In a music scene rife with musicians famous for not being more famous, Willie Murphy might be the godfather. His career highs are well known among older Twin Cities music fans: his influential 1967 album "Running, Jumping, Standing Still" with John Koerner, his thousands of sweltering gigs with Willie and the Bees, and the Minnesota Music Academy's decision to make him an inaugural member of the Minnesota Music Hall of Fame alongside Prince and Bob Dylan in 1990.

Murphy's lows are the stuff of local lore, too. Things like causing White Bear Lake to ban him from town during his wildest drinking days, and having countless fellow musicians want to strangle him over four decades, and watching album after album fail to rekindle his star status.

It seemed sadly fitting, then, that just as he was about to release his new double disc in October on Red House Records -- his most ambitious and widely distributed record in more than a decade -- he slipped on a piece of fencing in his back yard and broke his arm. Murphy is finally getting around to a CD-release concert Friday at the Bedlam Theatre.

Murphy, 65, has been relegated to weekly "blues jam" gigs for most of the past decade. He now plays every Monday at Wilebski's Blues Saloon in St. Paul and every Wednesday at the Driftwood Char Bar in south Minneapolis. "I love to play blues, but don't cast me strictly as a blues guy," he griped. "I know I'm better at it than most people around here, but that doesn't mean it's what I do best."

There is no blues on Murphy's new album. Instead, the two discs are split between two other distinct styles. "A Shot of Love in a Time of Need" features the horn-blown, funky R&B sound that Murphy honed all those years with the Bees. The other CD, "Autobiographical Notes," is a mellower, contemplative collection of soul ballads. Only in a lyrical sense is there any blues in songs like "Voice in the Night," "Fairy Tale" and "Story of My Love Life" -- not-so-veiled tales of a guy looking back with equal parts regret and gratitude.

Murphy hopes Red House's promotion of his new dual collection will help him tour again in Europe, something he did every summer going back to the early '90s. But either way he's proud of it. "It's the closest I've ever come to making an album that I actually realized what I was trying to do, and I did it."

As he talked about the CD, it became clear just how autobiographical some of its songs are.

"You know, I don't have kids," he said. "I've really given my whole life to this fucking music thing, which is kind of an easy way out, but it takes a great level of dedication.

"I knew a sociologist who used to talk about the pinball theory, where most people bounce into the first hole they land in, and stay there the rest of their lives. I'm certainly a pinball kind of guy in that sense, although my hole turns out to be a pretty nice one from my perspective. Really, I've had a pretty great time."