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The Lege works his West Texas mojo on an audience of unsuspecting Australians.

"I've been under enemy attack in Fallujah," he said. "I came here under Marine escort." In between assuring the reporter that "we've got no space shuttle earthenware here" and crunching on almonds ("gobbling goblets") because "I've got to watch my calcium intake so I can listen to Norah Jones," he said that he'd come from a meeting with the mayor of San Jose and that May 30 would be "Legendary Stardust Cowboy Day" in the city. He talked about starting a union for cowboys, "so we can have a jacuzzi in every bunkhouse."

Odam said that growing up in Lubbock was "horrible. There was nothing to do. Everybody I know left." From an early age, he was obsessed with cowboys, space travel, and show business. "It's just the way I came together at birth," he said. He took up music as a way of gaining popularity with his peers and would perform daily on the steps outside his school. The response was mixed: Some fellow students cheered him, while others pelted him with dirt clods and Sweetarts. In his green 1961 Chevrolet Biscayne with "NASA Presents the Legendary Stardust Cowboy" spray-painted on the sides and a map of the moon on the roof, he'd show up uninvited to perform at parties, clubs, and burger joints. "I was highly controversial," he said. "The school principal kept taking my guitar away." After high school, he studied electronics and ran a drill press in a factory, still dreaming of stardom.

The story of "Paralyzed" sounds like something out of a Hollywood movie: An unknown performer goes from total obscurity to national celebrity in only two months. In early 1968, Odam traveled to California to try to obtain a record deal, but "nothing was happening," and he returned to Lubbock to work in a warehouse. Around that time, he saw Tiny Tim, another strange novelty act, performing his freakishly fluttering falsetto versions of ancient pop songs on tv's Tonight Show. Odam resolved to go to New York and appear on the show himself. (That explains a lot: How many other people have taken Tiny Tim as their professional role model?) That September, Odam was on his way to the Big Apple when he stopped in Fort Worth to try to make some money. A pair of Filter Queen vacuum cleaner salesmen heard him singing in the parking lot of Dave Bloxom's Locker Room Club and took him to the Sound City recording studio, next to their office in the basement of radio station KXOL on Camp Bowie Boulevard.

There, Odam met an extremely sleep-deprived T-Bone Burnett, just 20 but already a studio veteran. The future O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack producer and his partner, David Anderson, had already been up for days experimenting with sounds, but when one of the salesmen suggested they record Odam, they were game. The Lege was playing a dobro with a broken neck. He said he needed a drummer, so Burnett agreed to play drums, even though he'd never played before. They cut "Paralyzed," then continued rolling tape while Odam played his songs, made animal noises, and told stories. As the session continued, curiosity seekers began to filter down from the radio station, making the Lege nervous. He insisted that everyone but engineer Frank Henderson leave the sound booth.

While Odam was still in the studio singing, Burnett took the snippet of tape containing "Paralyzed" upstairs and played it for KXOL station manager Jack Murray, who responded ecstatically, exclaiming, "It's the new music!" When the station played the song that night, after promoting it over the air every 15 minutes throughout the day, the switchboard lit up: Perversely, Fort Worth listeners loved it. (As Burnett has pointed out, it says something about Cowtown that its citizens could so willingly embrace a record as unconventional as "Paralyzed.") Among those who heard the song was local impresario Major Bill Smith, who'd produced Bruce Channel's "Hey Baby" and Paul and Paula's "Hey Paula." He smelled a hit and wanted a piece of it. Smith released "Paralyzed" (with the equally bizarre "Who's Knocking On My Door" on the flip side) on his own Psycho Suave label. Within a week, he'd made a deal with Mercury Records to release the record nationally.

Promoted as "the world's worst record," "Paralyzed" only scraped the bottom of the Billboard Top 200 for a couple of weeks, but that was all it took to land Odam on Laugh-In on Nov. 18, 1968 -- scarcely two months after his Fort Worth recording session. On camera, Odam appeared in full cowboy regalia -- boots, vest, chaps, and hat. He seemed confused when the show's cast made fun of him, and he wound up walking off the set. That didn't stop other variety shows from inviting him to appear. Then in December, a strike by the American Federation of Musicians led to a ban on televised live music. By the time the strike ended in May 1969, "Paralyzed" had dropped off the charts and the follow-up single, "I Took a Ride on a Gemini Spaceship," had failed to duplicate its success. A third Mercury single, "Kiss and Run" -- an attempt at a "straight" ballad -- also flopped, leading the label to scrap a planned Legendary Stardust Cowboy album (after pressing two test copies, legendary in their own right, which are still being hunted by collectors).

Shortly after that, Odam broke into Smith's office and stole a tape of 50 songs Odam had recorded with Burnett. Odam had the tape run off on a seven-inch reel, listened to the songs, wrote them down, then unraveled the tape down Henderson Street because "I didn't want [Smith] stealing my music." (At the same time, he destroyed notebooks containing the outline he'd written for a movie, Stardust in Your Eyes, which included narration, dialogue, and 18 songs that depicted the outer space adventures of the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, his winged horse Pegasus, and Gaylord the talking four-leaf clover.) Odam briefly had a manager, James Edgar "Chip" Whitmore Jr., but their relationship soured, and Odam was arrested for vagrancy after breaking into Whitmore's apartment "to get my guitar before he had a chance to hock it." Odam spent the next few years working a succession of dead-end jobs in Fort Worth and Dallas. It looked like the Legendary Stardust Cowboy's moment in the spotlight was over.

Jim Yanaway is a record collector and R&B fanatic from Fort Worth who now lives in Austin. In the '70s, he worked in musician and record distributor Slim Richey's warehouse on Vickery Drive and hosted an R&B show, "Finger Poppin' Time," on KCHU-FM. At the same time, he was taping local blues talent -- including fiery sets by Stevie Ray Vaughan at the Bluebird and U.P. Wilson at Tack's Fun House that remain frustratingly unreleased -- and planning to start a record label. In 1980, he launched Amazing Records, releasing a cross-section of Texas music that included blues (the Juke Jumpers, Omar and the Howlers, Denny Freeman, Gary Primich), rootsy rock (the Leroi Brothers), zydeco (Ponty Bone), and jazz (Return to the Wide Open Spaces, an album that reunited saxophonists James Clay and David "Fathead" Newman).

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