So … a warm’ish October night in the Texas Panhandle … Lubbock, to be exact … I was 27, Joe Ely was a little younger … that night his band played what I believe was their first gig … at the Main Street Saloon, across a boulevard and up half a block from Texas Tech … Main Street is actually kind of a side street in that neighborhood … no traffic to speak of, three’ish in the morning, they’d played well for a new band, and with great excitement, a catchy feeling … Joe and I sat on a curb in front of the club, I smoked a cigarette, he told a story.
If what I’ve related isn’t the exact story, it’s the gist.
There was this Arkansas farmer, as I recall, maybe a relative, sometime in the 1930s. Early evening, that farmer saw a large meteor streak brightly in an arc down to the ground. He figured it couldn’t be that far off, it was so bright and big. He hung some lanterns on his two-horse buckboard and headed west, toward where that brightness fell. He rode for a good while, then, finding nothing, he turned back. Next day, on the radio, that farmer heard how, the night before, quite a large meteor, visible for miles and miles, hit earth in the Oklahoma Panhandle more than five hundred miles west.
Well. The 1930s were forty years behind us when Joe told that story, and now that night in Lubbock is fifty-plus years behind. If what I’ve related isn’t the exact story, it’s the gist. I hold those two young men close in memory. Whatever else they did, they dared. They and their friends. Now I think what we had most in common, Joe and me and our friends, is that when we were young we saw a great light in the dark, and we knew what we had to do: We had to travel in that direction, toward that light. Unlike the farmer, we never turned back.
If Joe’s spirit is anywhere, it’s still on its way to that light.
Michael Ventura is a novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter, co-founder of LA Weekly, and publisher whose column Letters at 3AM ran in The Austin Chronicle from 1993-2014. His books include Cassavetes Directs: John Cassavetes and the Making of Love Streams, The Death of Frank Sinatra, and If I Was a Highway, a book of essays detailing in part his time within Lubbock’s 1970s creative community, including Joe Ely, Sharon Ely, Butch Hancock, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Terry Allen, and Jo Carol Pierce.
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This article appears in April 24 • 2026.