Lounge Ax has booked its share of edgy bands over the years, but even the Lincoln Park club’s regular denizens are in for a shock, because the Legendary Stardust Cowboy will record a live album there Saturday night.
When it comes to pure punk energy and all-around weirdness, today’s bands can’t hold a candle to “The Ledge” — who also is the subject of the documentary film “Cotton Pickin’ Smash!: The Story of The Legendary Stardust Cowboy.”
The opening lines of that film provide a good a summation of the man and his music. “He’s not insane . . . he’s eccentric,” says longtime band member Frank Novicki in the movie. “He is weirder, and wilder, and more sincerely out of his mind than anyone could ever imagine.”
The Ledge was born Norman Carl Odum, 50 years ago in Lubbock, Texas. Equally entranced as a teen by country music and the space program, he crafted his persona as the Legendary Stardust Cowboy.
He became well-known around Lubbock in the mid-1960s. Riding through town in an old car with “NASA Presents The Legendary Stardust Cowboy” spray-painted on the side, he would pull into the parking lots of the city’s roughest nightclubs and begin doing his act from the hood of the car.
In January 1968 he announced he was going to New York City to appear on “The Tonight Show.” The fact that he wasn’t booked, had no record, no manager and no connections didn’t seem to bother him. Other than the planets being properly aligned, there is little explanation for what came next.
The Ledge ran out of gas 300 miles away in Ft. Worth, in the parking lot of a building that held a recording studio and a radio station. Two salesmen who had an office in the building struck up a conversation with him. They knew the fellow who ran the recording studio (a very young T-Bone Burnett) and dragged the young Ledge over to meet him.
With no rehearsal, and only Burnett playing drums behind him, the Ledge began recording. One of the songs performed that day was “Paralyzed,” his first and only real hit. With unintelligible lyrics and thrashing drums, all punctuated by screams and bugle blasts, it was unlike anything the engineers had ever heard. A disc jockey from the radio station played a tape of the song that night, and the phones went wild.
Shortly after the record’s release, Ft. Worth Press columnist Jack Gordon summed it up: “It has to be the most horrendous disc ever cut — a record so incredibly terrible it surely will be a national smash.”
Even today, “Paralyzed” turns up on lists of both the best and worst records ever made.
“It falls halfway in between,” the Ledge explains. “It’s not middle-of-the-road, it’s in the middle of the Milky Way.”
Signed a month after the record was cut by the then-Chicago-based Mercury Records, the Ledge and “Paralyzed” swept the country. His appearance on the TV show “Laugh-In” that fall recently was voted by Spin magazine as one of the 25 best moments in rock ‘n’ roll television.
One of his Mercury labelmates was a young singer named David Bowie, who would later craft a persona based in part on the Legendary Stardust Cowboy — Ziggy Stardust. Contacted in London, Bowie recalled his first encounter with the Ledge’s unique brand of music.
“When I first signed with Mercury Records in the late ’60s, I was given a bunch of his singles, including `Paralyzed,’ and my own personal favorite, `I Took a Trip in a Gemini Spacecraft.’ ” Bowie said. “He became part of the many inspirations for Ziggy, and I’m proud to say I still play his records to this day.”
Though it’s doubtful the two will ever share a stage, Bowie is pleased to see one of his old inspirations is still working. “It’s wonderful to hear that he’s still recording and performing,” Bowie said. “The Ledge is a true great of American music.”
While the Ledgendary Stardust Cowboy is completely serious about what he does, his songs tend to get pigeon-holed as novelty music. But that doesn’t bother him.
“The fact is,” he said, “novelty music sells very well if it is promoted the right way. Look at Liberace, he was one big novelty act.”
The Ledge’s on-stage antics are as unpredictable as his music. Riding his guitar like a hobby horse, stripping down to his boots and underwear playing his bugle, the Ledge has left more than one club owner scratching his head.
“Sometimes things just happen,” he said. “There’s no telling what will happen when I get on stage. Ask anyone who’s seen me play, no two shows are ever the same.”
Tony Philputt is an Indianapolis based-filmmaker who spent eight years making the documentary about the Ledge. It contains interviews with a Who’s Who of the Texas music scene: Jimmie Dale Gilmore, T-Bone Burnett, Butch Hancock, the Ledge’s old classmate Joe Ely, and many more. All of them expressed their love and admiration for the Ledgendary Stardust Cowboy.
“No one would make fun of him,” said Philputt. “In fact, several of the people I talked to wanted to be sure I wasn’t poking fun at him in the film before they agreed to participate. They all seemed very protective of him.”
In later years, the Ledge’s career has been sporadic at best. His later singles, “Standing in a Trashcan Thinking of You,” “Rock-it To Stardom” and “My Underwear Froze To A Clothesline,” never gained the same notoriety as “Paralyzed.”
He has toured Europe and Australia to great acclaim, but has had a hard time finding American distributors for his records. Though he still plays around San Francisco regularly, his main job is as a night watchman for a computer company.
He has had bit parts in four movies, but his own idea for a film — in which the Legendary Stardust Cowboy flies to Mars on the winged horse Pegasus to take the Martians’ soldering irons — has yet to find a buyer.
There still is a small but dedicated base of fans around the world who adore him. And the musicians who play with him come from far different backgrounds than the country music that first inspired him. His current bass player is Klaus Fluoride, formerly of the Dead Kennedys. It’s all to be expected, according to the Ledge.
That he has a legion of fans and artists who want to work with him “doesn’t surprise me at all,” the Ledge said. “The record people and booking agents misunderstand my music but the fans don’t. They latch on to it.”
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The Legendary Stardust Cowboy will perform Saturday at Lounge Ax, 2438 N. Lincoln Ave; 773-525-6620. Clips of the Legendary Stardust Cowboy performing “Paralyzed” can be heard at www.hear.comhollowparalyze
