Lewis - The Phantom Dandy

There are stories tied to the world of music so peculiar that, once they emerge from their niche and reach general attention, they're hard to believe. Artists shamefully forgotten who, as Sixto Rodriguez teaches us, find in the new digital era the space that was denied to them decades earlier. And yet we're so used to being tricked, to being deceived, that the easiest thing to believe is that we're being told an intriguing story just to better sell a particular product.

When Lights In The Attic announced the reissue of L'Amour, a 1983 record credited to the mysterious Lewis, many thought it was a hoax. And yet some songs by this mysterious singer with the soft voice could already be found online four or five years earlier: a rather overcomplicated plan just to launch a record, wouldn't you say? Still, doubts lingered for many, despite the wealth of information that later emerged, and the discovery of two other forgotten albums only reinforced, for some, the idea of a scam. Yet Lewis really does exist and, a rare thing these days, has no interest in becoming famous.

It all began with a private pressing found by collector Jon Murphy in an Edmonton record shop, later shared online by Aaron Levin, a true fanatic of private press records. This discovery, thanks to a few liner notes, led to tracking down some of the people who had worked on L'Amour, among them photographer Ed Colver, who was the first to reveal Lewis's true identity: Randall Wulff, a charming figure who drove a convertible Mercedes and, during the recording of the album, stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel with a girl who looked every bit like a model. His check for payment of the photographs, 250 dollars, later bounced.

In 1983, Randall Wulff showed up at the Music Lab in Los Angeles determined to record his own songs. There he hired Bob Kinsey as sound engineer and Philip Lees on synth, and recorded the album, later released by R.A.W. Records, an unknown label. L'Amour is an album out of time, especially when placed in the context of early-1980s Los Angeles, where punk had been replaced by new wave and synths weren't exactly being used to weave delicate, ethereal musical textures. It's a collection of songs as elusive as their author, with blurred edges, where the interplay between synth, voice and piano is anything but coordinated. Lewis's sweet mumbling over a handful of piano chords still manages, in some strange way, to connect emotionally with Lees's work on the synth, a true exercise in alienation that at times props up and supports Lewis's singing, while at other times drifts off on its own, as if lost in another dimension. The songs speak of love as a sweet memory, tinged with a lingering melancholy, rather than something to be relied upon in the future. Lewis is that latin lover who seduces you with a smile, tells you his incredible stories with tenderness, and disappears the next morning back into the nothing he came from. On "I Thought The World On You", "Let's Fall In Love Tonight", "Romance For Two" you get the impression that everything has already happened, yet, at the same time, that it could still happen, if only one let go. Lewis is romantic without being saccharine; his whispers aren't tears of compassion for what has been, but rather nostalgia for a dream from which one woke up too soon. "Cool Night In Paris" draws on French chanson, thanks to a few well-chosen guitar chords, and ties it inseparably to the character of Lewis, an American dandy with gentle manners trying to freeze that single moment of happiness lived on the streets of Paris. If a Nick Drake or an Arthur Russell had ever recorded an album with Angelo Badalamenti, L'Amour would probably have been the result.

Once the work was complete, Lewis/Randall Wulff vanished into thin air, like a ghost. Left behind: a dedication to model Christie Brinkley, a bounced check, a few photographs, and ten heartbreaking songs about love.

Meanwhile, in the present day, the search for the artist reborn as Lewis continues in Alberta, Canada. There, a nephew is tracked down, who claims to remember Randall Wulff as a stockbroker who had vanished without a trace years earlier. The nephew does provide one useful lead, however: among the many aliases Wulff used, there was also that of Lewis Baloue, which leads Light In The Attic to Vancouver, where a new album, Romantic Times, is unearthed in the private collection of DJ Kevin "Sipreano" Howes. At almost the same moment, in the very same shop where L'Amour had first been discovered, a similar copy of this extremely rare record surfaces and is put up on eBay, where it will eventually sell for the astonishing sum of $1,825. Word spreads, and Lewis becomes the story of the year.

Randall Wulff thus resurfaces in 1985 on Canadian soil, two years after the release of L'Amour, in Calgary. At Thunder Road Studios he finds Dan Lowe, with whom he will work on Romantic Times, under the alias Lewis Baloue, further fueling his legend. Impeccable in an all-white suit, he's photographed in front of his Mercedes and a private jet: he's the alpha male, looking every bit the yuppie, yet his music is the complete opposite of the image Lewis projects of himself. Lewis is a gentle troubadour of love, and his songs are comforting embraces. Romantic Times gives us a fuller picture of Lewis the artist. Wulff's voice is warmer here than the barely audible whisper of his debut. The stories are less personal, and Lewis sings them with clever lyrics, revealing a certain awareness of his own songwriting skills. The fragile balance built in L'Amour couldn't afford any instrumental interference, whereas here Lewis makes room for new elements, like the lush saxophone of "We Danced All Night" or the drum machine of "So Be In Love With Me". But the ethereal beauty we came to know in "L'Amour" is still there, only now it no longer rests on the gentle notes of a piano, but on the effects of a somewhat cheap-sounding drum machine. "It's A New Day" and "Where Did My Love Go Away" are delicate flashes of beauty within a fascinating record, one that nonetheless lacks the almost mystical charm of its predecessor.

As expected, Lewis vanishes once again, but journalist and filmmaker Jack D. Fleischer and Light In The Attic boss Matt Sullivan are determined not to give up the chase. After all, the reissue royalties remain frozen while waiting to find the rightful author of the songs, and an artist deserves to know that their art, whatever it may be, is finally being recognized. And, as if in a movie, thanks to the right tip, they manage to pull it off. They find Lewis in Canada, outside a coffee shop, dressed head to toe in white exactly as he was thirty years earlier. He's relaxed, enjoying life with style, just as one might expect from a man like him. He has absolutely no idea what's been happening around his music, and seems genuinely surprised when the two reveal they've been tracking him down for years. Randall Wulff comes across as a man who has moved on, both in life and in music, and who has no wish to look back. He has no interest in money, yet he doesn't disown his past either, about which he's shared some amusing stories without ever revealing everything. From Romantic Times to the present day, it seems Wulff never really stopped recording music (possibly even in Europe) purely for his own satisfaction, and a new album soon surfaced from a Vancouver studio, Fiasco Bros, recorded under the alias Randy Duke (at 00:50 of this video, Lewis can briefly be seen at work). The record, titled Love Ain't No Mystery, was recorded in the early 2010s after years of attempts and was later reissued in 2014 by Summersteps. Len Osanic, who handled the recordings, later offered some insights to help better understand the artist Randall Wulff. Osanic describes him as a maniac for silence, obsessively attentive to every last detail. Someone who "would show up at the studio with four different acoustic guitars, switching between them depending on which one best matched the mood of the day" and "capable of sitting in silence for ten minutes before recording, just to get into the right headspace". Osanic adds: "He's the most delicate artist I've ever worked with. He could only wear a certain kind of sweater during recording sessions, because any other shirt would make too much noise".

Love Ain't No Mystery is an album quite different from its two predecessors, yet there's no doubt it's the work of the very same man behind L'Amour. Lewis's voice is unmistakable, as expressive and, by now, as familiar as ever. The fifteen tracks that make up the record mark a shift in Wulff's work, all of them extremely drawn out (only one clocks in under five minutes) and all built around the usual subject: love. But Lewis is no longer the romantic seducer of the Eighties; he's now a man with a broken heart, unafraid to confront it head-on. The songs are stripped of the ethereal synths heard on his earlier records; here, the artist stands bare, with no filters. His songwriting is direct, almost maddening in the way certain lines are repeated, as if he were trying to purge himself of some sin. Lewis's vocal performance is of tremendous quality, and it's truly what defines every single track; on songs like "Fountains" or "I Come From Texas", Wulff pushes his vocal cords to the limit, creating a kind of tremolo in his voice that's deeply expressive of his own emotion. On others, like "I Was Not Shy", he returns to those soft whispers we've come to know so well. Love Ain't No Mystery is a fascinating, substantial, even excessive work: not even a voice like Lewis's can hold one's attention for so long without stirring up a touch of boredom. And yet there's something about the mature Lewis that intrigues and captivates just as much as the Eighties playboy did, still capable of stirring emotion after all these years.

Whether or not you choose to believe the story of Randall Wulff/Lewis, what remains of this almost unbelievable tale is a collection of poignant songs about love, the kind that only someone who has lived life to the fullest can sing without ever slipping into cliché. A timeless artist, able to travel through time itself in order to appear at just the right moment to the ears and hearts of those who truly want to listen. Exactly as any self-respecting ghost should know how to do.

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