The saddest man in Texas

Joe Ely, Streets of Sin Rounder *** My God, Joe Ely is one sad dude. The West Texas blues-country rocker’s first solo album in six years gives us a man running (or stumbling) for his life, just trying to hang on. It’s a far cry from Ely’s rock-out early days. But it’s a good, if not great, album. Just make sure you have some Prozac handy. These dozen tracks –– 10 penned by Ely, the other two by another Texas musical legend, the superb Butch Hancock –– are dark, sorrowful meditations on a man and his shadows, sort of like Lucinda Williams, but with testosterone. Just check out the titles. We begin with Hancock’s tough-sentimental ^Fightin’ for My Life~, the first line of which is “I’m ridin’ through the middle of some god forsaken town,” the town a sort of objective correlative for his own psyche, a haunted ghost town. Other titles, to give you an idea of the tone, include such let-me-out-of-here tunes as ^I’m on the Run Again, Run Little Pony, 95 South,~ and another beautiful Hancock number, ^Wind’s Gonna Blow You Away~. The CD’s final song, the almost-whispered ^I Gotta Find Old Joe~, ends “I got to find ol’ Joe/ Before he loses it all,” which is nothing if not self-referential. This is an album full of bare trees, dusty Texas roads, swollen and threatening rivers, and drinking, of course, drinking. Ely’s uncharacteristically strong use of organ in the mix adds to the effect. But there is, underneath the pain, underneath Ely’s apparent crumbling ego, a kind of compassion for losers and loners and drifters and hardscrabble workers of the land that give the album a kind of bleakly affecting humanity. If you don’t know Ely, this may not be the best starting point, though you’ll want to come to it eventually. For that, try Live Shots, which was recorded in 1980 in the U.K., where Ely opened for The Clash (it may seem an odd pairing, but the Punk titans had toured Texas with him the previous year, and liked what they heard). This is Texas pedal-to-the-metal rock and roll at its finest, most raucous, self. Ely can flat out rock, as in a cover of the Buddy Holly-Rolling Stones Bo Diddly-beat hit, ^Not Fade Away~ that should really get your ya-yas out. Almost everything on the album’s great, but pay particular attention to ^Johnnie’s Blues~ and ^She Never Spoke Spanish to Me~. But Ely could also do ballads even then, ballads such as Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s ^Treat Me Like a Saturday Night~ (Texas never does seem to run out of first-rate singer-songwriters), and his own lovely ^Honky Tonk Masquerade~. It’s a song that provides an answer to my question about what happened to all the spectacular rock and roll energy of that album. “You sure look fine tonight/they’re turning out the lights Why did you hold my sleeve/when I said I had to leave I hoped it never showed/but that’s the way it goes. As the lights begin to fade/on this Honky Tonk Masquerade.”

Photo Credit: ely.com