pmsummer
simul justus et peccator
Seminal songwriter Willis Alan Ramsey prepares his second album - 37 years later
09:14 AM CDT on Wednesday, September 16, 2009
By ALAN PEPPARD / The Dallas Morning News
apeppard@dallasnews.com
In 1972, three years after graduating from Highland Park High School, singer-songwriter Willis Alan Ramsey released an album destined to become sacred parchment to the burgeoning country-rock movement.
But in a Zen career move, the 21-year-old declined to record a follow-up to his auspicious debut. He shunned the spotlight and led a peripatetic life in London; Edinburgh, Scotland; Nashville; and Austin while artists like Jimmy Buffett, America, Waylon Jennings and Lyle Lovett mined his abbreviated oeuvre for covers of "The Ballad of Spider John," "Satin Sheets" and "Angel Eyes." (Captain & Tennille cut a bastardized pop version of "Muskrat Candelight" and rode it to No. 4 on the charts as "Muskrat Love.")
The less Ramsey did, the more famous his one nearly perfect album, Willis Alan Ramsey, became. Like a guitar-wielding J.D. Salinger, the fame-wary troubadour became the focus of decades of speculation about a follow-up. And now, after 37 years, Ramsey is putting the finishing mix on the 10 tracks of his second album, Gentilly, and preparing to go on the road.
On Friday in Tulsa, Okla., he'll preview the album in a sentimental concert at the Church Studio, built by Ramsey's first musical champion, Leon Russell. PBS cameras will tape the show for a documentary.
"This event will be a really nice bookend for me," Ramsey says. "I was raised musically by all these incredible session players from Tulsa who had gone out to LA."
Birth of a classic
Like bottled messages tossed into the sea, the songs of the first album continue to be discovered.
"I've got a turntable, and last Christmas, my kids and I started putting on vinyl," says Jerry Jeff Walker, who recorded a version of Ramsey's song "Northeast Texas Women." "We put on Willis Alan's record, and they went absolutely nuts. They loved it. And, they took it. So I lost my album."
Ramsey was a songwriting prodigy who was running with the Allman Brothers and members of Eric Clapton's band by the time he was 19. But his talent was not forged in the blast furnace of poverty, it sprang from the genteel affluence afforded by his father's high position at Republic National Bank. When his older brothers left home, he seized their domain – the small staff apartment at his parents' University Park home at the corner of McFarlin and Douglas.
"That's where the trouble started," he says with a laugh. "Literally, the day my middle brother drove off to Centenary in Louisiana, I started pulling my stuff out to that room."
Hours in the demo booths at Ernstrom's Records on Lovers Lane were followed by more hours of listening and guitar playing in his tiny room adjacent to the garage. By high school graduation, he was a perambulating encyclopedia of musicology. And soon after arriving at the University of Texas in Austin, he was booked as an act on the National College Coffeehouse Circuit.
"I got very, very lucky when I was very, very young," he says.
He was also very ambitious.
Performing on the same Austin bill with the Allman Brothers and Russell, he knocked on their doors at the fabled Villa Capri motel on I-35, auditioned and ended up hanging out with Dickie Betts, the late Duane Allman and Gregg Allman, who flew him to Macon, Ga., and tried to sign him to Capricorn Records.
Russell then tried to sign him in Los Angeles to his Shelter Records.
"With the cockiness of a 19-year-old, I said, 'Well, Gregg Allman wants to produce me on Capricorn Records, how can you beat that deal?' "
Russell offered to let the teen live in his home recording studio in North Hollywood and teach him how to use it. "That was like catnip to me," Ramsey says.
When young Willis Alan Ramsey awoke each day, he never knew who he'd meet. "George Harrison would come by the studio with Phil Spector, then it would be Joe Cocker's band or James Taylor's band. And I was living there."
Soon, Ramsey's album came together with Russell on keyboards and some of the biggest session musicians in the business filling out the sound.
"Not many people put that many good songs in one album," says Walker. "We were figuring it was a strong beginning to something else."
Road to 'Gentilly'
But Ramsey was physically and emotionally drained from birthing the record. He was also disenchanted with LA and returned to Austin, and by the mid-'70s, he was attempting to build his own recording studio.
"I learned to record the Leon Russell way, which was my damage," Ramsey says. "It required that you have your own recording studio and you pay attention to things that end up costing a lot of money." The Austin studio idea was abandoned, as was a concurrent first marriage.
A decade later, living in Leith, Scotland, Ramsey was preparing to move to Ireland when he returned to the States for visa reasons and met and married fellow singer-songwriter Alison Rogers, a graduate of the Hockaday School.
Together, they co-wrote "That's Right (You're Not From Texas)" with Lyle Lovett, who put it on The Road to Ensenada.
When the couple had a daughter and relocated to Wimberley in the Hill Country, dreams began to materialize. They built their own recording studio in a former day-care center and top-tier musicians made their way to town to record Gentilly.
Longtime Eric Clapton drummer Jamie Oldaker co-produced the record with Ramsey and Rogers.
Players included Vicktor Krauss, a veteran of Lyle Lovett's band, on bass, Sam Bush on mandolin and Willie Nelson's longtime accompanist Mickey Raphael on harmonica.
"We hope to have it mixed and out by the first of the year," Ramsey says of Gentilly.
And to show he means business, he has signed Frank Riley's High Road Touring to book gigs. "We're starting to do some early touring so I can get my road chops up," he adds.
But four decades after his seminal first album, is he worried about releasing a second?
"No," he says evenly. "I'm due – long overdue."
Willis Alan Ramsey performs at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Church Studio, 304 S. Trenton Ave., Tulsa, Okla. Tickets $125. Host committee tickets, which include a Thursday night reception with the artist and other performers, $1,000 per couple. Call or e-mail Bill Keffer at 214-696-2050, bkeffer@mklaw.net.
09:14 AM CDT on Wednesday, September 16, 2009
By ALAN PEPPARD / The Dallas Morning News
apeppard@dallasnews.com
In 1972, three years after graduating from Highland Park High School, singer-songwriter Willis Alan Ramsey released an album destined to become sacred parchment to the burgeoning country-rock movement.
But in a Zen career move, the 21-year-old declined to record a follow-up to his auspicious debut. He shunned the spotlight and led a peripatetic life in London; Edinburgh, Scotland; Nashville; and Austin while artists like Jimmy Buffett, America, Waylon Jennings and Lyle Lovett mined his abbreviated oeuvre for covers of "The Ballad of Spider John," "Satin Sheets" and "Angel Eyes." (Captain & Tennille cut a bastardized pop version of "Muskrat Candelight" and rode it to No. 4 on the charts as "Muskrat Love.")
The less Ramsey did, the more famous his one nearly perfect album, Willis Alan Ramsey, became. Like a guitar-wielding J.D. Salinger, the fame-wary troubadour became the focus of decades of speculation about a follow-up. And now, after 37 years, Ramsey is putting the finishing mix on the 10 tracks of his second album, Gentilly, and preparing to go on the road.
On Friday in Tulsa, Okla., he'll preview the album in a sentimental concert at the Church Studio, built by Ramsey's first musical champion, Leon Russell. PBS cameras will tape the show for a documentary.
"This event will be a really nice bookend for me," Ramsey says. "I was raised musically by all these incredible session players from Tulsa who had gone out to LA."
Birth of a classic
Like bottled messages tossed into the sea, the songs of the first album continue to be discovered.
"I've got a turntable, and last Christmas, my kids and I started putting on vinyl," says Jerry Jeff Walker, who recorded a version of Ramsey's song "Northeast Texas Women." "We put on Willis Alan's record, and they went absolutely nuts. They loved it. And, they took it. So I lost my album."
Ramsey was a songwriting prodigy who was running with the Allman Brothers and members of Eric Clapton's band by the time he was 19. But his talent was not forged in the blast furnace of poverty, it sprang from the genteel affluence afforded by his father's high position at Republic National Bank. When his older brothers left home, he seized their domain – the small staff apartment at his parents' University Park home at the corner of McFarlin and Douglas.
"That's where the trouble started," he says with a laugh. "Literally, the day my middle brother drove off to Centenary in Louisiana, I started pulling my stuff out to that room."
Hours in the demo booths at Ernstrom's Records on Lovers Lane were followed by more hours of listening and guitar playing in his tiny room adjacent to the garage. By high school graduation, he was a perambulating encyclopedia of musicology. And soon after arriving at the University of Texas in Austin, he was booked as an act on the National College Coffeehouse Circuit.
"I got very, very lucky when I was very, very young," he says.
He was also very ambitious.
Performing on the same Austin bill with the Allman Brothers and Russell, he knocked on their doors at the fabled Villa Capri motel on I-35, auditioned and ended up hanging out with Dickie Betts, the late Duane Allman and Gregg Allman, who flew him to Macon, Ga., and tried to sign him to Capricorn Records.
Russell then tried to sign him in Los Angeles to his Shelter Records.
"With the cockiness of a 19-year-old, I said, 'Well, Gregg Allman wants to produce me on Capricorn Records, how can you beat that deal?' "
Russell offered to let the teen live in his home recording studio in North Hollywood and teach him how to use it. "That was like catnip to me," Ramsey says.
When young Willis Alan Ramsey awoke each day, he never knew who he'd meet. "George Harrison would come by the studio with Phil Spector, then it would be Joe Cocker's band or James Taylor's band. And I was living there."
Soon, Ramsey's album came together with Russell on keyboards and some of the biggest session musicians in the business filling out the sound.
"Not many people put that many good songs in one album," says Walker. "We were figuring it was a strong beginning to something else."
Road to 'Gentilly'
But Ramsey was physically and emotionally drained from birthing the record. He was also disenchanted with LA and returned to Austin, and by the mid-'70s, he was attempting to build his own recording studio.
"I learned to record the Leon Russell way, which was my damage," Ramsey says. "It required that you have your own recording studio and you pay attention to things that end up costing a lot of money." The Austin studio idea was abandoned, as was a concurrent first marriage.
A decade later, living in Leith, Scotland, Ramsey was preparing to move to Ireland when he returned to the States for visa reasons and met and married fellow singer-songwriter Alison Rogers, a graduate of the Hockaday School.
Together, they co-wrote "That's Right (You're Not From Texas)" with Lyle Lovett, who put it on The Road to Ensenada.
When the couple had a daughter and relocated to Wimberley in the Hill Country, dreams began to materialize. They built their own recording studio in a former day-care center and top-tier musicians made their way to town to record Gentilly.
Longtime Eric Clapton drummer Jamie Oldaker co-produced the record with Ramsey and Rogers.
Players included Vicktor Krauss, a veteran of Lyle Lovett's band, on bass, Sam Bush on mandolin and Willie Nelson's longtime accompanist Mickey Raphael on harmonica.
"We hope to have it mixed and out by the first of the year," Ramsey says of Gentilly.
And to show he means business, he has signed Frank Riley's High Road Touring to book gigs. "We're starting to do some early touring so I can get my road chops up," he adds.
But four decades after his seminal first album, is he worried about releasing a second?
"No," he says evenly. "I'm due – long overdue."
Willis Alan Ramsey performs at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Church Studio, 304 S. Trenton Ave., Tulsa, Okla. Tickets $125. Host committee tickets, which include a Thursday night reception with the artist and other performers, $1,000 per couple. Call or e-mail Bill Keffer at 214-696-2050, bkeffer@mklaw.net.
