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The next American Idol? The present-day Norman Odam is up in arms about the exclusion of Norah Jones from his local jukebox.

Yanaway first met the Lege in 1976 through Fabulous Thunderbirds drummer Mike Buck and invited Odam to appear on a live broadcast from the Modern Living Building at the State Fair of Texas. "I was cueing up records," said Yanaway, "and when I looked up, there were people seven or eight deep around the booth, listening to Norman sing. It was a real cross-section of people -- farmers in bib overalls, kids with cotton candy, Hare Krishnas -- all mesmerized, with idiotic grins. They seemed to genuinely enjoy what the Lege was doing." Even the host of the show scheduled to follow "Finger Poppin' Time" called in to tell Yanaway that he was digging it. The show was the local Black Panthers' weekly "Panthers and the People."

Yanaway and the Lege stayed in touch after Odam moved to Las Vegas in 1977 and got a job as a busboy at the Dunes Hotel. Yanaway felt that Odam hadn't been given a fair shake and wanted to record him. Originally, the plan was to record on New Year's Eve 1979 -- "at the overlap of the decades," Yanaway said. When they met at Dallas/Fort Worth International airport, the Lege presented him with a manila envelope full of newspaper clippings about showbiz figures like Totie Fields, Shecky Green, and Morey Amsterdam "because Norman thought I'd be interested in reading about them. I wasn't." But Odam brought no luggage and, crucially, none of his songs. He assured Yanaway that "I've got 'em where no one else can get 'em," pointing to his head, but he couldn't remember his songs in the studio, and the sessions had to be aborted.

It was more than three years before Odam could get time off from his busboy job in Vegas to resume recording at Grand Prairie's JD&D Studio in June 1983. The studio band, dubbed the West Texas Sci-Clones, consisted of guitarists Don Leady and Steve Doerr and Mike Buck on drums, who'd formed the Leroi Brothers after working together on the earlier, failed Legendary Stardust Cowboy sessions. While the schedule didn't allow for any rehearsal time, the three were familiar with the Lege's songs and had an idea of the basic approach he wanted: "jungle music." Their strategy was "not to let thinking get in the way," according to Yanaway. "We didn't want to overwork the material."

For the sessions, Odam used a guitar Yanaway had borrowed from his Richey Records coworker, Jim Colegrove -- himself an experienced musician, then with the Juke Jumpers (now leading Lost Country). When Yanaway played him the chaotic results of the session, Colegrove said, "I could hear songs with chord changes. People think [the Lege] is a put-on, so they play whatever they want behind him. But I thought, you could put music over this." Yanaway responded, "Why don't you do that?" Colegrove overdubbed bass, guitar, and harmonica on the basic tracks. While he admits that the results were not totally successful, Colegrove speaks highly of the Lege today. "Norman's a naïve artist, but he has an interesting mind that moves along interesting lines and comes up with interesting things," he said. "You could hear someone like the Clash doing a song like 'My Baby Tracks Me Down Like Radar.' I just wish he could perform in meter."

Amazing Records released Rock-It to Stardom in 1984. Some copies were pressed on colored vinyl: clear, blue, passionate pink (Odam's favorite color, from a batch that had been manufactured for a Dolly Parton release), and gold ("because the Lege always wanted to have a gold record"). To promote the record, Yanaway concocted a press release full of "high-falutin', pretentious B.S.," including allusions to Hegel, Einstein, and Newton, from which "lazy reviewers could extract 'quotes' from Norman." Yanaway's friend, Rolling Stone scribe Chet Flippo, managed to get the record reviewed in People magazine. A tour was booked for the following year, to include stops in New York City, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

In preparation for the tour, Yanaway hired Fort Worth artist Frank McCully to create stage props inspired by Z.Z. Top's "World Texas Tour": a cactus, a gila monster, a prairie dog, a rattlesnake, and so on. Some of these props figure in a series of promotional photos, taken around sculptor George Segal's Holocaust memorial in San Francisco, that are masterpieces of bad taste. In one, a gaunt concentration camp survivor stares bleakly through barbed wire while Odam blows a bugle in his ear. In another, a smiling gila monster sits atop a mound of corpses while the Lege grins at the camera.

While in New York, Yanaway and the Lege were walking past the Blue Note club in Greenwich Village when "the door exploded open and this maniac came running at us," according to Yanaway. The apparently deranged individual stopped and asked the Lege, "Are you Norman Odam?" It turned out that he'd had to follow Norman at a high school talent contest in Lubbock two decades earlier.

At Gerde's Folk City, the tiny club where Bob Dylan was discovered, the Lege was embraced by the cream of the Big Apple hip-oisie, who fell over each other scrambling to grab the paper plates -- adorned with the Lege's artwork, autograph, and mailing address -- that he sailed into the audience while singing "Fly Me to the Moon." On stage, the usually reserved and passive Odam was transformed into "a cocky little bastard," according to Yanaway. In a video of his Folk City performance, he's even wilder than he was on Laugh-In, "riding" his guitar like a horse and cavorting around the stage, thrusting his pelvis and shaking his hands like an unruly three-year-old imitating a tent-show evangelist. Toward the end of his set, he does a bizarre striptease, revealing scrawny arms and a concave chest, until he's left wearing only his boxer shorts. "I was only trying to imitate Elvis or Tom Jones," Odam said. "I had to leave my shorts on because it was chilly up there."

On the tour's European leg, he fronted a unit that included two refugees from the L.A. psychobilly-blues outfit Gun Club. On their opening night at the Paradiso in Amsterdam, they played before 850 people. In Australia, Odam performed on the country's top-rated tv show, Hey Hey It's Saturday -- a kind of hybrid Laugh-In / Saturday Night Live / Gong Show. The day after his appearance, two Melbourne policemen stopped the Lege in the street and asked him for autographs. He obliged, signing their suspect books in gold ink. "Touring was easy, it was fun," said Odam. "It wasn't heavy-duty, it was light duty." NEXT »

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