High Plains Drifters: The Flatlanders - laying the foundations for alt-country
- jamesgeraghty
- Apr 13
- 10 min read
Lubbock, Texas. A place pretty much miles from anywhere else, surrounded by the high up, dusty plains full of cotton, randomly cut across by mesas and canyons, and squeezed in to the part of West Texas between New Mexico to the west and the panhandle to the north. It was a city full of cowboys and honky-tonks, and yet was also the partial birthplace of rock n roll, when Buddy Holly burst out of the country music shackles in 1955 and followed hot in the wake of Elvis Presley.
In the 1970's, it was also the birthplace of a band, who have spent precious little time together over the years, and yet who are very much one of the pillars on which the movement we now call Alt-Country, is founded. Because, without The Flatlanders, along with more well known acts like Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie, artists of the 80's and 90's, like Uncle Tupelo, Steve Earle and Jason & The Scorchers, couldn't have built this fusion movement of country, folk, rock n roll and a little dash of punk.
Under the uncharitable skies:
It started out with childhood friendships. Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore first met each other in 7th grade. They were good friends during school hours, but not so much out of school; they lived in different parts of town and Hancock played a lot of after school sport.
Gilmore met Joe Ely through mutual friends on the local music scene. Hancock first saw him playing a "little folk joint" in an old grain elevator. "I don't know if we got introduced that night or not, but it was an amazing experience hearing Joe pick and sing like he owned the place - which he did. I mean, he walked into it and he owned it from that moment."
Hancock reflected on the Lubbock of the late 1950's and 60's; "[it] had a great music scene. It was just smaller and not as big an audience for it out there except cowboy honky-tonks and that kind of thing." He focused on it's somewhat lonely position in West Texas, saying "Lubbock is funny little place. It was considerably isolated…. You had the uncharitable skies and the horizon that goes all around you. You could see the whole horizon."
The Flatlanders though, started to carve out their little niche. "We were kind of the alternative culture in Lubbock which was pretty wide ranging. There was everything from architectural ideas to all the music we were getting into. Just the fact that we were getting into music and playing guitars was pretty odd for Lubbock. We had long hair and that was even more curious then. We were not quite the clean-cut kids that most of our neighbors were at the time."
However, before The Flatlanders, they had first called themselves the Super Natural Playboys. It was a bit of a joke for them, until someone pointed out that if they ever wanted to get anywhere, they could never use that name. Whatever the name of the band, the music they wanted to play mixed together all of their early influences - country, folk, bluegrass and rock n roll.
Ely noted the roots of this musical fusion; "Jimmie was like a well of country music. He knew everything about it. And Butch was from the folk world. I was kinda the rock & roll guy, and we almost had a triad. We hit it off and started playing a lot together. That opened up a whole new world I had never known existed."
The impact of place on the music can perhaps best be described by fellow legendary Texan, Townes Van Zandt, who once told them, "All you West Texas guys, you got that High Plains Air in your sound. I can't tell whether it's exactly in your voices or in the general sense of the music or what."
The Flatlanders: Dallas (Live from Austin, Texas)
Never been to Dallas:
The Flatlanders were making a few waves, on that small-time west Texas scene at least. And they did break out a little, making an appearance at the Kerrville Folk Festival (down south, between Austin and San Antonio), becoming one of the winners of the New Folk Singer / Songwriter competition.
Before long, they found themselves working with Shelby Singleton, owner of the famous Sun Studios. They created their first promo single, a recording of Gilmore's song Dallas, and laid down their debut album, American Music. Unfortunately, the single was a commercial flop, and the album was pretty much laid to rest, except for a limited run of the 8-track tape version, which was produced to meet contractual obligations.
They gigged a lot around Texas throughout much of 1972 and 1973, but ultimately decided to disband and go their separate ways. The album would get a proper release some years later, and the New York Times would eventually call it "a founding document of the alternative country movement."
We'll pick up the story of The Flatlanders, as a band, again in a bit, but first we'll explore how our protagonists got on outside the band.
The Flatlanders: Gimme A Ride To Heaven (Live from Austin, TX)
The Teacher - Jimmie Dale Gilmore:
Jimmie Dale Gilmore was born in Amarillo in 1945, growing up in the Texas Panhandle, before ending up in Lubbock.
He fell under the influence of Hank Williams early on, but also the honky-tonk played by his father. Then, along came the rock n roll Texans like Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly. At a concert at Lubbock Fair Park in 1955, the young Gilmore would see Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly on the same bill. Quite an impression.
He briefly attended Texas Tech University (in Lubbock), but after The Flatlanders disbanded in 1973, Gilmore would spend much of the 1970s in an ashram in Denver, studying metaphysics with Prem Pal Singh Rawat, who was then a teenage guru.
In the 1980's, he moved to back to Texas and to the capitol, Austin. He put together his first solo record, Fair & Square in 1988. He has also dabbled in acting. In 1993, he appeared as himself in Peter Bogdanovich's (director of The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon) musical comedy-drama, The Thing Called Love (starring River Phoenix, Dermot Mulroney and Samantha Mathis), which was set in Nashville.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore: Trying To Get To You (Audio only)
In 1994, he joined in on a version of Crazy (made famous by Patsy Cline) with Willie Nelson (who had actually written the song) for the Red Hot & Country AIDS benefit album.
Acting wise, his peak was probably in 1998, with a small, but memorable, role as the bowler Smoky, in The Big Lebowski. His character was a pacifist who finds himself being threatened by a gun wielding John Goodman (playing sidekick Walter Sobchak to Jeff Bridge's The Dude's).
For the last 25 years or so, he has been teaching a songwriting workshop for one week each year at the Omega Institute in upstate New York (minus the one Covid year, which they ran online) - and he also occasionally runs sessions at Esalen Institute on California's Big Sur coast.
The Thinker - Butch Hancock:
Butch Hancock was born in 1945, in Lubbock. He was at architecture school for a while, but dropped out in 1968, and went back to working on his father's farm for a while, driving tractors.
After The Flatlanders initially disbanded, he continued with his songwriting, before setting up his own Rainlight Records in 1978, releasing his solo debut LP, West Texas Waltzes and Dust-Blown Tractor Tunes.
He told Jason Gross (furious.com) "I had been wanting to make an album and I just thought I could do it myself. In the process of doing that, I was introduced to a lot of the basics of business in the world as well as the music industry itself. Although it was on a miniscule scale, it was at a scale where I could understand everything about it."
Many of his early solo records were primarily folk based with little more than guitar and harmonica, but over time he gradually expanded the instrumentation he put on his albums.
He lived for a long time in Austin (20+ years), before deciding to move out to Terlingua in 1997, preferring the more rural lifestyle offered by a small town close to the Big Bend National Park and the arc of the Rio Grande along the US-Mexican border.
Butch Hancock: Buckskin Stallion Blues (Live on KDHX - an old Townes Van Zandt tune)
He also gained a reputation as a photographer, hosting several exhibitions over the years, and running his own gallery for a while. But his writing was always there, with Steve Pick, writing in the St. Louis Post Dispatch (1994), that Hancock is, "one of the finest songwriters of our time." His metaphorical and ironic lyrics have sometimes been compared to Bob Dylan and his songs have been sung by the likes of Emmylou Harris and the Texas Tornados.
The Punk - Joe Ely:
Slightly younger than the other two, Joe Ely was born in 1947, a hundred miles up the road in Amarillo, but did much of his growing up in Lubbock.
His post-Flatlanders career took him on a much different path. His self-titled solo debut record came out in 1977, and the following year, he and his band found themselves playing in London. While there, he met The Clash, and there was much mutual respect - they were impressed with each others live performances. This resulted in them touring together, including shows around Ely's home, playing together in Lubbock, Laredo and Ciudad Juarez.
Joe Ely: Tennessee's Not The State I'm In (Audio only)
The respect was deep enough for Joe Strummer to pen the line, "Well there ain't no better blend than Joe Ely and his Texas Men", in If Music Could Talk, from 1980's Sandanista! triple album. Ely also got to sing backing vocals on Should I Stay Or Should I Go? on the Combat Rock LP. Strummer had always planned to record with Ely at some stage, but sadly died before that ever happened - something that Ely has regretted.
The Clash: Should I Stay Or Should I Go? (Official video - Strummer and Ely are singing the Spanish bits in the background)
In May 1982, Ely helped put on the Third Annual Tornado Jam in Lubbock (an event originally put on to raise funds for a tornado that devastated the region in 1970). A crowd of 25,000 was in attendance to see acts including Leon Russell, Joan Jett and The Crickets.
Ely also eventually turned to self releasing his work. In 2007, having previously mostly had his solo material put out by MCA, Happy Songs From Rattlesnake Gulch came out on his own Rack 'Em Records. Also that year, a book of his writings called Bonfire Of Roadmaps was published by the University of Texas Press.
2015's Panhandle Rambler had a reflective feel to it, which impressed Lonestar Music Magazine who said, "the title fits the record just right, neatly framing a dozen songs that fit together thematically like a map of both the West Texas landscape and of Ely's epic decades-spanning musical ramble."
Joe Ely: Band Of Angels (Audio only)
The Treasure of Love - more Flatlanders:
The three friends never lost contact through the years and would get together now and again. But in 1998, The Flatlanders were back together as a recording entity, making a contribution to The Horse Whisperer (Robert Redford, Scarlett Johansson) soundtrack, with a song called South Wind Of Summer.
The Flatlanders: South Wind Of Summer (Live from Austin, TX)
That paved the way for more frequent collaborations, but also some long overdue praise of their original output and importance to the music world. 2002, thirty years after the first, saw them release their follow up album, Now Again (on New West Records).
After years of doing their own things, the next decade saw a relative flurry of further activity. In 2004, they recorded Wheels Of Fortune (New West), and also saw Live '72 released, an old gig that had been recorded at the One Knite honky-tonk in Austin.
When Hills & Valleys came out in 2009, they finally got a tv appearance, popping up on the Late Show with David Letterman that July. A lot of their old unreleased recordings from those early 1972 sessions was put out as The Odessa Tapes (2012). And in 2013 they got a prestigious radio appearance on PBS's long-running A Prairie Home Companion, hosted by Garrison Keillor. To cap it off, in 2016, they were voted into the Austin Music Awards Hall of Fame (which includes pretty much every great Texas musician there has ever been, from any genre).
More recently, Treasure Of Love came out, having been made partly during Covid lockdown, with help of long-time friend Lloyd Maines (producer of Kris Kristofferson, Loretta Lynn, Wilco etc.). It was not even planned as a record, initially - the three of them were just enjoying being back together and playing. The initial sessions had been at Ely's Spur Studios in Austin, laid down over several years prior to Covid. Ely recalls, "I like to say that this album evolved more than it was recorded. We'd been chipping away at these songs for a while without ever really finishing anything, so when lockdown started, it seemed like the perfect time to really focus on it."
The Flatlanders: Moanin' Of The Midnight Train (Audio only)
The record contains a mix of new originals and vintage tunes (Johnny Cash, Leon Russell, Dylan) picked up over their years of performing. Hancock added, "Whenever the three of us get together, it all feels so fresh and exciting and unpredictable. Every time we collaborate, there's this feeling of newness and possibility, even though it's all part of this same story we've been telling since the very beginning."
What next?
Over the intervening decades between their recorded output, Ely had produced several albums by Gilmore and Hancock. Out of the three, Ely probably had the largest solo following, and because he continued to always play songs by his bandmates, it meant that their names were kept alive in public.
Gilmore wryly notes, "A lot of groups our age are either dead or not speaking to each other anymore, but I think part of the reason The Flatlanders are still together is that we've all had our own separate careers along the way. We're all such strange individualists, but we can co-captain this ship together because every time we come back to it, we feel that same magic we felt when we first started playing together."
He also has explained why the band works so well. "We've all been fans of each other from the start, but the thing that's always struck me about The Flatlanders is that, first and foremost, it's a band rooted in friendship. Beyond the music, we just connect with each other in these deep and personal ways, and that's been a lifelong treasure."
Who knows what may happen next? But given they always seem to end up together, as long as they can stay in good health, it seems likely that there may be more Flatlanders.
(Here is an old 30s tune by Mississippi Sheiks, that they covered on Treasure of Love)
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