Not many bands can go 30 years between albums and come back sounding like they’re still ahead of their time. But the Flatlanders were no ordinary band.
In 1972, the upstart trio of Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely and Butch Hancock — who have since become the holy trinity of West Texas music — ventured to Nashville to record their debut album. There they were looked upon by the Country Establishment as rank outsiders, longhaired strangers from the Texas plains who had little or nothing to do with Nashville’s slick production values and airbrushed melodies. Their debut album, “Jimmie Dale and the Flatlanders,” was deemed so unredeemable that it was initially released only as an eight-track tape and sunk without a trace, only to be revived decades later as a touchstone for the alternative-country movement that has spawned artists such as Lucinda Williams, Uncle Tupelo and Gillian Welch.
The Flatlanders’ debut, first reissued in England in 1980 and then retitled “More a Legend Than a Band” for its proper domestic release in 1990, is a surreal masterpiece of countryish melody, otherworldly singing and psychedelic instrumentation (an eerie, whining musical saw was the band’s unlikely lead instrument).
Now, after mounting successful solo careers, the three Flatlanders have reunited for a second album, “Now Again” (New West), out Tuesday, and it picks up where the trio left off: Hancock’s elliptical lyricism and weather-beaten vocals, Gilmore’s plaintive warble and bottomless sense of yearning, Ely’s raucous rock ‘n’ roll energy and finely tuned musicianship.
“We really didn’t know what was happening while making the first album, and we lost control of it,” says Ely in the Austin headquarters of the Flatlanders label, New West Records. “Now, we relate to each other much the same; only difference is we’ve been around the block.”
“Actually,” Hancock adds, “we’ve been around a bunch of blocks, two or three times.”
Three vagabonds
That’s a mild understatement. The three have remained friends, occasionally reuniting on the road over the last three decades after growing up in Lubbock, Texas, where they were “vagabonds who shared the same house,” says Gilmore.
“We were a fraternity more than a band,” Ely says. “We did maybe a dozen paying gigs in the whole time we were together, but we probably played hundreds of gigs in our living room and in people’s houses around the neighborhood. Every door at our house was always open, and someone with an instrument would walk in at any hour and we’d start playing.”
Literally and figuratively, the open doors to the Flatlanders’ $80-a-month rental home welcomed all points of view, an oasis of open-mindedness for fellow musicians, artists, university professors and writers in the flat lands of political, social and musical conservatism. Ely brought the rock ‘n’ roll, Gilmore was a student of country and blues, and Hancock poured himself into the literate folk tradition of Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie. They blended these musical interests with shared passions in Beat poetry, Eastern philosophy and Mad magazine.
Humor was a bond, but so was a sense of wonder about what lay beyond Lubbock’s seemingly endless horizon. As boys, they would stand on rooftops and watch storms roll in from miles away. At night, Ely would grab a sleeping bag and stare at the sky until he knew the configuration of every constellation, like a road map of the infinite. Guitars became as commonplace as jeans and cowboy boots, and a life of cotton-picking was too confining to contemplate.
“In present day terminology, we would have been called homeless,” says Ely, who spent a year hitchhiking and hopping trains around the country. “But we took it as our education. Not having a home enabled us to explore the world. There were days we went without eating, but we knew there was always a meal around the corner.”
Playboys strike out
The trio shared books and jokes, and spent hours teaching each other songs, from the Carter Family to the Beatles. When money got low, they’d set up on the steps of the Texas Tech student union with their guitars and post a sign: “You are what you pay.” Inevitably, they’d come home with enough cash to keep the landlord at bay for another month.
“In informal situations our music translated pretty well,” Gilmore says. “But on stage, it didn’t. It wasn’t what people were used to.”
No wonder the raggedy Texans never stood a chance in straight-laced Nashville.
“We came to Nashville and we really didn’t have a name,” Gilmore says. “We had been calling ourselves the Supernatural Playboys in Lubbock, but the guys in Nashville instantaneously said, `No.’ That should have been our first clue that something was wrong.”
But as they played Carter Family songs in the studio for producer Royce Clark, they made an impression. “This is so strange,” Clark said. “It takes a bunch of flatlanders to come to Nashville and show us how to play mountain music.”
Sonic impressionism
The name stuck, but Gilmore, Ely and Hancock soon went their separate ways, each forging a distinctive solo career while maintaining their friendships. Talk of a Flatlanders reunion finally got serious when recorded a track for the 1998 movie “The Horse Whisperer.” The session went so well, yielding the lilting border ballad “South Wind of Summer,” that the trio began working on an album.
It was recorded not in Nashville but in Ely’s home studio on the outskirts of Austin. It begins with an image of a mirage, an illusion:
“Is that the moon I see/Over there in the west?/Or just a headlight beam/C&O express?” Gilmore sings on Utah Phillips’ “Going Away,” the sole song on the album not written by one of the three principals.
“Deciding what’s real and what’s not — that’s what life is,” Hancock says of the lyric. “The record is like that too. You tell a story without telling the whole story.”
“Sonic impressionism,” Gilmore says. “It gives the singer and the listener a lot of room to move, a lot of possible ways to interpret things.”
The finely chiseled lyrics are balanced by seductive melodies and glorious three-part harmonies. Hancock’s “Julia” holds a gem of a chorus, “Down in the Light of the Melon Moon” builds from brooding introspection to a haunting glow, “My Wildest Dreams Grow Wilder Every Day” is a dandy two-step, and “I Thought the Wreck Was Over” ferrets out the mischief behind the mayhem. Then there’s “Pay the Alligator,” which suggests a swamp-rock version of a Coasters song.
It’s a strange mix of folk and comedy, soul and surrealism, rock ‘n’ roll attitude and sawdust philosophy. Thirty years on, the Flatlanders still sound amazed by the world, steeped in its mysteries and energized, as Gilmore says, “by each other’s insanities and weirdnesses.”
“Now Again” is less a culmination of the Flatlanders’ journey than another stop on the road beyond that vast Lubbock horizon. Even in their mid-50s, Gilmore, Hancock and Ely still are making music that feels remarkably fresh and open to all possibilities.
“People calling us `godfathers of alternative country’ or whatever; those terms were made up by somebody else, later on,” Ely says. “We never set out to change anything. We just set out to do what we liked to do. Today there are a lot of people who set out on a course. They want to do something specific, and it’s like tunnel vision. They leave out everything they might discover on the way there. We let everything in, then filter out the stuff that doesn’t work.”
Adds Hancock, “We’re about comprehensiveness, whereas the whole 20th Century is a drift toward specialization. We’ve been drifting in the other direction the whole time.”
