The way it happened, you might have thought the ghost of Kurt Cobain had a hand in this thing, because who would give odds that Madison Smartt Bell, the novelist from Baltimore, would get his own recording contract to sing and play a Les Paul guitar with back-up from Don Dixon, the legendary producer who built successful careers for R.E.M., Marshall Crenshaw and the Smithereens?

It shouldn't have happened. But it did. It's real. It's serious.

And it started with a dream of Kurt Cobain.

A few years ago, Bell got a grant and decided to take a break from his job at Goucher College, where he runs the writing program. He had a little time, and decided to teach himself to play lead guitar. The way he tells it, Nirvana was big then and he had just bought the Les Paul, so he wanted to learn how to play "Lithium," but couldn't figure out the chord progressions. It was more complicated than he thought.

"Then Kurt Cobain showed up in one of my dreams," he says, "and explained to me how to play the song, and when I woke up, I thought it might be the start of something, so I wrote a short story called Never Mind, and when I read it over it seemed like it might be a jumping-off place for a novel."

It was the start of a book about a rock 'n' roll band.

Music and writing cross over a lot in Bell's work. Musical structures. Musical rhythms. Musical characters. It finds a part in each of his 13 works of fiction.

Playing guitar also frees up some space in his mind when the action of writing and plotting bog down. Everybody knows about Bell's big historical fictions set in Haiti - a huge, ambitious trilogy that's two-thirds done. It's already made him a National Book Award finalist for the first one, All Souls' Rising, and earned him respect like you wouldn't believe. So playing music and writing little fictions about smaller circumstances help.

"There's nothing sufficiently physical in the process of writing," he explains. "It's all abstract. It's got references that are very concrete and that's what you have to stay in touch with. But unlike most other arts, there's nothing solid you can put your hands on. Music has always been my solution to putting my hands on something."

The N.C. connection

Anyway, while he was learning "Lithium," this guy in North Carolina who collects first editions, Scott Beale, wrote and asked for an autograph. One night Beale and a buddy bought a couple of fezzes (Shriners' hats), and stayed up drinking and talking about literature, and they said, "Madison Bell is really good; we should send him a fez." So they did. "A tribute to your art," Beale remembers writing on the gift.

That started a friendly correspondence. (You have to understand, both these guys are middle-aged Southerners with a certain bent and a certain sense of humor. Maybe it sounds funny, but it's real.)

About three years ago, Bell sent Beale a tape. By then the writer had picked up some student musicians from Johns Hopkins University and Goucher College and was playing lead guitar and singing. Sometimes they played at a friend's house on 33rd Street, so people would drop by to listen, and Bell got good enough to perform in front of people and to make a listenable tape of his own work.

"It was the best thrown-together band I ever played in," says Bill U'Ren, the drummer, who had played professionally in California before coming to study in the Hopkins writing program. "I've played with some session guys in L.A. before, and Madison was a solid guitar player. Too bad he's such a great novelist, because he'd be a great guitar player."

Back in North Carolina, Beale had left the tape Bell sent him in a drawer. He didn't think much about it until a few months ago, when he happened to come across it and give it a listen. Hmm, he thought, this isn't bad.

By then Bell had finished the novel that started with the dream about Kurt Cobain, and it was going to be published. It was called Anything Goes, and it was about life in a half-way successful, small-time rock band touring what they call the "Black Cat" circuit of Southern bars and cinder-block roadhouses.

The Vt. connection

To put the finishing touch on his novel, Bell had teamed up with a poet friend in Vermont, Wyn Cooper. Cooper had a big stroke of luck a few years ago when the singer Sheryl Crow used one of his poems for her chart-buster "All I Want To Do is Have Some Fun." So Bell got Wyn to write some lyrics for his fictional band.

It was sort of a gimmick.

"Here's the way I look at it," Bell says. "Wyn Cooper went to high school with Madonna, and he happened to make an 8mm movie of her when he was there where she fries an egg [while] in her bikini. Then a few years later, she emerges as Madonna, the singer, and Wyn has this tape, which you may have seen on TV. It's all over the place now. And then this thing happened with Sheryl Crow.

"Nothing ever happens like this just twice. It's once or three times. This is the rule of life. We were both thinking this way: Wyn is destined to be struck by lightning again. So I thought, maybe I can attach my operation to that probability, and that's when we came up with the idea of making a demo."

It was like this: Bell thought he could help his friend by putting some of his poems to music, which his buddy then could shop around with bands in L.A.; Cooper thought he could help his friend by writing some fresh lyrics for the book. Then together, this past January, they made the demo CD using some actual musicians who are friends of Cooper's in Vermont.

That was when things got weird.

A novel voice

The demo has 11 songs. Two of them accidentally ended up being sung by Bell because he didn't have time to chart them out for the real musicians during the recording sessions. "I thought they'd trash them in favor of real songs," Bell says. "But it was OK, since we figured having me on there would stir a little human interest for the book."

Needless to say, Bell's performances are a lot different from the others. The Southern drawl, the cigarette-and-bourbon-stained voice, a bad-dog quality teamed with some dark, kind of nasty lyrics makes them stand out like a sore thumb. One of the songs ends with a bunch of chihuahuas barking and a bird screeching. It's different.

This is where his North Carolina connection came back into play. When Scott Beale accidentally ran across his old tape of Bell's guitar playing, he sent an e-mail asking if the writer had any other tapes. Bell sent a copy of the new demo, not knowing that Beale had started a recording company. Beale listened to the CD and got caught up on two tracks: "Forty Words For Fear" and "On Eight Mile." Bell's tracks.

"It had a cheap-motel-room-in-the-wrong-part-of-to wn-caught-with-a-teen-age-hooker feel to it," Beale says. "The voice reminds me of a hybrid of Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits with a dash of Lou Reed. It was great stuff. My wife said, 'This is really depressing,' and I said, 'That's exactly what we're looking for.'

"Since I had never talked to Madison, I didn't know what his voice was like, so I contacted him and said, the CD's all right, but I really like the guy on tracks 5 and 8, and I'd like to talk to him about a recording. Could you talk to him for me? And Madison said, 'I'll see if he's available.'"

Second opinion

Bell remembers thinking it must be a joke. "I'd never met Scott, but I knew he was a witty guy and he's a practical joker, so I refused to answer his question straight out until he asked it three times. That's when I knew he was serious."

Beale was serious. He had sent the CD to Don Dixon, a well-known producer with a legendary way of discovering and bringing out unusual musical talent, especially of a nouveau Southern rocker variety, and asked him if the voice on "Forty Words" and "Eight Mile" was as good as he thought or if he was just crazy.

"I sort of dug what was going on there," says Dixon. "I liked the singing style, the songs were really descriptive and my instinct was to tell Scott to go with it. The potential of the material is very interesting."

That's when Madison got his contract.

He's going to make the recording in December, during winter break at Goucher, and Dixon's going to play and help out in the studio and a professional drummer named Jim Brock, who's a friend of Beale's, will produce it.

At one time in his life, Madison Smartt Bell would have liked being a guitarist in a rock 'n' roll band, going from roadhouse to roadhouse, living paycheck to paycheck. "I think I would have enjoyed the life that was described in the book," he says. "Just making enough money to get to the next night. I think I'm perhaps a little bit over that now. But it's something I never quite did when I had the resilience to survive it."

Which makes what's happening now kind of like a dream or the fulfillment of a fantasy. Like something that might happen in a book or could change a man's life, who knows?

But no, Bell says. He has a fantastic wife, a wonderful daughter, a good job and a great novel in progress. He's not even tempted.

"I'll be 45 in a few weeks," he says. "I know my limitations. My expectations are low. All this is a good thing."