Singing a new song

Though Andy Pratt has been churning out his own intensely personal songs for four decades, one Rolling Stones cover he lately has added to his repertoire rings especially true for him.

"I picked this song because it has a message -- I lived through it," he says when introducing "19th Nervous Breakdown."

Now living in Amesbury, the 60 -year-old songwriter has experienced some of the highest highs and lowest lows the music industry can muster. They're chronicled in his new memoir, "Shiver in the Night."

In a dogged comeback effort that has been years in the making, he has had a few glimmers of hope of late, most recently performing for an audience of record-industry insiders over St. Patrick's Day weekend in Austin, Texas, for the second consecutive year at the career-boosting South By Southwest music conference.

A wildly creative singer and multi-instrumentalist born into old money, Pratt was signed by music mogul Clive Davis, worked closely with Bee Gees producer Arif Mardin, and had his most familiar song, 1973's "Avenging Annie," covered by the Who's Roger Daltrey.

His own version, a high-pitched romp that reimagined Annie Oakley for the hippie generation, made its promotional debut on a split single with a song by a scruffy young troubadour named Bruce Springsteen.

A few years later, Rolling Stone magazine declared that Pratt's music "has forever changed the face of rock."

But the singer's eccentricities over the course of several years gave marketing departments migraines, and the major labels lost interest by the end of the '70s. He was troubled by two divorces and his estrangement from his family.

He turned to Christianity and moved to the Netherlands, where he did social work and produced enough born-again albums in obscurity to qualify for sainthood.

"There's a certain kind of suffering you have to endure," the soft-spoken Pratt says with a faint smile, drinking strong coffee cut with honey and stroking one of the Siamese cats he shares with the woman who brought him back to Massachusetts.

"I finally got the right one," he says of his current wife. "She's a vagabond, just like me."

Tall and wide in a bulky sweater and a loose-fitting pair of jeans, Pratt has a snowy ring of mad-scientist hair and a demeanor that's alternately wistful and blissful.

Though his conversation often returns to personal hardships, he catches himself quickly.

"That's OK," he'll say, almost like a mantra.

As the youngest of four whose father, Edwin H. Baker Pratt, was headmaster at the Cambridge private school now known as Buckingham Browne and Nichols, Pratt was a shy boy born to a family of power brokers. His great-grandfather, Charles Pratt of Glen Cove, N.Y., was an oil baron who endowed the Pratt Institute.

Gazing at an old black-and-white photo of three generations of stern-faced Pratts, the singer remembers his grandmother, Ruth Baker Pratt -- the first US congresswoman to be elected from New York -- wondering aloud about her withdrawn grandson.

"What's wrong with him?" she asked. "He doesn't say anything."

Sent away to boarding school, Pratt felt distanced from his family from an early age.

"I was a totally peer-influenced person," he says. When he got to Harvard in the mid-'60s, the counterculture was in full blossom.

"We saw things differently," he says matter-of-factly.

Having learned "the rudiments" of classical piano as a child, he taught himself guitar and played in psychedelic rock bands in Boston. Like a lot of musicians at the time, he was stylistically omnivorous. Though it sank without a ripple, Pratt's solo debut, "Records Are Like Life," recorded in 1969, is a lost treasure of folk-jazz, inspired in part by his love of Bill Evans and John Coltrane. (It is, like most of Pratt's prodigious output, now available at the online record label It's About Music.) Cryptic and alluring, it's the kind of record that can sound fresh and original to later generations; in fact, when Pratt played in Chicago recently, contemporary "weird-America" singer and actor Will Oldham, a fan, was in the audience.

Pratt's next album, his self-titled debut for Columbia Records, gave him a fleeting taste of success.

He played a celebratory week at the Jazz Workshop and rode around Boston with promotional men calling WRKO and WMEX from their car phones.

"I'd never seen that before," he says.

The cascading piano and breathless storytelling of "Avenging Annie," which couldn't transcend the lower reaches of the national Top 100 but was a breakout listener favorite in some cities, put Pratt in the same ballpark as then-experimental songwriters such as Springsteen and Billy Joel.

"As time goes by," says Dean Sciarra, a former music critic and band manager who now runs the It's About Music website, "we tend to think of [Springsteen's] 'The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle' as a normal record. In fact, when it came out, it was so groundbreaking. The 'Andy Pratt' album was very similar."

But while Springsteen and Joel (and many of their peers) went on to mainstream ubiquity, the transition for Pratt was elusive.

"I can't compare my career to anybody else's," he says today. "I'm a little more complicated."

His failure to follow "Annie" with another charting record was not for lack of trying. Of his disco-era album produced by Mardin, he says, "the only regret was that it wasn't a hit."

But it is his first three albums in particular, including "Resolution," the one that inspired Rolling Stone's rare five-star rave, that continue to attract new listeners for this unlikely survivor.

"We're all basically half his age," says 36-year-old drummer Geoff Greenberg, who put together a band for Pratt's one-off appearance in Chicago last fall.

Greenberg, a library archivist who plays in a rock band by night, calls himself "a real record nerd" who discovered Pratt's music in a flashback in a British rock magazine. He's been hooked ever since.

Pratt will return to Chicago for another gig at Schubas in July, and he has a date scheduled in May in Washington, D.C., booked by another ardent fan who will provide a backing band there.

"He's the consummate self-promoter," says Greenberg. "We'd be in a coffee shop, and he'd say, 'I'm Andy Pratt. Google me."'