I was listening to eTown, a live music & consciousness-raising program from Boulder (CO), on public radio last Saturday night when I learned something new about my favorite rock group. It's the story of an unlikely collaboration between some gritty Brits & an odd couple of Americans. I'm pleased to share it with you, dear readers, if only via blogpost.
The special guest musician on last week's eTown was Joe Ely (pronounced "EE-lee"), a roots-rocker raised in west Texas (born 1947). A few years ago I saw Ely perform, along with his old folk-country pals Jimmie Dale Gilmore & Butch Hancock, at Luther's Blues in Madison (WI) during a Flatlanders reunion tour. In the late '80s, I had the pleasure of watching Ely play guitar & sing with his own band on two occasions, at hip venues in New Orleans (Tipitina's - Happy Mardi Gras, y'all) & Boston (The Rathskeller, I think, near Kenmore Square).
Serendipitously, in March 1990, I caught Ely playing a solo acoustic gig at a bar in downtown Seattle. After the show I met the friendly Texan outside, got his autograph & suggested that he consider booking a lucrative tour of Japan (I was headed to Tokyo to teach conversational English that April). Joe Ely always puts on an entrancing show, mixing a honky-tonk sensibility with the rockabilly attitude of Buddy Holly, the musical pioneer from Lubbock (Joe's hometown).
Check out Ely's early live albums, Musta Notta Gotta Lotta (1981) & Live at Liberty Lunch (1990), for the sound of his stagecraft & samples of his songwriting prowess. Dig if you will the opening lyric of Joe's "Honky Tonk Masquerade" (1977) , a boozy masterpiece: "You sure look fine tonight / in the beer sign light." Or try this poetic opener from "Letter to Laredo" (1995): "As I was rolling across the Mississippi / I stopped there and I cried / No use for a man to keep a mighty river / All dammed up inside." Joe's also a member of the Tex-Mex side-project Los Super Seven, along with David Hidalgo (Los Lobos) & Freddy Fender ("Wasted Days and Wasted Nights").
Anyway, eTown host Nick Forster was interviewing him when Ely mentioned that his Nashville-produced records of the late '70s sold much better in the UK than they did in the USA. Joe was touring England in 1978 when three guys crashed through the club's backdoor after a show in London. It turned out to be some local fans named Mick Jones, Paul Simonon & Joe Strummer (nom de punk of John Mellor, a diplomat's son), a/k/a The Clash - minus a drummer. The musicians hit it off so well that Joe Ely & the Clash ended up touring Texas & Mexico together not long afterwards.
Now here's the cool thing I did not know: Ely said that's him doing the background vocals in Spanish on "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" - the first hit single from the Clash's Combat Rock (1982). On that same album, the last songwriting & recording collaboration between Jones & Strummer, you can also hear Allen Ginsberg's impressive baritone. That's the legendary Beat poet interjecting verses (on Rimbaud, the Paris Commune, addicts of metropolis, death squad Salvador, etc.) alongside Strummer's plaintive choruses on "Ghetto Defendant."
Over 30 years later, Joe Ely remains as lively as his slinky "Cool Rockin' Loretta" down in Austin, Texas. Clash fanatics still miss Joe Strummer, who died of a freak heart attack in London at age 50 just before Christmas 2002, when he moonlighted by presenting a BBC Radio world-music program. Sadly, Strummer passed not long after he'd made two groovy albums with his comeback band, the Mescaleros; and he had plans to record with Ely & his band. As for the prophet-bearded, om-chanting Allen Ginsberg, cancer dragged his spirit into the mystical realm of the dead in 1997 at age 70.
In their weird transatlantic collaboration, Ely & Ginsberg & the Clash rocked the Casbah of culture by cross-pollinating poetry, languages & music.
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