Drive Keeps Joe Ely All Over the Map : Pop music: Tough to categorize, the singer-songwriter is always looking for a new road--but not shortcuts.

Joe Ely gave the title “Lord of the Highway” to the album he released in 1987, but it’s a mantle he might more easily keep for himself. Since leaving his Lubbock, Tex., home in his teens to do the Kerouac bit, the 46-year-old singer-songwriter’s odometer has turned over more times than the most road-weary Greyhound bus.

In Ely’s world, the highway is as familiar and well-worn as the route to the kitchen. When you read of Lubbock’s Buddy Holly having recorded in “nearby Clovis, New Mexico,” that “nearby” covers a distance of 104 miles.

The town’s other neighbors are equally removed: Amarillo (122 miles); Vernon (181); Odessa (142), and the nearest big city, Dallas (348). These are long, flat, featureless miles, vistas Ely has described as “psychedelic” in their spareness. Contemplating them through a windshield has inspired more than a few of his songs.

His meager level of commercial success has kept him on the road steadily for nearly two decades. Ely’s lightning-fired mix of rock and country music just came along too early, some have said. He’s too country for rock fans, too rock for country and too damn good anyway to warrant much notice from the slick ‘n’ light music Establishment.

Some folks have been rightly peeved that Ely never hit the big time while lesser talents are driving their big rigs down the road he blazed. Ely, however, isn’t one of them.

“I never considered ‘success’ as a real gauge of anything. Just last night backstage at this place in Davis, I guess some musician had drawn a picture of this scared musician with great big eyes looking at this signpost between ‘fame’ and ‘obscurity.’ And I thought, ‘Man, what does that have to do with music ?’

“That’s thinking like a businessman or a marketing engineer or something, if he was afraid of some crossroads like that. I love taking different roads. Every time I put a new record together or attempt something, it’s a different road,” Ely said.

True to form, he was calling from a pay phone.

“Where am I? Hell if I know,” he said. “We’re on Interstate 5, somewhere between San Francisco and Bakersfield. It’s not even a city, just one of those complexes that only has gas stations and fast-food joints. The city of the future! I’m in some Nathan’s, I guess descended from the Coney Island place that invented hot dogs. Now they have them looking just like 7-Eleven gas stations and stuff. Boy, this place is too clean and too well lit for me.”

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Ely played 180 cities last year, somewhat less this year due to some side projects. The gigs are a varied lot.

“In this last year I’ve played with Springsteen at Madison Square Garden and then last night in a tiny little room in Davis, Calif.,” he said. “That’s kind of been my life, jumping between all kinds of places. And the thing that keeps me going is the whole variety of everything, how everything changes, records and songs, people, places and everything else.”

Among his changes of late are an all-acoustic album due in the spring and his work on a musical, “Chippy,” a recent collaboration with some of his old West Texas friends.

Though Ely is no stranger to playing acoustic at shows--his Coach House performance tonight will be a solo acoustic outing--this will be the first time he’s done without the wattage in a studio since his first recording in 1972 with the Flatlanders, which also was the first recording experience for Ely’s friends Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock.

Another friend from that time is visual artist and musician Terry Allen. (His “Youth in Asia” was exhibited at Newport Harbor Art Museum in 1993). Ely, Hancock, Allen and his playwright wife, Jo Harvey Allen, got together to do “Chippy” after Jo Harvey had come across the dust-bowl-era diaries of a West Texas prostitute.

The resulting musical has been staged this year in Philadelphia at the American Music Theater Festival and at New York’s Lincoln Center. The music, released on Hollywood Records, has garnered rave reviews, though the production on whole has been less well received. Ely doesn’t expect it’s headed for Broadway.

“The actual reviews of the play were pretty mixed, you know,” Ely said with a chuckle. “It’s not a real popular subject, not really Broadway material, not a light little comedy like ‘Best Little Whorehouse. . .’ was. Although it is a musical, it was a very heavy piece, and made Chippy into a real complex person.”

Doing the music was a departure from the way Ely usually approaches a song.

“Usually I don’t have subject matter sitting there in front of me and then write a song around it. Instead, I’ll start a song because it’s something personal, not just some outside subject or person. It’s rather something that happens to me or something that comes into my gut and my consciousness, and I’ll write a song about it.

“In Chippy’s case, she’d died years ago and the only thing I had to go by was piecing together these diaries we had gotten from this lady that knew her on her death bed. We got to look through those, but you could tell that Chippy didn’t really bare her soul, even in the diaries. You had to read in things that she was afraid to write down.

“Sometimes she’d just say, ‘I feel like hell--maybe I shouldn’t have done that,’ and never state what it was that she did. There were certain things going on in her life that were upsetting her tremendously, but we’d have to guess what they were. But all of us knew the area, that part of the country, and we were real familiar with stories from the Depression era because all of our parents had told us of it.”

As serious a work as “Chippy” turned out to be, Ely confessed, “the whole thing came down more as an excuse for all of us to work together than for any other reason. When I look at how Butch, Terry, Jimmie and I have been friends, I think it’s amazing that we all actually found each other in such a dusty, desolate part of the world and have stayed friends for all these years.”

Ely is doing a few of the “Chippy” songs in his show, adding that others don’t work outside the context of the play, which may be toured next year as a musical revue. He also is doing some songs likely to be on the acoustic album. Though he’s done recording, he has more songs in the can than will be on the finished product. He’s now in the process of selecting which ones will make it.

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He said the album is developing a tone, and to hear Ely describe it, it resembles a Cormac McCarthy novel.

“I guess it could be a bit like that,” he said. “There seems to be a theme to the record where it’s all real close to the border, and sometimes it jumps back and forth from either side. There’s one song I’ve wanted to record for years that Tom Russell wrote about a chicken fight called ‘Gallo del Cielo,’ which means ‘Rooster From Heaven.’ A new song of mine I feel real good about is called ‘Ranches and Rivers,’ which hangs right there by the border. One is about stealing a rooster, and one is stealing a girl in a work camp.”

The album will feature Ely’s usual rhythm section of Davis McLarty on drums and Glenn Fukenaga on bass, with help from longtime associates David Grissom (usually with John Mellencamp these days) on acoustic guitar and Lloyd Maines on slide guitar. Much of the album will also feature Dutch musician Teye Wijenterp on flamenco guitar.

For those who can’t wait until spring for some new recorded Ely, he does a superlative version of Merle Haggard’s “White Line Fever” on the just-released Hag tribute album, “Tulare Dust.”

“I love Haggard,” Ely declared. “After my first MCA record in the mid-’70s, one of the first big tours I went on was in Western Europe with Merle & the Strangers. We played some really fun shows, and I got to know him really well. We’d sit up just tossing songs back and forth. That was a huge thrill for me because I had really loved his stuff when I was growing up. So I jumped at being part of this project.”

Ely always has appreciated other writers, and, along with his own solid originals, his albums and shows typically feature songs by others “that I just have to do.” Among the current writers Ely likes are Dave Alvin--whose “Every Night About This Time” Ely covered on his “Love and Danger” album--Texas writer Wayne Hancock and O.C. honky-tonker Chris Gaffney.

Along with spending two-thirds of his year on the road, Ely also holds down a family life--he lives with his wife and daughter outside Austin. He has also recently branched into the art world, with a hometown show of computer-enhanced photo art titled “How to Make Jail Hot Chocolate” and a Philadelphia exhibit of “Chippy”-related art.

“I don’t think it’s that different from doing music, because when I write songs I think real visually anyway,” he said. “I never let it out in public before last year, but for my whole life I’ve carried a notebook and drawn sketches in between the songwriting, keeping drawings of the places I’d been and people I’d met.”

* Joe Ely, Paul Kelly, Nan Vernons and Kerry Getz play tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 p.m. $15. (714) 496-8930.