Gradient Blend with Alpha

Is there a way to control alpha with a gradient blend texture? I’m trying to make a color fade out into transparency, but I can’t get the blend texture’s alpha to effect my model. I enabled transparency in my material and turned on alpha controls in the texture, but it doesn’t seem to work.

you must set the alpha of the material to 0.0, so that the texture can override it.

(material panel, transparency tab , alpha =0.0)

Thank you!