Texas Monthly Talks
Joe Ely
The Vitals
Born February 9, 1947, in Amarillo
Attended Monterey High School, in Lubbock
Seventeen albums as a solo artist, including Joe Ely (1977), Musta Notta Gotta Lotta (1981), Lord of the Highway (1987), Letter to Laredo (1995), and, just out, Happy Songs From Rattlesnake Gulch (2007). Two spoken-word CDs and a collection of pre-
Flatlanders songs will be released later this year
Four albums with the Flatlanders, including Now Again (2002) and Wheels of Fortune (2004)
Two albums with Los Super Seven: Los Super Seven (1998) and Heard It on the X (2005)
First book, Bonfire of Roadmaps, diary entries and illustrations from thirty years of touring, has just been published by the University of Texas Press
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Look who you’ve played with over the years: Bruce Springsteen and the Clash and other people outside the realm of country music.
Right, but all of those guys have this romantic idea of where country came from. The Clash loved Marty Robbins ballads about El Paso and the streets of Laredo, and Bruce always brings in country stories. I guess you never really define what you’re doing, because once you define it, you almost destroy it.
The counter to that is that if you don’t define yourself in a recognizable genre, it’s hard for you, as an individual artist or a band, to present yourself to a record label or a radio station and have it know what to do with you. In other words, the eclectic nature of your career may work against you commercially.
Oh, I’m sure. But it also gives me huge freedom to do whatever I want without having to fit in. If I was a Top 40 country guy in the seventies, I don’t think I’d still be making music now.
Would you have preferred more success?
Absolutely not. In fact, every time I would get right to the edge of national attention, I would always back off. In the late seventies or early eighties, when we were literally on the road for a year and a half, in Time magazine, playing with the Stones and the Clash, I started feeling that I was losing the very thing that had inspired me. My songs were turning into things that I didn’t even recognize. So on New Year’s Eve of ’82, the band just dissolved and didn’t play a single gig for a year and a half. I think we’d played five hundred shows straight without ever coming home, and then all of a sudden we just stopped. And it was the best thing I could have done, because even though I could have probably parlayed that into a corporate business and flown my flag over a building downtown, that was not quite what I considered success.
There are an awful lot of people in the business who would trade their left arm for that kind of success. They say, “Well, I don’t want to sell out,” but that’s mostly because they don’t have the opportunity to. You had the opportunity but chose not to.
Yeah. I have no idea what things would be like now if I had gone in a different direction. But I can’t think of anyone who I was recording with on the MCA label during that time who’s still up and running, except Tom Petty.
Like you, he’s not a young man anymore. I just don’t understand how you guys do it, how you keep up the pace at your age.
I always admired guys like Muddy Waters and Jimmy Reed, who spent their whole lives on the road telling stories, you know? I just thought that was the most romantic way to spend your life. And I still to this day really enjoy going up and down the road telling stories.
Are there issues with being sixty out there on the road? Do you get tired more easily?
Absolutely. I don’t do as many dates.
How many shows did you play a year back in the day?
Three hundred.
And today?
Maybe a hundred.
A hundred shows? I’ll tell you what—that’s still two days a week. You’re still on the road nearly 30 percent of the year.
Between January 13 and March 19, I’ll have hit 35 cities with my old songwriting buddies John Hiatt, Guy Clark, and Lyle Lovett.
Isn’t there a point when you think, “I want to sit on my butt and watch a football game”?
That does not appeal to me in the least. I’ve never had any thought of slowing down, retiring, doing anything like that.
You’re going to be one of those guys who goes off and dies with a guitar in his hand.
Or a pencil. You know, I really enjoy living, and I feel like it’s important to make a note of what comes through your experience. I don’t care what’s on TV. I don’t care what football team is number one. It might be sacrilege to say that, but I really don’t get wrapped up in any of it because I have to keep moving to finish everything I’m working on. I’ve got four albums coming out!
All in 2007?
I’ve got a companion piece to the book that’s coming out in February or March, and then a set of acoustic songs from the Flatlanders days that I’ve never released, and two spoken-word records. Then, later in the year, I’ve got some other things, like compilations that need to be put together.
Your label relationship right now is what?
That’s another thing I’m excited about. After thirty years working with record labels, I started my own.
Called?
Rack ’Em Records.
This is for you only, or are you getting into the record business?
I’m not interested in the record business. The only reason I started it is because I talked to different people and different labels about some of my projects, and it seemed to just scare everybody to death when I said, “I’m going to put out twenty albums in the next five years.” They didn’t know how to handle it.
That’s your plan: twenty in five years?
Well, as I said, some of these are compilations.
How has the whole move away from brick-and-mortar record stores and toward digital distribution of music affected your plans?
I think the music world is forever changed. The guy at Tower Records holds up an iPod and says, “This is where I get my music,” and shuts down his company. It’s created a whole new way of thinking. It used to be that a CD had to have at least ten songs. Now a collection can be four songs. Or thirty. Or a hundred. I don’t think the CD has more than five years left on it.
Do you still get excited listening to other people’s music?
Not so much. I do if it’s a really great song.
Whom do you listen to these days?
There’s a kid out of eastern New Mexico named Ryan Bingham. He came up and played a few songs with me in New York. He’s about 25, but the way he tells stories he sounds like he’s 50. I really think he’s going to be great.
You like anything by anybody who’s conventionally popular?
Dylan’s last record. And Tom Petty’s.
What’s become of your old running buddies? Are you doing anything new with Jimmie and Butch?
Every time we get together there’s a hurricane or a flood or a drought. We’re talking about doing another record.
What would keep you from doing it?
Our complete lack of ambition. Each one of us has a small lack of ambition, but together we have a monstrous lack of ambition.
It’s nice that after all these years you can still be friends and not hate one another.
We don’t do it for any reason. That’s probably why we’ve managed to keep going for as long as we have. We have no reason whatsoever.
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