Original image by There Stands the Glass.
My old man and my girlfriend sat on either side of me in the balcony of the Uptown Theater at a Joe Ely concert on May 20, 1982. For ninety precious minutes, I had my hopes up high.
The presence of a date wasn’t surprising- I’d been girl-crazy for years. Getting my dad to the show was more complicated. Music provided common ground in our fraught relationship. I convinced him to join us by insisting Ely’s most recent album Musta Notta Gotta Lotta wasn’t all that different from the current sound of his favorite artists Waylon Jennings and Hank Williams, Jr.
The absence of alcohol in the balcony was an issue for my dad- people under the age of 21 weren’t allowed on the main floor- and the sound mix upstairs was terrible. I don’t think my date or my dad enjoyed the concert, but the night meant more to me than any of the approximately nine Ely performances I caught before and after 1982.
I pitched several of Ely’s albums on the Hightone and Rounder labels as a sales representative in the 1990s and the aughts, but Ely’s self-titled 1977 debut for MCA Records has always been my favorite. The thwarted optimism of “I Had My Hopes Up High” has long made the opening track one of my personal theme songs.
