Incredibly, the record was not only a regional hit, it made the national charts and briefly propelled the Lege -- as he's known to his friends -- to celebrity of a sort. He appeared on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In and earned the distinction of being the only performer ever to walk off the show because people were laughing at him. Back in Cowtown, he became the stuff of bona fide local legend for stealing his own master tapes from a business associate and unrolling them down Henderson Street. In 1984, the Lege released a "comeback" album, Rock-It to Stardom, on Fort Worth-based Amazing Records, and toured Europe, Australia, and New Zealand the following year. Since 1986, he's lived in San Jose, Calif., still performing, recording, and harboring the dream that originally brought him to the Fort: appearing on The Tonight Show as a guest host. Norman Carl Odam is an unlikely musical hero. That's the name the Lege's parents gave him when he was born, in Lubbock in 1947. But since high school, he's called himself the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. He has an extremely limited vocal range, has trouble singing in time, and can barely play his instruments. Yet, some surprising people like him. Chameleon-like British rocker David Bowie based his Ziggy Stardust character on the Lege after receiving a copy of "Paralyzed" from Mercury Records upon signing with the label in 1968. Bowie even covered Odam's song "I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship" on his 2002 Heathen c.d. Joe Ely, who grew up with Odam in Lubbock, has said that his old friend "might be the greatest jazz musician ever to come out of West Texas." Ely's claim sounds preposterous, but it's still indicative of a degree of bewildered admiration. While the Lege sees himself as a showbiz figure on a par with Elvis, Tom Jones, or Frank Sinatra, to aficionados of left-of-center music, he's an authentic primitive in the manner of backwoods rockabilly wildman Hasil Atkins. What he's not: some drug-crazed psycho. (Odam never touches anything stronger than Diet Pepsi.) While his persona plays on the myth of the cowboy as rugged individualist, he's also representative of the kind of lonely, alienated outsider who dreams of winning acceptance through celebrity. Indeed, his greatest appeal might be in his guilelessness. Contacted by phone in San Jose, he asked me, "Do you think the Legendary Stardust Cowboy could be the next American Idol?" All of which begs the question, "Is this guy kidding or what?" According to Amazing label boss Jim Yanaway, who recorded the Lege in 1984 and accompanied him on his world tour, "Norman is as serious as any dedicated musician."
One who would agree with that assessment is Tony Philputt, an Indiana-born filmmaker who's dedicated the last 13 years to telling the Lege's story. Since 1991, he's been working on a documentary film about the Lege, entitled Cotton Pickin' Smash. Philputt, now living in L.A., is a true believer. He exhausted all of his resources making the film and filed for bankruptcy shortly after finishing a rough cut in 1999. Since then, he's re-edited the movie to make it more digestible by the casual viewer. "At first, I just wanted to cram in every fact that I could. Then I realized that I needed to pace the film for the average schmo drinking a beer on a Sunday night." Even before undertaking the film project, Philputt spent years chasing the Lege. At 15, he was "the first big punk rocker in Indiana." In 1979, he was given a copy of "Paralyzed" by a friend who told him, "This is right up your alley." The record was a revelation to Philputt. "I thought, 'It took four people in the Velvet Underground to make this much noise!' It also piqued my curiosity. How'd this ever get on a major label?" With the dawn of the internet still a couple of years down the road, Philputt scoured the public library for clues, to no avail. Fortunately (although maybe not for his finances), Philputt's Lege fixation seemed to run in his family: An uncle who was also a music fan told him the story of the Laugh-In appearance and showed Philputt a picture of the Lege that he'd drawn in eighth grade after seeing the show. With so little information to go on, Philputt gave up the search until 1984, when he was working in a record store. "I used to do the ordering," he said, "and one day I was calling in an order and [the distributor] asked, 'You don't do much with country stuff, do you?' I told him we didn't and he said, 'Then you probably won't want this Stardust Cowboy thing.' I said, 'I'll take ten!'" When Rock-It to Stardom arrived, Philputt was still disappointed. "The cover was saturated red and the picture on the inner sleeve had his face in shadow -- there wasn't one clear picture. What did this guy look like?" The genesis of Cotton Pickin' Smash was almost accidental. When his roommate bought a car and wanted to spend a summer driving around the U.S., Philputt took a chance. He had finally gotten Odam's address off another record, a single Odam had made on a California label. So he wrote a fan letter, asking if they could visit him. Philputt was surprised to receive a lengthy affirmative reply from Odam and immediately hit the road with a video camera and "15 years' worth of questions." Rather than the Clint Eastwood figure of his imagination, he met a small, slight, bespectacled figure who seemed obsessed with current events and the weather. Staying at Odam's house and capturing his story on videotape whetted Philputt's appetite to know more about the Lege's life and career. As he moved around to the record collectors conventions where he went to sell videos, he scheduled subsequent interviews with people who'd known or worked with the Lege. The toughest piece of the puzzle for Philputt to track down was the videotape of Odam's Laugh-In appearance. "Anyone I talked to who had seen it, saw it the first time it aired," he said. Odam had been taping reruns of the show for years, but the producers had removed all musical performances before releasing the shows to syndication to avoid having to pay royalties. Finally, Philputt got in contact with the production company. "The woman I talked to said it was impossible," said Philputt. "She said the rights to Laugh-In were owned by three people that hated each other." Undeterred, Philputt wrote a letter to the production company, asking that it be given to all three principals. "I told them that I was a college student working on a thesis on 'Atonality in Modern Pop Culture,' and that I needed the clip to be able to show a progression from Stravinsky to Stockhausen to the Legendary Stardust Cowboy." Two weeks later, he received a call from the production company, asking for his address. Philputt said the Lege appeared unimpressed on viewing the clip. "They've edited it!" Odam said. "I was on for longer than that!" Philputt's big score still left one major roadblock in place: The producers wanted $20,000 for the rights to use the Laugh-In clip in his documentary -- money Philputt just didn't have.
Interviewing the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, even by phone, can be a surreal experience. He tends to free-associate wildly, until he's asked a direct question. Then he's less loquacious. Maybe he's tired of telling his story. He's done it before, most extensively in autobiographies he penned to promote his records in '69 and '84.
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Analogies to Vietnam are just a liberal plot. By Ken Wheatcroft-Pardue
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