Riding High with Hard-Luck Guys

By JAY COCKS

Joe Ely keeps faith with the past and makes good music

The best country album of 1980 never came out in the U.S., and the best country album so far in 1981 isn't getting played on the radio and hasn't sold enough copies to keep Glen Campbell in rhinestones. The fellow responsible for both records isn't taking it too hard though. "I'd like a hit," Joe Ely muses.

"But I'm not in it for the fame and fortune. It's getting so that if you don't make three million bucks, you're not hot. But you don't need three million.

I try to play to people for whom music is a necessity, not a luxury."

So the kind of country sound Joe Ely has set down on five fine albums --the newest, Musta Notta Gotta Lotta, was released in February--bears little resemblance to the chart-topping fodder of Kenny Rogers or the cuddlesome crooning of Eddie Rabbitt. Anyone who considers that those old boys sing country music is guaranteed to be mixed up and maybe a little unsettled by Joe Ely. Country slickers like Eddie and Kenny have helped divert the mainstream of Nashville about 1,600 miles west, right into the middle of Las Vegas, where a soft pedal steel guitar can set up a gentle rhythm for the slots.

There is nothing at all gentle about Joe Ely's music. Hard, strong and direct, with heavy rockabilly underpinnings, it can raise more blisters than a long week's farm work.

"My music," Ely states proudly, "is a strong, aggressive attack," and at a time when outlaws like Willie Nelson have mellowed into genteel grandees, Ely is an unreconstructed rowdy. He works the kind of honky-tonk where the patrons would tear the designer label off an urban cowboy's jeans, and songs like / Keep Gettin' Paid the Same and Dam of My Heart (both on the new album) sound gritty and firsthand, not arm's length, the preferred performing distance of contemporary country gentlemen.

Joe Ely's bare-knuckled and open-hearted approach to country music has consequently created a fair amount of confusion. His manager has compared him with Bruce Springsteen, presumably to get rockers to pay a little heed, and his record company just acts stymied. Ely puts up an almost reflexive resistance to any discussion of categories--"I don't like definitions," he says, "and I write my own labels"--but he has a lively awareness of where he has come from and where country music is going. "Nashville's problem is that it is always filling the air waves, like TV," he says. "Country has become pop mainstream. It has lost rawness and vitality." Ely looks back to some of the men who put those qualities there in the first place. Jimmie Rodgers; Bob Wills, the king of western swing, who opened up country to newer, jazzier rhythms; Hank Williams, "who gave the music heart-stabbing bite." And Buddy Holly. When Ely, now 34, was growing up in

Lubbock, Texas, he took guitar lessons from Buddy's old teacher, a door-to-door salesman who did not need to urge Joe to duplicate the music he heard drifting through the night air from the honky-tonks. Joe did not need much encouragement to leave school either. By the time he packed it in, at 16, he was already working three to five nights a week in clubs, "making enough to reinvest in equipment."

He gigged around Texas, working the kind of joint that advertises a prohibitive $100 cover charge for blacks only, and by the time he was 20 he was sleeping on the beach in Venice, Calif., using his amplifier as a pillow. There was not much else to do with it; work was short. He tried San Francisco, then went back home to Texas for "a stretch of riding the rails with hard-luck guys." He wound up in New York City, where he landed a job playing guitar in a Texas-style musical at Joseph Papp's Public Theater. He pulled down wages of $60 a week and slept on the Staten Island Ferry.

"Wandering isn't fun," Ely recalls.

"It's colorful misery." Home again in Texas, Joe started working some of those miserable shades into songs. There were several false starts and at least one more hard-times visit to New York, where, Ely recalls, "I was mostly singin' in the subways and in front of Bloomindale's."

Finally, in 1974, Ely put together the nucleus of a band, and released his first big-time record in 1977. Big time and big business are not necessarily the same, however, and although the personnel in the band have changed, Ely's hot-poker music still gets the same puzzled reception from any audiences and executives who expect a country singer to toe the redneck line.

Joe Strummer of the Clash recognized a kindred spirit and invited Ely and his band to share billing on a European tour in 1979. The punk audience, Ely remembers, "threw shirts, hot dogs, bottles and panties at us. We threw back a crate of ice, and they loved it." The recorded result of the London leg of this tour, Live Shots, was never released in the U.S., although the album's reckless drive and scalding lyricism could have put a few badly needed cracks into the country Establishment.

Ely's songs, like those of his crony and frequent collaborator Butch Hancock, are bleak and wistful and angry, awash in the colors that Joe picked up on all of his magical misery tours. Ely's band, along with the traditional complement of bass, rhythm guitar and drums, also includes a sax and an accordion, so its sound sometimes takes on Tex-Mex overtones, or even a certain savor from Cajun territory. Ely's sources are scrupulously eclectic. Perhaps his nearest spiritual peer is that old renegade Jerry Lee Lewis. Live Shots contains one old tune, Fingernails, that may once have been intended as a send-up of Jerry Lee.

Ely just turns the song around and sends it back out again as a tribute.

The music that Joe Ely makes has so many cross-cultural inflections that trying to classify it seems ultimately a fussy academic exercise. His songs are what country music used to be before it became a main tributary of show business. And so what if Joe Ely has not been asked to guest-star on the Barbara Mandrell show?

He sings from the true heart of the country, and the country may not always be where the green is. --By Jay Cocks.

Reported by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles

With reporting by Martha Smilgis

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.