Flatlanders Take Up Where Legend Left Off

If the fabled West Texas band the Flatlanders made a list of reasons to reconvene almost 30 years after recording its only album, cashing in on past fortunes surely wouldn’t be on it.

“Yes, here comes the payoff gig,” jokes Butch Hancock, 55, whose friendship with fellow Lubbock singer-songwriters Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Joe Ely turned into the musical collaboration that became the Flatlanders. “It’s been a long-standing joke that nobody ever made any money from any of the Flatlanders’ endeavors.”

That’s certain to change with a brief tour that brings the group to the House of Blues in West Hollywood on Tuesday and the Anaheim House of Blues on Wednesday.

Yet money still isn’t the issue.

“Now that we’re doing these shows,” says Ely, “promoters and radio guys will say, ‘What’s the reason for this tour?’ And we’ll say, ‘What do you mean, the reason? We like to get together and play.’ And they’ll ask, ‘You mean you’re not selling anything?’ Nobody can believe musicians can go out just to enjoy each other without selling anything.”

Of course, the Flatlanders never sold much to begin with.

The album, released as “The Flatlanders Featuring Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely, Butch Hancock,” came out in 1972 only as an eight-track tape. (It’s now enshrined as one of only 10 albums voted into the eight-track Hall of Fame on https://www.8trackheaven.com. “As a combination of great music, a mythic meeting and as a rarity, this album is a must for the hall of fame,” reads the entry on the Flatlanders.)

Eight years later it appeared on vinyl, but only in Europe. It was 18 years before Rounder Records issued the album in the U.S. with the whimsical title “More a Legend Than a Band,” reflecting the cult following that had developed around the album and the band.

The album included Gilmore’s “Dallas” and “Tonight I’m Gonna Go Downtown,” both of which Ely recorded and has performed live for decades. They were typical of the Flatlanders’ material, poetically rich, ethereal songs often born out of the expansive and desolate West Texas countryside. The group’s music had little in common with anything coming out of Nashville at the time, but was more on a par with the folk-country writings of Texans such as Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt.

Back then, Ely, Gilmore and Hancock were simply roommates who did most of their music-making for friends, going public only when they got desperate.

“There was one time,” Gilmore, 56, recalls, “when between all of us in the band and all our girlfriends, we couldn’t come up with the $85 to pay the rent that month. . . . Joe and I did a lot of duet gigs at Pizza Hut in those days when we needed a little money.”

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After the Flatlanders’ record fizzled, Ely became a critically admired country rocker of modest commercial success, Gilmore made a series of literate folk-country solo albums for various labels and Hancock built a reputation as a wordsmith par excellence through numerous albums for his own Rainlight Records label.

Through the years, they’d turn up at one another’s concerts, or just hang out when schedules allowed. Then in 1998, an MCA Nashville executive invited them to reform the Flatlanders and contribute a song to the soundtrack of Robert Redford’s film “The Horse Whisperer.”

“We had talked about doing this basically the whole time,” Gilmore says. “Every now and then we’d do something, like when [a friend’s] daughter got married, the band played for her wedding. But it was ‘The Horse Whisperer’ thing that congealed it. That was where Butch and Joe and I first collaborated on writing. We found that we were really good at it and that we really enjoyed it.”

They’re carrying the music-for-music’s-sake attitude to the fullest on this tour, which follows an equally brief East Coast tour last summer. Gilmore declines to call it a reunion because, he says, “there never was a breakup. . . . We’ve remained best friends through this whole time.”

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Where songs from the Flatlanders’ first go-round were written by Gilmore, Hancock or Ely individually, now they’re writing as a team.

“Once this was set in motion, we decided we’ve got to get some more new songs,” Ely, 54, says. “We didn’t just want to play the old stuff from the first record, so since then, we’ve written six new songs.”

Added to those they wrote in ‘98, it raises the issue of whether a new album is forthcoming.

“We decided that if we could come with enough material that we really like, we’d consider the idea of recording,” Gilmore says. “The motivation is the music rather than business. . . . We agreed among ourselves not to put the cart before the horse, like it almost inevitably is. . . . We’re not going to jump into anything. If a good offer comes in, we’ll definitely consider it.”

Says Ely: “We’re at the point in our lives where we can make music and just enjoy it, and go out on the road when we want to. We’re fortunate to have an audience to support that.”

The Flatlanders play Tuesday at the House of Blues, 8430 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, 8 p.m. $20. (323) 848-5100. Also Wednesday at the House of Blues Anaheim, 1530 S. Disneyland Drive, Anaheim, 7 p.m. $20. (714) 778-2583.