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
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