The Nashville trio Riders In The Sky has made a relentlessly expanding career of emulating and parodying the music and melodrama in the low-budget Western movies of the `30s, `40s and `50s.
But the Riders, scheduled to appear Sunday evening at Fitzgerald`s in Berwyn, are hardly copies of their idols. Would such all-American cowboys as Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Tex Ritter, for instance, have ridiculed a vice president of the United States?
A forthcoming segment on the Riders` National Public Radio series,
”Riders Radio Theatre,” does just that.
”We`ve just started writing `The Mystery Of The Lost Ozone,`
” discloses an incongruously bespectacled and intellectual-looking Rider who has dubbed himself Too Slim.
”The bad guys have this giant aerosol can that they`re blackmailing the world with, and they have all these demands that get called in to Dan Quayle. The call is answered by his answering machine, which says:
” `Marilyn and I aren`t here right now. We`re attending a monthlong conference on the homeless in Acapulco. If you have a message that can`t wait for 1996, please wait for the sound of the tone.` ”
OK, so now you see that the Riders aren`t just hard-riding airwave heroes seeking to re-establish the squeaky-clean ideals of ole Gene, Roy, Tex and every other saddle-warming Hollywood yodeler equipped with a white hat and a recording contract.
Actually, the Riders are hard-riding airwave heroes-and, as such, favorites of the kiddies-while they also offer moms, dads, grandpas and grandmas out in National Public Radioland thought-provoking humor and new, original music in the Autry-Rogers-Ritter tradition.
Their attention-grabber, though, is humor. They say other Western bands can do the music as well as or better than they can, but they add-with apparent justification-that none of the others has a show that even approaches theirs in, well, strangeness.
”Nobody has the three loony characters and the rope tricks and the varmint dancing,” says Too Slim, whose intellectual demeanor is backed by a bachelor of science degree in wildlife management from the University of Michigan.
”Plus, a lot of the humor is topical, stuff that people who are interested in what`s going on today can relate to.”
”I don`t look at what we`re doing as copying anything from the past,”
adds Slim`s fellow Rider Woody Paul, a drawling Ph.D. in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
”I look at it as just entertainment steeped in various traditions and mediums. And our music is really good. In fact, these days we`re doing it better than ever.”
There is, of course, a third member of this trio. Its central figure onstage is Ranger Doug, who has a Vanderbilt University degree in English, has authored books on country-music history and is the man whose obsession with all things Old Western led the Riders to their career-long Trail Drive.
Ranger Doug isn`t around the bunkhouse the day of the interview, but his sidekicks speak for him more immodestly, surely, than he would speak for himself.
”Ranger Doug is the Idol of American Youth,” says Woody Paul, with hardly a trace of envy. ”I look up to him totally. Slim does, too. We both idolize Ranger Doug. He does everything The Cowboy Way.”
Oookay. Then who are Too Slim and Woody Paul?
”Too Slim,” replies Slim, ”is an innocent with a lot of energy who will follow ideas probably beyond where they ought to go-to where Ranger Doug has to say, `Slim, shut up.”`
”And Woody Paul is sort of a rural absent-minded professor-type that Slim can lead into all sorts of things and laugh at,” says Woody Paul.
This improbable trio, together with various other characters whose voices are supplied by Slim-the Drive`s crusty old cook, Sidemeat; a talking cow skull called Too Jaws; a Canadian Mountie, Sergeant Dudley, etc.-have been hunkering down around an electric campfire and other novel accouterments on stages across America for a decade now, while word of their offbeat artistry slowly but steadily spreads.
With credits as seemingly contradictory as the slapstick ”Hee Haw”
syndicated TV show and the cerebral ”Prairie Home Companion” National Public Radio show, they launched last fall the 30-minute weekly ”Riders Radio Theatre,” the first NPR show ever to emanate from Nashville.
Since then, their ”Theatre” has grown steadily, now reaching audiences on 80 stations nationwide (but not including Chicago). It is recorded, with no false starts or restarts, before a live audience at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville, after being largely written by the Riders themselves.
And what is required for such writing?
”A lot of pencils,” says Woody Paul.
”We have about 10 years of stuff we`ve developed on the road and on the TV show we did on The Nashville Network (for 3 1/2 years in the mid-`80s),”
says Slim.
”So we have a backlog of stuff. We just sit down in a room with a friend named Steve Arwood, who bears the brunt of actually putting the stuff down on paper, and improvise and come up with ideas and write.
”Then Steve turns it into a script, and we go over it a couple more times, then take it to the air. We do two half-hour shows at a time in front of a live audience, with an intermission in between.”
With guests ranging from bluegrass music patriarch Bill Monroe to the O`Kanes, the shows themselves are, to say the least, bizarre.
For example, in one, the Riders` mythical homeplace, Tumbleweed Valley, is invaded by villains who plan to do in the Riders via the latest diabolical invention, a yodel-seeking missile. Unbeknownst to the villains, Sidemeat has hypnotized one of them into yodeling every time he lies, and, since he lies all the time, the missile boomerangs onto its perpetrators.
Let it be fearlessly reported, however, that a note of more adult-style travail threatens to rear its ugly head in innocent Tumbleweed Valley. Woody Paul confesses he contemplates trying to work into their routine an incident in which, as he puts it, ”the schoolmarm gets pregnant, and Ranger Doug thinks he did it with his yodel.
”See,” Woody Paul says, musingly, ”they were out overlooking the canyon, and he just had to let a yodel go because it was all so beautiful.”
”Yeah, and how many times have we warned him he shouldn`t go yodeling around women?” agrees Slim.
”And as he`s on his way to propose to her,” Woody Paul proceeds, ”we can use a line we`ve never used in the show: `Head him off at the pass.` ”
People also buy their albums, although in modest quantities so far. The Riders have recorded seven LPs for small but prestigious Rounder Records and, more recently, two for giant MCA Records.
They proudly note that, instead of beginning as some industry analyst`s idea of a way to exploit a niche in the marketplace, they evolved
”organically” as just people who enjoyed ”dressing up like cowboys” and playing out-of-fashion music.
How, they are asked, does one get to that point from a doctoral degree in physics? Woody Paul furrows his brow and answers with a typically intellectual Rider pun.
”It`s a quantum leap,” he concludes.
