Joe Ely has driven off from Taos, headed west, because of course he was. He was 78.
Pneumonia, Lewy body dementia, and Parkinson’s did for him, according to The New York Times. It took all three to finally drag the old troubadour off the road.
He was always going places: riding a motorcycle through the halls of his high school; hitching and riding the rails around Texas and the Southwest; covering the earth like a spilt can of Sherwin-Williams. In the photo on his website he’s behind the wheel of a convertible. In London, he joined a touring Shakespearean troupe.
As Mother Times noted:
He might open for Bruce Springsteen at Madison Square Garden one night, and then take the stage in a tiny music hall in the Jersey suburbs the next. He loved it all, especially the hours spent driving from gig to gig on the open road, and above all the vast empty stretches of highway out West. “There’s something about that vast emptiness that makes your imagination come alive,” Mr. Ely told The Los Angeles Times in 1992.
Now and again Ely would hook up with two of his old high-school pals from Lubbock, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, performing as The Flatlanders. That on-and-off gig lasted from 1972 until the mid-2000s. He opened for the Clash, becoming friends with Joe Strummer, and wrangled llamas for the Ringling Bros. circus.
Jaysis H., what a life. Other people got famous. Joe Ely lived. Somebody give this boy a ride to heaven.
Mad Blog Media 
Well there ain’t no better band
Than Joe Ely and his Texas Men
Where the wind blows
I ain’t seen none like that scenery
The Clash, Sandanista, “If Music Could Talk”
Joe accompanied The Clash on their stint in Texas (Austin, Houston, Dallas, and Lubbock) on their fall ’79 US tour. He showed them that wild, West Texas scenery, so foreign to their English experience. I missed their Lubock gig, as I was teaching high school science at Spur, TX, that year, and making that 75 mile drive both ways on a school night was not in my plans. Wish I had done it!
Back to Joe. Saw him plenty of times in Texas and thereabouts. My older sister knew him socially in Lubbock. Now, that’s two Joe’s gone from us — Strummer and Ely.
Dale in Mid-MO
That’s the kind of music my bros and I got addicted to in college. Faux cowboy hippies we were, wearing Resistols or Stetsons, snap-button shirts, and hair down to our belt buckles.
One of us actually married a cowgirl; I had to drive the old Datsun pick-’em-up back to Greeley, Colo., from Burlington, Vt., for the nuptials. Church was split right down the middle, with hippies on one side and cowpersons on the other.
Love that Flatlanders tune “I Had My Hopes Up High.” Don’t we all?
So much good music that it’s hard, perhaps impossible, to keep up. Never heard Joe before, until now.
“There’s something about that vast emptiness that makes your imagination come alive,”
Yeah. That’s why I have a real hard time leaving the Southwest.
Yup. Once I got a squint at our Looney Tunes Road Runner & Coyote country I was hooked.
The parents drove us around Texas once we got there in 1962. Summer vacation trips took us north through Oklahoma to visit mom’s kin in Iowa; and west to see more of her family in Scottsdale, with a side trip to some land the old man had bought in Ash Fork west of Flagstaff. Never east to Florida, where his people were.
And that trip to Vermont was my one and only road trip east. Once I got control of the wheel it was the wide-open West for me.
There is more music that I have missed along the way. Thanks for the tip.
I moved to Lexington, KY for six months in 1988/89. I missed Arizona the entire time. We moved back in June of 1989 and never regretted it.
My one extended stay out of the Colorado-New Mexico-Arizona area was in Oregon, and I did not thrive there.
O, I had moments, like being able to drive to the Oregon coast in fairly short order, catching the Crusaders at the Mount Hood Festival of Jazz, catching Andy Irvine and Paul Brady at a Corvallis bistro (and yes, I bought this album), meeting my old newsie bro the M-dogg now and again for a romp through the dive bars in Seattle (he was working at a paper in eastern Washington then), and like that there.
But the weather threw a soggy blanket over my mental health and I had to get the fuck out of there and back to Colorado before I dissolved into a smelly puddle of equal parts Guinness, Jameson, Marlboro, and despair. It took a few more years to return to what for me passes as normalcy, but the bicycle helped. Corvallis remains the only place I’ve ever lived where I never rode a bike.