Music
Chaps Schtick
Fame has always been the destiny of Lubbock’s Norman Odam, a.k.a. the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. Just ask him.
(Page 2 of 2)
The Ledge hadn’t gotten far when he met up with fate in a Fort Worth recording studio, where he had stopped off, hoping to make a record. Serendipitously, a young engineer named T-Bone Burnett (who would go on to produce Roy Orbison, Elvis Costello, and Los Lobos, among others) happened to be working in the studio, which happened to be located a floor below the KXOL radio station. What followed is surely one for the music-history books. “It was early morning; we’d been up all night,” Burnett recalls. And when the Ledge showed him his act? “It was thrilling. He’s an explosive talent.” After the Ledge recorded several tracks, including “Paralyzed,” with Burnett playing drums, they ran the tape upstairs to KXOL’s manager, Jack Murray. It was a Eureka! moment. “This is it!” Murray proclaimed. “This is the new music!” All day KXOL announcers teased listeners with talk about the “new music”; when they finally played the Ledge’s tape, the station was flooded with phone calls, and in a couple of weeks “Paralyzed“—despite its incomprehensible lyrics—had become the station’s most-requested song. Major Bill Smith, a Fort Worth record producer known for such hits as “Hey, Paula” and “Last Kiss,” sold “Paralyzed” and two other Ledge singles to Mercury Records. Before long “Paralyzed” broke into the top 100 on the Cashbox charts (although it would peak at number 98). The Ledge was booked on Laugh-In, and appearances on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, The Ed Sullivan Show, and The Joey Bishop Show were scheduled.
Then, a month after the Laugh-In gig, the American Federation of Musicians, which Odam had recently joined, went on strike, forcing him to cancel the other TV performances. By the time the strike had ended, four months later, the Ledge had slipped off the media’s radar screen. For the next decade, between occasional gigs, he picked cherries in Provo, Utah, worked at a Dallas convenience store, and slept in a discarded air conditioner duct behind the Thunderbird Hotel in Las Vegas.
But he never gave up his dream and fantasized about various cockamamy promotional gimmicks that would be sure to lure destiny onto his side. At one time he considered trying to popularize the phrase “LSC, not LSD.” Though he never got around to it, he thought about marketing all sorts of things with his name on them—pink vinyl bumper stickers, blue pillowcases, even pantyhose—as well as life-size inflatable LSC dolls so that every woman could possess him. Why not get himself kidnapped and offer $1,000 to the person who discovered his whereabouts? What about having a birthday party in Texas Tech’s Jones Stadium? Or asking a commercial artist to paint his portrait for the Amon Carter Museum? After all, he was the Legendary Stardust Cowboy.
Lightning sometimes strikes twice, and it did in 1976, when Jim Yanaway, then a record slinger, featured Odam on a radio show broadcast from the State Fair of Texas. “During breaks I would do interviews with the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, and I noticed all these people would gravitate toward the booth,” Yanaway recalls. “I’d turn around and all of a sudden the crowd was five or six people deep—all these people were standing around with these foolish grins on their faces. They seemed to be universally attracted to whatever this was. I thought since it was no put-on, I might be able to help him take another shot at getting on the path he felt he was sidetracked from.” Yanaway decided to produce and promote the Ledge’s first full-length album, Rock-It to Stardom. The musicians now known as the LeRoi Brothers were introduced to each other to form Odam’s backup band, and they complemented his shrieks with an impressive, polished rockabilly sound.
When Rock-It to Stardom was released in 1984, the critics were so taken with it that the Ledge was soon booked at Gerde’s Folk City, the Greenwich Village hot spot where Bob Dylan got his start. “Norman did a dance that he practiced with lead weights to build up leg strength,” Yanaway says. “When he didn’t have those on, it would be effortless; he was like Baryshnikov or something. He could do the high leg kicks. He had this costume made for him that was a bright orange jumpsuit. I don’t know what material it was made out of, but it was not natural,” Yanaway says, giggling. “I think it was waterproof!” Odam sent paper plates that he had decorated and autographed soaring out into the crowd like flying saucers. The audience went crazy, Yanaway says: “They were diving over each other to grab these things—falling down on tables, crashing into the furniture.”
But Gerde’s was just a launching pad. In the spring of 1985 a concert promoter in the Netherlands named Willem Venema booked the Ledge for a European tour. This was no small-time deal: Venema had booked everyone from the Rolling Stones and Prince to the pope. Backed by members of the psychobilly group Gun Club, the Ledge, always the showman, stripped down to his skivvies, rode a plastic horse onstage—and packed clubs in Germany, Norway, Sweden, and England. His star seemed to be on the rise again.
That fall, accompanied by Yanaway, who was acting as his de facto manager, he toured Australia and performed on a popular nighttime television program there called Hey, Hey, It’s Saturday, a combination of Laugh-In, The Gong Show, and The Ed Sullivan Show. From their hotel balcony in Melbourne, Yanaway and Odam spotted Prince Charles and Princess Diana, who were watching a regatta. “We mingled with the royal entourage,” Yanaway recalls. “Norman had on his outfit and everything. He just figured this was meant to be.”
After the Australia tour, Odam and Yanaway parted ways. Odam moved to San Jose, California, formed a band, and in 1989 recorded two spirited punkabilly records, Retro Rocket Back to Earth and The Legendary Stardust Cowboy Rides Again, while supporting himself as a Lockheed-Martin security guard. His records have become cult hits, and he frequently receives royalty checks from unexpected sources, including CNN and an airline in Malaysia. Last October the indie label Pravda Records released his new CD, Live in Chicago, which was taped in April 1998 before a packed audience at the venerable club Lounge Ax, and in March he played to a mostly baffled but amused crowd at Austin’s South by Southwest music conference. “I don’t think there’s room for people like him in the mainstream,” says Doctor Demento, “but fortunately today, with CDs and the Internet and all, there’s a whole lot of life outside the mainstream.”
Though his band recently broke up and he’s back in a slump, the Ledge is hoping that lightning will strike yet again. He talks about the future with as much energy and optimism as he did in 1968. He believes his friends “can probably swing it to get me on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno; if that happens, then everything just busts wide open.... If I had a manager like the Dixie Chicks’, then I could make a go of it!... I like it when [singers] get out there and rip and roar like Ray Charles. I bet me and him could really get together on a record album. Really rip it up.”
Meanwhile, he’s keeping his job as a security guard in San Jose. He’s just riding through the bumpy territory that every legend encounters from time to time. “Bigger things will happen when I’m on Letterman,” says the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. “I guarantee it!”
Pages: 1 2
My Library
