Lubbock on Everything: the Evocation of Place in the Music of West Texas

Home , Butch Hancock, Honky Tonk Masquerade, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely, Leave a Mark, Lubbock (On Everything)

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Lubbock on Everything: The Evocation of Place in the Music of West Texas

Blake Gumprecht

The role of landscape and the importance of place in literature, poetry, the visual arts, even cinema and television are well established and have been widely discussed and written about. Think of Faulkner’s Mississippi, the New England poetry of Robert Frost, the regionalist paintings of John Steuart Curry, or, in a contemporary sense, the early movies of Barry Levinson, with their rich depictions of Baltimore. There are countless other examples. Texas could be considered a protagonist in the novels of Larry McMurtry. The American Southwest is central to the art of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York City acts as far more than just a setting for the films of Woody Allen. The creative arts have helped shape our views of such places, and the study of works in which particular places figure prominently can help us better understand those places and human perceptions of them.1 Place can also be important to music, yet this has been largely overlooked by scholars. The literature on the subject, in fact, is nearly nonexistent. A sim- ple search of a national library database, for example, retrieved 295 records under the subject heading “landscape in literature” and more than 1,000 under the heading “landscape in art,” but a similar search using the phrase “landscape in music” turned up nothing.2 This line of inquiry is so poorly de- veloped that no equivalent subject heading has been established. More ex- haustive searches, likewise, yielded almost no major studies in this area. John

Reprinted by permission from Journal of Cultural Geography 18 (1998): 61–81.

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Burke’s book Musical Landscapes, in which the author looks at the influence of the British landscape on the music of classical composers like Ralph Vaughan Williams and Edward Elgar, appears to be the only contemporary, English-language monograph of this sort.3 The influence of place on music has received little attention even within the growing subfield of music geography. Over the last three decades, cultural geographers have produced an increasingly diverse body of work on musical subjects; two separate book collections of such research have been published since 1994.4 But a closer examination of research on the geography of music reveals that the majority of published scholarship in this subfield has focused on the origins, diffusion, and distribution of musical styles, performers, and re- lated elements—subjects that are largely quantifiable or mapable. This has been especially true of geographic studies on popular music.5 Research seeking to examine the influence of place on popular music has been rare, and nearly all such studies produced have been so broad in geographic, thematic, or temporal scope that they have revealed little of what music can tell us about specific places.6 Others, too, have recognized the failure of cultural geographers to explore the linkages between music and place. Susan Smith, for example, has criti- cized geographers for privileging sight over hearing in landscape study and for neglecting “the extent to which sound generally, and music in particular, structures spaces and characterizes place.”7 In urging cultural geographers to pay greater attention to musical subjects, Lily Kong notes that music “can serve as useful primary source material to understand the character and iden- tity of places.”8 George Carney remarked in 1994 that “curiously, music geographers have completed little in the way of cultural landscape interpreta- tion, although the topic lends itself to this approach.” He added that “the possibilities for landscape analysis using music seem endless.”9 The annals of American popular music are filled with examples of artists whose work evokes a strong sense of place. With songs like “Tulare Dust” and “Kern River,” Merle Haggard has created an evolving portrait of life in Cali- fornia’s San Joaquin Valley. Bruce Springsteen so captured the feeling of growing up in and around Asbury Park, New Jersey, on his early albums that he will be forever linked with that place. The music of bands like the Beach Boys and the Eagles helped create an image of southern California that still defines the region in the eyes of many. More recently, “gangsta rap” artists like N.W.A. have painted a very different view of Los Angeles in their music. The ability of song to communicate a sense of place is more than just a function of lyrics, however. Lightnin’ Hop- kins, for instance, rarely sang about his hometown, but his lazy, acoustic blues nonetheless convey a strong sense of the Houston ghetto on a sultry summer 02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:27 PM Page 257

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day. Even when they sang about such universal subjects as love and redemp- tion, the bluegrass of the Stanley Brothers, as one critic has commented, re- mained “in tune with the mountains” of their southwest Virginia home.10 Regional themes may be most prevalent in the music of performers who are not commercially successful and, thus, may feel less constrained by the dic- tates of the marketplace and the preferences of radio promoters for songs that can play as easily in Boston as Biloxi. Bands like the Velvet Underground and Suicide provide the perfect soundtrack to the urban hell of New York. The music of artists like Professor Longhair and the Meters articulate the peculiar rhythm of life in New Orleans. To someone who has spent time in Kansas, Freedy Johnston’s album Can You Fly is simply imbued with a spirit of place. Musicians, too, realize that the influence of geography can be inescapable. David Thomas of the Cleveland band Pere Ubu, in trying to explain the postapocalyptic character of much of the music that emerged from that city in the 1970s remarked, “All I can say is whatever you feel from the music is what it feels like to be here.”11 Curt Kirkwood of the Phoenix band the Meat Puppets once said that “living here, the desert creeps into everything you do.”12 This chapter will use the case of three lesser-known performers from Lub- bock, Texas, as an example of the influence geography can have on music and the ways in which music can create strong images of place.

Images of West Texas

The land and culture of West Texas (figure 16-1) has left an indelible impression on the music of Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, and Terry Allen, three performers who play a uniquely Texas strain of music that falls somewhere between country, rock and folk, and who, despite their relative lack of national notoriety, are well known in their home state and have influenced a host of more famous musicians. All three grew up in Lubbock in the late 1950s and early 1960s and have been friends for years. But all three left the city the first chance they got because of its conservatism, the limited possibilities, and its distance from everything. Yet all agree that West Texas continues to hold a strange power over their lives and music. All three remain closely associated with Lubbock, even though none of them has actually lived there in more than twenty years. Ely, Hancock, and Allen are not the most famous musicians to come from West Texas. The area, in fact, has been a fertile breeding ground for future stars. Rock and roll legend Buddy Holly is from Lubbock. There is a bronze statue of him downtown. Singer and television star Mac Davis also grew up 02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:28 PM Page 258

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Figure 16-1. The landscape in and around Lubbock, Texas. Map by author

in the city, but found Hollywood more to his liking (he once sang “happiness is Lubbock, Texas, in my rearview mirror”). Western swing pioneer Bob Wills was raised in the nearby town of Turkey. Waylon Jennings is from Littlefield and that fact is proudly proclaimed on the city’s water tower. But none of these performers evoke the spirit of West Texas in their music the way Ely, Hancock, and Allen do. This study concentrates on their earliest albums because it is on those recordings that the impress of place is greatest. Lubbock sits on the eastern edge of what has been called “one of the most perfect plains regions in the world.”13 The Llano Estacado forms a 200-mile-wide front porch to the mountains of New Mexico; the Caprock 02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:28 PM Page 259

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Escarpment defines its abrupt eastern boundary. Unrelentingly flat and treeless except in the artificial oases of the towns and farmsteads, this is a region where the only features that interrupt the horizon are the results of human activity—oil wells (figure 16-2), windmills, center-pivot irrigation systems, the occasional forlorn farm house, a crossroads cotton gin, a country church (figure 16-3). Too far west to receive much moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, this is a land of little rain and frequent drought. Trees were so rare before settlement that one theory on the origin of the name Llano Estacado, or Staked Plains, says that riders on horseback passing through the area had to drive stakes into the ground to tie up their horses. In such an environment, the sky is a dominant element. Distant features appear closer than they are. “In West Texas, you can look in any direction and see for fifty miles,” says Butch Hancock. “And if you stand on a tuna fish can, you can see for a hundred.”14 “It’s like being dead center of a giant saw blade,” says Jo Harvey Allen, Terry’s wife.15 With so little to block its path, the wind is a constant presence, picking up sand and dirt and depositing it along fence lines, at the base of buildings, and in the teeth of the people who live there. It has been said that you can tell a West Texan by watching him drink: He never completely empties his glass because of the sand that collects in the bottom.16 Despite the lack of reliable

Figure 16-2. Oil wells in rural West Texas. Photo by author 02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:28 PM Page 260

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Figure 16-3. Characteristic landscape of the southern Plains. Photo by author

precipitation, extreme weather is unusually common in the region. When moist air from the Gulf of Mexico does reach the area, it tends to collect along the Caprock Escarpment where it meets drier air transported from the Rocky Mountains. The interaction between these contrasting air masses trig- gers the formation of storms of such ferocity that West Texas has one of the highest incidences of severe thunderstorms, hail, and tornadoes in the world. A tornado that plowed through Lubbock in 1970 left a path of destruction a mile wide and killed twenty-eight people. West Texans have survived such an inhospitable environment by looking underground. They dug wells to provide water for their cattle. They tapped the Ogallala Aquifer with powerful pumps to irrigate their crops. They discovered large reservoirs of oil and natural gas. Today Lubbock is an important cotton market and center of a large cattle and oil-producing region. It is home to Texas Tech University and is the largest city on the High Plains. Still, Lub- bock feels in many ways like a small town. West Texans as a lot are ultracon- servative and deeply religious. Liquor stores are forbidden within the Lub- bock city limits. Rock and roll was once banned from Buddy Holly Park. “People here are steady, God-fearing, and patriotic,” B. C. (Peck) McMinn, mayor of Lubbock a few years ago, said at the time. “We stand up when the flag goes by.”17 02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:28 PM Page 261

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Such attitudes could not help but leave a mark on three young men with creative impulses who as kids chased DDT trucks for fun. “In Lubbock, we grew up with two main things,” Hancock says. “God loves you and he’s gonna send you to hell, and that sex is bad and dirty and nasty and awful and you should save it for the one you love. I really felt as though I had landed on the wrong planet.”18 The earliest recordings that feature Ely, Hancock, or Allen came in a band called, appropriately, the Flatlanders. Ely dropped out of high school at age sixteen and left Lubbock, wandering around the West and winding up in southern California. “I knew I had to get out of there,” he later said. “I sure didn’t want to work in the cotton fields or fix pump jacks.”19 Hancock, meanwhile, had moved to San Francisco. But both found themselves back in West Texas in 1970. They did not know each other at the time but were introduced by a common friend, Jimmie Dale Gilmore.20 Before long, the three were jamming daily on acoustic guitars and moved into a house together on 14th Street in Lubbock. Others drifted in and out of the group. They began performing at weddings, goat roasts, and the like and recorded a demo for a freelance producer. He played it for a Nashville record executive, who brought the band there in 1972 to make a record. They recorded seventeen songs, including Gilmore’s “Dallas,” which was released as a promotional single. An album was scheduled for release as well. But the Flatlanders old-timey, acoustic sound had little in common with the country music that was being produced at the time, and the album was never released. The band soon disintegrated. Much later, when Ely had established a worldwide cult following as a solo artist, the album was released in England on Charly Records. In 1990, after Hancock and Gilmore had also released solo records to critical acclaim, the material was issued in the United States for the first time by Rounder Records under the title More a Legend Than a Band.21 The five members of the group are pictured on the cover standing in a field so level it had to be in West Texas. The attitudes displayed on the album also strongly reflect the band’s geographic origins. “Did you ever see Dallas from a DC-9 at night?” sings Gilmore in a reedy voice that recalls an era of 78 rpm records. The song expresses the sentiments of someone more accustomed to the South Plains than airplanes, a person for whom Dallas represented something simultaneously evil and seductive. “Dallas is a jungle,” intones Gilmore, “but Dallas gives a beautiful light.” Three decades after these recordings were made, it is not hard to imagine why they disappeared almost without a trace in the 1970s, a time when country music meant string sections and choirs. Delightfully anachronistic, with 02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:28 PM Page 262

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traditional instrumentation and low-fi production, this was true country music, performed by people who knew what it was like to sink up to their ankles in mud and wash dust from their faces. The band’s West Texas roots are most evident on the Hancock composition “You’ve Never Seen Me Cry,” with its references to wind breaks and watersheds, lonely highways, and the cold north wind that whips across the plains in winter. A strong sense of place also runs through the music, particularly in the use of a musical saw, which sounds like nothing so much as an otherworldly whistling of the wind. Years later, commenting on the album, Ely said, “It’s pretty crude but there’s a certain flavor about the record. It had an eerie, lonesome sound that reflected our roots in Lubbock and the wind, the dust, and the environment.”22

Because of the Wind

Shortly after the Flatlanders demise, Joe Ely (figure 16-4) drifted back out of Lubbock, hitchhiking around the country and jumping freight trains, following the tracks of spiritual kin like Woody Guthrie, Jack Kerouac, and myriad Mississippi bluesmen. By the time he was thirty, Ely had spent time picking chilies in New Mexico and playing for change in the subways of New York. He had driven a concrete truck in Colorado and toured Europe with a the- atrical troupe. “I just had to go to these places,” he says. “I’d hear a song about it, and have to go there.”23 He even joined the circus for a season, taking care of the llamas and “The World’s Smallest Horse.” His rather inglorious stint under the big top ended when he was kicked by a horse and knocked uncon- scious as the elephants were being led into the ring. Ely was born in Amarillo, a block from Route 66, in 1947. Both his father and grandfather worked for the railroads, and Ely inherited the restlessness of that way of life. But he had also been corrupted by music at an early age. There was always a piano at home, and he remembers when the man who taught Buddy Holly how to play Hawaiian steel guitar came to the door hawk- ing music lessons. Then there was the time Ely’s dad took him to see Jerry Lee Lewis perform outdoors at a local Pontiac dealership during a raging dust storm. When Ely was ten, his family moved to Lubbock, where his father ran a second-hand clothing store that was popular among the Mexican migrants who worked the area cotton fields. The sound of the accordion and border- town conjunto that blared out of neighborhood bars during the harvest would later color his music. Despite the strong impression those early years left, it was not until much later that Ely realized Texas was where he belonged. He was living in New 02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:28 PM Page 263

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Figure 16-4. Joe Ely. Photo by Wyatt McSpadden

York’s Greenwich Village in the mid-1970s, sleeping in a basement so close to the subway that the trains made his teeth rattle, when he experienced a geographical epiphany. “I said, ‘Man, I got to get home,’” he recalls. “‘I’ve been up here six months. I’ve seen what there is to see. This isn’t my place. I’ve gotta get back to West Texas.’”24 He returned to Lubbock and began to put together a band, creating a sound that reflected his diverse musical influences. Ely, by this time, had a suitcase full of songs and started playing bars like the Cotton Club. It was there that a scout for MCA Records heard him. Ely was signed to a contract soon after. Ely’s self-titled debut album was released in 1977.25 The first song on the album finds the singer hitchhiking out of town, as Ely had done so many 02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:28 PM Page 264

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times. Here, as in so much of the music of the region, West Texas was something to escape and the blazing blacktop was the way out. But as Ely had discovered, the road out of Lubbock did not necessarily lead to a better life. The character in the song finds himself first riding in a semi hauling dynamite with a truck driver bemoaning his bad luck. He winds up next with a man on the run from the law and, finally, with a preacher, whom he asks to save his soul. The experiences of the luckless drifter mirror Ely’s own journeys. “I never thought that I / would ever wonder why / I ever said goodbye,” he con- cludes. Yet despite the theme of the opening track and the sense of West Texas portrayed in two others songs, Ely’s first album bears less a mark of the South Plains than his later recordings. Perhaps it is because he still had illusions at the time that he could be successful in commercial country music terms (it is his most conventional album). Perhaps, it is because he had spent so many years on the road. Ely, in fact, would leave Texas yet again, moving to Los An- geles briefly in the late 1970s. This time he quickly discovered his mistake. “I couldn’t write any songs,” he says. “The things I wrote just seemed empty. And don’t you know it, as soon as I got back on some desolate stretch of highway, I started writing songs like crazy.”26 Ely’s second album, Honky Tonk Masquerade, released in 1978, is widely regarded as his masterpiece.27 It rocks louder and swings harder. The band is more exuberant, the songs are more memorable, and Ely is singing more con- fidently. Perhaps not coincidentally, the album also evokes the spirit of West Texas more than any other Ely album. That spirit is strong on his rendition of Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s “Tonight I’m Gonna Go Downtown,” which suggests the loneliness of growing up on the High Plains. It is present on Ely’s versions of two Butch Hancock compositions, “Boxcars,” which reinforces the ro- mance of the railroad in a place where the mind naturally wanders to some- place else, and “West Texas Waltz.” It is also vivid on two Ely originals, “Corn- bread Moon,” and, especially, “Because of the Wind,” in which Ely equates the memory of a lost love with the ever-present gale:

Do you know why the trees bend at the West Texas border? Do you know why they bend, sway and twine? The trees bend because of the wind across that lonesome border, The trees bend because of the wind almost all the time . . . She is to me like the breeze that flows from Corpus Christi; She is to me like the breeze that flows up from the sea; Now if she is like the breeze that flows from Corpus Christi, then I must be like the trees cause Caroline blows through me.

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like West Texas. Such a claim can be difficult to elucidate because of the abstract nature of music and the fact that a song is more than the sum of its parts. The best way to prove this would be to take the reader to Lubbock and head out on one of the many farm-to-market roads, the windows of the car open, and the album blasting from the stereo. Lacking that ability, a few details will have to suffice. The galloping rhythms that begin the album give a sense of the freedom of the West Texas highways. The lonesome wail of the steel guitar suggests the emptiness of the landscape and the whistling of the wind in the telephone lines. The thunderous ending to “Boxcars” is the perfect musical equivalent of a train barreling across the plains. Ely added an accordion player to his band after his first album, and the presence of the accordion helps capture some of the feeling of the Mexican street life in Lubbock that surrounded Ely as a boy. Ely has made a dozen albums and has long been a critics’ and musicians’ favorite. He has toured with the Clash and the Rolling Stones. Dwight Yoakam calls him a hero. Bruce Springsteen is a friend and sings on one of his recent albums. Ely travels the world and now lives in the Hill Country outside Austin, Texas. He has not lived in Lubbock in years. But when asked a few years back if there was a theme that runs through his music, he replied: “It always seems to go back to that place in West Texas. And the wind. The wind that always blows.”28

Texas Air

Butch Hancock (figure 16-5) is the least well known but arguably the most tal- ented of the bunch. He is something of a renaissance man. He studied architecture in college and has restored historic buildings. His photographs have been displayed in museums and art galleries. Fed up with the recent growth of Austin, where he had lived most of the time after leaving Lubbock, he moved to the Big Bend region along the Rio Grande, where he is a river guide. Above all, he is a poetic and prolific songwriter. Many of Joe Ely’s best- known tunes, in fact, were actually written by Hancock. Emmylou Harris introduced his song “If You Were a Bluebird,” to a mainstream country audience. He has toured with Canada’s Cowboy Junkies, who are big fans. Hancock has also released nine albums of his own, not to mention a fourteen- cassette series featuring 140 originals recorded over six nights at an Austin nightclub. As such facts suggest, Hancock is an enigma. He has been known to answer interviewer’s questions with parables and once photographed a series of 02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:28 PM Page 266

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Figure 16-5. Butch Hancock. Photo by Wyatt McSpadden

Austin crosswalks, distorted by the heat and automobile exhaust, because he thought the images would reveal something profound. One of his ambitions is to be the first person to build an adobe airplane, and he once proposed a mock “Beautify Austin” campaign that would have entailed widening the city’s main street and removing all the buildings. Hardly typical of a trained architect, he was living in an Airstream trailer at the time. Hancock figures if his other endeavors fail, he can always fall back on his first skill. “I’m gonna go on doing what I’m gonna do, and if people pick up on it, that’s wonderful,” he says. “And if they don’t, I can always drive a tractor.”29 It was on a tractor, in fact, that Hancock wrote his first songs (figure 16-6). Born in 1945 on a cotton farm outside the town of New Home, twenty miles 02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:28 PM Page 267

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Figure 16-6. John Deere tractor in West Texas. Photo by author

south of Lubbock, Hancock grew up in the city. He wandered out west after high school, but, like Ely, got homesick, returning to Lubbock to enroll in the architecture program at Texas Tech. He dropped in and out of college and, in 1968, went to work for his father driving a terracing machine on farms in the area. “It was an amazing experience, a turning point in my life,” he says. “I was outdoors every day, six days a week, maybe seven, doing earth-moving work with my dad, sunrise to sunset. I got really tuned in to the earth and the weather.”30 Hancock also found that the sound of the tractor was a perfect accompani- ment for writing songs. He kept a notebook in his pocket and periodically would jot down a few lines. He would finish the songs at home on his guitar. “Second gear at two-thirds throttle on a John Deere tractor—I found that that speed and gear was the key of G and you could play any song you wanted to in it,” he recalls.31 Some of the songs Hancock wrote while driving a tractor became part of the Flatlanders’ repertoire. But Hancock became disillusioned with the music business when the band’s album went unreleased. He knocked around Texas, migrating first to the Clarendon in the Panhandle, where he did con- struction work. Later, he found his way to Austin. Eventually he began to perform in public again, and after Ely released his first record, Hancock decided to make an album of his own. “I’d been wanting to do just a real West 02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:28 PM Page 268

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Texas/early Dylan/Woody Guthrie sounding album for a while,” he says.32 Hancock called up Ely, who invited him to record at his house in Lubbock. The result was West Texas Waltzes and Dust Blown Tractor Tunes, released in 1978 on Hancock’s Rainlight Records label.33 Hancock’s subsequent albums have been more universal in their themes, more introspective in approach, even metaphysical in their imagery, but West Texas Waltzes and Dust Blown Tractor Tunes is as straightforward and place conscious as its title suggests. The eleven songs on the album paint an evoca- tive portrait of the landscape around Lubbock and life on the South Plains. Hancock sings of windmills and water tanks, hailstorms and drought, trains that run for hours without stopping, and the sound of a tractor on a faraway hill. There are references to the flora and fauna—mesquite, purple sage, crows, and roadrunners. There is even a toponymical yodel at the end of “West Texas Waltz” that mentions Lubbock and seven nearby towns, including such picturesque place names as Levelland and Plainview. The album is so saturated with a sense of the place, in fact, that it could be used as a text- book for a college course on the geography of the Llano Estacado. The lead track, “Dry Land Farm,” is typical:

There’s thunderstorms building up over on the county line; All the neighboring farms get rain but I never get a drop on mine. You might think a little ol’ summer breeze couldn’t do nobody harm, but it burns like a blazing blowtorch when you’re living on a dry land farm. When the west wind comes blowing, well the sand comes blowing too; And I must say a mouthful is more than I can chew. I’ve swallowed a gallon for every acre and God know its hurts, but it ain’t as bad as the trouble I had breaking up that dry land dirt.

Hancock has said that most of the songs on the album were written while driving a tractor and it shows. There is a song about the rancher’s enemy, the coyote, and one about urban encroachment on agricultural land. He sings of cotton in bloom and cattle in the fields. The harshness of the physical environment is a persistent theme. There is an entire song about a single thun- derstorm and endless references to the wind, the weather, dirt, and the blowing sand, all sung in Hancock’s gravelly warble (he has been called Texas’ Bob Dylan), which lends an air of authenticity to the songs. But even with the stark images he presents and the ambivalence he sometimes expresses toward West Texas, he is clearly singing about a place he holds dear, a perspective un- abashedly proclaimed in the song “Texas Air”:

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I love the blackbirds in the blue sky, and I love the old windmills. I love the cotton when it’s bloomin’; I love the ribbon in your hair. I love the sweet smell of purple sage; yes, I love Texas Air. . . . Leave my spirit on the prairie; Bury my bones in the sand. Toss my troubles to the western wind, baby, it’s a wide, wide land.

Like others, Hancock has puzzled over why Lubbock has left such a lasting impression on its artists and why West Texas has produced so many musicians who have gone on to wider acclaim. Ely, for example, believes that the persistent wind creates a static electricity that makes people restless and inspires them to “create something out of nothing.”34 Jimmie Dale Gilmore thinks the lingering effects of the DDT they inhaled as kids, chasing the trucks used in the city’s mosquito control program, might play a role. A few have even won- dered if the so-called Lubbock Lights that would appear in the night sky in the late 1950s—and some said were caused by UFOs—might have something to do with it. Many simply attribute the unusual creativity of a few West Tex- ans to the isolation of the region, the fact that, as was expressed in the title of a 1984 museum exhibit on West Texas music, there’s “Nothin’ Else to Do.” Hancock thinks all those factors contributed, and insists the influence of West Texas has been even more pervasive than has been acknowledged. “I think,” he says, “it’s affected people in ways they don’t suspect.”35

High Plains Jamboree

Terry Allen (figure 16-7) is best known as a visual artist. He has been on the cover of ARTnews. He has works in the permanent collections of the Metro- politan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. His sculptures are on public display at the Moscone Center in San Francisco and the Denver International Airport. He has been called a “bona fide art star” by a San Francisco magazine.36 But Allen has also released ten albums of music. Performers as diverse as country singer Bobby Bare and the rock band Little Feat have recorded his songs. He has collaborated with David Byrne of Talking Heads and contributed a song to Byrne’s motion picture, True Stories. The son of a former major league baseball player and a jazz pianist who was expelled from Southern Methodist University for playing in an interracial 02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:28 PM Page 270

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Figure 16-7. Terry Allen. Photo by Todd V. Wolfson

combo, Allen was born in Kansas in 1943. His family moved to Amarillo soon after, then to Lubbock. Like Ely and Hancock, he attended Monterey High School. The oldest of the three, Allen was the first to leave the city—“I got my driver’s license before they did,” he says—moving to Los Angeles in 1962 to attend art school.37 After graduating from the Chouinard Art Institute, he taught in California for several years and now lives in New Mexico. He is the only one of the three who never returned to Lubbock to live, though admits he goes back “a billion times a year.”38 The enduring influence of West Texas is reflected in his art and music. That influence is most overt on his 1978 album, Lubbock (On Everything).39 Although Allen is known more as an artist than as a singer, his life and art have always been closely tied to music. There is a piano in his studio, and fre- quently he will wander away from whatever he is working on to fool around at the keyboard. His mom taught him to play when he was a boy. His father also exerted a musical influence. He booked many of the earliest rock and roll shows in Lubbock after his baseball career ended and even brought Elvis Presley to town for the first time. As a teenager, Allen worked the concession stand for those shows. These days, Allen often incorporates music into his art. Four of his albums, in fact, were composed to accompany other creative works. Lubbock (On Everything) was first conceived more as a conceptual project than an album in the tradi- 02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:28 PM Page 271

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tional sense. Allen wanted to create a geographical musical piece, recording with a variety of artists at different locations, including Lubbock. When such a project proved financially unfeasible, fellow artist and Lubbock resident Paul Milosevich persuaded him to record an album with a similar intent en- tirely in West Texas. Returning to Lubbock for an extended period for the first time in fifteen years, Allen was forced to confront his feelings about city. “I convinced my- self when I was growing up that I hated Lubbock,” he recalls. He felt un- comfortable returning there to make the record but was surprised by what he found; his experience forever changed his perspective about his hometown. That change is reflected on the album. Lubbock (On Everything) is a deeply regional work. It includes a half-dozen songs expressly about West Texas and several others that were clearly inspired by life there. Nowadays, Allen readily acknowledges the influence of the dusty plains where he was raised. “There is something about West Texas that gets stuck in the bones,” he says. “You go back . . . and you know damn well there’s nothing there except your memo- ries and your friends and the flat land and the wind. That’s enough. It makes you know who you are and stiffens your back for going away again.”40 The West Texas of Allen’s imagination is a land of straight-line highways, neon-lit bars, cheap motels, and Pearl beer. It is a place where the men have gold teeth and the women wear red nail polish and blue eyeliner. It is a place of pickup trucks and fried chicken, high school football, and the Hi-D-Ho drive-in. Such images are based in large part on Allen’s experiences growing up there in the 1950s, but they retain a potency and currency today. Lubbock, to be sure, has its gangs, its traffic jams, its shopping malls, but in many ways, West Texas is an anachronism. It just feels different. That feeling is present in Allen’s music. The first song, “Amarillo Highway,” with its propulsive rhythm and Allen’s devilish Lubbock twang, sets the mood. “I’m panhandlin’, man handlin’, post holin’, high rollin’, Dust Bowlin’ Daddy,” he sings. “I ain’t got no blood veins / I just got those four lanes of hard Amarillo Highway.” If Butch Hancock is the poet of the South Plains, Terry Allen is the class clown. Lyrically, Allen is a storyteller and a wiseass. Where Hancock’s songs about West Texas have been largely about the rural environment, Allen’s songs are full of memorable characters and speak to the essential tackiness that is also a part of the place. He sings about the “Lubbock Woman”—“too much rouge / too much booze / too many movie magazines.” Another song, “The Great Joe Bob,” subtitled “A Regional Tragedy,” tells the story of a high school football hero, that quintessential Texas icon (figure 16-8), who loses his scholarship to Texas Tech for drinking during training, gets suspended for of- fending the daughter of the dean, falls in love with a loose waitress, and ends up in prison after he robs Pinkie’s Liquor Store. 02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:28 PM Page 272

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Figure 16-8. High school football in West Texas. Photo by author

Emblematic of Allen’s desire to leave Lubbock as soon as he was old enough to drive, the most common themes on the album are variations on the idea of escape, real and imagined—sex, liquor, the radio, and, most of all, the road. Once asked his definition of art, Allen replied, “To get out of town.”41 He has also said that he has written three-quarters of his songs while driving. “In West Texas your first memory is when you get your first car,” he says. “You really have no reason to have a memory up until that time.”42 That attitude is reflected in both the album’s music and the lyrics to the songs. The high hat cymbal on “Amarillo Highway,” for example, is suggestive of the click-click of tires hitting the seams of the pavement. In “The Wolfman of Del Rio,” more- over, a fifteen-year-old boy tastes freedom for the first time behind the wheel of a 1953 Chevrolet, driving a hundred miles an hour through the empty night with the rock and roll from a border radio station playing loud.

Lubbock or Leave It

Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, and Terry Allen have not lived in Lubbock in years, and the influence of West Texas on their lives and music has receded some- what in the rearview mirror, but it is still there. Ely’s recent solo albums have marked a return to the themes of his early records, and he talks in interviews 02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:28 PM Page 273

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about a desire to record an album of story songs about West Texas. Hancock titled his second album The Wind’s Dominion,43 and when he opened an art gallery and performance space in Austin in 1991 he named it Lubbock-or- Leave-It. Thirty five years after leaving the South Plains, Allen still calls his band the Panhandle Mystery Band. “Flatland Boogie,” a song on a 1996 album, is a nostalgic return home, in which he sings about the endless cotton fields, the Caprock Escarpment, coyotes, and caliche.44 Ely and Hancock, meanwhile, reunited with Jimmie Dale Gilmore in 1998 as the Flatlanders to record the song “South Wind of Summer,” for the soundtrack to the movie The Horse Whisperer.45 That experience prompted them to reform the band on a permanent basis and, in 2002, the Flatlanders released their second album, Now Again, thirty years after recording their first.46 But nothing demonstrates the enduring influence of West Texas more than a 1993 collaboration between the three, a bawdy musical play entitled Chippy: Diaries of a West Texas Hooker. Based on the actual Depression-era diaries of a Panhandle prostitute, it is the story, as one of the songs from the musical says, of “whiskey and women and money to burn.” The real-life Chippy roamed the Panhandle during the 1930s, an era in West Texas char- acterized by blowing dust and rampant oil speculation, tent cities, and boom- towns. The play debuted in Philadelphia and later played at Lincoln Center in New York. A soundtrack album, Songs from Chippy, was released in 1994 on Hollywood Records.47 Songs like Butch Hancock’s “Low Lights of Town,” Terry Allen’s “Angels of the Wind,” and Joe Ely’s “Cold Black Hammer,” a song about oil wells, are the perfect evocation of a time and place and again demonstrate the important role geography can play in music. Music in general may be less place conscious than literature or film because those art forms, except in their more experimental varieties, require a setting that a more abstract endeavor such as song does not. Still, some music carries a strong imprint of the place in which it was inspired. The early recordings of Ely, Hancock, and Allen represent but one example of this. The unique characteristics of particular places leave their mark on all of us. Song- writers and musicians are no exception. Often this influence is communi- cated through the music such artists create. Popular music is our most ubiquitous cultural enterprise. Music plays everywhere—in our homes, in our cars, in the workplace, in the restaurants where we eat, in the stores in which we shop, in places where television and other forms of popular culture do not reach. As such, music can shape our attitudes about the world around us. Music that carries a strong sense of place has the ability to help create and reinforce our images of those places. Scholars and others seeking to understand our diverse geographies and how 02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:28 PM Page 274

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humans respond to them, therefore, would be wise to open not only their eyes but their ears, to listen to what music can tell us about place.

Notes

1. For examples of research by geographers on the role of place in the arts, see Ronald Rees, “Geography and Landscape Painting: An Introduction to a Neglected Field,” Scottish Geographical Magazine 89 (1973): 147–57; Charles S. Aiken, “Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County: Geographical Fact into Fiction,” The Geograph- ical Review 67 (1977): 1–21; Douglas C. D. Pocock, “Place and the Novelist,” Trans- actions of the Institute of British Geographers, n.s., 6 (1981): 337–47; Larry Ford, “Sun- shine and Shadow: Lighting and Color in the Depiction of Cities on Film,” in Place, Power, Situation, and Spectacle: A Geography of Film, ed. Stuart C. Aitken and Leo E. Zonn (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield), 119–36; and Lisa M. Benton, “Will the Real/Reel Los Angeles Please Stand Up?” Urban Geography 16 (1995): 144–64. 2. Search conducted on OCLC’s WorldCat database, January 8, 1999. 3. John Burke, Musical Landscapes (Exeter, U.K.: Webb & Bower, 1983). 4. George O. Carney, ed. The Sounds of People and Places: A Geography of Amer- ican Folk and Popular Music, 3rd ed. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994); Andrew Leyson, David Matless, and George Revill, eds. The Place of Music (New York: Guilford, 1998). 5. I define “popular music” as music that, while not necessarily commercially successful, nonetheless seeks to communicate to a general audience. I exclude classical music and experimental music generally associated with a more elite segment of soci- ety. I also exclude folk music intended primarily for the culture in which it was created. 6. For examples of research by geographers that have explored images of place in popular music, see Larry R. Ford and Floyd M. Henderson, “The Image of Place in American Popular Music,” Places 1 (1974): 31–37; Floyd M. Henderson, “The Image of New York City in American Popular Music: 1890–1970,” New York Folklore Quar- terly 30 (1974): 267–78; Bob Jarvis, “The Truth Is Only Known by Guttersnipes,” in Geography, the Media & Popular Culture, ed., Jacquelin Burgess and John R. Gold (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985), 96–122; John R. Gold, “From ‘Dust Storm Disaster’ to ‘Pastures of Plenty’: Woody Guthrie and Landscapes of the American Depression,” in The Place of Music, ed. Andrew Leyson, David Matless, and George Revill (New York: Guilford, 1998), 249–68. 7. Susan J. Smith, “Soundscape,” Area 26 (1994): 232. 8. Lily Kong, “Popular Music in Geographical Analyses,” Progress in Human Ge- ography 19 (1995): 184. 9. Carney, The Sounds of People and Places, 28. 10. John Morthland, The Best of Country Music (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984), 161. 11. Jarvis, “The Truth Is Only Known by Guttersnipes,” 21. 02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:28 PM Page 275

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12 Chuck Crisafulli, “Rock in a Hard Place,” Los Angeles Times, October 16, 1994, Calendar sec., 73. 13. Walter Prescott Webb, ed., The Handbook of Texas, vol. 2 (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1952), 69. 14. Joe Carr and Alan Munde, Prairie Nights to Neon Lights: The Story of Country Music in West Texas (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1995), v. 15. Jo Harvey Allen, “Chippy Narration,” Songs from Chippy, Hollywood Records HR 61609-2, 1994. 16. George Hancock, Go-Devils, Flies and Blackeyed Peas (Corsicana, Tex.: Self- published, 1985). 17. Elizabeth Hudson, “Bush Gives Lubbock Plenty to Talk About,” Washington Post, March 8, 1989, A6. 18. Nicholas Dawidoff, In the Country of Country: People and Places in American Music (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 299. 19. Mike Boehm, “Joe Ely Sticks to the Road Less Traveled,” Los Angeles Times, Orange County edition, November 13, 1992, F23. 20. Some would argue that Gilmore should be more a part of this study than he is. He was nominally the leader of the Flatlanders, singing all the songs on the album and writing three of them. But Gilmore did not record his first solo album until 1988. And though that album was produced by Ely and includes two Hancock compositions, it came so long after Gilmore left Lubbock that the music seems to have been washed clean of the dust and grit of West Texas. 21. The Flatlanders, More a Legend Than a Band, Rounder Records CD SS 34, 1990. 22. Colin Escott, liner notes to the Flatlanders, More a Legend Than a Band, Rounder CD SS 34, 1990. 23. Raoul Hernandez, “Texas Troubadour Joe Ely: Son of the Circus,” The Austin Chronicle, October 2, 1998, 62. 24. Hernandez, “Texas Troubadour,” 62. 25. Joe Ely, Joe Ely, MCA Records MCAD-10219, 1977. 26. John Roos, “Amblin’ Man: Texan Joe Ely Roams through Life and Various Mu- sical Styles, Flavoring Tunes with Busted Dreams and Desperadoes,” Los Angeles Times, June 22, 1998, F2, Orange County edition. 27. Joe Ely, Honky Tonk Masquerade, MCA Records MCA-2333, 1978. 28. Alanna Nash, “Joe Ely,” Stereo Review, October 1991, 62. 29. John Morthland, “Plains Song,” Texas Monthly, November 1991, 114. 30. Brad Buchholz, “The Image Maker: Singer-Songwriter Butch Hancock Puts Some of His Visions on Films,” The Dallas Morning News, May 29, 1994, Dallas Life, 14. 31. Dawidoff, In the Country of Country, 300. 32. Jason Cohen, “Butch Hancock: ‘It’s Just life, Y’know,’” Option, March/April 1992, 45. 33. Butch Hancock, West Texas Waltzes and Dust Blow Tractor Tunes, Rainlight Records 114, 1978. 34. Kimberly Goad, “Joe Ely: This Texas Troubadour Rocks to His Own Beat,” The Dallas Morning News, September 10, 1995, 1E. 02-233 Ch16 9/19/02 2:28 PM Page 276

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35. Richard Gehr, “Lubbock Is Everywhere,” Newsday, February 6, 1994, Fanfare, 17. 36. Sarah Vowell, “It Came from Lubbock,” SF Weekly, June 19, 1996. 37. Steve Terrell, “Lone Star: After Many Years of Anonymity, Texas-Born Musi- cian/Artist Terry Allen Finds Growing Fame in Sante Fe,” Santa Fe New Mexican, March 17, 1996, E1. 38. Vowell, “It Came from Lubbock.” 39. Terry Allen, Lubbock (On Everything). Fate Records, 1978. 40. Elizabeth Sasser, Out of the Ordinary: The Art of Paul Milosevich (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1991), 88–90 41. Miles Beller, “Wanton Wonderland: Terry Allen at the L.A. Louver,” Artweek, July 22, 1993, 12. 42. Noah Adams, interview with Terry Allen, Morning Edition, National Public Ra- dio, March 1,1996. 43. Butch Hancock, The Wind’s Dominion, Rainlight Records RLT 1644, 1979. 44. Terry Allen, Human Remains, Sugar Hill Records SHCD-1050, 1996. 45. The Horse Whisperer, soundtrack to the motion picture, MCA Records MCAD- 70025, 1998. 46. The Flatlanders, Now Again, New West Records CD020, 2002. 47. Songs from Chippy, Hollywood Records HR-61609-2, 1994.