Jimmie Dale Gilmore: Vision Thing

JIMMIE DALE GILMORE’S train of thought makes all the stops. During one memorable conversation two years ago at an espresso bar in his adopted hometown of Austin, Texas, Gilmore described how he wrote one of his best-known songs, “Tonight I Think I’m Gonna Go Downtown.” The story itself wasn’t much; he’d hit an impasse on the tune halfway through, and a guitarist friend, John Reed, helped him finish it. But the winding detours Gilmore took in telling the story were something else. For the better part of an hour, he waxed large on obscure Texas rock history (Gilmore was in the house band at Austin’s old psychedelic ballroom the Vulcan Gas Company); deep academia (he once studied logic and linguistic analysis with a guy who had studied under Bertrand Russell); Mark Twain (“He could say the most dark, true things in the world and still make it funny”); and the lack of comedy in his own songwriting (“My standards are too high”). There were also passing mentions of Aldous Huxley and the Indian mystic Swami Divachananda (“My favorite overall writer”). Obviously, for Gilmore, music wasn’t just a matter of notes and rhymes, it was an act of spiritual and intellectual passage.

“In my music, what’s going on is a recognition and appreciation of the ineffable,” Gilmore noted. “With my voice, I will never be categorized outside of country. But the things I’m most interested in are the least common themes in country music.”

Gilmore has since changed his tune – slightly. In conversation, he still rides the zigzag express, hugging the rails in a breathless drawl that echoes the high, lonesome shiver of his singing voice. Over lunch recently in Los Angeles, talking about his major-label debut on Elektra, Spinning Around the Sun, Gilmore tries to describe his unique brand of country music via offramp chats about old Delta blues (“Young country fans don’t know how much the music derives from these old black guys”), radical ’60s politics (“I was a big fan of Paul Krassner – still am”) and punk rock (“I went with my son to see the Cramps, and it blew my mind!”).

But Gilmore has discovered that the restless intellect and resistance to easy packaging that once kept him out of the country mainstream is now leading to a bigger payday. “Because of the separation from most country music, people are shocked by the rest of my interests, and that becomes fun for everyone to talk and write about,” he says. “It used to seem like the kind of thing that would destroy my career. Instead, it seems to be making my career as an American musician.”

The proof is in the impact. Gilmore, 48, was recently voted Best Country Artist in the Rolling Stone Critics Poll for the third straight year, and Spinning Around the Sun – the follow-up to Gilmore’s 1991 LP After Awhile (which was part of the Elektra Nonesuch/American Explorer series) – has received a Grammy nomination this year for Best Folk Album. Gilmore has appeared on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno as well as the Nashville Network, has shared stages with acts as diverse as Bob Dylan and Dwight Yoakam and is about to release a one-off single on Sub Pop – honest! – that he recorded last year with Mudhoney.

Gilmore’s growing success has everything to do with his definition of country music, which is as broad as the West Texas plains where he was born and raised. In concert, he’ll cover Boz Scaggs’ “Up to You” as Bill Monroe gone roadhouse and jam on Elmore James’ “Goodbye Baby” with ZZ Top mettle. Then he’ll sing Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” as if to the manner born, his operatic coyote tenor capturing the whine of Williams’ midnight train with a rare, vivid dignity.

As a songwriter, Gilmore cites major debts to Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac while noting tangential sources like M.C. Escher’s surrealist puzzle art and the teachings of the Indian guru Maharaj Ji. Yet the lanky Amarillo-born Texan’s best songs are incisive meditations on the everyday, like “Dallas,” a reflective ode on the city’s nightscape as seen from a DC-9, and “Treat Me Like a Saturday Night,” which speaks volumes of pain and hope just in the title.

“This isn’t being coy or anything,” Gilmore says, “but I believe that because I’m not a good enough musician, I could never have copied a style. That’s not where my talent lies. It’s as if I’m an expressive actor, and the songs are my lines. To me, it doesn’t matter if I wrote the song or not.” In fact, Spinning Around the Sun, a richly rendered document of Gilmore’s myriad influences and musical interests, features only four new original songs.