Author Archives: Alan Ilagan

Our day of ‘Rodeo’ inspired music comes to a gentle close with this rendition of the old cowboy tune ‘Goodbye Old Paint’, which Copland reportedly used as part of his ‘Rodeo’ ballet cycle. On a Friday night in this Fall of the Cowboy, after a day of rain and rumination, I’m feeling a touch more contemplative than I typically do at the start of a weekend. Time for a story song to take us out of our own heads and worries…

When I take my saddle
Down from the wall
Put it on my pony
Lead him from the stall
Tie my bones to his back
Turn our faces to the West
We’ll ride the prairies we love the best

A cowboy carries a certain sadness in their countenance. Whether it’s been beaten into them after one too many falls from the saddle, or whether they’ve beaten it into themselves – cowboys being their own harshest abusers – the tears of a cowboy run like little rivers through the dirty canyons of their hollow cheeks. True cowboys don’t get to indulge in the weekend either – animals requiring constant and daily care outside the societal limitations of human time. Friday night is as Sunday morning is as Wednesday afternoon and so on and so forth. A cowboy’s days are not often his own, and we haven’t gotten into a cowboy’s nights just yet… but we will.

It was my first time playing with an orchestra, and even though it was the Empire State Repertory Orchestra, I was still way out of my league. Not helping matters in the least was the fact that somehow we were late for this first rehearsal, throwing someone with severe social anxiety way off his game. As I sheepishly stepped through the orchestra already making its wild way through Copland’s ‘Hoe-Down’ movement of his ‘Rodeo’ ballet, I dodged the string-player’s elbows and squeezed into the second oboe’s spot near the front and center of the whole group. From that day forward, the conductor did not like me very much.

Looking back, I cannot blame him – and even at that time, I knew most of the blame fell on me – for not being good enough, not having the first clue about orchestra etiquette or decorum, and definitely not being prepared enough for the sort of talent that the ESYO family sought and sustained. My chosen instrument – the impossibly difficult oboe – was the only thing that got me into such a vaunted space; no one wanted to attempt a tackle and taming of that dreaded double-reeded monstrosity. I had only picked it because a girl I liked in grade school had selected that as her chosen instrument. Somehow, I’d made it into mine in the ensuing years of blood, sweat and tears – and all of them would be elicited from those rehearsals and practice sessions and weekly private lessons.

Aaron Copland – the brilliant, and gay, composer with ties to Brandeis University, where I eventually ended up matriculating – would bracket my years in the Repertory Orchestra and the Empire State Youth Orchestra. On this first night, his sixteenth notes gave my tongue a run for its barely-teenaged money, and my mind reeled at the speed and power with which the orchestra charged through the sheet music; like some wildly uncontrollable bucking bronc, it grabbed me by the jodhpurs and did its best to throw me off.

It succeeded a number of times that first rehearsal. I lost my place, couldn’t catch up with the rest of the players, and felt terribly like I did not in any way belong there. Like any good cowboy, however, some bit of fire inside of me refused to let me give up. Well, a bit of fire coupled with my parents’ insistence on not dropping out – not that I even proposed such a thing, even though I was in over my head. Over the next two years, I would focus on my practice, work with my teacher, and more or less master the oboe well enough to get me into the actual Youth Orchestra. It still wasn’t where I belonged, but my innate tenacity insisted on asserting itself despite grave social anxiety, crippling self-doubt, and all sorts of imposter syndrome set-backs.

On that first evening trying to capture Copland’s mad genius, I couldn’t hear the message he was trying to get across from all the stress I felt – and I wouldn’t hear his real music until my very last concert with the orchestra the following year. That much I regret about the experience – the competition, the five-hour double rehearsals, and the rustic weekend at Frost Valley stressed me out so much that any appreciation in music that I should have been developing was made impossible until I was at the end of my time there.

So yes, regrets… I’ve had a few… but then again, too few to mention.

The supposedly-macho and often-misogynistic history of country-western music is being turned on its antiquated head as we repurpose and reformulate readings of cowboy lore for this Fall of the Cowboy. As a gay cowboy in-the-hopeful-making, my own pose is one of retro-amusement – and while some may be quick to dismiss this as nothing more than a pose, there are deeper things at work here, such as the distillation of the essence of a cowboy and his primal make-up. Far more than the boots or the animal-caretaking actions, a cowboy is unbridled chaos and passion barely contained within the confines of his denim and rope. He carries the weight of a history almost obsolete and a tradition worth preserving in his dusty back pocket, surviving on a vision and the will of a heart still bound to this earth and all its physical machinations, purposes and pleasures.

The highway, she’s hotter than nine kinds of hell
The rides, they’re as scarce as the rain
When you’re down to your last shuck with nothing to sell
And too far away from the trains
Been a good month of Sundays and a guitar ago
Had a tall drink of yesterday’s wine
Left a long string of friends, some sheets in the wind
And some satisfied women behind

They’d ride me down easy, Lord, ride me on down
Leave word in the dust where I lay
Say I’m easy come, easy go
And easy to love when I stay

A restless spirit is part of many a cowboy’s operation in this life. A desire to be free and entirely unfettered, at odds with all the rope they require, adds to their allure. We mostly want all that we can’t have, and a cowboy carries that power with only the merest understanding of his pull. It doesn’t completely exonerate him from blame, but it lends a charm that makes some of it forgivable, or at least tolerable for those with a decent amount of patience. I’ve only encountered a few spiritual cowboys over the years, and I’m afraid I didn’t treat them well or with the respect they deserved – this was after a bad break-up in which I didn’t exhibit much good behavior. One day soon I’ll tell you about some of them – one of those spiritual cowboys who came into my life as a lesson, which I promptly failed and fucked up, then watched it all play out in the dim hurt of his eyes.

Put snow on the mountain, raise hell on the hill
I locked horns with the devil himself
Been a rodeo bum, a son of a gun
And a hobo with stars in his crown

In my own way, I was a love ’em and leave ’em type of cowboy at the time – unable to process my actions while wading through such a pool of hurt and heartbreak, I lashed out and ruined and destroyed with willful abandon, giving and accepting sex as a weapon and currency – those brief spurts of satisfaction attempting to become something more, and me refusing at every turn, then turning to another. I remember one sweet gentleman waiting at my door with a carved wooden rose in his hand – I came downstairs, opened the door, accepted the gift, then said something so cruel he never bothered coming in. The worst of it is that I no longer even remember what I said, and maybe that’s for the best. I’m haunted by enough of what I’ve done, and the more forgotten, the better I might sleep at night.

So ride me down easy, Lord, ride me on down
Leave word in the dust where I lay
Say I’m easy come, easy go
And easy to love when I stay
Ride me down easy, Lord, ride me on down…