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| Alameda Slim rustles cattle with his hypnotic yodel in Walt Disney's 'Home on the Range.' |
Happy trills for Illinois yodeler Disney lassos `Cowboy Randy' for new movie
By Patrick Kampert
Tribune staff reporter
Published March 28, 2004
CLINTON, Ill. -- You probably haven't heard of Springfield resident Randy Erwin,
but at least a couple of the Disney Co.'s hopes for a rebound hang on his very flexible vocal cords.
As a hired
hand in the recording studio, he provides the distinctive yodeling that enables villain Alameda Slim (Randy Quaid) to hypnotize
and steal cattle in the animated movie "Home on the Range," which opens Friday.
The recording sessions
actually took place a couple of years ago. Today, the native Texan is back at his real job as a children's entertainer.
On this day, he has a more restless audience than cattle to enchant with his yodels, cowboy songs and rope tricks: a kid-heavy
crowd of 153 at the Warner Library here in central Illinois.
The yodeling came to him naturally as he grew up "singing
all day long" on his parents' rice farm in the verdant coastal plains between Houston and Corpus Christi. His ease
with young audiences seems equally laid-back, perhaps due to sons Milo, 10, and Evan, 3.
"Do I look OK?"
he asks a girl seated on the floor as he adjusts the microphone. She nods her approval of his western shirt and cowboy hat.
"I heard somebody humming the D," he notes a moment later, smiling as he tunes his guitar. By the end of
his 45-minute show, he will have the children mooing like cows, howling like coyotes and standing inside twirling lassos.
He'll sing a song about buckaroos in Spanish, explain Newton's First Law of Motion with a rope trick and relate
that Erwin is his stage name because nobody can pronounce his real last name, Skalicky.
The show seems breezy,
yet it is carefully planned. Erwin says he's "obsessive," and that is the same quality that helped him win over
the Disney crew, including Oscar-winning composer Alan Menken.
The producers had tried out every yodeler under
the sun, but the music called for more than simple yodeling.
"There's real stylized cowboy stuff. Some
of it is operatic-sounding. Some of it's just strange, high falsetto, counter-tenor singing," Erwin explains.
Erwin was recommended by an agent in Austin, Texas, whose client had failed to get the gig. Erwin impressed the Mouse
people at the audition, then meticulously went over the main song, a four-minute yodeling opus, note by note on his Apple
computer at home. When the tape rolled weeks later at the Disney studio in Burbank, Calif., he was ready.
"It
was like I had my quilt already made," he said. "All I had to do was throw it out there."
He nailed
it, as they say. "He came in and kicked butt," said Menken, who hopes the movie will boost Erwin's career. "No
one deserves it more. He's a very nice guy and very talented."
"I was revved up real high,"
Erwin admitted. "When we got to the end, Alan and the producers jumped out of their chairs and started dancing around
and clapping. I knew my whole life had flipped right then."
The heady moment capped years of struggle as Erwin
took his western tunes and rope demonstrations to open mikes and comedy clubs around Texas in the '80s. He then spent
seven years as the lead singer and accordion player in Cafe Noir, a gypsy jazz band in the mode of Django Reinhardt.
The gigs were interesting, he says, including a stop at Carnegie Hall's recital space, but paid little as he supplemented
wife Dusty's income as a staff writer for alternative newspapers.
When the band folded in '97, he modified
his cowboy act for young audiences and put together a CD with his friends in the critically acclaimed rock band Brave Combo.
For the last seven years, he has been "Cowboy Randy" at libraries, birthday parties, church picnics and
schools. He moved to Springfield in 2002 when Dusty got a job there. The kids, he said, have sharpened his act.
"They're
really rough," he said. "So my show had to get a lot better in order for me to survive. You have to think on your
feet, because they'll come up with something off the wall. You never know what they're gonna do."
The
"Home on the Range" connection has helped Erwin line up dates at more than 70 Illinois libraries this summer. It
may not put him in the Rolling Stones' league and it may not last, but Erwin says he's content.
"It's
a good job," he said. "After this Disney stuff is done, I'll immediately go back to the bread-and-butter circuit
of kids' gigs. I'm pretty lucky actually."
Copyright
© 2004, Chicago Tribune
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