SAN DIEGO — Has fame eluded Terry Reid or has Terry Reid eluded fame?

It’s a fair question to ask about this uniquely gifted singer and songwriter, who famously opted not to join Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple — after having previously declined an invitation to replace Steve Winwood as the lead vocalist in the Spencer Davis Group.

Instead, this uncompromising troubadour has consistently followed his muse to create a potent body of work. His music is treasured by a small but intensely dedicated fan base that includes more than a few rock legends who came up alongside and after him.

“There are things in my gut that I know are not for me,” Reid said. “You’ve got to stay true to what it is you can do well. Because as you look back at things, you don’t want to say: ‘Oh, what the hell was I thinking doing that?’ People talk about Led Zeppelin, but it’s boring to me because I’ve played in so many bands.”

Reid has led nearly all the bands he has been in. His singular vocal skills and stunning blend of rock, folk, country, soul, jazz and Brazilian music have long put him in a class all his own. Accordingly, he was handpicked by Mick Jagger to sing at the head Stone’s 1971 wedding to his first wife, Bianca.

That was the same year Reid and David Bowie shared the stage — and a massive joint — at the first Glastonbury festival in England, and one year after the death of Reid’s good friend, Jimi Hendrix. His other confidantes at the time included two of Brazil’s most influential singer-songwriters, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, who had been exiled from their homeland by Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship.

Over the years, Reid’s admiring collaborators have included Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees Graham Nash, Joe Walsh, Joe Perry of Aerosmith, former Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor, Jackson Browne and Robert Plant.

It was Reid who recommended Plant, along with drummer John Bonham, to Led Zeppelin founder Jimmy Page when Reid’s 1968 touring commitments opening for the Rolling Stones prevented him from accepting Page’s invitation.

While Led Zeppelin would have benefited greatly from Reid’s singing, songwriting and distinctive guitar work, being in that barnstorming band would have placed unacceptable artistic restraints on him. And Reid has always steadfastly followed his heart, regardless of any potential commercial consequences.

His songs are by turns earthy and mystical, gritty and graceful, expansive and euphoric, sometimes unconventional and often beguiling. They have been recorded by Crosby, Stills & Nash (“Horses Through a Rainstorm”) Cheap Trick (“Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace”) and the Hollies, John Mellencamp and REO Speedwagon (“Without Expression”).

Reid and Nash co-wrote the song “Be Yourself” for Nash’s 1971 debut solo album, “Songs for Beginners.” The haunting Reid ballad, “To Be Treated Rite,” was faithfully recorded by former Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell, while Reid’s slow-burning “Rich Kid Blues” has been covered by such disparate performers as Marianne Faithfull and the Jack White-led Raconteurs.

Famous admirers

“Terry and I have been friends for a long time. He is a tremendous talent,” said Nash, who met Reid in 1965 when both were budding teenage rock stars in their native England.

In 1969, Reid did his third consecutive tour as an opening act for the Rolling Stones, in that instance as part of the Stones’ extensive U.S. tour with B.B. King and Ike & Tina Turner.

“I got to know B.B. really well,” Reid said. “He was the best. And, like me, he was a big Frank Sinatra fan!”

In 1968, an admiring Eric Clapton handpicked Reid to be the opening act on the U.S. farewell tour by Clapton’s pioneering power-trio Cream. At the time, Reid was known as “Superlungs,” a sobriquet inspired by his pinpoint, whisper-to-a-scream vocal power and his high-velocity 1968 recording of the Donovan song “Superlungs My Supergirl.”

Soon after hearing Reid perform in a London nightclub that same year, Aretha Franklin made her oft-quoted declaration: “There are only three things happening in England: The Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Terry Reid.”

Speaking from his longtime home in La Quinta, near Palm Springs, Reid chuckled appreciatively when reminded of the late Franklin’s praise for him.

“Aretha was always very good to me,” he said. “I got to know her a bit and she would always affectionately call me ‘White boy.’ She was the kind of person who would not say anything she didn’t believe. And when she didn’t agree with something, look out!”

The high esteem in which Reid is held by his peers is also underscored by his work as a vocalist on albums by Bonnie Raitt, Don Henley, Johnny Rivers and more.

Reid is very likely the only musician to be featured on albums by Oklahoma-bred country music favorite Hoyt Axton, the English heavy-metal band UFO and Bay Area hip-hop and electronic music maverick DJ Shadow. Reid’s songs have also been featured in “Up In The Air,” “Wonderland,” “Win It All” and other films.

Charlie Parker & James Moody

Reid first stood out as the 15-year-old lead singer in Peter Jay & the Jaywalkers, the brassy English band that served as a launching pad for a solo career that began when he just 16.

While he loved American rock, soul and country music — Ray Charles is still one of his biggest heroes, with Willie Nelson close behind — Reid was also enamored with jazz. Its influence can be heard in his unique vocal phrasing and modulations, unusual guitar tunings and his passion for reshaping his songs each time he performs them.

“I know I’m not a jazz singer. But I can do at least 15 Frank Sinatra songs, right now, no problem,” said Reid, who speaks enthusiastically about Billy May, Nelson Riddle, Quincy Jones and other preeminent musical arrangers who worked with Sinatra.

“When you’re playing guitar and singing, the one thing you have to have — and a lot of people don’t — is independence. The guitar becomes independent of what you’re singing. The only way you can have that independence is if you’re not listening to what you’re playing. You need to really just fall into it.

“And when the timing is right between the instruments and the voice, you can have a musical conversation and tell a story. For singers, timing is everything. And most new singers today sing right on the beat, which makes it a lot less interesting.”

Reid’s two best works from the 1970s, “River” and “Seed of Memory,” are not jazz albums. But some of the standout songs on both boast a jazz-informed fluidity, along with contributions from such jazz standouts as percussionist Willie Bobo, trumpeter Blue Mitchell and saxophonist Plas Johnson (the soloist on the Henry Mancini-composed theme song to the 1963 Peter Sellers film comedy, “The Pink Panther.”)

“When I was growing up, all my friends were into Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy and Elmore James, while I was getting into (jazz sax giants) Charlie Parker and James Moody,” Reid said. He then joyously began scat-singing the melody to “Billie’s Bounce,” the vocal-free, 1945 bebop classic Parker recorded with Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis.

“After that,” Reid continued, “I got into Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and John Coltrane. I was only about 15, so I don’t think I understood everything Coltrane was doing. But I was really inspired by all the great jazz singers and instrumentalists, and the way they did variations on a theme so that they didn’t repeat themselves.”

Graham Nash & Rob Zombie

Reid’s best songs have an elasticity and sense of surprise and logic all their own. They don’t necessarily go where a listener might expect, but always land in exactly the right spot.

The captivating “Faith to Arise” — the opening cut on Reid’s superb 1976 album, the Graham Nash-produced “Seed of Memory” — is a key case in point.

The song opens with Reid’s deft, country-tinged acoustic guitar lines and the aching pedal-steel guitar work of David Lindley, followed by the crisp drumming of Socko Richardson. Reid delivers the deeply romantic verses in a lilting voice. He seamlessly shifts into a buoyant boss-nova for the chorus, which boasts some of the finest harmony vocals by Nash on any record.

And that’s just the first of the eight very different songs on “Seed of Memory.”

The album so impressed industrial-rock and heavy-metal star-turned-horror-movie-director Rob Zombie that he used three of “Seed of Memory’s” songs — the title track, “Brave Awakening” and “To Be Treated Rite” — in his 2005 directorial debut, “The Devil's Rejects,” and two more — “Faith to Arise” and “The Frame” — in its 2019 sequel, “3 from Hell.”

Moreover, Zombie credited “Seed of Memory” for inspiring him to make “3 from Hell,” telling an interviewer for the website Bloody Devastating: “There’s a lot of Terry Reid songs in ‘The Devil’s Rejects,’ off his album ‘Seed of Memory.’ But there’s a couple of songs that I didn’t use that, (and) every time I would hear them, they sounded like songs that I should use, again, for the next (movie).

“I would hear the songs and I would so closely link his voice and that album with the characters that I would just start seeing images … It was not like a full story arc or anything, it was just basic moments, and that’s what sort of got the ball rolling.”

Zombie is not the only high-profile fan of the album.

“I love ‘Seed of Memory.’ I listen to it often,” said Nash, who — as its producer — strived to provide a nurturing recording environment for Reid’s songs to flourish.

“When you are writing a song, they come out how they come out,” Reid said. “You don’t pin them down, you just tell yourself it has to go somewhere and you let it. You really don’t have any control — and you end up with a bossa nova or a samba.

“I’ve never done such a relaxed project in my life as ‘Seed of Memory.’ I know Graham so well and it’s easy hanging out with him and working with him as a friend. Plus, we had (audio) engineer Al Schmidt, who had worked with Sam Cooke. I didn’t want to leave the studio, because everything was so well taken care of. I wish I was still there now.”

“Seed of Memory,” like Reid’s “River,” is treasured by in-the-know listeners. But symptomatic of his stop-go career, it suffered from circumstances beyond his control.

No sooner was “Seed of Memory” released than financial problems brought ABC, the record company Reid was signed to, grinding to a near-halt. Poorly distributed and with virtually no promotion, “Seed of Memory” disappeared in a near-instant.

Several other record companies expressed interest in re-releasing the album. But efforts to buy it back from ABC failed. For Reid, it was an all too-familiar, soul-sapping scenario.

His recording career had lurched to a sudden halt for four years in 1979, due to a manager who refused to let him out of the stifling contract Reid had signed as a naive teenager. After “River” and “Seed of Memory,” Reid’s next album, “Rogue Waves,” came out on Capitol Records in 1979. But Capitol seemed to have no idea how to market his music and showed little interest in doing so.

Seed of memoir

It would be 12 years before he made another studio album, the stillborn “The Driver.” Since then, Reid has released two independently produced live albums that are hard to come by.

“River,” released in 1973 by Atlantic Records, made little impact at the time. But in the decades since, it has been heralded as a landmark work that ranks alongside such similarly evocative classics as Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks,” Joni Mitchell’s “Blue,” and John Martyn’s “Solid Air” as a strikingly original and accomplished album. Over time, “River’s” lofty reputation and influence slowly grew, leading to the 2016 release of “The Other Side of the River.”

A double album, “Other” features six previously unreleased songs from the “River” recording sessions, plus alternate versions of five numbers from the original album. Rightly hailed as an unearthed musical gem, “Other” quickly received the rapturous praise and media attention that had largely eluded “River” in 1973.

“You always hope something will stand the test of time, but you are too immersed in making it to know if it will,” Reid said. He expressed disappointment — but little resentment — about his career being repeatedly marred by poor management, clueless record companies and extended periods in which he almost disappeared from public sight.

That “River” is such an artistic triumph is all the more impressive since, midway through making the album in London, Reid lost two of his three band members. Alan White left to become the new drummer in the progressive-rock band Yes. Pedal-steel guitar and multi-instrumental wiz David Lindley was lured away to join Jackson Browne’s band in Los Angeles, where Reid soon moved after being signed by Atlantic.

“I was like: ‘What the hell just happened?’ ” Reid recalled with a throaty laugh.

In the early 1990s, Reid was a member of the Flew, a short-lived band that teamed him with Joe Walsh, pianist Nicky Hopkins, bassist Rick Rojas and drummer Phil Jones.

From 2000 to around 2010, Reid was a mainstay in the house band at the Monday night jam sessions at the Los Angeles club the Mint. The group included Rojas, Jones, San Diego singer-songwriter Jack Tempchin and longtime Rolling Stones’ touring singer Bernard Fowler. Guests who sat in ranged from Keith Richards, Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and the Who’s Roger Daltrey to Donovan, George Clinton and Leo Sayer.

Reid and Fowler had a friendly rivalry as singers. They also tried to outdo each other with their onstage fashion choices.

“Terry and Bernard were like two strutting peacocks!” Tempchin fondly recalled.

Reid laughed when Tempchin’s description was shared with him during this interview.

“I had a rule I would never wear the same thing twice. It almost became a joke,” Reid said. “There was one night when I wore orange pants and an orange leather jacket. Phil (Jones) said: ‘We’d like to thank Caltrans for letting Terry out to do the gig here tonight!’ It went over most of the audience’s heads, but Bernard and I were on the floor laughing.”

Reid now has three albums worth of new songs and is deciding whether to release them separately or as a triple album. With a Johnny Depp-directed documentary about him stalled by the actor’s other film commitments, Reid has started to write his memoir.

“It’s better for me to do the book myself,” he said. “I don’t want anyone else telling my story. And it’s not just about me, but about how I ended up in the middle of that thing — music — we love so much.”

Reid chuckled.

“Maybe,” he said, “that’s what I’ll call it: ‘What We Love So Much’.”

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