Flatlanders

In the early 1970s, these drum-less, saw-playing singing weirdos baffled Nashville with country music too attached to the past for the radio and too far ahead of its time to be liked by anyone who wasn't high as a kite on God knows what. Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock and Joe Ely all went on to have major solo careers.

More a Legend than a Band,' recorded in Nashville in 1971 and unavailable domestically until
now, is notable both for its compelling version of the "high and lonesome" country style
and for the band's creative core – Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, a
musical family of great depth and resolute individuality. The album's acoustic approach
(guitars, Dobro, mandolin, fiddle and string bass) and the loping rhythms of this s... More >

In 1972, Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, and leader Jimmie Dale Gilmore--drumless psychedelic cowboys returned to Lubbock from Europe and San Francisco and Austin--recorded in Nashville for Shelby Singleton, and even an eccentric like the owner of the Sun catalogue and "Harper Valley P.T.A." must have considered them weird. With a musical saw for theremin effects, their wide-open spaceyness was released eight-track only, and soon a subway troubadour and an architect and a disciple of Guru Mararaji had disappeared back into the diaspora. In cowpunk/neofolk/psychedelic-revival retrospect, they're neotraditionalists who find small comfort in the past, responding guilelessly and unnostalgically to the facts of displacement in a global village that includes among its precincts the high Texas plains. They're at home. And they're lost anyway. (Grade - A-)