Laura Straub
thebakeandbrew
christopher.
Tommy Wilson
stephenkillion
amsettineri
Peter Cavanaugh
AndrewFiled under: Night Drive Tunes, Songs for Contemplation, Songs to listen to with the windows down, Songs to start your day, Sunny Dispositions | Tags: Austin, Butch Hancock, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely, More a Legend than a Band, Rounder Records, The Flatlanders
I bet you didn’t know that Smokey, the over-the-line fragile pacifist from The Big Lebowski, also happens to be, in real life, one of the triumvirate leaders of perhaps the greatest band Country music has ever seen. His name is Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and along with Butch Hancock and Joe Ely, he makes up The Flatlanders, a group which, during their original ’70s career, released exactly one artistically compromised eight-track album on an unknown label with no distribution power, and yet still managed to influence the likes of iconic bands from The Clash to Uncle Tupelo.
The band was formed in 1970 in Lubbock, Texas, and after playing with a rotating cast of musicians, Ely, Hancock, and Gilmore, all guitarists, solidified the group with a fiddler, an upright bassist, a mandolin player, and even a guy on musical saw, who learned that instrument, and the autoharp, just so he could join the band.
In 1972 the Flatlanders went to Nashville and cut a record on the bargain-bin Plantation label, but the album was shelved following a pretty dismal response to the first single, “Dallas”. It was eventually released in 1973, in the above-mentioned form, and limited almost exclusively to truck stop eight-track racks. By then, most of the supporting musicians had left the band, and eventually even Gilmore, Ely, and Hancock drifted apart with the Texas winds.
The band had trouble finding a national audience because their sound was simultaneously too weird, and just way too Country for Country. The musical saw, especially, gave their songs that haunting sound like wind whistling through a dusty Old West town; it carried the hint of a Western scored by Ennio Morricone.
As the years wore on, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely, and Butch Hancock all became (relatively) well-known names in the music world, infiltrating the consciousness of Country fans on both sides of the Great Plains. I have never heard any of their solo music, and had never heard of the Flatlanders before, but I recognized those three names immediately when I stumbled across them in the Country section of the local library. They graced the cover of the 1990 Rounder Records release “More a Legend than a Band,” a reshuffled reissue of the Flatlanders’ lost landmark they recorded in ’72. Ditching two weak covers of Country standards and adding four completely unreleased tracks from the original sessions, “More a Legend than a Band” is one of the most aptly titled releases in all of Country music. It addresses not only the almost-mythic influence of a band which never had a hit single, or even a proper record release, but also the exquisite music on display here. Upon first listen, you might find it weird, especially when that musical saw kicks in. But in the universe of Country music, this group of songs acts as a pivot around which the rest of the world turns. There was nothing like it before, and there has been nothing quite like it since.
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