Liner Notes for "After Awhile"

By Ben Sandmel

"For a long time when I was growing up," Jimmie Dale Gilmore reflects, I was in a state of musical conflict, because I'd always loved country music, and yet I liked pop music and rock and roll, too. Back in the '60's before the Byrds made country hip, there was a real stigma attached to it. One part of me would think, 'are you stupid for liking country so much?,' while another part thought 'are you pretentious, hanging out and reading all these books, when you're really just a redneck?' "I'll tell you what resolved it for me. somewhere around my last year of high school or my first year in college, I read a book by Ezra Pound, and somewhere in it he 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. I don't remember precisely what Pound was referring to, but that one little sentence eliminated a lot of confusion for me. It made me realize that my impulses were really valid, and that there was nothing contradictory about having such seemingly different interests. It has always been kind of a guidepost for me. So I take it as a great compliment if people say that my music is balanced between being abstract and down-to-earth ­ because that really is my intent." Jimmie Dale Gilmore has been deftly maintaining this delicate balance since the late '60s, when he started writing and performing in Lubbock, Texas. Lubbock has produced an inordinate share of fine musicians over the years, from icons like Buddy Holly to hot soloists like Bobby Keyes, pedal steel ace Lloyd Maines, and guitarist Jesse Taylor. It has also spawned such articulate and respected writer/performers as Gilmore and his close associates Joe Ely, Butch Hancock and David Halley. "People used to ask us why there was so much music in Lubbock," Gilmore muses, "and we'd say that maybe it was the UFOs that came through in the early '50s. There was a famous sighting that was known as the Lubbock Lights." Extra-terrestrials aside, consider the lone Star state's many other progressive-country singer/songwriters ­ including Nanci Griffith, Lyle Lovett, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Robert Earl Keen, and Rodney Crowell ­ and Texas emerges as a major wellspring of earthy, intelligent music. Jimmie Dale Gilmore stands tall in this distinguished crowd by dint of both his lyrical skills, and his fluid, ethereal, twangy singing ­ a tremulous, resonant voice that's as unique and affecting as any heard today. The roots of this style were first nurtured in Tulia, "an archetypal West Texas town, where my daddy played lead guitar in a little old country band. I think I picked up a lot of my taste from him. Either I learned it from him, or it was genetically programmed, because we know what each other likes. My singing is not consciously patterned after anyone, although I guess the early influences are obvious: Hank Williams, Left Frizzell, Maddox Brothers and Sister rose. They all sang in a full-bodied style which isn't loud but is very forceful. Those influences go back to my very early, unconscious youth. The radio was playing a lot in our home when I was growing up in the late '40s and early '50s , and my daddy loved country music, still does. That was a constant. "We moved to Lubbock when I was grade-school age," Gilmore goes on. "My dad had a degree in bacteriology, and he was the director of the dairy industry plant at Texas Tech. I was exposed to a lot of different sorts of people. Actually there were two kinds of worlds that I lived in ­ the nightlife element was one, but then a big portion of my associates were creative and academic, studious types. "I think I always had the ambition to be a musician. I just took it for granted, my whole life. It wasn't a conscious decision, and there were many other things that I was interested in ­ I've read tons and tons of stuff, and I've studied philosophy. I never gave much thought to being a 'professional.' I just loved the music, so I started playing, and I ran into other people who did the same, like Butch Hancock. Actually Butch and I have been friends since about 1957, long before either of us learned how to play anything. "I tried to play the fiddle a little bit," Gilmore recalls, "and I took violin lessons around fourth grade. Then I played the trombone in junior high. Finally when I was sixteen I picked up a guitar and my daddy showed me a few things, my first chords. I was a fluke in that I didn't learn to like country music because of Bob Dylan and the whole folk movement. I always liked country music, and I never rebelled against it, say, to rebel against my parents. But I also loved everything else that came out, like Little Richard and Elvis, although the real hard rock which came later eventually started sounding loud and meaningless to me. "You know, people have called me a neo-traditionalist, and it is a fact that I am a traditionalist, and a folk musician. But the tradition that I come out of is radio. The folk music of my time was late '40s/early '50s country and rock radio. The music that naturally comes out of me comes from commercial country and early rock and roll ­ and blues of course, which is the backdrop to all of it, as far as I'm concerned. People are surprised sometimes at the way my taste runs toward the commercial. "I was playing commercial country covers when I first started performing," Gilmore points out. "Lubbock was totally dry at the time, and you could either play at little coffee houses, or bootlegging joints. I would play Ray Price and Willie Nelson covers; Willie was popular around Lubbock long before he became famous. As I began to write i would play my own songs. One of the first was 'Treat Me Like a Saturday Night', which I wrote when I was around twenty. A number of factors and people influenced my writing. To begin with, there's a guy named Terry Allen whom I met in high school. He's a couple of years older than me, and he's a pianist, a songwriter, and also a very accomplished painter and sculptor. We became very good friends, and meeting someone who actually wrote songs turned on a light for me. I realized that you could just do it, you didn't have to wait 'til you were forty years old. "Then an incident happened which was very important. Joe Ely and I had been casual acquaintances, but we really hadn't spent much time together. We would run into each other at these funny little gigs here and there. But one day he called me up and said 'I have a record that I want you to listen to. I picked up a guy hitch-hiking, and he gave me a copy of his album.' The guy was Townes Van Zandt, and it was such a great record. Such simplicity and power. It was a revelation to me, because I hear both worlds, folk music and country music, in the same place. "And a funny side effect of that record," Gilmore says, "is that from then on Joe and I started running together all the time. It broke the ice and gave us a reason to start hanging out together. We started playing together, and it certainly spurred my creativity. I put together a band, in which Joe played bass, to cut a demo tape for Buddy Holly's dad. Then we started playing around Lubbock as the T. Nickel House Band. Some time after that I moved to Austin for awhile and played in a band called the Hub City Movers. But then I came on back to Lubbock, coincidentally when Joe was just returning from Europe and Butch Hancock had moved home from California. The three of us started sharing a house with some other friends. In '71 we formed a band called the Flatlanders, along with Steve Wesson and Tony Pearson. Actually, there were a lot of other peripheral members, like Tommy Hancock, Jesse Taylor, Syl Rice." Both wildly innovative and deeply traditional, the Flatlanders blended their own modern lyrics with acoustic string-band accompaniment that even included a saw. A fine album of their work, recorded in 1972, appeared briefly ­ on 8-track tape only ­ and one of Gilmore's best known tunes, "Dallas," was released as a promotional single. The Flatlanders' album soon vanished from American stores, however; after years as a prized collector's-item import, it was finally reissued domestically in 1990. When the album first fizzled, though, the Flatlanders gradually went their separate ways, and Gilmore turned to spiritual and philosophic interests. "I got interested in the metaphysical implications of modern physics," he relates, "and found that some aspects are strikingly similar to Buddhist and pre-Buddhist thinking, and Hindu cosmology. I always had an interest in both of those subjects, and it was very interesting to find a place where they seems to come together. I became involved in meditation, also, and it has remained an important element in my life." Such pursuits ­ which are clearly reflected in Gilmore's lyrics ­ kept him away from professional performance for many years. Returning, refreshed, in the late '80s, he began actively working again, and cut a pair of fine country-oriented albums for Hightone. "I still like those records now," he says, "but they are very slanted in a country direction. They're a valid representation of me, but a limited one, in a stylistic sense, and also because I cut a lot of other people's songs. I wrote every song on this new album but one. "I don't think my approach and my writing have changed radically over the years. I think that I am a little more thoughtful about all of it. But in general, I still try to maintain that abstract/earthly balance, and a certain degree of ambiguity. Something that i always like, which is one big part of the blues, it to have a happy lyric with a heavy melody, or vice versa. Hank Williams was great at that, having a light little trippy melody with killer heart-rending lyrics, or the other way around. "I've put several of my favorite songs on this new album," Gilmore says. "Some that I wrote long ago and have wanted to record for a long, long time. There are also some new ones. When I stop to think, it's a pretty even spread, both stylistically and chronologically. "And I also realize that it's hard for me to talk about my songs. I think that I express myself best when I just sing them." Ben Sandmel is a New Orleans-based drummer, journalist and folklore researcher.

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