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.
Damme if Steve “The Colonel” Cropper wasn’t in my ear from day one.
Booker T. & the MGs. Sam & Dave. Otis Redding. Leon Russell. John Lennon. Wilson Pickett. Levon Helm.
And, of course, the Blues Brothers, with his teenage bandmate Donald “Duck” Dunn, “Blue” Lou Marini, Matt “Guitar” Murphy, Tom “Triple Scale” Scott, Tom “Bones” Malone, Steve Jordan, and all the rest of ’em, including John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd, who could actually play (drums and harp) when they weren’t busy being funny.
Man. The Pearly Gates Bar & Grill has one hell of a house band.
In 1973, an Air Force nuclear-missile officer named Harold Hering asked a simple question during a training session: “How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?” The question cost him his career. Military members are trained to execute orders, not question them. But today, both the man who can order the use of nuclear arms and the man who would likely verify such an order gave disgraceful and unnerving performances in Quantico. How many officers left the room asking themselves Major Hering’s question?
Following the news was starting to feel like losing a shit-eating contest, so I stepped away from the Mac and treated myself to a little expedition down to the bosque.
It was something of a whim, actually. I just grabbed the Soma Pescadero and without a plan in place took the Paseo de las Montañas trail down to I-40, rolled up and over the bike-ped bridge, and then risked life and limb riding Indian School and Washington to the brief I-40 Trail at Carlisle, which leads to the North Diversion Channel Trail.
But instead of turning northward as per usual, to head back to the Mac via Osuna-Bear Canyon, I swung south. What the hell? I thought. Why not? Let someone else gnaw on that shit sandwich for a few hours.
Ridden south the NDCT has an exit onto Indian School, which becomes Odelia as it traverses I-25. It’s the sort of auto-friendly shooting gallery that bicycle advocates call a “stroad,” with a bike lane, and drops past Albuquerque High School (pay no attention to the graveyard on your right). To avoid the equally dicey Broadway at the bottom I hung a left off Odelia onto Edith, then a right onto Mountain.
This is the same route I ride to collect the Forester whenever it needs a little love from the Subaru wizards at Reincarnation. But Mountain also winds through Old Town to the Paseo del Bosque trail.
Mountain can be a little sketchy, being a narrow two-lane shared with street people and gas-guzzlers. A seemingly endless construction project that I first dodged in June added a small degree of difficulty, taking me off the street and onto a series of sidewalks from Tiguex Park to the Albuquerque Museum. After dodging a dog-walker, dropping off the sidewalk onto Mountain, and crossing to the opposite sidewalk to punch the bike-ped button at Mountain and Rio Grande, it was smooth sailing to the bosque trail, which I joined just south of I-40.
The Rio Ground in fall.
Then another whim: Check the state of the Rio Not-So-Grande. Up the Gail Ryba Memorial Bridge I rode. Yikes, etc. Back to the bosque trail.
The cottonwoods weren’t showing a lot of fall color so early in the season. Just a hint of yellow here and there. No matter; just happy to be here. I brought arm warmers but never needed them as I cruised along at a pleasant skull-flushing pace.
I shared the trail with kindred souls. E-bikes, recumbents, mountain bikes, gravel bikes, even road bikes (how quaint). One long lean type on a flared-bar, fat-tired gravel bike ahead of me was riding no hands, swaying gently to some music in his mind.
They call me the breeze / I keep blowing down the road
Was he was thinking about ways to drag hapless strangers into unmarked vans and out of the country, or into court to fight some half-baked rap, strip them of their jobs, health care, and reputations, sic’ the thugs in his cult on them, or simply shoulder his way in front of a cluster of cameras so the rest of us have to look at him and listen to his bullshit? If so, I wasn’t seeing it. Just another dude on his two-wheeler, enjoying some fresh air between shifts in the barrel.
As I turned north off the bosque onto the Paseo del Norte Trail and headed for home I thought about how the barrel is with us always. We need a broader view than the one we get through the bunghole.
Me and the Pescadero, just blowin’ down the road. Trail. Whatevs.
Either way, your reaction is likely to be, “Oh, shit.”
Water consumption in the [Colorado River] Basin continues to outpace the natural supply, further drawing down reservoir levels. While Basin State representatives pursue the elusive goal of a workable and mutually acceptable set of post-2026 operating rules, our review of the latest Bureau of Reclamation data shows that the gap between ongoing water use and the reality of how much water actually flows in the Colorado River poses a serious near-term threat. Another year like the one we just had on the Colorado River would nearly exhaust our dwindling reserves. …
A solution can’t wait for a long-term agreement among the states. It may be difficult, if not impossible, for the Basin States to take such short term action. That reality puts the onus on the Department of the Interior to act.
The Department of the Interior? Led by former North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, a fossil-fuelish kind of fella who briefly ran against the Pestilence, then kowtowed to it, and worked with his former rival’s campaign to develop its energy policy?
Talk about shit and bad luck. Oh, god … oh, shit. …
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