Sunday, August 27, 2000

By JOHN SCHULIAN

One Album to His Name, but It's the Stuff of Legend

TRACE my fascination with Willis Alan Ramsey to a honky-tonk girl from Austin, Tex., a sweet hellion who coveted her reputation as a provider of favors. What she gave me 28 years ago, however, was no mere kiss or long-neck Lone Star.

It was a freshly pressed album by Mr. Ramsey that marked both his debut and Austin's emerging musical confluence of hippies and rednecks. Only later would I realize that owning the album was also the equivalent of induction into a secret society.

For how could this honky-tonk girl or I have known that Mr. Ramsey, after bursting on the scene at age 21, would recoil from the possibility of country-music stardom and head for the hills? That was what he did, though, taking with him a songwriting talent that defied categorization and turning the lone entry in his discography into a perplexing icon.

Soon enough I was on my own, which is how honky-tonk girls always leave you, but I still had that album, "Willis Alan Ramsey," and I played it everywhere I rambled as a newspaperman, until the vinyl nearly turned to dust. Played it in Baltimore, where the postman delivered it, and in Washington, Chicago, Philadelphia and my latest stop, the one that brought me to show business, Los Angeles.

Everywhere I went, I trolled for fellow believers, dropping Mr. Ramsey's name and telling unbidden the story of the one time I saw him perform live, in 1975: The newspaper deadline in Philadelphia, the Metroliner to Washington, the meatball sub on a wild ride across town and finally the sheer joy of slipping into a club called the Cellar Door as Mr. Ramsey was applying his drawling tenor to "Ballad of Spider John."

Every so often, someone would step forth to say he, too, had enlisted in the Cult of Willis Alan. A medical student in Baltimore halted his desperate search for an apartment when he heard Mr. Ramsey's voice coming out my window. He knocked on my door and asked if I'd play the whole album for him, since he'd never expected to hear it anywhere except back home in Texas.

Much later, after casting my lot in Hollywood, I was supposed to entice James Crumley, the hard-boiled novelist from Montana, into writing an episode of "Miami Vice"; instead, we spent the evening eating barbecue and discussing the virtues of "Goodbye Old Missoula," a waltz Mr. Ramsey wrote about a heartbreaking barmaid.

And then there's my friend Danny Ferrington, who made guitars for Mr. Ramsey in the past and whose ownership of three copies of the album on vinyl makes him L.A.'s unofficial champion in that department. "Every time I see it at the Goodwill," Mr. Ferrington told me not long ago, "I have to buy it."

I understand the urge, although I have managed to content myself with my original copy on vinyl and a CD version purchased a decade ago. In and out of print ever since, the album came back on CD last year, which was as it should be, for "Willis Alan Ramsey" endures as one of those recordings that never grows old or stale. Its 11 songs -- wistful, evocative, elegiac, wry, sexy and just plain funny -- deserve a place alongside the best work of such Texas masters as Willie Nelson, Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. What makes those songs even more remarkable is that Mr. Ramsey wrote them all when he was barely out of his teens.

There's an abundance of youthful mischief in "Satin Sheets," his fantasy about rock-star life: "Pretty women'd come to me/ I'd give 'em all the third degree/ Give 'em satin sheets/ To keep 'em off the streets." But then Mr. Ramsey heads in an entirely different direction with "Boy From Oklahoma," his tribute to Woody Guthrie, a songwriter whose "heart was in the union" and whose "soul was reaching out for the servants' dream." I've yet to find anyone who can convince me that a better song about Guthrie exists.

The only Ramsey song I'd never quote is the one the nation hasn't really escaped since it became a chart-blitzing hit in 1976. Mr. Ramsey had called it "Muskrat Candlelight" when he put it on his album, with just him singing and playing guitar and bass and Leon Russell noodling on vibes and electric piano. Then along came the Captain and Tenille to record it as "Muskrat Love" and to do things to it that Mr. Ramsey couldn't have possibly imagined. Things that would make it a quasi- annuity for him, of course. But still . . .

Fortunately for Mr. Ramsey, even though he has been out of the public eye, there have always been like-minded artists to record his songs -- Waylon Jennings, Jerry Jeff Walker, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, the pre-Parrot Head Jimmy Buffett. When Shawn Colvin put "Satin Sheets" on her "Cover Girl" CD, she used the liner notes to urge fans to buy the CD version of Mr. Ramsey's album.

But the foremost campaigner for Mr. Ramsey in recent years has been Lyle Lovett, who learned to play every song on the album when he was in college and who has been quoted calling it "one of the greatest records of all-time." They've written songs together, and when Mr. Ramsey's wife, the singer Alison Rogers, joined them, the result was the Grammy-nominated "That's Right (You're Not From Texas)." Mr. Ramsey contributed background vocals to Mr. Lovett's album "I Love Everybody," and Mr. Lovett included a new Ramsey composition, "Sleepwalking," on his tribute to Texas songwriters, "Step Into This House." Somewhere in the midst of all that, Mr. Ramsey sang his achingly tender ballad "Angel Eyes" at the wedding of Mr. Lovett and Julia Roberts.

But what really caught my eye was when Mr. Ramsey turned up on the public television show "Austin City Limits" last year as part of a memorial to Walter Hyatt, a kindred spirit who died in the 1996 Valujet crash in Florida.

Mr. Lovett was the host, not surprisingly, and there was Mr. Ramsey, bearded, gray and better fed than he was as a kid in a cowboy hat smiling slyly on his green album cover. His voice sounded different as he sang two Hyatt songs -- richer, more confident, ready to take back out on the road. So it was that I started wondering if Willis Alan Ramsey might walk among us again.

Now, at age 49, he's actually out there doing live radio sets and playing gigs in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, mixing the songs off his album with those he wrote in self-imposed exile. He even found a manager who can play guitar, banjo and pedal steel for him if the need arises. I know this because Mr. Ramsey told me when I called him at home in Austin the other day. After 28 years, it seemed like the thing to do once I had his phone number.

E described his vanishing act as the only possible defense for someone as young and sensitive as he was back then. "Everything just got kind of stressful for me," he said. There was a falling-out with his label, Shelter Records, and then, after several years of touring, there was the "urban cowboy" phenomenon. "It seemed like more and more I was playing rowdy Texas bars that had mechanical bulls," Mr. Ramsey said.

Imagining him in that setting -- this perfectionist legendary for tying himself, and others, in knots -- it's easy to understand why he took his leave in the early 1980's. He lived in London and in an old signal tower outside Edinburgh, and he would have tried Dublin on for size, he said, if he hadn't come home to renew his visa, met Ms. Rogers and married her. They settled in Nashville, but when their daughter was born three years ago, Mr. Ramsey said, "my wife told me she was going to be raised in Texas, and I was welcome to come along."

The more Mr. Ramsey and I talked, the more he gravitated toward reminiscences of the cherished moments that the musician's life has brought him. Like Greg Allman playing "Midnight Rider" for him on a funky piano before the outside world ever heard it. And Leon Russell giving him, an untested kid, the run of his home and studio in the Hollywood Hills. Even when his record deal soured, Mr. Ramsey said, he still counted himself lucky, having Professor Longhair, the New Orleans pianist, open for him in Houston and, in turn, touring as the opening act for the bluesmen Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee.

It was, I couldn't help thinking, a time when ears were open to everything on the musical menu, a time far different than our current never-mix-genres era. And yet Mr. Ramsey insisted that his audiences today are better listeners than those in the past even if they do keep requesting the song he will call only "Muskrat Candlelight." This mindset, he told me, "is like I wish it would have been in the 70's." He wouldn't have discovered the change, though, if Mr. Lovett hadn't extended his hand. "Guys you influenced come back and they influence you," Mr. Ramsey said. "That's the way it's supposed to be."

His spirits thus buoyed, Mr. Ramsey talked about the possibility of a second album, maybe consisting of material taped during his radio performances, maybe a studio affair produced by Mr. Lovett. But there was a story he told that, no matter how much I want to hear his new songs, seems to me a far better fit for such an elusive figure. It sprang from a show in Dallas a decade or so ago, the last time he ventured into the spotlight.

"When are you going to make another album?" shouted someone in the crowd.

"What was wrong with the first one?" Mr. Ramsey said.

John Schulian is a television writer and producer in Los Angeles.