the legend of band

The legend, the band, the Flatlanders

A journey of spirit and song brings three roaming souls together again

By Brad Buchholz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, March 27, 2009

Originally published June 2, 2002

Dwarfed by savage peaks of the Chisos Mountains on the eastern horizon, Butch Hancock walks a jagged desert path near his home in the Big Bend town of Terlingua — wondering aloud about how many coyotes may have trotted along this trail before him. The sky is gray, overcast. A spring breeze blows soft and cool. In the quiet of the morning, Hancock's hiking boots make a happy crunch against the brittle desert floor.

Hancock is walking briskly, cheerfully, wending around tall stands of thorny ocotillo, green with spring. Around a bend, he pauses a moment and crouches low to the earth. Then he picks up a smooth, sand-colored rock — an almost perfect replica of the state of Texas, no bigger or thicker than a fat chocolate chip cookie.

In the silence of the desert, Hancock holds Texas in the palm of his hand. He does not say, "Hey, look at this!" As a matter of fact, he says nothing at all. Smiling, Hancock simply turns the rock over and over in his hand, considering the flip side of Texas as carefully as the front — and then passes it on to his hiking partner, like a gift, in the spirit of humility and humor and the wonder of nature.

Butch Hancock has made an art out of experiencing the world in such a fashion — forever celebrating that random nugget of beauty. . . or the great riddle. . . lying there in open sight, in the stark terrain, beneath the vast horizon. This vision, this way of seeing: It is the very essence of a flatlander.

There are three men, three musicians, collectively known as the Flatlanders: Butch Hancock, Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore. They are the best of friends, all deep into their 50s now. And all of-them embrace this special way of seeing—for they are sons of West Texas, raised in the high, flat plains near Lubbock. As artists, they are deeply influenced by the terrain of their youth, and as individuals, they reflect distinct facets of it. Butch is the earth. Joe is the wind. Jimmie is the sky.

"Growing up in that ol' desolate part of the world, we weren't hit by dramatic beauty," explains Ely, with a warm chuckle. "So we had to look more carefully, to recognize beauty in simpler things. It was hard, too. But there was a sunset every day, and a sunrise every day. And in the distance, there was simply the beauty of emptiness."

The Flatlanders met in Lubbock more than 35 years ago, a bunch of counterculture bumpkins who shared a fascination with Buddy Holly and Bob Wills, Alfred E. Neuman and the Bhagavad-Gita, Buckminster Fuller and the natural phenomenon of the Lubbock Lights.

Butch was the tractor poet. Joe was the restless rambler. Jimmie was the dreamy country warbler. They recorded one album together in 1972 — a sublime commercial flop, far ahead and far behind its time — and then proceeded, slowly and gently, to write and sing the most stunningly eclectic music over the next 30 years, on 30 different albums. . . as solo artists.

Since adopting Austin as their creative base in the late 1970s, Butch, Joe and Jimmie have become widely regarded as the iconoclasts of Texas song — literate, playful and curious. They love riddles. They love wordplay. They love to blur the dimensions of time and space. They're deeply into metaphysics — unabashedly setting their high-minded ruminations in West Texas honky-tonks, rhyming "circumstance" with "workin' pants," forever defying convention and commercial trends.

During the past year, Butch, Jimmie and Joe have been performing regularly as a band again — and, after a 31-year hiatus, they've released a second Flatlanders album, "Now Again." For the first time in their careers, the three Flatlanders are writing together, sharing songwriting credits on 12 of the 14 tunes. (It was," says Butch, "like riding a horse with three saddles.") The friends composed together, chorus by chorus, bridge by bridge, line by line. Lines like this, from "Yesterday Was Judgment Day". . .

"Did you hear the riddle of a road without a middle — or an end?"

The story of the Flatlanders has always been more about a manner of seeing than about a band. In truth all those solo records by Jimmie and Joe and Butch: They're Flatlander records too, because they reflect the shared sensibilities and vision, forged from common roots, passed on in the spirit of friendship.

Jimmie Dale Gilmore once suggested that there are actually dozens of Flatlanders, and only a few of them musicians - alluding to all the friends and strangers who have shared books, dreams and ideas with them over the years. Come to think of it: Do you see a perfect Texas in the desert sand? Do you hear the lilt of laughter in the midnight stars? Do you feel a gust of melody in the winter wind? If so, you may be a Flatlander, too.

A Flatlander round table: Search and substance

The Flatlanders at lunch are almost as fun as the Flatlanders on stage. They are boots and jeans guys: smart, warm, irreverent and quick to laugh. The conversation of the day, over Mexican food, is about the joy of music — without talking directly about music at all. Butch is wry and understated. Joe is eloquent, precise. Jimmie is a bundle of scattered, boyish enthusiasm. The salsa is thick. So are the West Texas accents.

Butch: There was a guy that gave a talk at the Texas Tech Student Union one year about music and, um, the universe. "Music and Life" was the title of it, I think. And the one sentence I remember from that was: "Life is spirit in search of substance, and substance in search of spirit." And that just nailed it for me. . . . It's one thing we've kind of had in our strange little conscious minds the whole time.

Joe: We were interested in so many things — and music was just a part of something we did while finding other things out.

Jimmie: We loved the quality -in each other that reinforced the value of that search. It seemed as if the best aspects of me, somehow, were corroborated by these guys. It's like these two guys, especially, nurtured the best side of me. . . We didn't do music all the time. There was art. There was creativity in general and an openness to all of it. We encouraged each other to the point that it became our life, something that overshadowed career and stuff.

Joe: It seemed everything we found opened up 10 different worlds.

Jimmie: The three of us read a lot. And just as in music, we had different interests, from different literary worlds. And we brought all that to each other.

Joe: Growing up, the Beat poets — Jack Kerouac and those guys — were, of course, an influence. Everybody grew up with that. But that led us into other forms, like Eastern religion and European writers we never would have discovered. . . . We were all huge fans of Henry Miller. And there was this Norwegian writer, Knut Hamsun. . . .

Jimmie: He wrote one book, "Pan," that was widely credited as being the first modem novel. He starts one of his books with a line — what is it? — "I don't think about her anymore." (He begins to chuckle) And then the entire book is about him thinking about her!

Butch: (decisively) "Hunger." That was the name of the book. It was about the hard times of being a writer. He'd wake up on top of the world. And by the time he got to the bottom of the steps, he'd be utterly miserable.

Joe: (with a trace of astonishment) He'd be thinking about pawning the buttons off his vest at a pawnshop!

Butch: The sentence I remembered from that whole book was "I always slept on my socks at night, because that way, by morning, they would usually be dry."

Jimmie: He just describes this terrible misery, and then his girlfriend left him — and, oh yeah, then he says, "And it was my birthday." (Much knowing laughter.)

Joe: It was just like an old country song, like George Jones' "These Days I Barely Get By." (They're all chuckling now). Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse. . . .

A moment with Jimmie

Jimmie Dale Gilmore lives with his wife, Janet, on the outskirts of Spicewood — close to nature, where paved road gives way to dirt road, not far from the Pedemales River. There are little pockets of garden in the hard-scrabble terrain that surrounds his simple wooden ranch house. One tiny mirror — now two, and three — dangles from a tree branch. Rosemary and iris dot garden footpaths. A ceramic Buddha sits at the edge of a goldfish pond, where water trickles through a rock fountain.

"Let me show you why I really wanted this place," he says cheerfully, blazing an impromptu trail through the high grass beyond the back of his house. His long, fine wisps of silver hair bounce lightly against his back. A dog, Maia, trails him. Within five minutes, he pauses at the lip of a natural grotto — a drop of 30 or 40 feet — where there is water and rock and cool air and hardwood trees. "Doesn't this blow your mind?"

Jimmie, a man with Cherokee, Apache and Irish blood, says an Indian friend saw this grotto and told him that spirits wanted him to play there. So there are evenings when he carries his guitar into the grotto and sings to the stars.

Certainly the most passionate of the Flatlanders, Jimmie is also the most childlike — the quickest to laugh. Beyond the music, he says, humor is the single strongest component of the Flatlander frame of mind. On a fireside mantel in his home, a foot-tall statue of Alfred E. Neuman looms over painted animal figurines from Central America and a statuette of the Hindu god Shiva. "It took me years to realize," he says, "that I'd assembled a shrine to humor."

Near the shrine, on a living room table, there are several scraps of paper, ripped from a spiral notebook, with scribbles in pen. They are lyrics — with chord progressions — of a song in progress.

"When I was much younger, I had a really dark spot about my music," says Jimmie. "I worried that I might not be able to make a living in music, even though it was the only thing I cared about. And this old friend of mine said this: 'Imagine the meanest old drunken cowboy you could ever meet, anywhere, in a bar. You know what? There's a song, somewhere, that brings tears to his eyes. Music is like food.'

"Just hearing him say that changed my life. It's true. It's true for me. In fact, I would rather go without food than without music. You know? Even with the kids I knew growing up: It didn't matter whether I liked their music or not. What mattered is that they were in love with music. It's just essential. It's crucial to the spirit."

Jimmie's finest songs have always connected spirit to the music. Like his voice — a quavering falsetto, evoking the high lonesome — Jimmie's music evokes something transcendent. He is part mystic, part Indian, part Singing Brakeman. The spiritual and physical blend into one:

"There she goes, she's magic. If you could understand . . . the faith and trust her love and light demand. With prophecy and poetry at her command, she holds the key to heaven in her hand."

And who is she? A mythic goddess? The eternal woman? His wife? The earthmother? Jimmie loves the mystery. "I'd frame my answer this way," he says with a playful smile. "It's her!"

A Flatlander round table: The quest for beauty

There are times, in concert, when the Flatlanders joke that the story behind "Now Again" is "three guys who wrote these songs while working on a fishing boat." In truth, the life journeys of these three men are more exotic than any tall tale about Flatlanders on a shrimp boat.

Butch majored in architecture at Texas Tech, mastered black-and-white photography, wrote songs while driving his father's tractor. Jimmie quit music entirely after the first Flatlanders album in 1972. He lived in an ashram in New Orleans, worked as a janitor in a Denver synagogue, studied under the Maharaj Ji. Joe traveled with a circus. . . .

Joe: It was the most miserable job I ever had, because it's no money and you sleep on the train, in a tiny compartment. It's mostly animals. You just have a few bunks back there. And I slept in the elephant car. So that the elephants are going back and forth, all the time. It's like they're on a ship, you know?

(Jimmie and Butch, amazed, laugh along with the story.)

Joe: There was a funniness about it, too: Sleeping in the elephant car, getting up the next day and loading the animals out and going in a parade through Albuquerque and the ponies getting loose. And the star midget looking up girls' dresses and the guys on the trapeze. . . . They're like royalty, you know: They don't mingle with anyone else. And they drive behind the train in a limousine. . . .

(Jimmie is laughing in wonder, a jagged, high-pitched chuckle).

Joe: The whole time, I'm shoveling elephant (dung) and taking it all in. It was a terrible job, but it was one of the best jobs I ever had. . . . (softly) I'd sit in the afternoon and watch the lion tamer break in a new lion. You know, one that was completely wild. And I'd watch his assistant there with a rifle, aimed on the lion, just watching this danger. It something you never see by the time it gets to an act. . . .

(Jimmie and Butch sit in awe, having never heard this story.)

Joe: I think all of us had these experiences as we were becoming songwriters. None of us said, "OK, let's just be songwriters." I think a lot of young songwriters, now, don't take in the rest of the world — they just listen to other songwriters. You're not experiencing anything, in a room, with the door closed. You have to get out. Like Butch driving the tractor. Or all of us, exploring the country, basically living. . . .

Jimmie: For long segments of time, we were what would now be called "homeless people." They didn't call it that then, and we didn't think of it that way.

Joe: We didn't have money, we didn't have a car, we didn't have a steady roof over our heads. We moved from place to place.

Jimmie: Most of our old high school friends had already gone into" their mortgages and all that stuff— and we somehow spun out. We did music for the love of it . . . but without really saying, "Now: I am a songwriter."

A moment with Butch

Butch Hancock lives with his partner, Adrienne, and their young family on the outskirts of Terlingua's ghost town — close to nature, where paved road gives way to dirt road, in a setting that casts him as the mad scientist of Texas song. For now, they are living in four Airstream trailers while Butch builds his desert dream house of adobe and stone . . . by himself.

Butch is very much the farmer's son, plain-spoken, broad-shouldered, unpretentious — even as he presides over a construction site rich with the most eclectic variety of litter. There are mounds of straw bales, a broken tuba, solar panels, a dilapidated Volkswagen Beetle, children's toys and funky fragments of chrome architecture from an old Sonic Drive-In. Well beyond the shell of the house some 250 burgundy theater seats salvaged from a movie house in Alpine, sit in straight rows in the middle of the nowhere — destined to become part of a desert amphitheater sculpted from nature, within the bend of a draw.

Lost in the beauty of his vision, Butch makes a slow circle about the perimeter of the house — past the concrete statuettes of Stan Laurel and Socrates — describing all manner of curves and domes and observation huts that may someday come. All the while, his drawing board sits empty. The Flatlander Architect has made no formal blueprints; it's all in his head!

Imagine Groucho, Gaudi and Thoreau meeting for a grand summit in the Chihuahuan desert. All the rules, broken. All convention, shattered. All of life's possibility, celebrated. This is the very essence of Butch Hancock and his songs:

"This old world is a minor miracle. The sun and the moon, they spin for you. But deep inside, there's a finer circle. And my friend, that's the wheel that must run true."

Butch is the most prolific writer in the Flatlanders — author of "If You Were a Bluebird," "Boxcars" and "She Never Spoke Spanish to Me." His "Leo and Leona" is a masterpiece of words, a celebration of the circle of life — in the roundness of vowels, in a wedding band and a bull ring, in the very idea of circumstance. Fellini shaped him. Bob Dylan shaped him. Seasons on a tractor shaped him, too.

"I think the most important thing you can do, for whatever specialized endeavor you choose, is to study something else," he says after heating up afternoon tea on his camp stove. "I don't think you learn about architecture by studying architecture. Sure, there's certain basic requirements. . . . But to really learn about architecture, you go study insects, like those wasps we saw this morning. You study plants. I think it's safe to say, no matter what you do, go study nature in some form."

Gazing at the distant mountains, Butch plays with riddle. Are those mountains something to behold? Or do they block the ideal of a perfectly . . . flat. . . . landscape?

"I think the year I spent driving a tractor was the pivotal year of my life," says Butch. "Everybody thought I was driving a tractor, writing a few songs. But boy, I discovered the universe!" Helaughs, the lone voice in the desert- "And I did discover it. I claim it, too, by the way. It's mine!

"I was doing a lot of metaphysical reading in those tractor days — and I tuned into some of their most basic principles, which have held for me, without fail, ever since. It was a joy to sit up there on the tractor every day, watching the skies come by, talking — literally talking — to the crows and the coyotes and the red-tailed hawks. A few snakes. Prairie dogs . . ."

In two weeks, the Flatlanders will perform in New York, on "Late Show With David Letterman." Certainly, the show's jittery big-city host will have a hard time understanding this picture— Butch Hancock, the poet on a tractor, the dreamer in the desert, moving as slowly as a sunset, honoring nothing but the song in his own heart. Yet Butch feels no compulsion to prepare an explanation for Dave — or anyone else. His mind is focused on tractor memories.

"Those talks with the crows," he says with a wink in his voice, "They were some of the "best ones. . . ."

A Flatlander round table: Lubbock

As young men, the Flatlanders couldn't wait to get out of Lubbock — feeling pinched by its social conservatism, forever aware of the greater horizon. So they wandered. They hopped trains. Yet even now, they go back. Joe Ely, in fact, remarks that he starts every record project by driving to Lubbock for the sake of grounding — making notes with pen and paper throughout the journey.

Lubbock comes up, over lunch, as the Flatlanders ruminate upon this quotation from Joseph Campbell: "To see life as a poem, and yourself participating in a poem, is what myth can do for you."

Joe: Well, we grew up in an almost mythological part of the world, where nothing was visible on the surface. West Texas is so stark, there's nothing there on the surface. Everything you find, you have to look behind something. And so it becomes mythological — because it's not apparent. It's in the landscapes, the buildings, the structures. And it's in the people themselves.

Jimmie: Yeah!

Joe: People don't let on what's inside of them. They have this ...hard surface, not letting on what they know. And it's only in becoming friends that you catch little glimpses of what's behind. And all of a sudden, you see something bloom out of that. It's almost like desert plants, you know? They have thorns on the outside, but a beautiful flower (appears) when it rains.

Butch: I don't think we ever hated Lubbock. It's part of a joke, you know? Because it was so stark. It was sort of self-effacement.

Joe: It was easy to pick on. (Everyone laughs.)

Jimmie: In a lot of respects. Lubbock was the epitome of a post-World War II American city, with everything distilled. The city people had only recently been removed from being country people. So we were a generation with a little bit of both. I mean, we grew up with media, cars, all of that — mass-produced books, movies, radio, TV . . . and we were affected by it. Being from Lubbock doesn't mean you're isolated. But in other respects, it does. Because it was from a culture — a rural, farm culture — where people could be suspicious of strangers, or bigoted, or racist. . . .

Butch: (Brightly).. . . But friendly! (The Flatlanders laugh.)

Butch: "Howdy, Stranger! . . . I think I'm gonna kill you. . . ."

Joe: About three years ago, we were playing a festival — for Buddy Holly Day — and they blocked off all the streets of downtown Lubbock. And all the TV cameras were out there, interviewing people from all over the world as to why they came to Lubbock. And a German guy, from Munich, is asked by this anchor lady what he thinks about Lubbock. And he says: "What an amazing waste of space . . ."

A moment with Joe

Joe Ely and his wife. Sharon, live in the country south of Oak Hill — close to nature, where paved road gives way to dirt road, a paradise of solitude. Their 100-year-old house, which rests on several acres of what was once the enormous Kuykendall ranch, is straight out of a gypsy's dream — rich with hacienda-style arches and Spanish tile and colored lights that beckon to the mystery of the night.

There is the scent of rosemary. Water trickles from a Spanish fountain. Joe, who did the exterior tile work himself, points to small harmonicas embedded in some of the spaces between tiles. It's for the wind, he says. To catch the music in the wind.

"There was a funny magic about that area of the country, where we all grew up — that dusty old place in the middle of nowhere — and how Buddy Holly and Bob Wills and Roy Orbison could find a melody and pull it from the sky." he says a little later, sitting down with a cup of English tea. "There was so much melody there, and I think that was the magic of it.

"Rhythm is power. It's a brute force. But there's something in melody that really is magic. I think the wind had a lot to do with forming the melodies out there—because the best melodies are a little windy, you know. They move around. They don't stay still."

Joe Ely is the windiest of the Flatlanders: a Texas Springsteen, a gust of wild energy, the runaway train. His best songs — and the treatments he brings to the compositions of others — have a cinematic sweep to them. It's no surprise that he's a painter, too, a man with a highly refined visual sense. If Butch's gift is the word and Jimmie's is the ethereal dream, Joe Ely is the Flatlander who makes the melodies move:

"She is to me just like the breeze that blows from Corpus Christi. She is to me just like the breeze that blows up from the sea. Well, if she is like the breeze that blows from Corpus Christi . . . then I must be like the trees, 'cause Caroleen blows through me."

For years, Joe carried in his guitar case a copy of Federico Garcia Lorca's "The Gypsy Ballads" — a gift from the writer Michael Ventura, who lived with the Flatlanders in Lubbock in the early 1970s. He's highly attuned to Spanish and Mexican textures, which have given his music a strong "border" feel from the very beginning.

"When I was 10, 11 years old, I worked for my dad, who had a used clothing store in downtown Lubbock," says Joe, whose teen-age daughter, Marie Elena, is named for Buddy Holly's widow. "And in the spring, all through the summer, the migrant workers would come up from Mexico. And at that time, they didn't have big machines; it was all hand labor. So you would have 100,000 workers come up in trucks, stacked in trucks, driving up every spring."

"On the weekends, the emigrant workers would come into Lubbock to do their shopping, because they all lived on the farms, in little houses, shacks. And right across the street from my father's store was a bar, and there was a band playing. You had guys on the streets, accordion players, bajo sexto guys. Crowds gathering. Tortillas cooking, from April to November. I loved that music. I was touched by the sadness in it. These people, they were really poor. And there's nothing more touching, I think, than a real fast, happy melody with real sad lyrics in it."

As the Flatlander with the keenest sense for musical texture, Ely served as the producer of "Now Again" and helped guide the first discussions about what the new album should sound like. Slide guitar . . . or musical saw? All acoustic . . . or a mixture of electric and organic sound? The consensus: "No rules!"

"The album was a real treat to work on - and now that it's done, it's a little bit sad, you know?" says Joe, out of the blue. "The whole object of it was not to make a record and say, 'Yea! We finished a record.' We did it for the beauty of working together on it. It was kind of like our lives: It's not what's at the end; it's the journey itself. Everything's a work in progress. There's no goal. No 'end-of-the-line' thing.

"I'm sure we'll go our separate ways after this tour, do our own things for a while. But now that we've opened this up — this idea of us writing and working together — I can't wait until we do it again."

The perfect circle

They came of age in a place nicknamed the Hub City, nurtured by a circle of friends who believed in the beauty of a life that honored the call of the heart. The wide, flat loop of the West Texas horizon captured their imagination, inviting them to consider meaning in Shiva's circle of life, a circus ring, the desert moon... and the path of the tiny planet, spinning around the sun.

"A circle of love," writes Butch Hancock, "is a work of art." Janet Gilmore, Jimmie's wife, describes the Flatlander story as "a constant circle of sharing."

"I think whatever you do with your time is actually your religion," suggests Joe Ely. "If you go to church every Sunday, that doesn't make you a spiritual' or 'religious' person if you spend the rest of the week sitting around watching football games. You don't have a lot of time on this earth. And I think the three of us have tried to spend our time, from the time we met, until now, on that search of where it all came from."

That circle goes round, and round, and round . . . and "now it's now again" for these old dear friends known as the Flatlanders. Imagine a cool, spring night in downtown Austin, circa 2001. Butch, Joe and Jimmie are playing together on the outdoor stage at Stubb's. It's a packed house. The aroma of barbecue fills the air.

The music isn't technically perfect. Jimmie's voice is a little rough tonight, and the band's timing is off a bit on some of the new songs. But the crowd roars with delight during "West Texas Waltz." A group of children jump up on stage and dance. There's a spirit of love — not just for the music, but the joy of sharing it — that shines through everything.

At the end of the night, the Flatlanders launch into "If You Were a Bluebird," one of Butch's most tender songs. In the spirit of sharing, the three singers take turns swapping verses. Then, inexplicably . . . they flub the song. Someone forgets the words. Or forgets a verse. Or forgets that it's his turn to take the vocal.

"I dreamed I wrote this one time," says Butch Hancock, still carrying the tune on his guitar, telling a joke at his own expense.

"I dreamed I forgot it," says the mischievous smile on Jimmie Dale Gilmore's face.

"It's all just a dream," answers Joe Ely with a warm laugh.

In the presence of affection and laughter, the Flatlanders bring a humble and human grace to their imperfect Texas love song—finishing the tune with the most elegant tenderness: "If I was a highway, I'd stretch alongside you. I'd help you pass by ways that have dissatisfied you. If I was a highway, I'd be stretching. I'd be fetching you home."

The audience sways in tune with the music, its feet shuffling against a dance floor of Texas earth. There is laughter in the evening sky. A melody floats clear in a soft spring breeze. It blows from Lubbock, with love.