'Alpaca Lips' - Article by Fred Mills
for Phoenix New Times - June 2000

When Tucson musician Rainer Ptacek died at the age of 46 on November 12,
1997, he left behind more than a wife and kids and an international community
of grieving friends and fans. Rainer -- stricken by an abrupt seizure one
February morning in '96 while riding his bicycle to work and subsequently
diagnosed with a brain cancer -- also left behind a trove of recordings, one
of which has just been issued, kicking off a trilogy series of posthumous releases.

Thanks to the diligence of Rainer's widow Patti Keating, his friend Howe Gelb
(of Giant Sand) and others, Alpaca Lips is now available on Germany's
Glitterhouse Records. An astonishingly pure, intensely soulful collection of
acoustic folk and blues that actually resides somewhere in a rarefied
between-genres space, the disc was recorded and compiled by Rainer himself in
early '96, just prior to the fateful seizure.

"Before Rainer got sick," explains Keating, "he'd recorded a lot of songs. He
wanted to get these out in Europe; he was already hooked up with Glitterhouse
because of Nocturnes [his  '95 album issued by the label]. And then he got
sick, and it was just pushed under the rug."

Keating recalls going through some of Rainer's tapes some time after his
death and coming across a DAT labeled "alpaca lips." ("Just his funny little
sense of humor, a play on words -- I think he actually wanted a closeup
picture of an alpaca on the cover!" laughs Keating, at the memory.) Knowing
her husband's intentions, she revived the project precisely as he'd conceived it.

While it may be folly to second-guess the dearly departed, Keating suggests
that Rainer may have subconsciously left clues to make such an endeavor
possible. Not only did he secure a completed, sequenced and labeled DAT, he
also tucked away scores of handwritten notes and hours of tapes chronicling
long practice sessions; radiation treatment and chemotherapy had affected his
memory, forcing him to relearn his own music. Says Keating, "It's almost as
if he left us road maps to where he was going because he wrote down
everything. The tapes, too, I think that was also his memory."            

One of Alpaca Lips' most riveting numbers is a cover of  Stevie Wonder's
"Pastime Paradise." With minimalist backing from Giant Sand/Calexico's Joey
Burns (standup bass) and John Convertino (vibraphone), Rainer hangs
shimmering, spider's-silk notes in the air; a fragile, world-weary vocal
pushes Wonder's cautionary rumination into the realm of existentialism when
he sing, "We're spending too much of our lives/ Living in a pastime paradise/
Yeah, we're wasting most of our time/ Glorifying days done gone behind/ Tell
me who of them/ Have come to be?/ How many of them/ Are you and me?"

"You know, that one was recorded right before he got sick, which is why it
seems so profound to me," muses Keating. "It's real eerie to me. Almost like,
not an omen, but... [voice trailing off momentarily] almost like he knew it
was coming on. A premonition."

***

Born on June 7, 1951, in East Germany, Rainer Jaromir Ptacek grew up in
Chicago after his family fled the Communist country in 1953. Musically
inclined from childhood, in the mid '60s Rainer swapped violin for guitar.
(He once quipped to this writer, "None of the Beatles, it seemed, were
interested in violin.") A decade later he'd become a fixture on the Tucson
music scene, ultimately garnering an international reputation as a song
stylist and slide virtuoso that had critics speaking of him in the same
breath as Ry Cooder and John Fahey while pondering the intricacies of an
elaborate tapeloop and delay pedal strategy he'd developed during his later
years that allowed him to sound like three guitarists at once. In addition to
five albums (solo and with his power blues trio Das Combo) released between
1986 and 1994, he collaborated with everyone from Giant Sand and Germany's
F.S.K. to ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons and Led Zep's Robert Plant. (Consult
Britain's sa-wa-ro website, 
www.sa-wa-ro.freeserve.co.uk/Rainer-Pages/rainer-albums.htm, 
for a discographical overview.)

After his death, aiming to expand his musical legacy, Keating and Gelb began
planning an ongoing archival project. Glitterhouse Records was only too happy
to get involved, having worked with Rainer previously on a CD reissue of the
'86 Rainer & Das Combo Barefoot Rock album and the Nocturnes collection of
ambient-tinged solo pieces.

Glitterhouse owner Reinhard Holstein remembers his first exposure to Rainer's
music: "I bought [1992 album] Worried Spirits and loved it. Then came Texas
Tapes [1993] and the fact that it was unmistakably ZZ Top backing him blew me
away. My initial impressions then were the same as they are now: I like the
way he constructs his songs, I love his electric guitar work, and I'm totally
into his dobro virtuosity. But what I like most is his voice, or the
combination of his guitar style and the vocals. That howl is maximum
intensity for me.

"We did Nocturnes, got a lot of great press and did reasonably well. And I
knew that Rainer had something coming; he'd sent me some of the stuff that
finally made it onto Alpaca Lips. But at the time the record was not put
together yet and he wanted to send me something that was finished. So now, we
want to do it right, and give it a fair chance to make an impact."

Alpaca Lips includes the Wonder song, one each by Greg Brown and Howe Gelb,
and 14 Rainer originals. Notable among them: "Bo Weavil," a funky country
blues and a vocal showcase for the slurring, falsetto-swooping Rainer; the
ominously droning, almost wraithlike "Rude World"; a nine-minute freeform
improvisation called "Horse Hair"; and a playful, touching number, "Rudy With
A Flashlight," about watching his son searching the starry heavens with the
light. Complex and riveting yet accessible on multiple levels, the album
locates Rainer at an artistic -- songwriting, singing and playing -- peak.

But wait; there's more.

"It took some time for Rainer to relearn everything he'd known before the
seizure," says Howe Gelb of the initial recovery period. "The most amazing
part of his trek -- which was unbearably frustrating, given how his brain
wouldn't work with him for the longest time to remember so many things, let
alone the coordination it takes for his hands to carry out his brain's ideas
-- was that he not only was able to teach himself all over again, his
stunning achievement was then to surpass his ability before he got sick! I
remember coming over to where he was practicing what would become 'The Inner
Flame' [recorded by Giant Sand and Rainer as the title track for the '97 Inner
 Flame Rainer tribute/benefit album featuring Page & Plant, Emmylou Harris PJ
Harvey and more]. The moment I heard it I could hear the progression of his
writing ability. And it was as if he were never sick at all. It was
astonishing to me since I'd watched him struggle with relearning to even hold
a guitar again!"

Another triumph occurred during prior to Rainer's relapse, at a Tucson
concert on June 6, 1997. Recorded professionally and now slated to become the
second installment in the trilogy, Live At The Performance Center is, by
Gelb's description, "the best live recording I have ever heard from anyone,
anywhere, from any time. And if you listen with a critical ear -- which is
hard to do, given the emotional status -- he keeps getting it better and
better as the set goes on. He's on a plane I have never heard anyone ever get to."

The third release will be called The Farm, comprising new songs culled from
the more than 15 hours of material recorded in the weeks immediately prior to
Rainer's passing. Recalls Gelb, "That came about after his final seizure [in
'97]. I raced home from a European tour to find him talking in numbers.
Again, he slowly began to relearn his guitar, but this time the end was
imminent. We all knew it. And we had to tell him as well. Anyway, I mentioned
to him that he was coming up with all kinds of ideas on the guitar, would he
like to record again? To focus on that as for the healing it can do and the
relief of the art he gave himself to his whole life. A day or so later, he
was up for it. We headed up to Harvey's place [Harvey Moltz, Tucson studio
owner] and three sessions later we had a slew of material."

Glitterhouse is additionally set to reissue Worried Spirits and The Texas
Tapes, both originally released by Demon Records but currently out of print.
(Consult the label's website at www.glitterhouse.com for mailorder details.)

Meanwhile, Gelb, who penned Alpaca Lips' heartfelt liner notes, observes that
there's perhaps a deeper significance to what Rainer accomplished, saying,
"What a great struggle for him at times to even read and make sense of the
notes he'd made! The spine tingle is the delivery from a man who is perched
on the precipice and able to look over into the void and deliver still, in
this world, what he sees on both sides.

"What can I say? You can hear it."