Q The Texas trio known as the Flatlanders have been referred to as more a legend than a band. Maybe that's because they haven't made a record together in 30 years, until now. With the release of their brand new CD "Now Again", Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock are making music more than worthy of their mythical status.
Welcome to Sundogs Barkin', The Flatlanders "Now Again" Conversation, joining me in a quaint East Austin studio are the members of the Flatlanders. Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock and Joe Ely.
Joe, as this is the second time for the Flatlanders, tell us a little bit about the first time around, when it was, how the three of you became friends and formed this band in Lubbock, Texas.
JOE ELY: Oh, boy. That's a good one. Around the late '60s me and Jimmie ran into each other. And we were playing around Lubbock and we would go to each other's gigs. And I was -- kind of came up in a rock-and-roll band. And when I met Jimmie, he just introduced me to a whole world that I didn't know existed. He knew millions of these old Jimmie Rodgers songs. Plus, he was writing these great songs. And then as we got to be friends, Jimmie introduced me to Butch. And they had gone to school together.
And Butch was this whole other world, you know. So here the three of us had all kind of vast, different interests, but, we came together on this kind of common thing that we loved music. And we were just starting to explore, you know, writing songs. So it was like this new thing. We just instantly hit it off.

Q And this is Lubbock, Texas. Butch, there's been so many great artists who've come from Lubbock. And I always hear different theories about why the flat plains would be a place that gave birth to visionaries like Buddy Holly and Terry Allen. Do you have a few theories on why that would be?
BUTCH HANCOCK: We've run through a bunch of them and all of them seem to actually be holding true after all these years. You know, the first one that's most obvious is that there's nothing else to do out there. And then, of course, the wind comes along and hits Yellow House Canyon, right north of Lubbock and kind of dumps everything right on top of you. And then there's always the theory of there's something in the water. But all of those would kind of hit everybody that lives out there.
So we've kind of narrowed it down to some that are a little more selective like the UFOs that appeared back in the '50s. You know, they could zap individuals. And I have always felt zapped all my life. And then there was the one thing that every musician from Lubbock that I've talked to remembers quite well, was hopping on their bicycles three days after any rain in Lubbock, because we'd hear the little chug, chug, chug, chug of the air compressors of the DDT trucks going down the alleys, spraying for mosquitoes. And we'd go chase those trucks down the alleys and see who could stay in the fog the longest. I'm sure that had a lot to do with our poetic leaps into songwriting.

Q I think it's fair to say that Butch has stayed in the fog the longest over the years.
Jimmie, the first and only Flatlanders' before the new album were made 30 years ago. Since then, all three of you have had musical careers that have occasionally intersected. But did the Flatlanders' first album actually get released when it was first made?
JIMMIE DALE GILMORE: Well, not really. There was a -- I think a kind of a perfunctory -- they made a little show of it. They manufactured a few eight-tracks of it. A few vinyl sides. I think maybe 50, something like that. Last year, Joe gave me a copy of the eight-track for Christmas and it's still unopened. At one point, Joe played one of them and it was -- you know, the package said "The Flatlanders." It's on the Sun label. And it looks just great, because it's on the Sun label. But on the actual recording was a record by Jeannie C. Riley. I don't believe that being released would be the right word for it.

Q Maybe it escaped for a little while. That album is called "One Road More," though.
JIMMIE: Right. From a song that Butch wrote that's on that record.

Q Let's flash forward about 26 years. The Flatlanders were asked to record a song for the soundtrack to "The Horse Whisperer." Can one of you tell me about that song and did it ultimately lead to this album "Now Again"?
JOE: I think it might have. The song was called South Wind of Summer. And it was -- kind of marked a point where the three of us actually sat down in a room and decided to write a song together. We'd always written separately and recorded each other's songs. But that period of time, there was two days there that we actually sat down and wrote together. And we wrote three songs, all of which are on the new album. And so it really led us into seeing that we could do that. And it also led us into the fact that anything was possible. Every time we'd start a new song it would be completely different. And so it made it kind of like, "well, what's next?".

Q South Wind helped bring the band back together. And like most of the songs on "Now Again", it's credited as being composed by all three members.
Jimmie, was this a situation where one Flatlander would bring in a song and then the other guys would help finish it or did you actually write these songs in a room all together?
JIMMIE: Oh, we wrote them all together. There were a few of them where one or the other of us already had an idea and presented it to the other ones. South Wind of Summer was one. Joe had actually written part of a song called South Wind of Summer. But he just gave us, really, the title. And we just started into it -- only with that, South Wind of Summer. It sounded so beautiful. And for some reason, it evoked a feeling. And that was kind of typical of the way they all went.
There was some of them where Butch and I had already had something that we were kind of working on. We had, once or twice in the past, kind of dabbled at trying to collaborate. We just never were disciplined enough to follow through with it. Then through the process of the song, all of us just went, "okay, let's just see where this goes from here." And there are portions -- througg the record, where I wouldn't even have a memory of which one of us -- I think in some cases we actually, in a sentence, you know, one of us would start the sentence and another one would finish it.

Q So this time around, you guys were disciplined enough to sit in a room. I mean, 12 out of the 14 songs are credited to all three of you. But there has to be someone watching over. And Joe, you produced "Now Again". How did you get the job with these two other strong personalities to deal with, two guys who also happen to be in the band with you?
JOE: Well, I mean, we did everything and my studio became our, kind of our clubhouse. So we'd meet over there. And in the process of it, as soon as we'd finish a song, we'd put it down immediately. You know, just that was the first thing we'd do is record it, because other things we'd worked on in the past we never recorded and they kind of blew out the window. So that was one thing.
And then the other thing - keeping working with how the song should be. And that took a whole lot of things, like, just trying different things. Trying harmonies and stuff, which we'd never done before. And it also, when we would go out on the road and play these new songs, we'd realize kind of how to play them in front of an audience. Because a lot of them worked kind of in the studio, but they didn't work so well in front of an audience. So we changed everything. And as we changed it, we came in and re-recorded it.

Q That's almost the opposite of the way a lot of people work. They do the album, then they take it on the road.
JIMMIE: By the way, I'd like to say, I don't want to let Joe sell himself short on what he can do, technically. This is (a) very unusual combination that somebody is a great musician and performer and then also really knows the board and the sounds. He's a phenomenon in that way. And you know, I didn't want to let it pass, because he -- you know, he never really takes credit for that. But it's an amazement. It's an ongoing amazement for me. And I think for Butch, too.
BUTCH: Well, actually, I think the real reason he became the producer of the album is because he owned the tape recorder. It's kind of like, you know, you let the bass player in the band because he owns the van.

Q Well, I mean, I've heard about the clubhouse. I think it's called "Spur Studios." Where's it at and what's the atmosphere like?
JOE: It's everywhere (laughter). It's all in your mind.
BUTCH: You know, Joe's produced a couple of my albums that -- the first one started out way back up in Lubbock where it was "Duct Tape Studio" and it's kind of progressed to "Spur Studio."

Q I'm just getting the feeling that we're not talking about an elaborate place here, but more like a small, closed-in sort of rustic room. Am I right?
A No, actually, it has a big room for drums. And you know, it's got a nice tall ceiling. It's got places, you know, where you can separate things. Four or five different rooms, so…

Q So much of "Now Again" has a supernatural bent. Butch, the next song we're going to hear, Yesterday was Judgment Day, fits right in. Can you tell me a little bit about what inspired it?
BUTCH: Well, years ago, Jimmie and I actually sat down and did one of our attempts at writing a song. And we started with that idea. And it was sort of a little Bluegrass ditty at the time. And we got like half a verse or two into it and it just kind of sat there and became -- it was kind of a funny little joke for us for a while. And then when we started writing these songs together, that one came right back up, because, you know, we were recalling anything that might be useable. We reconfigured it and kind of brought it up to date. You have to bring Judgment Day up to date (laugher).

Q Yesterday was Judgment Day, like much of the album "Now Again", it's cosmic in a Texas way. Since all three of you are now fathers, I'd imagine your growth as people contributed to this existential vibe. I'll ask Jimmie, since he is the grandfather Flatlander: Has all these years that have passed since the beginning, brought you to this place where you can make this record "Now Again" that really is a -- for lack of a better phrase, cosmic, existential record?
JIMMIE: We've had an awful lot of experience in between our early days together. But a lot of it has been -- we've been traveling along together, even though we haven't all the time been necessarily publicly associated with each other. For myself...just for myself, I know in certain ways, just in my own perception of myself, I've changed a lot in that time. For one thing, I've said this a lot of times. I used to think that I was the best singer in the band. And I realized that I wasn't. In lots of ways, my whole life has kind of been that way. I used to think that I was a lot more cosmic and ethereal and perfect than it turned out I really was.
I haven't even gotten very good at humility. I just discovered that I needed to.
BUTCH: And see, Jody, with me, it was just the opposite. I started out really humble and now I realize, finally, that I know everything that there is needed to know. I just don't tell very much of it.

Q You dole it out in small portions?
A You've got it, you've got it.

Q Well, I want to bring it back down to earth, now, if I have to, if I may. When the Flatlanders first recorded, you know, there was a heated political climate. We're talking early '70s. Vietnam escalating. And also, your music seemed like a reaction to the -- you know, there's all this musical excess at the end of the '60s, psychedelic stuff and everything. The atmosphere for the new Flatlanders' record is almost the same as the first. There's a heated political climate, a bunch of superficial music being made for the masses. So where do the Flatlanders fit in in 2002?
JOE: Well, you know, I do see a lot of similarities between the late '60s and the present day. And I think that could have been maybe why -- just the way, you know, everything just kind of lined up to where we actually decided to make another record. They say that eras kind of come in cycles and so do -- in our case, so do albums.

Q Well, the song and the feel of the album "Now Again", it brings to mind a world before cellphones, before pages, before computers. Did it take a lot of effort to make the record sound so effortless?
JOE: Well, I think that as more and more people kind of get connected and networked, I think more and more people want to get disconnected and unnetworked. And so we tried to make like a record where you didn't have to be plugged in to enjoy it.
JIMMIE: I have this feeling about the -- you know, the early Flatlanders' thing was, it was totally an acoustic record. But that never had anything to do with our having any prejudice toward that. That was what we were doing at the time. But we always were into electric music and technology. So in one sense, you know, I think the spirit of the new one still stays the same, even though we're -- you know, we're playing with a really intensive electronic -- well, a band. It's band music, but it's not that different from the character we had back then with all just mandolins and acoustic guitars and dobros.

Q But it feels good to listen to "Now Again" and get somewhat disconnected. There's, you know, the elements on the record. It's the moon, it's the stars, it's the breezes, it's the winds, it's the river. And it's the universal things that strike our hearts.
There's something -- well, there's probably a lot of things strange about "Now Again", but one thing that's strange is that we begin an album by three singer/songwriters with Going Away, a song that you sing the lead on, Jimmie, and it's a song written by another writer, Utah Phillips. What's up with that?
JIMMIE: It's a song that I love. You know, I learned that song from Bruce Bromberg, of all strange things, from my old label, Hightone Records. In fact, another thing that Joe produced was my first record on Hightone. But Bruce taught me this song. And I just loved it. And we had always, all three of us had been Utah Phillips fans all along. We used to do lots of his songs in the old Flatlanders. So one night when we were sitting around kind of, you know, being back together again and just trading out songs and actually recording -- we recorded a bunch of -- you know, scratch recordings of old songs we knew. And I threw that one out. And Butch and Joe hadn't heard me do it before. And we started messing with the harmony on it that night. In fact, later on, Joe ought to maybe explain some of that process, but you know, working on harmonies was new for us, too.
Ever after that, just almost every time we played, Joe would say, "Let's do that, let's work on Going Away again. You know on the old one, I did nearly all the singing. There was almost an imprint there that was my voice and sort of that style. And this one was like kind of a thing that's sort of halfway in between the old Flatlanders' sound and this new record.

Q The Flatlanders toured for a year or two before they began recording "Now Again". Why in the world would you do that?
BUTCH: Well, we actually got some offers to do so. I think, after we did the Horse Whisperer song we wound up doing a gig at Central Park in New York. And the New York Times did a big splash on us. And I guess people around the country read that. And the next thing we knew, we had some offers to go out and play. And about the same time, we were beginning to write a few more songs. And we accepted the offers to go play some gigs and began to think, well, are we going to play strictly our songs or is this going to be a rehash of the old Flatlanders. And we instantly felt that, no, we want to give them something new, because that's what we've been doing all our lives. And it just proceeded right into that touring world.

Q One thing I've noticed about "Now Again" is the vocal arrangements and the harmonies. They're absolutely beautiful. It seems to me those would be hard to evolve on the road. Did they, or are they like pieces of a puzzle that you had to fit together when you got to the studio?
JOE: The road really helped us actually sing together and everything, because we'd do it every night and we'd actually change -- sometimes change the parts. And then when we'd come back off the road, we'd come in and re-record the songs again. So we actually re-recorded some of them several times because the road helped the song kind of come to life. And then we started realizing that each of our voices are so different that we could -- when different combinations of them were singing, it made it almost like orchestral instruments. When Butch and Jimmie would sing harmony together, it's unlike anything I'd ever heard before. And so a lot of those things helped just us understanding the songs themselves and who should be singing what part.
BUTCH: That same process was actually at work in the songwriting. It was like the funny combination of three of us. Sometimes it would be kind of two of us working a little harder and then the other one would come in and double check us on it and take it to another level. We've described it before as like, it was like -- you know, when it's one person writing a song, there's always several people inside your head arguing about it. You know, like, don't do that line. Go this way with it. Well, a similar kind of thing kind of happened as we bought it out right in the middle of all three of us. And then Joe figured out it wasn't just three of us writing, it was about nine of us writing it (laugher).

Q It sounds like the Flatlanders had a great time making this record. It's fun. It's off-the-cuff. I always think of this band as Texas' equivalent to the Traveling Wilburys, because strong personalities, but no one taking things too seriously but yet coming up with, you know, something that means a lot.
But, I mean, there's a song like Pay the Alligator. I don't know how in the world you guys came up with that. And also, (how you came up with) I Thought the Wreck was Over. Let's talk about those two songs a little bit. Pay the Alligator, anybody?
BUTCH: Pay the Alligator, Jimmie was hollering something from another room about -- I think he said something about the radiator. And Joe and I were just trying to figure out the instrumentation on a song we had all just finished writing. And I said something like, "Oh, that would be a good idea. Maybe Jimmie could play the radiator." And then Jimmie thought -- he stuck his head out and said, "Did you say Pay the Alligator?" Which he said he knew it wasn't that, but it sounded registered like that on his -- in his brain. And when we all heard that, it was like a statement that our granddads had told us or something. And we just took off running with it. It was a hard song to write.

Q What about I Thought the Wreck was Over, where did that come from?
JOE: I had just been out in the desert out in Arizona. And I was working on a thing with a bunch of cowboys around. And late at night, everybody was sitting around a campfire and there was this one bull rider who started telling this story about getting thrown off a bull. And then he turns around and the bull keeps coming. He jumps over the fence and the bull keeps coming. And in rodeo language, when you get thrown off a bull, it's called "a wreck." He kept saying, "I thought the wreck was over." And he looks over his shoulder and here it comes again.
And when I threw that out to Butch and Jimmie, we all realized that -- sometime in our life, we'd all had relationships that had been kind of like that.

Q Not only are the Flatlanders Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, but there is an amazing band of musicians who made this album. Jimmie, who's in the core group that made "Now Again" along with you?
JIMMIE: Basically, it was us and then Robbie Gjersoe on lead guitar. You know, his imprint is on everything on the record. And lead guitar and dobro slide, slide banjo on one song. and Rafael Gayol on drums. There were several other percussion people, but he's the mainstay and the one that was on the road with us the most. And Gary Harmon on bass on all of it.

Q On the song we just heard and the one we're going to hear in a minute, there's an accordion player named Joel Guzman. Joe, how did he wind up playing squeeze box with the Flatlanders?
JOE: I'd been working with Joel on different projects. And his particular brand of accordion just brings the -- kind of the wild west or, you know, New Mexico or something, that whole feeling. And I just thought, on Butch's Julia, he's always kind of -- the chorus comes in "I was on the mountain," you know. And something about the accordion, to me, anyway, just sounded like it -- kind of opened it up, you know, in the middle of it. And he kind of let it in…

Q There's also a bit of continuity from your very first sessions 30 years ago. Steve Wesson, once again, plays the saw -- that's right, the saw, as in the took that cuts wood. Butch, perhaps you know how a guy winds up playing the saw and have you all been in touch with Steve all these years?
BUTCH: Pretty much. He lives up in Salado, Texas, right up I-35, which has probably kept us from seeing him all that often. But the saw, it's got that eerie UFO sound, which once Steve figured out that he could make that sound, he knew he was in the band -- we needed a UFO in the band out there in Lubbock.
JOE: Steve was a carpenter when we first met him. And the Flatlanders' house in Lubbock was kind of this open house where we just sat around and played all night. And the neighbors would come in and some of them would bring instruments. And Steve started just bringing his saw from work with a mallet and started playing it with the band at these all-night jam sessions.
JIMMIE: And Steve was -- also, he was an art teacher, too, and an actual cowboy, rodeo cowboy. Amazing guy. And he -- when he started playing the saw, it turned out that he -- it's like he had such good pitch that -- you know, it's not just a weird novelty thing, it's like he plays it really well. So it works.

Q That's different. And also, it's great that it ties back to the very first things that the Flatlanders ever did 30 years ago.
Butch, as a connoisseur of songs, you know that there's dozens of songs written with a woman's name as the title. It's got to be hard to bring something new to that concept. But in this song, all of nature's wonders are present, but the guy can only think, of course, of Julia.
BUTCH: Well, there you are!.

Q Butch, over the years, you've had a lot of interests. Songwriting, architecture, farming, photography. As a matter of fact, some of your pictures are on the CD booklet. And like the music, these pictures, they seem desolate. They smack of a time gone by. What can you tell me about the photos that you took?
BUTCH: Well, most of those pictures were taken by Sharon Ely. I have billions of other photos way backlogged. We were just up in Nashville and there's a bunch of them on exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame, which is the last way I ever expected to get into the Country Music Hall of Fame, a bunch of photographs of the West Texas broken trees and sandstorms. But I've just been real lucky. You know, we were all born in a century where there was a proliferation of guitars and cameras. And I kind of picked those two up as my main tools of the trade. And on all these music tours we've done and getting to travel around the world with the music, I've always carried a camera with me and kind of used it like -- a little bit like part of my songwriting technique, just snapshots of life on the planet.

Q Joe, your wife, Sharon, took a lot of the photos. Were you with her or did she present some to you? Because they -- they really are of a piece with the record as a whole.
JOE: I guess we probably took about equally number on that of photos. Really, we didn't even realize that we had those pictures. We had just a certain amount of time to get the record together because it was like a two-week period that if we didn't make that deadline, the record wouldn't come out until six months later or something. Which made us dig into these old archives of photos and found all these pictures that we'd taken when we lived up in West Texas.

Q Jimmie, in your earlier days, you brought your interest in Eastern religion to West Texas. I'm sure you've been told before that your voice has an angelic quality. I'm thinking that somebody has to lead a life of darkness to sing with such light. Is that true for you?
JIMMIE: Well, I think it's kind of what it turned out to be. Going back to that thing I said earlier, in lots of ways, I didn't have a real realization of that until much later on.

Q The first person thanked in the liner notes to the Flatlanders CD "Now Again" is the late Texas songwriting legend, Townes Van Zandt. Joe, since Townes has been gone more than five years, why was he the first person thanked?
JOE: When we were first getting together, I was out driving around Lubbock and I pick up this hitchhiker out way on the edge of town. And he's got a guitar in his hand, backpack on. And I carry him all the way though town. He was in a terrible spot. He would have never gotten a ride there. And meanwhile, he tells me that he's just coming from San Francisco making an album there. And when he gets out, he -- we talk briefly. And he gives me an album and it's Townes Van Zandt. That record became just kind of a centerpiece while we were getting together as the Flatlanders. And we always kind of think of Townes as kind of being the Flatlanders' patron saint. And so he's kind of showed us that you can actually make records. Here was a guy in the flesh that made these beautiful songs. And it inspired us.
And then, of course, years later, we all got to know Townes.

Q Joe, your past has included train-hopping, joining the circus, pool-sharking a little bit. To me, you're a guy that knows about living in the moment. The song that is this album's centerpiece and sort of its title track is Now it's "Now Again". It first appeared on a tribute album to a Buddhist monastery. Was that tribute disc what brought about the song or how did it come about?
JOE: No, the tribute disc didn't bring about the song. The song was actually, I think Jimmie had a little melody and that line from something that he had started before. And we were all sitting around the table in my kitchen and Jimmie sings this amazing melody that opens it up, with that line. And it just made us feel like -- it was almost like a déjà vu. Well here we are again, you know. This is kind of something that was almost like it had to be.

(End of interview)