Career Is Launched by Chance Encounter

A funny thing happened on the way to Nashville, where James McMurtry hoped to find fame and fortune as a country singer.

It was September, 1988, and McMurtry had had his fill of playing tiny roadhouses and honky-tonks in the Southwest and Alaska. He had just cut a demonstration tape and was eager to do some label-shopping in the Country Capital.

En route, McMurtry stopped off in Washington, D.C., to play a couple of dates with Kinky Friedman and to visit McMurtry’s father, who owned a bookstore there.

Larry McMurtry, a novelist and screenwriter known for “The Last Picture Show” and “The Lonesome Dove,” mentioned to his son that he was writing a screenplay with John Cougar Mellencamp. James McMurtry asked his father to pass along a copy of his tape “because I thought Mellencamp might know what to do with it,” he said.

Mellencamp did.

“I was staying in the upstairs storeroom, and one morning a few days later I checked my father’s answering machine and there was a message from Mellencamp,” McMurtry recalled. “It said, ‘Have your kid call me.’

“So I called him up and the first thing he said was, ‘Do you have enough songs for an album?’ When I said no, he asked me, ‘Can you write some more?’ I said yeah, and he said, ‘OK, let’s make a record.’ ”

Mellencamp subsequently secured McMurtry a recording contract with Columbia Records. The two began working on the album last February, in Mellencamp’s Belmont Studios in Bloomington, Ind., with the producer adding a decided folk-rock touch.

“Too Long in the Wasteland” was an immediate hit, critically as well as commercially, when it was released four months ago.

Praise began pouring in, including a review from the Boston Globe that hailed the album as “a tour de force of Lone Star wanderlust, small-town chatter and crazed relationships with lovable losers and boozers.”

The album began climbing the national charts, and its first single, “Painting by Numbers,” was picked up by more than 100 album-rock radio stations nationwide.

A month after the album’s release, McMurtry hit the road, opening for--and oftentimes stealing the show from--the likes of Arlo Guthrie, Nanci Griffith, Jerry Jeff Walker and the Indigo Girls, with whom he will perform tonight at the California Theatre in downtown San Diego.

And he recently made his national television debut on “Late Night With David Letterman.”

McMurtry takes it all in stride.

“I’m just happy to be working,” he said.

One reason McMurtry is finding all the work he can handle is timing.

His emergence comes when folk-rock singer-songwriters are getting more attention than they have since the Greenwich Village days of the early 1960s. Among his illustrious compadres are Tracy Chapman, Suzanne Vega and Edie Brickell and New Bohemians.

“I don’t really watch trends, but I’m glad to see these people are getting signed,” McMurtry said. “One of the things I keep hearing is that there’s this resurgence in literate songwriters, but it’s not really a resurgence at all--people like Guy Clark and Robert Earl Keene have been out doing that for years, but nobody paid any attention to it.”

McMurtry, 27, was born in Ft. Worth. His mother taught him to play the guitar when he was 7, and he began writing songs when he was 18.

“Actually, I began trying to write songs,” McMurtry said. “I never learned how to finish them until I was 25 or so.”

Did his father, the master wordsmith, give him any assistance?

“Not really,” McMurtry said. “Writing books and screenplays and writing songs is completely different. One is prose, the other is poetry. Prose is the long form--you’ve got a whole book to get your story across--whereas in songs, you have to say everything in three verses and a chorus, if you even want to write the chorus.

“I don’t like choruses. I think they should be outlawed. A lot of times, people come up with good lines, stick them in the chorus, and then beat them to death.”

After graduating from high school in 1980, McMurtry moved to Tucson and studied English for two years at the University of Arizona. He dropped out as a sophomore and began a new life as an itinerant musician, tending bar and working on farms between his infrequent bookings.

His chance encounter with John Cougar Mellencamp may have caused his fortunes to soar, but it hasn’t gone to his head. He harbors no change-the-world delusions of grandeur.