John’s Side of the Story

Return of the Amazing Buckeroos had its first inspiration way back in 1992 when my wife, children, and I moved from Los Angeles to Tucson, Arizona. In those days, the most famous cowboy band in the land, the Sons of the Pioneers, wintered in Tucson and performed dinner shows at the Triple C Chuckwagon out west of town. I still remember the brisket and cowboy beans. My young son, Eric, loved the Sons, and going to see them was one of my family’s favorite outings. Performing since 1933, the Sons are superb musicians, and their concert includes a fascinating video history.

Around 2005, I stopped writing so many novels and children’s books and got back into theater. With my buddy Sheldon Metz and a team of talented actors and singers, we began to put on Murder Mystery Dinner Theater. These were crazy shows with adult humor, broad characters, singing, good food, and lots of audience participation. Plus a murder or two.

We seldom had a real script, just a few cue lines and a notion of where we were headed. We sang half-a-dozen songs to recorded music and improvised shamelessly. In fact, we often had characters planted in the audience, just to interact with them. In Dillinger’s Diamonds, which we performed at Tucson’s Hotel Congress where John Dillinger was famously captured, we murdered an annoying heckler in the audience. Guests were encouraged to come in 1920s and 1930s garb, and we held a Charleston Dance Contest. The audience also got to explore a 1923 hotel room, looking for clues.

Despite this free-wheeling fun, I wanted to have a good murder mystery, and the trick to that is having lots of suspects. Why would several people all want to kill the same victim?

Enter the second inspiration for Return of the Amazing Buckeroos. Neil Simon’s famous play The Sunshine Boys is a showbiz tale about a two-man vaudeville team who hit it big on TV. Now a reunion is planned, but the two old comics hate each other and haven’t talked in decades. Wow, I thought, if we had some kind of musical group who all hated each other but had been forced to do a reunion concert, we would have enough suspects for a murder mystery.

A rock group didn’t work — too noisy, too many amps. My partner, Sheldon Metz, was a big fan of the movie A Mighty Wind, which lampooned folk groups of the 1950s and early 1960s, like the Kingston Trio. These groups are still touring in our modern world, and a reunion concert would be perfectly normal. In our previous shows, we always sang to canned music, and this would be the first time we actually had to play musical instruments on stage. There are some complex folk songs, but most of them are easy to play and in the public domain.That sounded good to me.

We named the folk group and the show The Pinkston Trio, after the odd pink and green plaid shirts the Kingston Trio always wore. That was the last of several Murder Mystery Dinner Theater shows I did with Sheldon Metz and dozens of talented actors, and I wish to thank all of them, especially Sheldon, for their inspired contributions to this work. I learned a great deal.

About halfway through that run, I realized that a cowboy band would work better for the story in Tucson than a folk group. Plus the music could be more upbeat, incorporating some Texas swing and more instrumentation than my three-chord guitar. We never had a script for The Pinkston Trio, the show having been derived from improvisation, so I decided to write the play down for the first time.

I quickly realized it was not the same show anymore — now it had a more legit stage feel to it. Less audience participation. I arranged a reading, with the songs being all pre-recorded, familiar cowboy songs. That went okay, but I knew Return of the Amazing Buckeroos was a different production than our usual tomfoolery. It was missing something, probably the original songs which had become part of the plot. The script sat on the shelf for four years.

Then COVID-19 hit, and I was sitting around, bored. Several stage shows I had been producing were cancelled. With goals more long-term, I took out the Buckeroos script and began to work on it. I liked the rewrite all over again, but I knew it needed at least a couple of original songs, hopefully ones that were funny. Who could I send it to but my old buddy, Mark Milner? I was certainly thrilled when Mark got so inspired.

Mark’s Side Of The Story

On June 12, 2020, John sent me his script Return Of The Amazing Buckeroos, about the murderous reunion of a legendary western cowboy band, and therein he had interspersed 10 songs of the genre, some public domain, others not. Four hours later, after reading the script, I offered to write original songs to replace those under copyright to save production costs. Three days after that, I emailed John:

“Okay, I got inspired - between 4:00 and 10:00 this morning I wrote these two (NB: Hoe-Down In The Bunkhouse and The Drunkard Cowboy [aka The Whoopsie Doopsie Song]), the first inspired by one of your titles, the second a rewrite of Old Chisholm Trail (different melody, different words [obviously - "scooby dooby dippy ti yi..."], but inspired by the form and subject matter of Chisholm).

“Ten song slots in your script, and, correct me if I’m wrong, but aside from some musical and/or subject matter suggestions - e.g., a yodeling song, a boogie, a saddle song, et cetera et alia - the songs neither advance nor comment upon the story...yes?

“I’d like to replace all ten with originals, if you don't mind, fun challenge for me, and, as the "cowboy" song genre is well-known (and I’ll be doing more rewrites subverting classics like Chisholm; specifically, I want to write some kind of twisted Ghost Riders tune), I think originals would have 1) a “Haven't I heard that before?“ quality, 2) an attractive spoofiness quotient, and, of course, 3) an original score is a plus...yes?

“Anyway, lemme if I’m on the right track with these.”

John replied in the affirmative that afternoon, and I was off to the races. By the following Saturday at 6:00 p.m., I had written those first ten songs, which indeed contained “a yodeling song, a boogie, a saddle song…(and a) twisted Ghost Riders tune”.

After I completed each song, I recorded a video of me singing and playing the number, both to 1) let John see and hear to what I was up, and, more importantly, 2) ascertain I didn’t forget the melodies and music (although I was later to rue the fact I hadn’t included my hands on the guitar neck in the shot, and had to relearn the chords by ear). These original demos - very rough, not necessarily in my keys, more-poorly-than-usually sung - can be viewed elsewhere on this site. Examining the video dates and times, I see that the aforementioned Hoe-Down and Drunkard were recorded on either side of noon on the 15th, The Canyon Yodeler and Dead Horse * were completed on Tuesday the 16th, Saddle Tramps, Long Horn Boogie, and The Cowboy Blessing (Until We Might Meet Again) were finished on Wednesday the 17th (my most productive day), Damned Vultures In The Sky and I’m A Young Cowpunk (Whoop Ti Do) were on the 18th (although the latter didn’t find its final form until the 19th **), and Up To Memphis finished off the first 10 on Saturday the 20th.

* Dead Horse was a trunk song of mine, originally written as a languid Texan waltz in 1976; with its subject matter I thought this shaggy dog story would fit right in, and I like the tune much better as a peppy two-step.

** With Drunkard, Damned, and Cowpunk, I utilized a songwriting method I’d never employed before, in that I took an established song (Old Chishom Trail, Ghost Riders In The Sky, and I’m An Old Cowhand, respectively - that last one the actual song John had Velvet sing in his script), wrote lyrics to the rhythm-and-rhyme template, then composed original melodies and chords. In fact, my lyrics can be successfully sung to the original music. However, and as can been seen in the trio of demo videos I recorded, I needed three steps to move from Cowhand's swaying lope to Cowpunk's syncopated drive, hence that song’s overnight completion.

John’s script featured a video explaining the genesis of the Amazing Buckeroos, in which he mentioned four songs that were their “hits” - Hoe-Down In The Bunkhouse, Saddle Tramps, Gooseberry Roan, and Last Train To Wilcox. Less than a week later, on the 26th, I had decided I wanted to write those last two as well, so all four could be excerpted in the video. I did so (with Gooseberry being informed by both Tennessee Stud [general subject matter], Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds [the chords of the chorus], and another mid-70s song of mine, Renegade Romeo, which outlined the basic story of a romance triggered [pun intended] by a barroom fight), and both turned out well enough to be inserted into the show.

An enormously and satisfyingly productive second half of June 2020 - amazing what one can do with three chords, four melodies, and a saddlebag of inspiration…