Joe Ely.txt
Joe Ely - Joe Ely (1977)
Audio CD MCA - MCAD-10219
CD Release Date - 1991
Total time - 32:10
Track listing:
From Wikipedia:
Joe Ely is the self-titled debut album by Joe Ely, released in 1977 on MCA Records. The album includes several tracks with "near-classic" status among Ely fans, including several written by Ely's bandmates from The Flatlanders. Although the The Flatlanders never actually broke-up, there would be several decades between their poorly distributed 1972 album and their next release.
Joe Ely, together with his follow-up, Honky Tonk Masquerade, established Ely as a solo artist. Although the reissued CD doesn't credit Ely's backing musicians, the original LP included a one-page insert containing lyrics and musician credits. The core of the backing band that Ely had assembled for his debut was the same Lubbock-based crack team that appeared with him the following year on Honky Tonk Masquerade and continued to follow him on the road until 1982.
Years later Ely would recall that the band had not initially made plans for a recording career:
"We had recorded some songs at [Don] Caldwell's studio," Ely said. "Don took that tape to Jerry Jeff Walker, and Jerry Jeff recorded one of the songs and played it for a guy with MCA Records. Then one night in 1975 at the Cotton Club, an A&R guy with MCA asked, 'Do y'all want to make some records?'"
"I told him we'd sure never planned on it. But we hadn't planned anything else either, so why not?"
In the years that followed the release of Joe Ely, the band would become an act of national stature.
All songs written by Joe Ely except as indicated.
Side one
Side two
Credits
Credits are summarized from track-by-track credits listed in liner notes.[6]
Musicians
Production
* Recorded at Young 'Un Sound Studios, Murfreesboro, Tennessee
* Mastered at MCA Recording Studio, Universal City, California
Releases
The album was digitally remastered and released on CD and cassette in 1991. In 2000, a remastered edition of Ely's first two albums (Joe Ely and Honky Tonk Masquerade) were released together on a single disk. Dirty Linen reported that this disk was especially worth seeking out since it was (at least at the time), "the only place on two continents you can get Ely's debut." The reviewer described Ely's first two albums together: "Ely's self-titled effort and HTM are a bit leaner than most of his other honky-tonk rockers, with a bit more piano than electric guitar backing his lonesome warble -- dry and forceful as the wind whistling through Waco."
Review from All Music Guide:
(4 STARS)
At a time when the outlaw movement was sweeping country music in the hands of Waylon Jennings (of RCA Victor Records) and Willie Nelson (of Columbia Records), it was not surprising that MCA Records, in search of its own representative of the style, would have taken a tip from Jerry Jeff Walker of its roster and signed Texas journeyman Joe Ely to a deal. The 29-year-old Ely had knocked around for a while, notably as a member of Jimmie Dale Gilmore & the Flatlanders, whose sole album had a brief release on Plantation Records in 1972. Clearly, Ely had kept in touch with that band's other principals, since Jimmie Dale Gilmore's excellent composition "Treat Me Like a Saturday Night" is included here, along with four songs written by another Flatlanders alumnus, Butch Hancock. In fact, those tunes -- "She Never Spoke Spanish to Me," "Suckin' a Big Bottle of Gin," "Tennessee's Not the State I'm In," and "If You Were a Bluebird" -- are all strong ballads, the best material on this record, and suggest that maybe MCA should have signed Hancock instead. Ely, who provides the other five songs, is no slouch himself, however. "I Had My Hopes Up High," which leads things off, is his account of his peripatetic life of hoboing and hitchhiking around, while "Mardi Gras Waltz" is a good Cajun number and "All My Love" (the first single) is in the Bob Wills Western swing vein. With his accent and light tenor, Ely came off as an experienced Texas honky tonk performer on his debut album. Maybe he wasn't MCA's answer to Willie and Waylon, exactly, but Joe Ely showed promise for a powerful, individual repertoire in the future, especially if he continued borrowing songs from his pal Hancock.
~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
Ripped by MidnightRocker with EAC V1.0 beta 1, from the factory-pressed CD.
Includes noncompliant wav and flac CUE files and single wav CUE file.
Complete art includes; covers, insert, disc.
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