The Flatlanders

Now Again (New West Records)

Playing July 11 at Dancin’ in the District

During the early 1970s, The Flatlanders didn’t play many gigs and put out only one album—an 8-track tape available mostly at truck stops. Nevertheless, the group managed to achieve mythical status both stateside and abroad. Sure, the band’s three singer-songwriters—Joe Ely, Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore—went on to successful solo careers, but for fans of the group, there was something about the three as bandmates and friends that personified the expansive freedom and romance of their West Texas origins. Now The Flatlanders have reunited for a long-awaited tour in support of Now Again, their debut on New West Records; after 30 years, that kinship is as evident as ever.

One of the first things you notice when talking to Ely, Hancock and Gilmore is that, like siblings or a couple who’ve been together awhile, they finish each other’s sentences—so much so that after the conversation is over it’s often hard to recall who said what. That’s the symbiotic nature of their creative partnership; the way they involve each other in the songwriting and performing process ensures that the musical sum will be greater than its parts.

“We all learned from each other, but then there was always something more than that,” Gilmore explains. “We’re friends, and anything that one of us is intuitively interested in and focuses attention on, the other two of us are always open to and are drawn in....”

“We have a similar openness to being astounded by things,” Hancock says, picking up the thread. “About ’69 or ’70, we all wandered back to Lubbock after having our brains rattled and, kind of by osmosis, drifted together like a club of outsiders...standing around shaking our heads about the same kind of things. That’s the beginnings of an understanding that’s gone with us—an understanding of the unknown,” he says with a laugh.

A series of fortuitous events led to The Flatlanders reforming. First, in 1997, producer Tony Brown asked Ely to write a song for the Robert Redford movie The Horse Whisperer. Ely ended up involving Hancock and Gilmore in the project, and the three, who, remarkably, had never written together before, quickly realized that their creative “understanding” extended to songwriting as well. The track that resulted, “South Wind of Summer,” came together so nicely that each member put his solo plans on hold so that the group could continue working on songs.

Then, in May 1998, The Flatlanders appeared on The Late Show With David Letterman, which marked the first time the group had appeared together in more than a quarter-century. They were subsequently invited to appear as part of the 1999 New York Summer Stage series in Central Park, and the response from that huge audience was tremendous. The New York Times then ran a half-page article on the band, piquing interest on a national level. Suddenly, The Flatlanders—who didn’t have a record deal, management or a booking agent—were being offered gigs by promoters all over the country.

“It came naturally, unnaturally,” Ely says of the group’s formative attempts at collaborating on the material that became Now Again. Adds Hancock: “When one person’s writing a song, it’s like all these little characters are running around inside your head offering differing opinions about every line or what direction the song’s going to go. When there’s three people doing it, then each one of us has that process going on within ourselves, so it’s really like nine people trying to write the song,” he laughs. “I heard someone say a long time ago that the real job of the artist is to get out of the way of their art.”

Ely, Hancock and Gilmore ended up co-writing 12 of the 14 tracks on Now Again, which were primarily recorded at Ely’s Spur Studio in Austin. Supported by a studio band that included Austin mainstays Chris Searles and Rafael Gayol on drums and Gary Herman on bass—as well as two other original Flatlanders, Steve Wesson on musical saw and Tony Pearson on vocals—the recordings evince the wind-blown pathos that ties the group’s three writers together.

Take, for example, the restless departure conveyed in “Down in the Light of the Melon Moon”: “She doesn’t feel lucky, she doesn’t feel lost / She just feels like leavin’, whatever the cost.” Other tracks, such as “Pay the Alligator,” rely on the cryptic sense of humor that old friends like Ely, Hancock and Gilmore share. “You gotta walk on razors and sleep on nails / Talk like ducks and walk like quails / Go blindfolded backwards through the discombobulator,” Gilmore sings. “But if you don’t do it right,” answers Ely, “you gotta pay the alligator.”

When The Flatlanders gathered in Nashville this past May to celebrate the release of Now Again, it was the first time they had performed in town together since the studio session that produced their 8-track tape back in 1972. Those original recordings, released on Shelby Singleton’s Plantation Records under the title Jimmie Dale and the Flatlanders, have since been repackaged by Charly, Sun and Rounder Records. (Rounder’s More a Legend Than a Band, from 1990, was the most widely distributed.)

Nashville in the 1970s, however, just wasn’t ready for The Flatlanders’ idiosyncratic, off-the-cuff blend of folk, Brit-pop, country, Cajun and Tejano music; by 1973, the three had settled in Outlaw-friendly Austin, where they pursued solo paths. “We’ve always been upstarts, but we never did have this feeling of Nashville as being some kind of alien place,” says Gilmore. “A huge portion of the music that I love was recorded in Nashville, and Joe and I have recorded here a lot, so there’s an affinity. I guess there’s just a public relations thing between different cities, especially Nashville and Austin.”

Today, Music City is apparently more accepting of unvarnished, tradition-based acts like The Flatlanders. Despite existing mostly outside the mainstream, artists like The Derailers, Jim Lauderdale and Buddy and Julie Miller command a great deal of attention in the local and national media. Although The Flatlanders’ commercial timing seems good—the July 6 issue of Billboard listed their record at No. 19 on its country album chart—this reunion isn’t about cashing in on musical trends.

“It always seemed to me like there was some kind of a lucky star over The Flatlanders artistically,” Gilmore explains. “Timing just happens to let us indulge our musical loves, but it’s not like we had some manager saying, ‘Hey, you guys are kinda bluegrass, and bluegrass is hot!’ It didn’t work like that.”

As with most of the recent spate of roots-oriented record releases, it remains to be seen whether Now Again will break through the firewalls of country radio. In an effort to increase those odds, however, syndicated radio talk show host Don Imus has offered to donate $10,000 to the favorite charity of any country station in a major market that works a Flatlanders track into its Top 10. (Right now, it appears that KZLA in Los Angeles might rise to the challenge.) Such gimmickry is probably what it’s going to take, because, as The Flatlanders know, their commitment to pursuing their own eclectic path puts them at a distinct marketing disadvantage.

“There’s two different worlds that interact very uncomfortably,” says Hancock. “People that base the whole business on what’s selling right now, and people who approach it with ‘What do I like?’ or ‘What’s good music?’ We’ve always fallen so far into the ‘What do I like’ side that there’s never really been much discussion about what sells.”