“A good old boy can become an intellectual, but an intellectual cannot become a good old boy,” Texas guitarist and songwriter James McMurtry quips on his most recent album, a live collection.

McMurtry, who performs Thursday with his band, the Heartless Bastards, at The Grand Auditorium in Ellsworth, seems to have feet in both worlds, but clearly trusts the good old boys more.

The observation is more than a wisecrack, McMurtry said in a telephone interview last week.

“We have a Yale graduate in the White House who says ‘nu-kyoo-lar,'” he said of fellow Texan George W. Bush, and suggested the president is neither good old boy nor intellectual.

“He’s Barbara’s boy,” McMurtry continued, warming to the subject. “That boy never sat a tree stand.”

McMurtry, 42, who calls Austin home, doesn’t quite qualify as a good old boy himself. He’s the son of writer Larry McMurtry, whose novels include “The Last Picture Show,” “Terms of Endearment” and “Lonesome Dove.” His mother is an English professor.

But he demurs when asked about his place in this literary lineage, saying most of his ancestors were farmers and herders, and that he doesn’t see any genetic predisposition toward writing in himself.

He may not see it, but others do.

The new record has attracted a lot of attention.

Bangor music critic – and occasional horror novelist – Stephen King praised “Live in Aught-Three” as one of the 10 best albums of 2004 and the best live album in five years, and called McMurtry “the truest, fiercest songwriter of his generation.”

The characters in the songs on “Live in Aught-Three” are stuck in a red state of mind. They have brandy on their breath, look at the world through dead bugs on the windshield, and become randy when introduced to their second cousins.

At times, it’s hard to get a fix on whether McMurtry is disdainful or fond of them. His voice betrays wry humor and cynicism, and you can’t help but think he is pleased with how clever some of his lyrics are.

And they are clever.

In one song, McMurtry sings about inheriting 60 acres from a despised grandmother, and complains that cousin Clifford got the better parcel, the one on the highway that “looks like a Wal-Mart waitin’ to happen.”

In another, he cuttingly dismisses a woman’s ex-boyfriend by singing, “He’d never met Will Rogers, I’d be willing to say,” a line worthy of the master of the put-down song, Bob Dylan.

“My Dad was a big Dylan fan,” McMurtry said. “I listened to Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson.”

In his Entertainment Weekly column, King also draws the Dylan comparison, saying of “Live in Aught-Three” that “there hasn’t been anything quite like this since Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited album.”

King singled out the song “Choctaw Bingo,” describing it as a “psycho southland breakdown.”

It’s an epic travelogue of sorts, with a first-person plural narration of a journey to a dysfunctional family reunion in Oklahoma. The kids are strapped in the back seat, pacified with bottles of cherry Coke and a shot of vodka, and then it’s on to see Uncle Slaton, who has given up making moonshine whiskey and switched to crystal meth.

You’re not sure if you should laugh, write your senator, or take a shower after wallowing around in that world.

“That song’s kind of a cartoon,” McMurtry explained, but one based in reality. “I got cousins who are strung-out on crystal meth.” The drug is a plague on the Southwest, he said.

“Out Here in the Middle” is an ode to red-state life, a place where “We ain’t seen Elvis in a year or two.” McMurtry grows a bit wistful as he sings about “amber waves of greed” and bathtub speed, tractor pulls and “corporate-relo refugees.”

And McMurtry’s no slouch on the guitar. Armed with a Fender Telecaster and favoring open tunings, he power-slides his way through chunky, dirty riffs that would make ZZ Top sit up and take notice. And his band – just a bass player and drummer – are as tight as the suspension on a new quarter-ton pickup.

The McMurtry show on Thursday is sold-out.

Tom Groening can be reached at 338-3034 and groening@midcoast.com.