by Jason Mellard, Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University
This Week in Texas Music History, boy meets girl meets mechanical bull in Pasadena’s most famous honky-tonk.
On September 12, 1978, Aaron Latham’s article “The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy: America’s Search for True Grit” appeared in Esquire magazine, resulting in national attention to the country scene around Gilley’s nightclub and, two years later, a major motion picture. Sherwood Cryer founded the Pasadena honky-tonk in the early 1970s and brought in country artist Mickey Gilley as partner and club namesake. Over a decade, Cryer added on to the club, bit by bit, until Gilley’s was not just a honky-tonk, but, a 6,000-capacity compound with shooting gallery, showers for truckers, enormous dance floors, and a mechanical bull. Latham centered his Esquire article on that mechanical bull and the drama it stirred, especially for his star-crossed protagonists, real-life Gilley’s denizens Dew and Betty (Bud and Sissy in the film). Coincidentally, the article hit just as discomania peaked to the tune of Saturday Night Fever.
That film had been based on a magazine article, too, so it made sense that Latham’s piece also found itself adapted to the screen, in 1980, with John Travolta and Debra Winger. The double LP soundtrack, produced by Irving Azoff, mixed scene favorites Mickey Gilley, Gilley’s bandleader Johnny Lee (whose “Looking for Love” was a breakout hit), and Charlie Daniels’ “Devil Went Down to Georgia” with the California country-rock of the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt. Just as Saturday Night Fever launched a thousand suburban discos, so did Urban Cowboy ignite a honky-tonk inferno of two-stepping and cowboy hats far afield from the Houston metro. The Pasadena club closed in the late 1980s and burned down in 1990, though venues around the country still carry on the name.
Sources:
Jason Mellard. Progressive Country: How the 1970s Transformed the Texan in Popular Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013.
Heather Milligan in Laurie E. Jasinski, Gary Hartman, Casey Monahan, and Ann T. Smith, eds. The Handbook of Texas Music. Second Edition. Denton, TX: Texas State Historical Association, 2012.
