Joe Ely Performing at FitzGerald's Night Club

With a career spanning 18 albums, thousands of live performances, and hundreds of thousands of miles on the road over four decades, Joe Ely needs no introduction. Roll out the Lord of the Highway, King of the Honky-Tonk, torch-bearer of nitro-fueled, tornado-twisted West Texas rock and roll. Cite Lubbock and Austin for giving him a unique sense of place. Name drop Buddy Holly, the Clash, and Bruce Springsteen. Bemoan radio's inability to decide whether he's too country for rock, or too rock for country. That's it. You're done. Done. All that needs to be said has been said.

Or has it?

Joe Ely himself will be the first to tell you that Streets of Sin, which back in 2003 was his first studio album in 5 years, marks a changed man, a restless, creative soul hungry to get back to the ol' Joe.

“I used to take what was on stage and try to translate that into a recording,” he explains. “In 1975, it was all about coming back to Lubbock, putting a real band together with Lloyd (Maines) and Jesse (Taylor), building up a following and playing the real big honky-tonks. The first three albums I made were pretty much taking a well-rehearsed band from the stage to the studio. We were solid on the road all the way through 1981. I never came home. I lived in hotels. That left a big hole in my writing. I was no longer writing about the place where I grew up and the people that I knew. What I'd gained in an audience, I lost [in] what I set out to do to begin with--making a journal of my life.”

Streets of Sin is all about songs and the singer-songwriter who has learned to love the studio and find refuge in it, and the musician who plays more guitar than on any previous recording. The songs are the kind of small stories “you find on page 8 of the B section in the newspaper,” as he puts it, small stories that also happen to resonate and ring true in the larger world.

The Flatlanders, the band he started in 1972 with his South Plains co-conspirators Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, inspired the return to the basics. Reuniting, recording their first album in 30 years, and touring coast to coast and overseas brought it all back home for Ely.

“When Butch, Jimmie, and I first started, we were always discovering music. I remember when we stumbled onto Mance Lipscomb,” he recalls. “We couldn't get enough of him, his finger-picking, and his country blues. Moments like that, or picking up Townes Van Zandt hitchhiking and he gives me this new album he's just made and it becomes our favorite album, conjured up that spark and reminded me how magical music can be.”

The proof is in the music. “When I was singing these songs, I found myself singing not to the multitudes, but to somebody alone in the kitchen,” Ely says. “A listener can relate because they know a character like the ones I write about. It doesn't require audience participation. I think it's best listened to in the kitchen, by the computer, in the backyard, or in the car. It's got a nice road flow to it.”

“This is not a honky-tonk or a rock record,” he makes plain. “It's more folk and blues-y rhythms and simple songs and a little dark. 'A Flood on Our Hands' isn't just about the big flood that dumped 50 inches of rain in three days over south central Texas last year. It's about what's happening in the world post 9/11. The rain keeps falling. When will it stop? I wanted to take the world situation and manifest it in the lives of everyday people, capturing the struggles and uncertainty of the time, while trying to add some optimism to the big picture. I don't believe in doomsday.”

Neither do Joe Ely's fans. But they sure better believe their Texas troubadour has delivered up a big heaping serving of songs worth listening to, now more than ever, especially when the wind starts kicking up out of the west.

Joe Ely, Thursday, June 17 at 8pm, $20.
Advance tickets now available at: Ticketweb
or at FitzGerald's Nightclub, 6615 W. Roosevelt Rd. Berwyn, IL 60402.