Love Songs From the Open Road : After a 2-year absence, West Texas honky-tonk hero Joe Ely is back in town with a new album, ‘Love and Danger.’

He rushes onstage with his hard-driving band to spin quirky, impassioned tales that celebrate the joys of the open road, of goin’ honky-tonkin’, of lovers spending a sleepless night in love.

Transported from the confines of their lives to unsafe, seductive worlds of dance-hallers, barroom brawlers and lovers on the run, audiences are compelled to get up and dance to West Texan Joe Ely’s personal blend of rock ‘n’ roll, country, blues and Texas swing music. No one gives more of himself to his audience than this Austin-based singer and songwriter, who after recording nine albums since his debut in 1977 has maintained a relatively small but intensely enthusiastic following in cities all over the United States and Europe.

After more than two years without a stop in the Los Angeles area, Joe Ely is back in town with a new album, “Love and Danger,” for MCA Records. He’ll perform with his band at the Roxy on Wednesday.

Drummer Davis McLarty and bassist Jimmy Pettit have been joined by Reese Wynans on piano and Hammond B3 organ. Wynans played in the late Stevie Ray Vaughn’s band, Double Trouble. Austin guitarist Ian Moore has replaced David Grissom, who has been touring with John Mellencamp.

Unlike the rabble-rousing album “Lord of the Highway”--recorded on the Hightone label in 1987--the aptly titled “Love and Danger” concentrates on the delights and sometimes the despair of love relationships. Ely, 45, wrote most of his songs when he got off the road after a long tour on behalf of the 1990 album “Live at Liberty Lunch.”

At the time, “I was tired of the road, tired of traveling,” Ely said on the phone, speaking from Chicago. “When you’re a road musician, a lot of the time you kind of leave behind a little bit of what makes you a human being.”

He said that finally, “I was able to take time off. I really had a chance to sit back, go out and ride bicycles, meet old friends again, shoot pool and do stuff like that that I’d really been missing. And so this album kind of came about just because I wanted to--I was in love.”

But don’t think that Ely’s gone mushy. “I wanted to do more like a love album, although a lot of the songs turned out to have dangerous pairs, dangerous attractions.

“That kind of became the theme of the album, but it’s still got love songs, and it’s got some passionate feelings in there. It really reflected the time, the first time that I’d had to take a breath, and I wanted to feel the wind in my face.”

“Love Is the Beating of Hearts” is unabashedly direct, but the six other songs that he wrote on the 10-song album contain the offbeat lyrics and stories that he is known for.

The album begins with “Sleepless in Love,” one of the finer examples of Ely’s way with words:

He had hair black as a fiberglass speedboat. . . .

He swaggered like a surfer on a Louisiana dirt bike. . . .

She had eyes bright as a sunlit Airstream. . . .

She was calm, still as a July willow. . . .

In “Whenever Kindness Fails,” written by fellow Texan Robert Earl Keen, a gun-toting protagonist crossing the desert by train sees

. . . the brakeman and the engineer drinking wine and eating Brie. I asked them who would brake and who would steer--they started pointing back at me. So I shot ‘em down.

“The character that’s singing it is trying to hold back, and I guess that’s what made that song,” Ely said. “I really love it.”

Tony Brown, executive vice president and head of the artist and repertoire department at MCA Records/Nashville, co-produced “Love and Danger” with Ely. Among other things, Brown is known for working with artists such as Lyle Lovett and Steve Earle, whose music cannot be categorized specifically as country, rock or pop.

Ely and MCA had parted company in the mid-’80s after MCA refused to release an album he had recorded. Brown was responsible for re-signing him.

“What can I say? He cast a spell on me,” Brown said. “I went and saw him play with Grissom and all those guys, and it just blew me away. And then they played me the demos he’d been writing, and, I don’t know, we just hit it off. He had that live album, ‘Live at Liberty Lunch,’ which I could buy automatically. We decided to buy that one and put it out, and then we’d cut an album. “There’s a few Austin-type artists such as Kelly Willis, Nanci Griffith, Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett that I had worked with in the past. I think Joe Ely was a big influence on all those people. I was really turned on to Joe by Steve Earle.

“He 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, screamin’ in my ear and singing the songs. That’s about a good 2 1/2-hour ride. He played that album wide open, there and back. I remember it like it was yesterday. That was my first real indoctrination.”

Joe Ely’s first encounter with rock ‘n’ roll occurred when he was about 7 years old. He had accompanied his parents to a Pontiac dealership in Amarillo, Tex.

“It was one of those things like free balloons and hot dogs for the kiddies,” Ely said. “There was a raging dust storm, dust blowing so hard that people had scarves and bandannas over their faces. You couldn’t even see across the street. I remember there was a flatbed trailer and some guy up there selling Pontiacs. Every once in a while he’d say, ‘Now we have this piano-playin’ kid for ya. We’re gonna turn it over to him for a little bit.’

“It was Jerry Lee Lewis, flailing away on this piano. The wind was blowing so hard that his microphone kept blowing over. The Pontiac guy would go over and pull his microphone back up for him. I just remember this madman in a dust storm. It made an impression on me, and I thought, ‘Man, that’s what I want to be when I grow up.’ ”

When Ely was 12, his family moved to Lubbock, the home of rock ‘n’ roll legends Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison. In elementary school, he had taken violin lessons. But in Lubbock, a friend’s step-brother introduced him to the guitar.

“My violin started gathering dust,” Ely said. “He taught me loads of old Buddy Holly songs, so it just kinda went from there.”

Beginning in his teens, Ely rambled around the country. “I was always reading a lot. I guess from reading Kerouac books, I started jumping freight trains,” he said.

Unconsciously, he developed his story-telling abilities on the road, keeping a journal of images that came to him.

“I’d always write ‘em down, just little short things, and then as I did that every day, some of them turned into longer stories, and some turned into songs,” he said. “I do that to this day.”

He’s now doing it with a lap-top computer. “He’s real computer-literate,” Brown said.

Ely played hamburger stands, honky-tonks and the like for 15 years before he recorded his first album in 1977, which includes songs by his fine story-teller friends, Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. After the widely acclaimed “Honky Tonk Masquerade” (1978), and “Down on the Drag” (1979), Ely was invited to open a European tour for The Clash in England. He had toured there before, and found a lot of young bands were rediscovering long-lost music, mainly rockabilly.

“I discovered a whole part of West Texas music that I didn’t know existed,” Ely said. “I thought how strange it was for me to go all the way across an ocean into a giant city like London, and to find music that was made 30 miles from where I grew up that I never knew existed.

“I guess The Clash liked my music because it reminded them of an exotic place. I don’t know if it still existed or not, but they thought West Texas and the Wild West out in the desert was a completely romantic part of music. So their first tour of the States, I took them out into Texas, and we hit some towns that normally aren’t on tour schedules, like Laredo, Juarez and Lubbock. It was good fun.”

After a live album from those performances in England, called “Live Shots,” and the 1981 “Musta Notta Gotta Lotta,” which led to his opening shows for the Kinks, the Rolling Stones and Tom Petty, many fans and critics believed that Joe Ely should and would reach superstar status. One could speculate about why he is not a household name today. His 1984 album, “Hi-Res,” was not so well received. Perhaps the difficulty an artist who is not purely country or purely rock ‘n’ roll faces in getting radio airplay is a significant factor.

Speaking of Ely’s work in “Love and Danger,” Brown said: “There are certain things about this album that are as commercial as Springsteen or Cougar (Mellencamp), but for some reason he’s in that funny little cult world. Once you get in that little world--Bonnie Raitt’s probably one of the first ones who seems to have broken out.

“I think you have to see Joe Ely to really appreciate him. He’s so great live. His shows plaster you against the wall.”

Ely doesn’t seem particularly bothered by his lack of mainstream fame. “I really love playin’. I go through all this bouncin’ down the highways, and these old lonely hotels and bad food for just that couple of hours every night,” he said.

“I know where the songs came from, and then I say, ‘Well, now it’s on a record, and now I’m up here playin’ it. There’s actual sound crossing this dance floor, and it’s affecting people in some way.’ It’s really amazing the way things come from nothing just because you put them together. I really like that feeling.”

Joe Ely at the Roxy, 9009 W. Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, on Wednesday. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Show starts at 8 p.m. with opening act, Greg Trooper. Call (213) 480-3232.