After 30 Years, Fame Finds a Texas Trio

Photo: Mike Appleton for The New York Times

There have been bands with more tortured recording histories than the Texas group known as the Flatlanders, but not many. Here's just a summary of their troubles:

The first set of recordings made by members of the band, with the help of Buddy Holly's father, have been lost for good. A second set of demos were thought to be lost but were recently found and could be released soon. The band's first real album — now revered as a cult classic, a kind of founding document of the alternative country movement — was made in 1972 but not released until eight years later and then only on vinyl in Britain. Unless you count a few eight-track tapes sold in truck stops around Nashville. And to this day that first record, the one that made their reputation as a band, has made them no money whatsoever.

"We decided we were going to try to sue the guy that made it, but a lawyer told us we'd have get in a long line," said Joe Ely, 56, who makes up the Flatlanders along with Jimmie Dale Gilmore, 58, and Butch Hancock, also 58. Mr. Gilmore added, "At some point I just had to decide not to be bitter about it anymore."

But while it took almost three decades for the band to be recognized as a band — and for its fame to catch up with it — its three members are working hard to make up for lost time. A 2002 record, "Now Again" (New West Records), was widely praised and sold unusually well for an independent release. (Don Imus, a longtime fan, donated $10,000 to the favorite charity of a Los Angeles radio station that gave frequent air play to one song on the record.)

The three have now released a new album on the same label, "Wheels of Fortune," which is also receiving enthusiastic reviews. (They will play tonight at the Bowery Ballroom, the first stop on a national tour.)

In many ways the album shows just how far the band has come since its days of record-company nightmares. It was recorded in Mr. Ely's own studio, in his home outside Austin, Tex., which he describes as having "no neighbors around, so we can rattle all night." The record was also not sought by any label but born simply of the three band members' feelings that they were ready to go into the studio again.

"I like to record things when I'm not supposed to be," said Mr. Ely. "It always comes out sounding better when it's something you're not supposed to be doing."

Over lunch in TriBeCa recently, Mr. Ely and his band mates, who have all had some success over the years as solo artists, said they had probably written 300 to 400 good songs among them. And yet even with so many to choose from, they said, they were still able to agree about which ones belonged on the new record. In part, they said, this ease comes from having grown up together, in Lubbock, Tex., and from playing together at what Mr. Gilmore called "goat roasts and keg parties" in West Texas. "We know how to hang out together," Mr. Hancock explained. "We've spent many hours in the pancake houses of this country revealing the secrets of the universe to each other."

Their consensus was helped by the fact that many of the songs on the new record have also been around since the band members were young. One song, "Whistle Blues," by a Texas songwriter, Al Strehli, was included on those lost recordings made with the help of Buddy Holly's father, L. O. Holley, in Lubbock in the late 1960's, on which Mr. Gilmore sang and Mr. Ely played a bass made of a 2-by-4 with strings screwed to it.

"Basically, it took 35 years for that one to get released," said Mr. Ely, seeming a little stunned at that figure himself. Another song, "Neon of Nashville," was written by Mr. Ely when the band went to Nashville to make the ill-fated 1972 record. And he wrote another, "Indian Cowboy," while working in the circus in the mid-1970's, after a failed stab at becoming a singer in New York.

"Probably the newest song on there," Mr. Gilmore said, "is still almost 20 years old."

That such old songs are finally being recorded will undoubtedly thrill the band's fans, who tend to think of the Flatlanders as a jealously guarded secret. As they ate lunch that day, two familiar-looking fans — the moviemakers Joel and Ethan Coen — walked up and said hello, beaming, asking whether the men would be playing. (Mr. Gilmore was cast in a bit part in the brothers' 1998 movie, "The Big Lebowski," as a slightly disturbed bowler.)

Mr. Gilmore accepted the adulation, shyly, but then said, smiling: "My two minutes in that movie got me more attention than 40 years of playing music."

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