It is Adler's return to the concert stage that is most exciting and his storied career is remarkable.

He played with the Cincinnati greats - Bootsy Collins, Slim Harpo, H-Bomb Ferguson, Albert Washington - while still in high school. He headed off to San Francisco in 1969, jamming with John Lee Hooker, T-Bone Walker, Solomon Burke, and joined experimental group Elephants Memory, which would later attract John Lennon and Yoko Ono in their post-Beatles street music period.

Adler took his funk and R&B roots to England in 1971, playing the pub rock scene. He wouldn't return for 20 years as his Roogalator outfit found an audience among British fans and artists fascinated by Adler's surreal mix of blues, jazz, reggae, and rock in a bouncy, creative beat.

"When I got to England I found my style was exotic and interesting enough that I actually started getting an incredible amount of work," Adler said. "I played a lot of interesting situations - an Irish country-western band, African and Jamaican, funk. It was very much appreciated. So with that occurring I never came back. It sustained me until things started slowly down in the '80s."

Along the way there was a stint as a member of Rocket 88, the roots band formed by Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts in the late '70s. And Adler made friends with an as yet undiscovered Elvis Costello, an admirer of Adler's musical style, but more so of his look

"I would say he appropriated my visual look," Adler said with a chuckle. "I think it's more than a coincidence that we have the same kind of glasses and he's playing a Jazzmaster. When he first came to see me play, he was kind of a California hippie dude with wire rims and long hair and played acoustic guitar. The next time I saw him he looked like me, with the Jazzmaster and Buddy Holly specks."

With the music opportunities drying up by the late '80s, Adler pursued his first love. He became a locomotive engineer in the early '90s, a job he still works based out of his current home in Charlevoix, Mich.

"I always loved trains. If I could have left school at 5, I would have become an engineer. Avondale was just up the road from Winton Station. It was before air conditioning and the trains had still had those steam whistles. It was in my blood. Probably my only claim to fame as an original guitar stylist is my train whistle ability on the guitar."

Adler was coaxed back into gigging by Cincinnati musician Tim Brown, who had been a lifelong Roogalator fan, finally meeting Adler almost by accident through a family connection.

Adler's music may also get a renewed digital exposure to a new generation since he is negotiating with iTunes to offer some of his Roogalator tunes from the '70s for download.

Adler's musical journey began in childhood with his father, a piano-playing Jazz/Dixieland hobbyist who passed his love of music to his children. An early fan of R&B ("WCIN used to come through all our telephone lines," says Adler from his Charlevoix home), he was also exposed to the Blues through his older brother, and fell in love with Lonnie Mack, The Beatles and Rolling Stones.

He took up guitar in the early '60s, started playing in bands and began picking up session gigs for traveling Blues artists. He moved west in the late '60s, moved back east for the Elephant's Memory gig then headed to England in 1971 where there was more live Blues work than in the U.S.

"I was playing in Irish Country & Western bands with African drummers and Jamaicans and all that was blending into the original stuff I was doing," says Adler. "Then I started getting my own bands together and started recording in the mid-'70s."

Adler formed Roogalator in 1975 and recorded his classic Cincinnati Fatback album shortly thereafter. Roogalator ran for three years before Adler disbanded the group.

When work dried up in England, Adler returned to the States to care for his parents. He began his railroad training and effectively took nearly 15 years off from professional music, preferring to pursue it on a recreational basis.

"In the late '80s I met these Belgian gypsies whose fathers had played with Django Reinhardt and I was practicing techniques they had shown me," says Adler. "I met the Bluegrass guys in Cincinnati and started jamming with them

and I was playing Jazz and I started playing saxophone and more keyboards. I think the most important thing I learned was that I got to listen to music the way other people do -- and as a healing thing, to just enjoy -- and I think that's helped color my newer material and make it more emotionally connected to peoples' lives."

Adler was pulled out of retirement in 2004 by local musician Tim Brown, who wanted to learn Adler's arrangements. After a year of woodshedding, the Danny Adler Band began playing out. Although the new band has yet to record any new material, Adler has demoed a lot recently and has at least 20 new songs ready to record. "I'm just taking my time with that," he says.

Perhaps the biggest news in Adler's career at the moment is the fact that he's working on a digital music distribution deal that would make the bulk of his catalog, a good deal of it out of print for years, available through iTunes. The deal should be done this summer.

In the meantime, Adler is enjoying life in northern Michigan as an itinerant engineer, the return of his band and the odd solo gig. The only thing Adler doesn't see much of is home; his day job and his night job both involve travel.

"That's tricky," he says with an audible grin. "I like the work and that's about all I can do."

But with the Sex Pistols leading the punk charge in rock and pre-fab disco hits ruling R&B, Roogalator's greasy funk and down-home rock 'n' soul fusion never caught on.

Which makes this new 18-track collection even more of a revelation. Unlike other white blues wannabes of the time, Mr. Adler sounds utterly at home on his self-penned, groove-happy tunes. His fluidly soulful guitar is a perfect match for sly lead vocals reminiscent of former bandmate Bootsy Collins.

Mr. Adler has the same taste in catchy novelties, as in his densely driving, James Brown-style plea for cash, “Sock It to My Pocket” or the rocking “Sweet Mama Kundalini.”

Roogalator, named for a vague blues slang term with various good luck charm/sexual meanings, was just as hard to pin down, musically.

The band knew its way around blues, funk and soul and came up with such shoulda-been R&B hits as “Water.” But Roogalator could turn on a dime for the lighter pop of “Love and the Single Girl.”

Mr. Adler, 50, lives in Charlevoix, Mich., where he makes a living as a free-lance locomotive engineer (songs here contain frequent train references; there are even more on his solo CD of '80s recordings, Better Make a Move, also on Proper).

Mr. Adler remains one of Greater Cincinnati's more fascinating musical footnotes. In the '80s, he played with the Rolling Stones offshoot blues band Rocket 88.

He also recorded an album during a visit here and convinced a British label that it was the lost recordings of a mythical Cincinnati blues great that he named Otis “Elevator” Gilmore. One of those tracks, an authentic-sounding “T Bone Blues,” is included on Better Make a Move.

Cincinnati Fatback (a title that refers to the uniquely funky Queen City groove) is a must-have for any local-music collection. But beyond historic interest, it stands on its own as a set of rootsy rock/soul/pop/funk that still packs a punch a quarter century later.