their hippie-adjacent cosmic sound, all group harmonies and neo-Buddhist koans, is a far cry from the rough and rowdy ways of Ely’s solo work. Before the group reformed in the 1990s, Ely gave their songs his own interpretation; Honky Tonk Masquerade’s version of “Tonight I Think I’m Gonna Go Do Town” adds a baritone grit where Gilmore’s voice is gentler.
After the Flatlanders’ first run, Ely would live the kind of rambling life that makes for good country music, imbuing his work with both a droll absurdity and a deeper sense of yearning—the odd jobs he kept during the mid 1970s included time as a roadie for the Ringling Brothers Circus. As a solo performer, Ely would cut his teeth on the same dive-bar circuit as bluesmen like ZZ Top and Stevie Ray Vaughan, and that raucous energy has remained at the core of his music.
With his first solo albums, Ely became a surprising sensation in Europe, where he befriended the members of the Clash on tour. If you listen closely to the Spanish-language vocals on “Should Or Stay or Should I Go,” you can even hear Ely’s drawl doing backup duty, the first of many jam sessions between the two bands. What Glen Campbell was to the Beach Boys or Dylan to the Beatles, Ely became to the Clash, kindred souls whose mutual genre-bending sensibilities fostered an organic exchange of collaborative energies. In line with punk’s primal instincts, Ely was also returning to the origins of rhythm and blues, with a delinquent spirit and mod-leaning look not too far removed from the California cowpunk of X and the Gun Club, part ranch hand and part Lynchian highway drifter.
Ely’s 1977 self-titled LP is sparse compared to the fuller sound of subsequent records, but it demonstrates the development of his hybrid style and an ear for textured production. It’s also the most Flatlander-esque of his early solo work, with tracks like “Treat Me Like a Saturday Night” bearing the distinctive wistfulness of Jimmie Dale Gilmore. The record is still grounded in acoustic guitar, but the big-band sound Ely became known for is bubbling underneath, with a cameo from the Muscle Shoals horn section on “Johnny’s Blues.”
On the Butch Hancock-penned “She Never Spoke Spanish to Me,” Ely plays with Tex-Mex flavor more for novelty’s sake, but by Honky Tonk Masquerade, the norteño influence had become integral, with accordionist Ponty Boone joining the band full time. The classic lineup of Ely’s live band—Jesse Taylor on electric guitar, Lloyd Maines on steel, Gregg Wright on bass, and Steve Keeton on drums—had at this point become a well-oiled machine, as central to his sound as Ely himself. The production on Honky Tonk Masquerade aims to replicate the tactility of live performance; you can almost hear the pick against the strings on the opening riff of “Cornbread Moon.” The Jerry Lee Lewis impression on “Fingernails” even turns his body to an instrument, like an old Mickey Mouse cartoon: “I keep my fingernails long, so they click when I play the piano.” The steel guitar work by Lloyd Maines—an institution of Texas music in his own right who, among many other credits, played on Wilco’s A.M. and fathered Natalie Maines of the Chicks—is especially foundational to the Ely style, the main source of the honky-tonk flavor that distinguishes his solo tunes from the Flatlanders; the picking on “Because the Wind” is like the sound of weeping. It’s not all country-and-western pastiche, though. “Boxcars” makes for a foreboding hobo ballad that could have been covered by Tom Waits, with a fuzzy electric guitar subbing in for the wail of a train whistle.
Ely’s warbling delivery suggests someone who sincerely loves country music but can see through its tropes, affecting a character in the pursuit of a greater sincerity—he even breaks into a slight yodel to embody the heartbroken patsy of “I’ll Be Your Fool.” There’s a distinctive swagger in his voice that could only come from Texas, and he has a rascally sense of humor. On “West Texas Waltz,” he playfully acknowledges that some of his stylings might be a little old-fashioned, encouraging his listeners to “bind up their bunions” and “dance away the arthritis.” The cover of “Honky Tonkin’” transforms Hank’s sinful original into a strutting dancehall bop, the kind of big-band jam that sounds like it could last until the cows come home, if not for the fade-out.
While Joe Ely and Honky Tonk Masquerade were recorded by legendary Nashville guitarist Chip Young, for Down on the Drag he recruited Bob Johnston, who cut countless classics by Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash—perhaps an indication of the kind of artist Ely hoped to become, a lyrical auteur drifting between genres but beloved by all. The title expresses Ely’s complete immersion in the Austin scene: “The Drag,” where Ely imagines himself down and out, is an overcrowded thoroughfare on the edge of the University of Texas campus. “Standin’ at a Big Hotel” is classic gonzo sound in the vein of Jerry Jeff Walker, while “Crawdad Train” works in a touch of Delta blues. The drumming on Ely’s records always sounded a little more forward in the mix than other country of the era, but Down on the Drag indicates his more rock-facing turn with its emphasis on percussion; Steve Keeton serves as a strong backbone on songs like “Crazy Lemon” and “Fools Fall in Love.”
Despite the radical transformations country music has undergone in the last 50 years, Ely has somehow weathered them all. In the ’70s, Ely was opening for Carl Perkins and Merle Haggard; by 2000, he was touring with the Chicks. As often as his music looked to the past, Joe Ely was regularly on the cusp of the future, in the tradition of his amplified forefathers. The unexpected cameo from a Moog synthesizer on “Fingernails” foreshadows Ely’s later experimentation: After his honky-tonk period, Ely would dabble in “computerized” music with Hi-Res, a bedroom pop album produced on an Apple II in the vein of McCartney II or Neil Young’s Trans. And in a parallel to his many unexpected musical friendships, Ely’s long nights of technological tinkering led him to become virtual pen pals with Steve Wozniak.
More than any name-brand hit ever could, those fertile relationships with creatives and performers of all stripes speak to the quality of Ely’s work, revealing an understated influence felt far beyond the West Texas plains. He’s the kind of artist you want as your jam partner or back-up vocalist, an effortlessly talented musician who also knows how to function as a member of a band. But these new remasters make the case for Ely as a leading man in his own right, separate from his many cameos, as a singer who embodies the inherently hybrid nature of Texas culture. As his English comrades in the Clash did with genres like reggae and lovers rock, Ely absorbed the musical diversity of his native landscape and synthesized a new blend, equal parts reverent and unholy.
