Jimmie Dale Gilmore Shares Flatlander Tales, Jamming With Mudhoney & Art of Songwriting (INTERVIEW)

Living Legend is a moniker usually bestowed upon someone who has stood the test of time, has done stellar work in their chosen profession, and is well-respected to the point of idolization. Singer-songwriter Jimmie Dale Gilmore meets all those stipulations with gusto. An Americana troubadour, the Texas native has been writing, recording, reinterpreting, and performing music just about his whole life – and he just turned 79 back in May. What a treasure he is, and if you’re discovering him now, with the release of Texicali and longtime friend Dave Alvin, you’re finding him at a fine time. But you’ve got a whole lot of catching up to do. 

For Part Two of our double feature with the gentlemen behind the Texicali album, Gilmore lets us in on some good stories, old and new. He’s been around the world with his music, he’s studied philosophy and protested against the Vietnam War, has recorded and/or shared a stage with such a diversity of artists from Mudhoney to Natalie Merchant to Lucinda Williams and Emmylou Harris, and stood toe to toe with The Dude in The Big Lebowski. “I don’t think I ever doubted that what I wanted to do with my life was be a musician,” Gilmore told me recently during a break in his tour with Alvin. 

Although he is best known for being a solo artist, his second most notable entity is The Flatlanders with Joe Ely and Butch Hancock. More recently, he’s been hanging out with Alvin on a long tour that will take them coast-to-coast before the year ends. Performing many songs from Texicali, such as “Borderland,” “Roll Around,” and the very fun “We’re Still Here,” these rascals are enjoying kicking up their heels. “I always felt that Jimmie was a great blues singer, even though he’s known more for folk-country singer-songwriter or Texas singer-songwriter stuff,” Alvin told me during our interview a few weeks ago. Although their styles can be different, they have melded together so nicely, like sprinkling cayenne pepper on the most succulent cream sauce – it’s divine.

So without further ado, here is Jimmie Dale Gilmore. 

I understand you’re doing a songwriter workshop while you’re on a break in the tour. 

Yeah, I teach a one week, well, I say teach but it’s more I conduct a workshop and they call me the teacher (laughs). But the way I look at it, I’m more like the facilitator. It’s in upstate New York at a place called the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies. I set up a collaboration between small groups of people, about three members to each group, and generally, we try to set it up so that it’s people that don’t know each other, people that haven’t met before. It’s getting a little harder because a lot of people take the class every year, so a lot of them have already worked together, so it’s hard to enforce that rule. Anyway, we set it up for them to collaborate on a song during the course of the week and present it to a live audience on the night before the last day of the course.

When you have a chance to be home, what do you like to do? Are you sitting around writing songs or are you trying to be normal like me?

(laughs) We just finished a little run. We did Houston, Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio. That was the heels of a giant West Coast tour we just finished. But you know, I’ve gone through phases of writing. I’ve never been a very prolific writer, and I don’t spend a lot of time on writing cause most of my songs I’ve ever written have come from inspiration. I don’t set myself down and make myself write a song, even though in some ways I kind of regret that I haven’t had that policy. I know many people with a strong work ethic about songs and end up having a lot of material. But I just never have worked that way. In the time off, I do a lot of getting together with family, all of my kids and grandkids and their various spouses live close, in the Austin area. So we spend a lot of time together.

Your son Colin is a singer-songwriter as well. Where do you see YOU the most in HIM as a musician?

Well, that’s really hard to say because he was so surrounded by a bunch of my friends his whole life, and in some ways, I think he was at least MORE influenced by Joe Ely and Butch Hancock than he was by me (laughs). But we all were such an integral part of his growing up. We’ve all been like family all these years, and when I say family, it also includes a big group of friends.

Your friends aren’t too shabby. You’re lucky.

(laughs) I am lucky. I am really aware that I just lucked into having some close friends that turned out to be world-class musicians, you know. None of us were that early on (laughs). We were just doing it because it was fun.

Dave Alvin told me that the seeds for him to do another album with you came from when you visited him while he was having some chemo treatments. He knew then that he wanted to do another album with you. When did you know you were ready to do another album with him?

Well, for me, it was any time they wanted to. We did a year together of just the two of us playing acoustic, a duet. We thought it would be like a song swap; we’d trade songs, but we kind of really quickly discovered that we had a whole bunch of songs in common that we both knew and that we both could play together on. So we had a year of that, and in the course of that, Dave decided we needed to make a record together. That was the seed of Downey To Lubbock. 

So we made the record and toured for a year behind that. What happened was, during that year, the band, The Guilty Ones, and Dave was the one that pointed this out to me, in that year of touring we became an actual band; not just backup musicians. We traveled so much and did so much together and enjoyed it so much that it became like, wow, at my late age, I’m suddenly a new member of a new band! (laughs). When Dave was sick, gosh, we weren’t sure he would be able to do anything more. When it worked out that he recovered and recovered enough, for me, it was like, anytime Dave says he’s ready to do this, I am too. It wasn’t a decision on my part; it was just a given, a certainty.

Tell us about the song “Trying To Be Free.” I understand that it has a history that goes way back.

Oh yeah, it’s got a very interesting history. That song was on a set of songs I recorded in the sixties. I had been a folk singer, just a solo performer. Joe Ely and I had done some stuff together, the two of us. Joe had played in bands and other stuff, which I had never done when I was younger. I was totally solo. But Buddy Holly’s father put up the money for me to make a demo tape and that was one of the songs on it. I put together a band to do that recording, which ended up being the springboard for a lot of the stuff that came out of Lubbock later on. The Ely Band and The Flatlanders sprung off of the band we put together to do a six-song demo. Then we started performing around Lubbock, and I started playing in a band because of that. It was just unexpected good luck of meeting Mr Holly. He was a sweet old gentleman, kind of a salt-of-the-earth West Texas gentlemanly old guy. His wife, Buddy’s mom, was just a sweet, wonderful woman, and they both liked my music. You know, I was younger than Buddy but I didn’t ever get to meet him. I was just a fan from the distance. When I did meet his parents years later, it was after Buddy was gone.

When you listened to that song after such a long, long time, did you change it much?

Oh yeah, the style we recorded with Dave and The Guilty Ones was quite a bit different from the original recording. It’s just a different treatment of it. Dave said since it was from the sixties, he decided we’d just imitate some of the sixties music. There are little things in it, sort of like inside jokes in it. It’s got like the Everly Brothers, the little interlude thing like on “Wake Up, Little Susie,” where it goes [humming melody]. They stuck that in there. There are little things throughout the recording that kind of harken back to different songs and styles from the sixties. When I originally recorded it, we didn’t do any of that. We just recorded it straightforwardly, pretty much a country rock thing.

Both you and Dave play guitar. Where on Texicali is a moment when you feel Dave shines as a guitar player?

On everything. That’s Dave’s thing. Dave is one of the best lead guitar players around. And also, he’s the producer, so his mind is sort of behind all of it, the sounds and the arrangements and everything. Although, like I said, since it’s a band and the whole thing was recorded with this band, everybody had an input, maybe accidentally came up with something while we were doing a cut or when we were going through a tape or going through a rehearsal, it was like, “Oh man, let’s keep that in there!” I’m sort of like an adequate accompanying guitarist (laughs). I only play acoustic. I don’t ever play electric. But Dave and Chris Miller are both monsters on the electric guitar.

When did you start?

I was very young, but the ironic thing was that my dad was one of the earliest electric guitar players in Texas, but I never did learn to play electric. I have always been a music lover. I always was involved in the music that my dad loved. When I was a little bitty kid, I was just steeped in it, and that music was Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, real country stuff, real honky tonk country kind of music. And it was all on the radio. I didn’t hear it in honky tonks (laughs). But that was the genre that I was steeped in. 

When I came to the age that I started wanting to learn to play the guitar, my dad taught me a few chords. However, I had become interested in folk music and songwriting. So, I drifted more to that direction than to being an instrumentalist. So, I learned how to play the guitar well enough to accompany myself. I learned how to fingerpick and strum it as a backup to myself. Then, when I started recording, what I did was, I surrounded myself with people who were better than me. I kind of figured that out real early on that that was a necessity (laughs). I never did compete musically with the band members or anything. I was, this is your part now, this is where you shine. That set it up perfectly with Dave and me because Dave can take care of that aspect better than anybody.

Do you remember when you tried to write your first song with lyrics? Was that easy for you when you were younger?

It was in a way. The way I work, well, first of all, there is another story behind that that is kind of interesting. Terry Allen was in the same high school I was in, and Terry was a couple of years older. I knew him very slightly, but we weren’t like friends cause you know that age difference is huge when you’re in high school; you don’t hang out with guys two years older than you (laughs). But I heard Terry playing at a school carnival, and he was singing his own songs, and it was great. I was probably a sophomore, and he was a senior in high school. So I became aware of him, and I got a little bit acquainted, and then a few years later, I went and hung out with Terry out in California, and we became very close friends. 

I kind of think that I always assumed that I was going to be a musician, even though I was interested in a lot of different subjects. I read a lot and was interested in science, philosophy, and all kinds of stuff. I don’t think I ever doubted that what I wanted to do with my life was be a musician. But at that age, I thought to be a songwriter you had to be older and experienced and everything. And here was Terry, only two years older than me, already writing these really good songs. That somehow broke the spell for me, and I started writing.

What did you write about?

The way it worked for me, like I mentioned earlier, I don’t work at it. I sort of let it come to me. If an idea popped into my head of like a melody or a line, a tagline, if it stayed with me, if it kept popping up later on, then I would finally go, I think this is good, and I’m going to work on it, and then I would sit down and finish it. But I had to be convinced it was something worth messing with. Now, later on, of course, Butch was one of my best friends, but Butch and I didn’t know that each other were playing music until we were college-age. It’s very strange. We were friends at junior high school, but you know, that kind of thing where you had friends at school, but outside of school, you didn’t hang out with them cause you lived too far apart. So by the time Butch and I started spending time together, it turned out we both were playing music (laughs). Butch was playing banjo originally, and we both liked a lot of bluegrass music and especially blues music that we share in common. That’s the common thread with Dave too. The blues influenced all of us real deeply. But anyway, I don’t have a set way of going about it. I wait for the songs to happen to me.

When you started The Flatlanders, and that was the early seventies, what were those early concerts like for the band? 

Well, for the most part, The Flatlanders mainly just played at parties and at home, for friends and stuff. We didn’t play out very much. We played only a few kind of real gigs in Lubbock. We ended up going to Austin and playing in Austin. We were living in Lubbock, but we played more in Austin than we did in Lubbock, and we had a good reaction there. Joe and I both had already spent some time in Austin before The Flatlanders ever happened so we had connections there and knew the club people and stuff like that. So we were strangely almost like an Austin band than a Lubbock band, except that we were from Lubbock (laughs). 

Like I said, we played mostly for friends and for each other. In a way, we didn’t set out to be a commercial enterprise. Joe and Butch, and I were just mutual fans of each other and learning each other’s songs. That was the origin of the band really, that and Joe and I had earlier done a little bit of playing around places and then done the recording that Mr Holly subsidized. The Flatlanders were kind of an anomaly (laughs). We didn’t set out to be some kind of trailblazing thing. We were just doing what we loved. There were a lot of other members of The Flatlanders that sort of didn’t go on to be professional musicians or anything. Joe and Butch and I were the only ones that kept with it. 

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, there was a lot of chaos in the world. How did you feel about Vietnam? Were you worried that you would have to go there?

Oh yeah, that was part of it. We were very anti-war people at that time. In the late sixties, we had to deal with that all the time, you know. I actually was almost drafted, and then somehow, and I don’t know how this happened, but my papers got lost or something, and I never got a classification. So I didn’t get drafted. It was very weird. But Butch was in college, and Joe actually didn’t graduate from high school, and I just did a couple of years of college. I never did graduate. I did study for mainly Philosophy for a couple of years. I studied a lot of different subjects, but philosophy was the one thing that I was interested in enough to get good grades. But I also got married very, very young, and we had a daughter, and then our marriage broke up very young. So it was tumultuous all the way around because of all the Civil Rights movement and everything.

Were they having protests in your area?

Oh yes, the general population was so conservative that it was strange. In Lubbock, it was sort of dangerous to be perceived as hippies or outsiders, you know. A lot of the young people in Lubbock didn’t agree with us, even a lot of our old friends.

Did you go to any of the protests?

Oh sure, we were in them, we caused them. It was a very small number of us that were like that and we definitely did protests and stuff but it wasn’t enough people. But we traveled around a bunch too. I was in Berkeley when a lot of the riots happened. It wasn’t just Lubbock, it was the whole country. A lot of young people now don’t really realize how really dangerous it was to be an anti-war person in that time.

The opposite of all that chaos is that you lived in an ashram for a little while.

I lived in what they called an ashram for a very short period in New Orleans on Napoleon Street. But that was after The Flatlanders happened. Then I lived in Denver in a large community of people that were doing the same meditation that I was studying under this same guru. I think it got put into Wikipedia or something, like I lived in an ashram in Denver, but that’s not true. I lived in a community of people, and there were ashrams, but I wasn’t in one of them. But I was very deeply involved in that community, the study of Asian Philosophy.

What did you learn about how the consciousness works?

That question would take volumes of books to be written about (laughs). It’s still, to this day, what my main preoccupation is. I’ve been studying with a Buddhist Lama, Tibetan Lama, for many years now. My wife Janet is actually an ordained teacher in that. We’ve been studying with this same teacher for a long time. At one point he asked her to be basically his representative for our group here in Austin. When you were asking what I do with my time, a lot of it is that.

How did you get involved with a band like Mudhoney? On paper, it seems like an odd pairing, but it sounded great.

It was in the period when I was on Elektra Records and Nonesuch Records. The people there that had brought me into the label and signed me and everything were just very imaginative, innovative people. There were several individuals that were a big part of causing all that to happen for me and David Bither, who is now head of Nonesuch Records, was one of them. Natalie Merchant was a big part of getting me a record deal back in that period. I had done a record on Hi-Tone early on and that was the first one I had made under my name, not as The Flatlanders but as Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Then I went from there to Nonesuch Records and then from Nonesuch they signed me to Elektra for a couple more albums. 

So during that period, they just saw me, I think, as an experimental artist, even though I was sort of lumped in as country or whatever. They kind of recognized I was a little bit more than that and that was what brought it about. Plus it was mutual friends that were friends of that music gang in Seattle where Mudhoney was based that brought us together. You know, I probably never would have thought of it myself but I was certainly willing to experiment. It’s kind of like what still goes on even with Dave. I’m just willing to try it and see if it works.

I wanted to ask you about Townes Van Zandt. Where do you see the importance in his music?

Oh, Townes was immensely important to me, both musically and personally. We were really good friends, and it’s a tragedy that his life worked out the way it did. It’s ironic, Townes and I used to have arguments. He’d say to me, “I’m going to be like Hank Williams. People don’t know much about me and then I’ll get famous after I’m dead.” And I used to say, “Townes, that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You’re making that happen.” He was right and it turned out to be true. But he made it be true. But Joe Ely used to say that Townes was the Patron Saint of The Flatlanders. I don’t know if you’ve heard the story before about how Joe picked up a hitchhiker and it turned out to be Townes. We’d never heard of him and he was coming from San Francisco and hitchhiking through Lubbock. He was on his way to Houston and he had a backpack with only LPs in it. He didn’t have clothes (laughs). All he had was this record he had just made. It was just so strange, you know. 

But Joe and I had been like mutual fans of each other before that but we didn’t really know each other. But Joe called me up and said, “Hey, I’ve got this record that this hitchhiker gave me. You’ve got to hear this.” We got together and that was the beginning of Joe and I hanging out all the time. That was several years before The Flatlanders happened. So Townes kind of incidentally triggered what grew into The Flatlanders.

Do you have a favorite of one of his songs?

There is so many of them. I’ve recorded a couple of them. I recorded “White Freightliner” and “No Lonesome Tune” and I always did, in very early days when Joe and I were singing as a duet, I always did “Tecumseh Valley.” He wrote so many truly great songs, it’d be hard for me to really pin it down. There are some that I think I sing really well but not necessarily that I like them better than some of the other ones.

Is there one you are itching to record that you haven’t already?

I haven’t really thought about that but now I will (laughs)

How is the rest of your year looking? You’re going back out with Dave and then what?

That’s going to take up a lot of the year. After I finish the songwriting class, we’ll be touring the East Coast, and then we’ll have a few days off, and then we’re going to do the Midwest. We’re doing the whole country with this record. I don’t really have a plan beyond that because that’s sort of a handful in itself (laughs).

And you’re playing some of these new songs?

Oh, we’re playing nearly the whole record. That’s pretty much our set, and it’s really been going over really well.

Are you doing “Roll Around” that your buddy Butch wrote?

Yes, I love it and it’s very difficult. That song is very hard to memorize the lyrics because they’re so dreamy and non-linear (laughs).

Did you change it any when you went to record it?

The presentation of it is not even similar to the way Butch did it. The song is the same and the melody and the lyrics but it’s a reggae rhythm and Butch didn’t do reggae at all. I think Butch likes reggae but that’s not his style, even in the least.

Last question: What did you like the most about filming the video for “We’re Still Here”?

It was fun doing it and the video is just as light-hearted as the song is. It was fun and that’s part of the whole deal with this band. The people in it are fun and the music is fun.

Portraits by Leslie Campbell; live photo by Leslie Michele Derrough