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 The
universe of West Texas is distilled from just two elements,
the land and the sky. They keep one another balanced in symmetrical
counterpoint, with the horizon as an elusive point of reference.
It is left to the intangible presence of light to invest them
with meaning and magic. In this most unadorned of landscapes,
moonlight and sunlight, weightless though they are, charge the
plains and the Caprock ridges and the overarching sky with improbably
transcendental power.
So it is with the music of Jimmie
Dale Gilmore. The essential elements are unremarkable; the
tonal variations of the human voice and the plucked guitar
string. And those simple elements are arranged according to
familiar patterns--folk, blues, country, rock and roll. But
Gilmore's music emits its own sort of light, a luminosity
which renders the musically commonplace elusive, alluring
and resonant. It is the sort of quality which led one Rolling
Stone writer to describe the contents of Gilmore's most
recent album, Braver Newer World, as "Songs (which)
defer to no one and nothing but the desolate beauty of his
own music."
Desolate beauty. That was what
Gilmore was born into in Amarillo in 1945. The Texas Panhandle
has a beauty so austere that Georgia O'Keeffe (who taught
in the region in the 1920s) painted the dawn horizon over
and over again, trying to capture its essence.
Gilmore's father played electric
guitar in a Panhandle honky-tonk band, following in the two-stepping
footsteps of Webb Pierce and Lefty Frizzell. But it was the
acoustic guitar that seemed to offer Jimmie Dale the key to
the musical mysteries. Gilmore always said he was a devotee
of folk music, but his definition of "folk" was
breathtakingly elastic.
"I am a folk musician,"
he asserted one day. "I am a traditionalist. But the
tradition that I was born into was a whole bunch of radio
music. And the folk music that I'm a product of is everything
from Hank Williams and Elvis and Little Richard and the Beatles,
to Joan Baez, Chuck Berry, and Brenda Lee. That, to me, is
folk music."
The other tradition he was born
into was one of footloose curiosity. West Texas breeds two
kinds of kids; those who see the horizon line as a prison
wall and those who see it as an escape hatch, beckoning with
promise. As a boy, Gilmore thrilled to the exploits of older
men--older children, really--such as Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison,
Waylon Jennings, and Buddy Knox and his wonderfully-named
band, the Rhythm Orchids, musicians who would do anything
to kick a hole in the numbingly neutral, atonal backdrop of
flatlands, dust and boredom.
Music, he soon concluded, was a
ticket to ride. At night it blew in on the big clear-channel
stations from up north, and from the colossal Mexican stations
down south across the Rio Grande, signals so strong you could
pick them up on the fillings in your teeth. UFOs were buzzing
Lubbock on a regular basis in the late Fifties and early Sixties,
and to teenagers like Gilmore and his boyhood pals Butch Hancock
and Joe Ely, the air seemed alive with possibilities.
"Lubbock was a rural society
that had urbanization thrust upon it very suddenly, Gilmore
mused. "I grew up in a city lifestyle, but my daddy was
a farm boy. And a lot of that conflict surfaces in art, and
especially in music."
He formed his first group, the
T. Nickel House Band, in the late 1960s, followed in short
order by the Hub City Movers. But the group that really put
Gilmore and his evocative songs at center stage was the Flatlanders.
The centerpiece of the group was the singer/songwriter troika
of Gilmore, Ely and Hancock.
The first sound that listeners
heard of the Flatlanders on record was the mournful, high-lonesome
voice of Jimmie Dale Gilmore singing one of his own songs
called "Dallas." The opening lines of that tune
harbor what is still, perhaps, his most potent and poignant
image: "Have you ever seen Dallas from a DC-9 at night?"
Another vocalist might use the line to convey anticipation,
but Gilmore sings it with the melancholy echo of unredeemed
dreams-the lights are only beautiful from a distance. In that
song-and in many more in the years to come-Gilmore demonstrated
his enviable ability to conjure up a world of emotion in a
few simple words.
Unfortunately, not many people
were privileged to witness Gilmore's subtle alchemy. The Flatlanders-highly
untutored in the ways of the music business and greener than
chlorophyll- were all but laughed out of Nashville. Their
one album was recorded under an onerous record contract and
went Dixie with breathtaking rapidity (what few copies of
the album ever saw the light of day appeared only on eight-track
tape!). In 1980, the tracks re-surfaced on England's Charly
label as One Road More; since 1991, the album has been
available on Rounder Records as More A Legend Than A Band.
From 1974 through 1980, Gilmore
retreated from the music business, living in Denver in a spiritual
community that followed teenage guru Mahharaj Ji. Still, his
songs received an airing via superlative cover versions by
Joe Ely (notably "Dallas," "Treat Me Like A
Saturday Night," and "Tonight I Think I'm Gonna
Go Downtown").
It wasn't until well after he moved
to Austin, Texas in 1980 that he began to consider another
run at the music business. "I came to believe I could
integrate my life in music with my spiritual life," he
told journalist John Morthland.
It wasn't easy. Gilmore sparred
with some personal demons during the Eighties, and he waged
a parallel struggle to reconcile what he created as an artist
with what moved him as a fan.
"I'll tell you what resolved
it for me," he told another writer. "Somewhere around
my last year of high school or my first year of college, I
read a book by Ezra Pound and somewhere in it it said, 'The
poem fails when it strays too far from the song, and the song
fails when it strays too far from the dance.' That line really
hit me. It made sense, because I'm a music lover, but I also
feel that music has to be understandable, right down to the
honky-tonk level."
Gilmore got down to the honky-tonk
level at a pair of Austin clubs called The Alamo Lounge and
emmajoe's. There he honed songs both old and new, in the presence
of musical contemporaries such as Lyle Lovett, Robert Earl
Keen, Lucinda Williams, and Nanci Griffith. It made for some
magical nights.
Finally, in 1988, he released his first solo album, Fair
& Square, on Hightone
Records, followed by Jimmie Dale Gilmore in 1989.
Both were noble flawed attempts to cast Gilmore in a more accessible
commercial mold. Still, his eclectic gifts as a songwriter ("Don't
Look For A Heartache," "Deep Eddy Blues") and
an interpreter (Townes Van Zandt's "White Freight Liner
Blues," Mel Tillis' "Honky-Tonk Song") were at
last displayed under his own moniker. A duet album with Butch
Hancock, Two Roads--Live In Australia, was released on
Virgin Records in 1990, and showed his music off to better advantage.
It wasn't until 1991 that Gilmore's
cross-pollinating musical vision approached true fruition
with the release of "After Awhile," on Elektra
Nonesuch Records' American Explorer Series. Rolling Stone's
1991 and 1992 Critics Polls dubbed him Country Artist of the
Year, and why not? At last, Gilmore was making the music he
heard in his head, a stylistically malleable synthesis of
country, blues and rock that would gladden the heart of Jimmie
Rodgers and Jack Kerouac alike. Everything from the transcendent
longing of "Tonight I Think I'm Gonna Go Downtown"
to the bluegrass-flavored comic vignette of "My Mind's
Got A Mind of Its Own" to the harrowing hellhound-on-my-trail
blues of "Midnight Train" fed into a timeless musical
vision as expansive as a West Texas horizon.
That vision was further clarified
by 1993's Spinning Around the Sun (released on the
Elektra label), which ended up seemingly on every Top Ten
list this side of David Letterman's. A 12-song cycle that
included contributions from fellow Panhandle tunesmiths Al
Strehli and Jo Carol Pierce, along with a duet with Lucinda
Williams and trophy-retiring covers of Hank Williams' "I'm
So Lonesome I Could Cry" and Elvis' "I Was the One,"
the album made the most of its contradictions. From it's very
first lines (I've seen crimson roses/ Growing through a chain-link
fence...I've seen crystal visions/ Sometimes they don't make
sense"), it embraced both wild romance and the limits
of the human heart. Everybody has a seat on the train to glory,
Gilmore might have sung, but nobody rides for free.
Produced by Emery Gordy, Jr. (whose
previous credits include albums by Patty Loveless and George
Jones) and recorded in a Nashville that is far more accessible
and accepting than the Flatlanders could ever have dreamed,
Spinning Around the Sun proved to be Gilmore's most
mature and fully-realized work. In a way, it was his calling
card. "I can't say I've ever been rejected by the country
music establishment," he noted wryly, "because I've
never been presented to them."
Following the album's release,
Gilmore found himself in a series of improbably high-profile
situations: Dueting with 10,000 Maniacs' Natalie Merchant
on "Dallas" for the edification of Jay Leno and
The Tonight Show audience; appearing (at 47, grey-shot
mane of hair and all) in a fashion layout in Esquire;
recording an EP with Seattle grunge icons Mudhoney (They sang
his "Tonight I Think I'm Gonna Go Downtown," he
sang their "Blinding Sun," and they dueted on Townes
Van Zandt's "Buckskin Stallion Blues.")... .Somewhere,
Buddy Holly is smiling.
Following a solo tour with Nanci
Griffith, Gilmore returned to Austin to spend the fall of
1994 to woodshed and consider the direction his next album
would take.
 After
a number of false starts, the project coalesced as Gilmore's
eighth album, 1996's Braver Newer World. Even for listeners
accustomed to chasing Gilmore's far-flung creative horizons,
the new work challenged the preconceptions of what one man's
musical universe could encompass. As one Austin writer pined
upon hearing a rough mix of the album, "If Hank Williams
had listened to the Beatles' Revolver before going in
to cut "Your Cheating Heart," he might have emerged
with something akin to Braver Newer World."
In a four-star review, Rolling
Stone referred to Gilmore's music as "high-plains caroling
and Zen-like driftin' blues," and noted. "Gilmore
evokes the Sir Douglas Quintet and the Tao Te Ching
in equal measure.
To Gilmore and his producer, fellow
West Texan, T-Bone Burnett, the goal was "to go in with
the attitude (Roy) Orbison did - more of an anything-goes
attitude," said the former in the albums liner notes.
And Burnett added, "I wanted to make a real West Texas
album, where you could see the horizon all around you for
a long ways."
To that end, the pair utilized
songs by composers as disparate as Blind Lemon Jefferson,
Sam Phillips, Joe Ely and, of course Gilmore himself.
The Telecaster/Tao approach paid
off; Braver Newer World was nominated for a Grammy
in the Best Contemporary Folk category.
Gilmore and Elektra Records parted company in 1998. Gilmore
continues to perform, write and search for the next thread in
his musical tapestry. He took an acting part in the Coen Brothers'
movie, The Big Lebowski and, along with his old Flatlander
compatriots Butch Hancock and Joe Ely, recorded a track for
Robert Redford's film The Horse Whisperer.
The release of "One Endless
Night" on February 29, 2000 is
not only his first since 1996's Braver New World (from way
back in the 20th century) but the debut release on his own
Windcharger Music label. The result is the album that Gilmore
considers closest to his heart.
He describes the collection as
a musical self-portrait, an artistic mosaic of the various
influences that have forged his singular artistry. Though
the selection features some inspired original material the
album-opening title track and the Orbisonesque "Blue
Shadows," it mainly celebrates the songwriting contemporaries
who have touched him most deeply. Many of them have also been
among his closest friends; some are no longer with us. In
paying tribute to Townes Van Zandt, Walter Hyatt and Jerry
Garcia, he affirms that their music will live forever.
Album highlights additionally find
him returning to the songbook of Butch Hancock, while applying
his interpretive artistry to favorites by such storied songwriters
as John Hiatt, Willis Alan Ramsey and Jesse Winchester. While
it wouldn't be a Gilmore album without a couple of revelatory
surprises, neither the Grateful Dead's "Ripple"
nor the Brecht - Weill classic "Mack the Knife"
sounds like much of a stretch once one hears how easily the
singer adapts those songs to his pure, plaintive style.
For such a pivotal project, Gilmore
teamed with Buddy Miller, Nashville producer and guitarist
extraordinaire, whose work with Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle
(as well as his own albums and those of wife, Julie) had established
him as a kindred spirit. Miller enlisted the services of a
stellar crew of Gilmore fans, including Harris, Jim Lauderdale,
Victoria Williams, Cry Cry Cry and Julie Miller to participate
in this labor-of-love recording.
After four years of taking stock,
Gilmore has re-emerged with the most effective synthesis to
date of his traditional and visionary influences, on an album
that both brings him full circle and opens new vistas. Though
other labels made offers to sign Gilmore, the artist decided
the time was right to take full control. The songs and the
sound of the album resist easy categorization, melding the
strains of inspiration that Gilmore holds dearest.
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