“Elektra Records was going to make me a big star. We were doing the same show every night and if I said something the audience thought was funny, I would repeat that every night. They put us on the road with these big tour buses. I still owe them money for that.”
Jimmie Dale Gilmore has one of the most unique voices to ever be heard on the Texas music scene. His career started with The Flatlanders, a group of Lubbock non-conformists who by more luck than design made an album in Nashville in the early 1970s. With fellow Flatlanders/friends Joe Ely and Butch Hancock, he became part of the 70’s Austin music scene at the time when Doug Sahm and Willie Nelson were turning the Lone Star state capital into a “groover’s paradise.” He was in his mid-40s when he was signed by Elektra in the early 1990s. He was named Country Artist of the Year by Rolling Stone magazine for three years in a row and received three Grammy nominations. However, the man who had most likely spent more time studying Buddhism than worrying about his commercial prospects wasn’t destined for mainstream success.
Gilmore will turn 70 next month and though he talks about aging (“Sometimes I forget the words to the songs that I wrote; it’s weird when that happens”), his vocals are as strong as ever. That haunting, almost ghostly Lubbock twang tenor voice that almost sounds more like it should be on an old 78 record than on contemporary recordings still has the same cutting, disquieting strength. His specialty is country music heartbreak and folk ballads, but he’s not a one dimensional artist. When he sings about losing his love on “Tonight I Think I’m Gonna Go Downtown,” his emotional loss is so heavy that he not only feels disconnected from his former lover, but from the world is a whole. Such is the man’s gravitas.
On this particular evening, Gilmore was accompanied by his son Colin, who is also an accomplished singer/songwriter. Jimmie Dale played rhythm guitar, Colin played lead and performed a few vocals as well. Having no new product to push, Gilmore was free to play anything from his catalogue or anyone else’s. It was a relaxed, well paced show with frequently humorous, almost stream of conscious stage banter. He has an aura unlike any performer I’ve ever seen in that his mere presence radiates positive energy. He has been blessed with or worked to attain an overabundance of good karma.
Some highlights included the trips through musical history including versions of the 1956 Elvis Presley teen angst love song “I Was the One,” a humorous take on the Lefty Frizzell hit “Saginaw, Michigan,” and his thunderous “Midnight Train” in the encore, where the locomotive metaphor is swept away by the nature of self-fulfilling prophecies. Jimmie Dale Gilmore embodies the musical legacies of Lubbock and Austin performing in both the classic country and the Texas singer/songwriter traditions. And, he wrote the best song about Dallas that anyone will ever perform.
Grade – A
Setlist:
Tonight I Think I’m Gonna Go Downtown
Santa Fe Thief
My Mind’s Got a Mind of Its Own
The You That I Knew (lead vocals – Colin Gilmore)
Another Colorado
Saginaw, Michigan (popularized by Lefty Frizzell)
Georgia Rose
The Way We Are (lead vocals – Colin Gilmore)
Just a Wave, Not the Water
One Endless Night
Beaumont Rag
Llano (lead vocals – Colin Gilmore)
I Was the One
Oh Boy (Buddy Holly cover)
Headed for a Fall
Dallas
Gotta Travel On (popularized by Billy Grammar in 1959)
Encore:
If You Were a Blue Bird
Midnight Train
