Joe Ely's career can be likened to a long, slow drive across Texas with just enough crackling good tunes to keep your spirits up against the oppressive heat and the endless highway. Start out in the dusty west Texas town of Lubbock, where Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock begat the Flatlanders in 1970, recording one album of unearthly beauty that literally went nowhere. Drive on through virtual nothingness for a few years and, all of a sudden, an oasis: a good milkshake, critical accolades for a trio of classic country rock solo albums and an invite from the Clash to accompany them on tour across America and back in England. Then more desert, running on empty until -- phew -- another cool roadside refreshing, this time thanks to a British journalist who tracked down that lost Flatlanders album to have it reissued, refilling the tank with just enough critical and cult interest to get you through that last, long stretch out of the wasteland and into the promised land of Austin and beautiful central Texas Hill Country.

Now you kick back, put out an album every now and then and before you know it, film directors are knocking on your ranch-house door one-by-one as if Eric Clapton went on sabbatical from the soundtrack biz. Although an early bid for a spot on the Garth Brooks-bolstered Hope Floats soundtrack fell through, Ely did manage to rustle up his old Flatlanders compadres to record "South Wind of Summer" for the critically acclaimed soundtrack to The Horse Whisperer. Life, like the soundtrack Ely has been writing for it over the years, is uncommonly good.

The only part of the whole metaphor that don't float is the kicking-back part, because Ely has never really been the kicking-back type. Anyone who has seen him in concert can attest to this fact. His new album, Twistin' in the Wind, which reunites Ely with many of the outstanding guitarists he's worked with in the past and finds him at the peak of his songwriting prowess -- capturing the many varied flavors and dialects of Texas like a Cormac McCarthy novel as told by Kinky Friedman -- is the next best thing to being there. *There* being a sweaty, exhilarating Ely show, or Texas. Take your pick.

You've got quite a guitar army behind you on the new album.

Yeah, its funny ... it's kind of like all the guitar slingers I've worked with in the last fifteen years or so all kind of show up on this record. Everybody from David Grissom to Lloyd Maines to Jesse Taylor to Teye. It's great to get two guitar players from different parts of my life together and just see how they'd work together. So a lot of times I would get strange combinations like Teye's flamenco guitar with Lloyd's dobro ... it always kind of surprises me what comes out.

I listened to "Twisting in the Wind" a dozen times the other day. Either my CD player is skipping, or that's gotta be one of the most engaging songs of your career so far.

That's funny, because that song was originally written for this Sandra Bullock movie that came into Austin about a year ago. Forest Whitaker, the director, came out to my house and I showed him these lyrics that I had written that seemed to follow the character in this movie, Hope Floats, almost verbatim. And Forest really liked the song, so I started working on it, but as their movie kind of developed, the whole theme completely changed, so the song didn't fit anymore. So I just thought, well, hell, I'll put it on my record.

But you still managed to hang onto your spot on the Horse Whisperer soundtrack, with the Flatlanders. So you came out even.

It's funny, this last year I got bombarded with requests for songs from movies. So much so that I had to pass on some of them, which is something I never thought I'd do. I really don't know the reason for it. It's kind of a whole different thing -- I've never really thought about songs in movies. And it's a little weird to write for other things. In the case of The Horse Whisperer, they sent me a script, and wanted me and Butch and Jimmie to write a song for it, and said, 'read the script, and then write us a song that has nothing whatsoever to do with the script.' (Laughs) I've kind of learned that movies are like that; they want a song, but they don't want it to say anything about what's in the movie. So I wonder why they even send me a script in the first place.

Texas music fans have been dreaming about new Flatlanders material for years. Why has it taken so long, and how did these film people talk you into it?

I guess all three of us have been so busy recording and touring that we just haven't really thought about it. I guess [the movie] was just kind of the thing that brought us together to see if we could do this. We were together for two days and wrote three really good songs. So then we thought, 'well, let's do this more often.' So now we're planning on getting together and writing some more stuff. We don't really have anything concrete now, but there's a lot of record companies that would love to see that happen. And it's something that we would love to see happen. It would be great to go out and do a Flatlanders tour.

What do you think of the whole semi-legendary status of the Flatlanders?

It was kind of funny, because we never thought of it as a band to begin with. We were all good friends, we were living in Lubbock, we were all dead broke. We found an old house over by Texas Tech University that we could rent for $80 a month. We'd just sit around and play in the living room, and some friends would come over, and we'd stay up all night playing. I think we played a few weddings and a few funerals. If we had to make the rent, we'd go out and play in some old honky tonk, or out on the street and pass the hat. But we got kind of an inspiration out of playing with each other, and we wrote a lot of songs that we play even to this day.

Did you ever feel at all a part of the Outlaw country movement?

We came down to Austin and played a lot during that, when Willie and Waylon were doing the Outlaw thing, but we felt so far out of touch with that we were kind of beyond outlaws ... we were the in-laws or something. We never really felt a part of that. We kind of danced around it.

Outlaw or not, your live shows can be pretty wild. Robert Earl Keen told me once about one particularly memorable Eighties gig of yours where the crowd was shooting fireworks at the band.

Oh! It was New Years Eve. We were playing at this old place called the Cotton Club out in the middle of a cotton field, twenty miles outside of Lubbock. No security, and about 1,500 people show up in a room built for about, oh, 800. And about 300 of them were the Banditos, which were a bad-ass biker group that was gathered around Lubbock at the time. And the first song we played, the Banditos pull out Roman candles and shoot them across the dance floor, hitting people on the other side. So I make an announcement, 'Cut that shit out or take it outside,' because I was afraid they were going to hurt somebody. So we start the next song, and here they go again -- BLAM! BLAM! And I just kind of stopped the band, and said, 'Hey guys, this show ain't going to go on if you keep doing that.' And so we start another song, and they blow them off again.

So Jesse Taylor, our guitar player who was a pretty mean old-boy -- he was a Golden Gloves boxer when he was growing up -- he stops everything and says, 'Look, we'll just make this real simple: Whoever blows off the next roman candle has to come deal with me.' And we start the next song and Jesse's turned around tweaking his amp a little bit, and the head honcho of the Banditos lights a string of Black Cats and throws them at Jesse's feet. And Jesse just calmly lays his guitar down, the dance floor clears, and here's the head of the Banditos and Jesse just walking towards each other -- it was kind of a scene from High Noon. And Jesse just walks straight towards him and cold cocks him with a right hook that you could hear bounce off the walls. Lays the guy out. The Banditos jump up, head toward the dance floor ... we're all throwing our guitars down, and the rest of the guys, the cowboys, start heading for the dance floor too. And there's just a tiny little scramble there, and I guess everybody realized that if anything started, everyone was going to be dead -- and it miraculously just stopped. Everybody goes back to the tables, we fired up the band, and played all night. It was one of the most amazing nights, because it could have been ... death in the cotton fields. But it turned out all right.

RICHARD SKANSE