The line running through the initial five artists featured in Flashback – Lyle Lovett, Mark Collie, James House, Marty Brown, and Kelly Willis – is Tony Brown.
As cool a cat as Tony Brown was in the late eighties and early nineties for introducing a cohort of insanely talented young artists to Nashville, was there ever a cooler Brown-produced artist than veteran Texas legend Joe Ely?
Tony Brown credits Steve Earle for turning him onto Ely, who, at the time, was already an established Texas icon and cult hero, despite never having a big national radio hit or one true signature song.
Ely had been recording since his 1972 debut with the Flatlanders. Brown told the Los Angeles Time, ”[Steve Earle] played me ‘Lord of the Highway’ from Calgary to Banff, doing 80 miles an hour, me watching for the Mounted Police, and him playin’ this, screaming’ in my ear and singing the songs.”
Legendary pedal steel guitar player, and Ely band mate, Lloyd Maines described Ely as “the rock ‘n’ roll Bob Wills.”
In the liner notes to Live Shots, an earlier live Album Ely recorded in London, England while touring with the British punk band the Clash, LA based music journalist Max Bell said, “Joe Ely’s music had a substantial impact on both the moment and the years to come. For all we know Joe’s whole sound illuminated the exact time that a strange symbiosis took place enabling rock and country to fuse and spawn the new roots country movement, or whatever its pundits would call it later.”
Across his recording career, Ely has his own distinctive eras and sounds that his legion of fans love to lobby for as being the best and most representative of his singular charisma, frenetic energy, and prodigious talent.
As for his sound, Ely said, “Our booking agent would book us at these county fairs and pig races in the Appalachia Mountains, and when we’d play, Lloyd would hot that stomp box and turn his steel into a flaming war machine and people would just leave in droves.”
Ely was one of the artists I read so much about in Country Music magazine as a teenager but never had the opportunity to hear his music on the radio or even the chance to find his albums racked in music stores in the Twin Cities.
That changed with the MCA deal with Brown producing Ely’s 1992 MCA studio album Love and Danger. I purchased this album on cassette while in school at Hamline University in the Midway district of St. Paul, Minnesota. One going narrative about the mainstream support from Nashville is that MCA was hoping Brown would capture lightening in a bottle with Ely the same way he had with Steve Earle’s Guitar Town in 1986. Die-hard Ely fans consider the recording Ely-Lite, a sanitized stab at commercial success. Not a bad album because Ely has never recorded one, just not the full-Ely experience.
For the uninitiated, however, who did not grow up in Lubbock, Texas, or immersed in the Texas music, scene, the album is a revelation. Even as it as often charged as being too polished, Love and Danger is as audacious as it is bodacious. It is a great entry point into Ely’s deep and rewarding musical catalog, a safe place for a kid for the upper Midwest to be introduced to the greasy and sweaty intensity of Texas roadhouse music.
Brown was always excellent at cross-promoting the artists in his musical stable at MCA. Mark Collie co-wrote with James House, George Strait recorded a Marty Brown composition, and on her third and final MCA album, Kelly Willis covered Ely’s “Settle for Love.”
Ely’s version here of “Settle for Love” simply crunches. It is starling percussive and punchy, lean ,loose and loud. I couldn’t stop listening to it as the first track on side two of my cassette tape. Bruce Springsteen was also apparently a fan of the song which was originally released as the lead-off track from Ely’s 1988 album Dig All Night. Springsteen and Ely performed the song at one another’s shows while touring Dublin, Ireland in 1993.
On Love and Danger Ely covers Robert Earl Keens, “The Road Goes on Forever” and “Whenever Kindness Fails.”
He also brilliantly covers Dave Alvin’s “Every Night About This Time.”
“I want to Slow You Down” is sultry and sexy as you might guess, while “Pins and Needles” is all exposed nerves and crazed hope,
A Stereo Review piece said that “It’s [Love and Danger] got the dynamic locomotion of rock, the righteous sassiness of the blues, the narrative twang of country, and the hook-filled, melodic sheen of pop.” The Chicago Tribune wrote that the album was, “bursting with a crazed and dangerous sexual energy, rocks as hard as anything Ely has ever recorded, yet that rootsy Texas twang is never far away, nor is his startling poetic flair.”
If you want drama, muscle nerve, sugar, honey, fire, and fever, listen to this Joe Ely album. Just gas up before chasing Ely down the rabbit hole
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