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Texana Dames |
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Austin American-Statesman Filmmaker Amy Maner wants you to know Lubbock. she wants you to see it as someplace sacred and severe, plain and preposterous and windy, the most magically drab space in all the world. If you get it - if you feel the charm of such High Plains contradictions - Maner believes you’ll understand a larger story about Texas music, and Texas genius. Maner, a Lubbock Native, has spent the past five years creating a musical documentary called “Lubbock Lights,” just release on DVD. Her film is about terrain, the land that gave birth to musical icons Bob Wills, Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison. Yet it also celebrates the philosophical terrain in habited by an eclectic tribe of modern artists that came of age in Lubbock: singer-songwriters Butch Hancock, Joe Ely and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, collectively know as the Flatlanders. Terry Allen, too. Tommy X Hancock. Lloyd Maines. The Texana Dames... “There’s something about
Lubbock geography. It puts on a certain biorhythm,” says Maner, a former
homecoming queen from Lubbock’s Monterey High School who received her
graduate degree from the Texas Tech Film school. “It’s something you feel.
When Butch Hancock talks about how songs came to him while driving a
tractor, he says it’s not just about the ideas or the lyrics that were
important. It was the feeling, the sound of the tractor that so often
inspired those words and lyrics.”
Lubbock ain’t no Paris-on-the-Panhandle. “Lubbock Lights” introduces us to a city whose nature is to be obsessive about grid and order, as it appears in the rows of cotton, or the lines of a football gridiron, or in the straight-line pattern of its streets. Jon Dee Graham alludes to the “violent emptiness” of his hometown. “it’s not just flat. And it’s not just empty,” he says. “it’s the flattest. And the emptiest.” Lubbock musicians have been telling this little joke on their hometown for years - how crushing and conforming it is, how they ran away as fast as they could, how something about the huge horizon stayed with them, how they love it still. “Lubbock Lights” helps us understand this more clearly. As lads names John, Paul and George found creative fire in a stark, unremarkable city called Liverpool, so did Butch, Jimmie and Joe in a city called Lubbock. “I think being born in the middle of a flat line, 360 degrees, kind of plants a ‘search’ in you pretty early,” Butch Hancock observes in the film. “And that’s an age-old tendency for people growing up. They wonder what’s over the hill. (In Lubbock), we have to wonder what’s over the horizon.” Maner’s High Plains movie is rich with high-plane aspirations. It’s grounded in humor and reflection and love. Lee Daniel’s cinematography is stunning: Lubbock’s grids, dust storms, lightning bolts and severe flatness are captured with the art-house flair, often echoing the Flatland artists’ own artistic allusions. There’s no narration at all; the film is cut so that the musicians and their friends tell the story in their own words and music. Most of the musicians speak to us outdoors, wind ruffling their hair. The filmmaker wants the audience to see the artists in context, forever part of that flat, windblown landscape. Clearly, Maner loves the outside story, the searcher’s story - not the insider’s one. “I had no interest in making one of those Ramones kind of movies, about what goes on backstage or (some musician’s) heroin addiction. Who cares?” she says. “This film is about philosophy, about life, about growing up in a small town, about writing and lyrics and where it all comes from.”
Amy Maner first screened “Lubbock Lights” at the Paramount Theatre during the 2002 South by Southwest Film Festival. The film was politely received that day - the interview footage and cinematography were terrific - but it was clear that “Lubbock Lights” needed work. The film lacked narrative continuity. It was too long. It lacked the dimension of “story.” There was no chance for a theatrical release. So Maner and co-director George Sledge, with outside help from film editor Mark Bullard, took the film apart and started over, thinking DVD. It took years. They cut the existing movie in half, tightened its focus, gave it a dimension of flow. The new “Lubbock Lights” is 80 minutes long. The improvement is dramatic. “The entire film changed,” says Maner. Well, almost. The director retained at least two wonderful segments in their entirety. In the first, the Flatlanders perform “If You Were a Bluebird” at the 1991 Montreux Jazz Festival - the only time a song is played from beginning to end in the entire film. The second is some sort of home movie-music video of Tommy X Hancock and the Supernatural Family Band doing the bunny hop at Machu Picchu. Montreux is tender and sublime. Machu Picchu is outrageously and exhilaratingly funny. Those High Plains contradictions again... Ultimately, the Flatlanders and their friends are not mainstream kind of guys. So it’s not likely that the “Lubbock Lights” DVD will find a happy home for those who live near the heart of the American Grid. But those who know this music already - or feel that creative pull in their heart - might well hear the voices on this film and whisper, “What a beautiful way to live one’s life.” “I know these guys in the film aren’t superstars in other people’s worlds,” says Amy Maner. “But if I can just turn on just a little piece of the world to this West Texas secret. I’ve done my job.”
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