Johnny Dowd Quickly Making Up for the Years Before His Late Start

By RICHARD CROMELIN

May 31, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

In his song “Big Wave,” Johnny Dowd creates a character who lies on his deathbed and recalls his grand adventures as a surfer--which turn out to be pure fantasy, “West Virginia born and raised/Had my surfboard on my car/I’ve left home many times/But I never went too far,” he sings.

“It was just one of those songs about someone wanting to leave home,” says Dowd, who plays the Knitting Factory Hollywood on Friday. “It’s about a character that wanted that but never could cut the ties.”

The theme resonates for Dowd, who really found his footing only four years ago when, at age 49, he recorded a debut album that would spark one of the unlikeliest music careers currently unfolding. Now with three albums of eccentric, harrowing songs in his catalog, this upstate New York moving company owner finds himself compared to musicians such as Nick Cave and Captain Beefheart, filmmaker David Lynch and author Raymond Carver.

“I could have stayed, and I often wonder if I’d have been happier,” continues Dowd, who departed the small Oklahoma town of Pauls Valley at age 17. “The only ambition I’ve ever had in my life really was to leave home. Once I accomplished that I was at kind of loose ends for the next 30 years.”

His long drift and late start are two of the hooks that make Dowd’s story compelling, but the interest from critics and his cult audience comes mainly from his doggedly individual songs about victims and victimizers, men, women and children caught in cycles of abuse and dependency. On his current album, “Temporary Shelter,” he and his band detonate his vivid tales with a sound that crosses rockabilly mystery with psychedelic freakout.

The intensity and detail of Dowd’s stories suggest an uncomfortable familiarity with their events, but the singer himself is a few steps healthier than most of his characters--though he admits to a propensity toward “chaos.”

“My mom was great, my dad was great, had a big extended family, great sisters,” says Dowd. “I got no complaints about anything as far as the hand life has dealt me. . . . I’ve dealt with violent situations and unfortunate circumstances and stuff, but I don’t think it would really make that much difference [in the music]. . . .

“There are people who live in that world, they swim in that sea, but for me it was just like goin’ down three times. . . . Mental confusion, that kind of thing.”

As a teenager, Dowd went from Oklahoma to Memphis to the Army, then spent a couple of years at Cal State Long Beach on the G.I. Bill.

“I think I thought I was just gonna be a cool guy,” he says. “That was gonna carry me through, and it did till I realized you can’t be a cool guy and be thirtysomething years old and be a dishwasher. So that’s when I bought a guitar. You could be a cool guy with no money if you had a guitar.”

Dowd had a full tank of anger and ambition, but he pretty much spun his wheels.

“I got nowhere, till I finally had no one to play with and no one to see me if I did play,” he says. “So the impurity of my motives caught up with me.”

He began recording his first album, “Wrong Side of Memphis,” in a spirit of spite, but then a funny thing happened.

“I ended up actually expressing myself, I guess, which wasn’t what I had in mind. I didn’t think I had anything to express and that anybody would be interested if I did. And then I did it and people showed an interest, so I was completely thrown. My whole view of life in a way got turned around, and things kind of went from there.”

Dowd released his second collection, “Pictures From Life’s Other Side,” in 1999 and “Temporary Shelter” this year. Both are on the KOCH label, which also reissued “Memphis” last month.

Dowd still isn’t self-sufficient as a musician, and he continues to operate Zolar Moving Co., which he co-founded in the mid-’70s. He plans to release his next album, “The Pawnbroker’s Wife,” early next year, and while his pace has changed, he has no worries about going dry as a writer.

“I try to avoid anything too exciting at this point in life,” he says. “I’m not really looking in the way that I was when I was younger--you know, when you’re going out of your way to put yourself in situations. Now just a normal day is happy. I’m happy with that. I still have plenty to draw on.”

* Johnny Dowd, with Ramsay Midwood and Bob Forrest, Friday at the Knitting Factory Hollywood, 7021 Hollywood Blvd., L.A., 8 p.m. $12. (323) 463-0204.