Mechanical bulls are kind of weird, but they have certainly made a place in American pop culture over the years. Largely due to one movie, Urban Cowboy.
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Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey you, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. Jerry is not here. She stepped away for a minute digitally speaking, but she's still here in spirit. So this is stuff you should know. Jerry's looking for love and all the wrong places, right, that's right. And Chuck. I was not really cognizant of what was going on when all of this was happening. But there's a period of time where like country was just beyond cool in America, like it was the popular culture. Yeah, I mean I really remember it. And you're, what five years younger at least never gets old. Uh. It is a time that I remember well in the TV show Dallas and when country, you know, had these big crossover stars like Eddie Rabbit and Juice Newton and Mickey Gilly and Kenny Rogers and Kenney Rogers was making these big Hollywood movies and Dolly Parton was making big Hollywood movies. It was it was an interesting time, and it was it was sort of the beginning of the change of country music from sort of more underground outlaw cowboy Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Whale and Jennings stuff to the big A M A's country thing that we see today. And I think the transition was kind of happening back then in the seventies early eighties. That seems to be where it finds its roots is is in this area of this era where it turned into pop basically yeah. And the transition from um, like you were saying that kind of outlaw like hardcore country, um, you pop by way of easy listening, which is a pretty hard left turn if you think about it. But this that easy listening UM was featured prominently on the sound check for a movie called Urban Cowboy, which in one of the more surprising things I've ever come across in our research in the thirteen years we've been doing this. Happy anniversary by the way, um yeah, like right now it's right basically yeah, alright and close enough to that's worth saying happy anniversary for um. One of the more surprising things I've ever come across is that, since we're talking about mechanical bulls today, you can't tell the story of mechanical bulls without John Travolta. I know, right, who knew? Not me? Did you know that that was tied together intimately Urban Cowboy and Mechanical Bulls. Well, it was a big surprise for me, in a pleasant one too, Like I'm still on cloud nine enough for learning about that. Yeah, I mean this was I guess I was a little kid, so you would have been just a babe at the time, So it makes sense that this is more cemented in my memory. But I remember Urban Cowboy. I just remember it all being a very big deal, like people like Olivia Newton John where where people were making country albums that normally didn't because it was just the hot ticket. It was a big deal. Yeah, it really was. Um And like I like, I watched enough um ME TV and stuff to to to be able to recognize this era. It seemed weird to me. Uh it's I think it stands for memorable entertainment television. It's all like old three runs from the seventies. Is it a channel or is it like a streaming app? It's a channel. Um, we have one of those like antenna's. You can get a digital antenna and there's a lot of like really good um rerun Like, uh, what's the word I'm looking for. I guess nostalgic TV out there and me, TV is one of them. But anyway, you know, every once in a while, probably every six their seventh episode of Bionic Woman or six Million Dollar Man will suddenly have some weird country trucker lumberjack theme going on, and you can tell it's like it's because that was the cool thing, right then, you know it was. I mean, like I said, Dallas was a big TV show, and the Dallas Cowboys and the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders was the biggest thing going, and and b J and the Bear and the Dukes of Hazard and right it was. It was this weird time in America where like the Southern and Western country western culture was at the four it's it's very strange, and it coincided with punkin new wave, and you know, it's it's a very weird kind of cool time in this country, I think. But the one of the things that came out of this, one of the things that was popular at the time that really tied into this country zeitgeist that was like the basis of the pop culture at the time was mechanical bull riding, right that that is some thing you would do if you were trying to show off at some bar. It doesn't matter where the bar was in the United States, and I suspect in other parts of the Western world as well, um that that you would ride a mechanical bull wearing a cowboy shirt and tight jeans even though you were from you know, Miami or something like that. Yeah, it's funny. When I was reading this and they were saying, like, they have him in New York, and they had him in New York, in Los Angeles, and it's popular everywhere. The first thing I thought was, I bet they had him in Japan. Surely I was looking. I'm like, I wonder if it's just some like throwback retro uh like mechanical bull riding trend somewhere in the world. I couldn't find any any mention of it anywhere, but surely it is somewhere, you know. It seemed like a good fit. But the mechanical bull, if you don't know what one is, you're not under a rock. Everybody. You could be very much aware of many things in the world and not know what one is. It is. Boy, Chuck, you've really softened and Mellot in your old age, I really have h it is. It is a a simulation of bull riding the rodeo sport of bull riding. It isn't literally a mechanical bull, and we'll talk about how it's made and what it looks like, but you know it's uh, go google a picture. You sit on it and someone is in control of it on the other end, and it mimics the bucking of a bull as if a human were riding on it. And they are very popular in bars, touristy bars usually and maybe in Japan. There's one in New York City at Johnny Utahs. I have some stories about later. But um, the mechanical bull basically can be used to train a rodeo rider, although it's usually just for entertainment purposes. Yeah, it's really interesting about what you just said that it's used for training. Is it's not entirely clear if the mechanical bull was used to train rodeo riders first, or was used as an amusement at Honky Tonk bars first and then became used to train rodeo riders. It has a really hazy origin and it's possible that it evolved um in parallel and multiple places, because there there was a need for training rodeo riders on artificial bulls because part of rodeo that kind of grew out in the nineteenth century in America as um rodeo riding developed based on some of the Mexican blood sports with bulls um As they made their way up north in the United States the southwestern US, um bull riding just kind of came out of nowhere rather than you know, toreo doors um. It was. It got translated into bull riding, and if you want to train on riding a bull, your way better off finding something to simulate the bowl and learning how to ride a bull by riding a bull. You know. Yeah, although you know what it did see somewhere and I couldn't verify it in a lot of places, but I did see in the sixteenth century in Mexico they were actually riding bulls. Uh yeah, so that might have just been a part of the blood sport of bull fighting. If you're a tough guy and you see a bull, you say, I'm gonna ride that bull. Watch this maybe so uh. And then the nineteen thirties in the United States, the Rodeo Cowboy Association was formed, so it was a full deal by the nineteen thirties, the one thing we do know is that the precursor to the mechanics, the mechanized or mechanical bull, was the bucking barrel, which, um, if you could just do an image search for bucking barrel, you've probably seen these at some point. It is a barrel like an oil barrel, tipped on its side, with a saddle on it, and its suspended off the ground and tied at four corners with some pretty heavy duty tight rope. And um, you would go sit on that that barrel, on that saddle, and you would have four ranch hands try and throw you off of it. And imagine that was a lot of fun. Yes, which I mean it's dangerous in and of itself, especially if the ranch hands are jerks, but it's a lot safer than riding a bull. When you're practicing writing to ride a bull, Yeah, I would. I would write a bucking barrel. If I was at one of those uh city slickers like cattle rustling things and they were like, you want to get on the bucking barrel, partner, I'd say, heck yeah, but I would. You could not pay me to get on a real mechanical bull. Oh, I don't know. I was watching some um there's like mechanical bull throw compilations, people falling off mechanical bulls. I watched quite a bit of this. What's the funniest ones are the ones that happened in slow motion, Like the camera's on in slow motion, is just the person who is sliding off in slow motion. Yeah, that's usually how it works instead of really being thrown, right, it seems like legs on there. Pretty not dangerous. So I would ride a mechanical bullet I ever encountered one. Yeah, I'm not into it. That's fine, I won't yum your yuck. Well, I mean there, we'll talk injuries later on. It's uh oh yeah, pretty badly. I think we should. That's that's it's worth saying. We're like, you can really get injured on a mechanical bull maybe not live bul level, but don't ride live bulls anyway. Let's just put that one out there, and then if you're gonna ride a mechanical bull, no that it's still very dangerous and can be. That's right. So, um, should we take a break, Sure, Yeah, let's do it. I'm not we won't come to blows. It's fine, it's fine. I'll just go along one. All right, we'll take a break and then we'll talk more about this funny thing. Right after this m hm, so chuck um. I was saying, like, the origins of mechanical bulls are fairly hazy. Um. We are pretty sure that they came from the bucking barrel that that preceded them, but it's not entirely clear that the mechanical bull descended from the bucking barrel in the rodeo world or into the amusement world. First, like Ed put this together for us, and he looked high and low to find primary source but couldn't find one. But he saw a lot of like mentions of a place called Bertrand Island, an amusement park in New Jersey that supposedly had a mechanical bull back in the thirties. Yeah, this was in New Jersey, and I think this is what the deal is. I saw this referenced a lot online, and there is a coffee table book about Bertrand Island amusement Park. And I bet you dollars to donuts there's a picture of this rightem cowboy ride in that book, because they all referenced this book. But I didn't have time nor the inclination to buy this book to prove it to myself. But I have a feeling that there was a picture of this right um cowboy ride in this in this coffee table book about Bertrand Island Amusement Park in the nineteen thirties. Okay, I've got a great idea. Let's get in the way back machine and we'll go to the printing of that book and we'll look through one of the books. Are you ready? Well, why don't we just go back to the Bertrand Island Amusement Park in the thirties and ride the thing. I guess we could have done. Okay, all right, let's see that. I mean, we can go to a book branding shop. Okay, we'll go to Bertrand Island. You're ready, look at it? Okay, here we are there. It is there, it is. We have definitively proven it. There was a rightem cowboy mechanical bowl um Bertrand what year is it? Right now? Uh? While I'm looking at my uh shark surf watch and it says two. Okay, mechanical bull at Bertrand Island Amusement Park. All right, I guess we should just go back, all right, well, it's weird that we went back and we didn't ride it or getting saltwater taffy or hit the big strongman bell like could have just gone to do the printing press place. I guess we should have. Huh. Probably had a little candy dish with saltwater taffy there that we could have gramped. So if you talk mechanical bulls, you're gonna hear the name Sherwood cry or come up a lot. Uh. Some people might mistakenly say he invented the mechanical bull. Uh. Certainly is could be looked at as the sort of grandfather of the mechanical bull. But he owned a mechanical bull in his saloon in the seventies. That will get too later. But it was built by a man name Actually I don't know if he built it. Joe Turner built it. But Joe Turner and knew my scope at the very least, held a patent for this mechanical ball. Right. Um, I saw it with my own two eyes, but it's from six So Joe Turner definitely didn't invent the mechanical ball, though he was an inventor of the mechanical bull. But we can say definitively since Sherwood Cryer bought the patent from Joe Turner, that Sherwood Cryer is not the inventor of the mechanical Bull, even though I believe even um Wikipedia cites him as the inventor. Yeah, I was surprised to see that, UM, But yeah, he's very widely held to be the the the inventor. But he even said there was an interview with him in the Austin Chronicle in the late nineties where he said he talked about how he bought it off of UM Joe Turner for thirty dollars, and it will become clear why he did that and why that was actually a really good move on his part later on. That's right. But if you want to talk about the mechanics of the mechanical Bull, it is a hydraulic based machine that has a couple of motors on it. It's got a a center shaft and a main gearbox that make up the spin motor, and that's the one that's gonna spin. It's gonna turn it back and forth. That usually when you see them operated, they usually rarely even go a full three sixty before they turn back and go the other way, because that's kind of the whole object is to keep this thing moving in different directions. Right and it's turned back, and the other direction is usually very sudden and harsh. That is abrupt. There's abrupt, thank you buddy, UM. And then there's another motor usually above the bottom motor, and that that that motor has to do with UM moving pistons up and down. Like imagine a platform that that the saddle sits on that the build the bowl is built around that. The rider actually sits on this platform. It moves from side to side and up and down and left and right. So you have a you have a a lot of yaw control is what you need, UM when it comes to riding a mechanic ankle bull because there's also there's pitch yaw and what's the third one role role? You got all three of those going on in this mechanical ball. I believe right. Uh, if you see one of these in a bar, or if you rent one, I love that. Ed did the research in Ed lives in Buffalo, New York and said, and Buffalo, you can rent one for three hours for nine bucks and it comes with the operator and everything. I heard that and then I thought that might be a have been a fun fiftieth birthday party, but unfortunately quarantine to be like three or four people standing around. That's not You could ride it on zoom for all of the other party guests. But it is mounted very very securely to a big floor plate and uh, it is surrounded. I think Sherwood Choir would drive around and collect mattresses at first, but now they have this big inflatable ring basically that surrounds it. And uh, it's got a saddle. It's it's usually the horse itself is um fiberglass or or it's it's metal maybe, but it's covered in this sort of thick padding with leather and then a real deal saddle. Yeah, and um, the ones today there, you know there. There are plenty built in the seventies and eighties and even in the nineties that look like old carnival fun house rides. Basically the controllers are real like old and Yankee looking and colorful and kind of cool in retro. The ones today are um touchscreen. They have like speakers built into them. The padding around them isn't like a mattress, they're like blown air, like a bouncy castle. Kind of thing. Um. So when you get thrown, it's it's like doesn't feel like anything is actually kind of pleasant. Um. And the controllers are much more computerized and less mechanized than they used to be in times past. Yeah, and these days if you look at Urban Cowboy too, it is just sort of the body if you would of the bowl. Uh. Now, if you go to a Johnny Utah's in New York or any kind of fun house, are you getting free drinks there or something? No? I just learned of it, and I didn't know that there was still an urban cowboy type place in New York that you could go. I think it's it's got to be close to Times Square. It's in Midtown and urban urban Cowboy bar that's referential to point break. It's like man covering all the bases. Um. You they have a little fake foam bull heads and horns, and apparently you can even find them with if you want to ride a bison or or a ram like a sheep, you can get a sheep's head put on or a ram's head put on. It goes even more than that. I literally you there's a hammer head, shark, camel, hot dog, banana and then apparently there are there's like the this tawdry thread of bull riding, there's a sexual element to it. I think, uh yes, sure, I mean Ed ed found one of the settings is sexy right right on the actual operations of one machine. ED found it was like pro, intermediate, beginner and sexy. So it's definitely fair to say, okay, And also what I turned up goes way beyond a sexy setting. There's there's a penis one you can get sure, there's a one woman called Horny Hannah, and there's a guy named Randy Roger Boy. So it gets pretty um stupid. Sure, it gets pretty like dark bachelorette party really quick with when you if you if you wanted to go that way, apparently you can you can make it go that way. That's right. We were just speaking of the settings. There are those automated settings, usually that you can just hit pro or beginner or whatever, but you can also be in control. And I think the automated settings are much more common these days. I think back in the urban cowboy days was very much about a human operator trying to you know, really simulate a rodeo. For these sort of about say pseudo competitions. They were competitions in bars. Yeah, I mean there would be like you know, you could win you know, a hundred bucks or something like that. Okay, alright, so so there was like a competition, but um also like in bars, it was you know, just to show off to like that was the whole reason. That's the entire reason for mechanical bulls. If you're sitting there wondering, like, why does anybody do this, it's basically to just show off to stay on as long as you possibly can, basically, And so, like you're saying with the original operator, the operator's job was too humiliate you. That was the whole dynamic. You showing off, the operator trying to throw you off in a very humiliating fashion. And so the more you could stay on, or the longer you could stay on despite the operator's best efforts, you know, the more of a show off you are. I guess. Yeah, I mean, it's not any different. It it's not a far cry from any carnival game where it shows some sort of feet of strength, whether you're hitting the thing with a hammer to make the bell ring or the punching bag to see how hard you can punch a thing, right, and the ones that you rent today for the parties. Uh ed described as an all in one entertainment center. I mean it's got a built in p A system with speakers and a microphone and amplifier, and it's electric scoreboard and timer, and it's just this big thing now, whereas it started out as just sort of this very very rudimentary, hydraulic thing. Yeah. Um, which makes sense because again this is the kind of thing that you can rent like a bounty house, but for grown ups, although they have little kids ones too. About those. And then something else I saw is there's a um so there's like the riding the bull version, there's also a surfboard version that you stand on. And I actually saw a video of a dude who combines those two. Look up on YouTube. Man dances a mechanical bull wearing best Sunday suit and this guy is in a bar wearing a tie, not not just standing up dancing on a mechanical bull that's going at a pretty moderate rate, and it is one of the most astounding things I've ever seen in my life. Amazing. Yeah, but there's the version you can you can rent that or by I guess if you're into that kind of thing. That is, it's like a surfboard and like the bounty area around you. The padding is like a wave kind of thing. It looks pretty cool. Well that's fun. I thought so too. It looks fun at least. So if you're going to ride one of these things, I will say most of the videos I saw at Johnny Utah's among others, is they they keep it pretty tame. Although we'll talk about the dark side of that in a bit too. But um, if if you're going to get like a real ride, then you want to go is forward on that thing towards the head of the bull as much as you can. Uh, you want to grip that bull with your inner thighs and dig those heels in and keep your feet ahead of you and point those toes. Apparently you want to you know, they have a strap that you put your hand in and then you put the other arm up. They say to hang on with your non dominant hand. That's all I've seen. That's all I've seen too. I don't know. I feel like I would be stronger with my dominant hand, but I don't know. I think you're using your non dominant hand because any stupid hand can hold onto a strap. Your dominant hand is balancing. You're holding up in the air to balance, and you need a little more finesse. That is why, right, Well, that's my guess, and it makes sense to me because that's my guess. And what you want to do is you want to go opposite. That's the whole idea. If the bull bucks forward, you want to lean back. If it goes back, you want to lean forward towards its nose. You want to keep those legs tightened down as much as you can, and you want to try and keep everything from the waist up as loose as possible. But again, if you've been throwing down cowboy boot mugs full of beer uh at Jill Roy Rogers, just do whatever you want and good luck. So this this advice comes from a pro rider named Will Roberts, and um he uh. He basically says that if you take each one of these movements as like a wave that you're riding, and think of think of them um discreetly, as discreet motions, and you're just handling each one at a time, you could stay on indefinitely. He didn't say the indefinite part, and said. In fact, he said, you shouldn't stay on longer than fifteen seconds or else you're gonna get hurt, like with at full bore. But I think you could stay on indefinitely. Well, one of those videos I saw was titled something about woman rides bull for so long that video cuts out or something. How is that right? Like? She never fell off, I mean it was going really slow, but uh, you know she she hung in there hanging. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure. It depends on which one you're rented. Uh, well, if you like we said the rental price, if you want to buy one of these systems, it's about twenty grand. I saw that too, But I also saw one on eBay for the suspiciously low price of hundred, and it's possible the whole thing was used. I think if if trampolines are one of those things you buy and then end up just wanting to get rid of, a mechanical bull is probably ten x that, you know. Yeah, I don't know if I would get on a mechanical bull where someone's like, I got a really good deal on it, right, it's basically free. All right, let's take another break and we'll talk about to me what is the most interesting part of this episode, which is sort of the history of Gillies Saloon. Right after this, Sorry Josh okay, Chuck, you promised to talk about Gilly Saloon. What is that? Well, we talked about Mr Cryer. He owned a saloon. It was really kind of an oversized tent called Shelley's and Pasadena, Texas outside of Houston, and this was in the early seventies, like one and he would bring in country singers who weren't big national acts yet, but they were sort of known regionally and it was a popular bar, and it was getting bigger and bigger because that was oil country. People came in with some money and he said, you know what, I think the needs to not be at tent, but to be a real deal saloon. And he partnered up with a man named Mickey Gilly right, and I mean he gave him a pretty sweet deal. He said, look, I want to build this thing out. I'm going to build it out. We're gonna make it a more permanent structure and turned it eventually into like a forty thousand square foot bar, multiple multiple, multiple bars. Um that was basically like a real deal Texas Roadhouse and honky tonk Um you, Gilly, We're gonna name it after you and you and your house band, um are gonna play basically every night. And Gilly, did you say that that was Jerry Lee Lewis's cousin? No, but he was? He? Yes, he was Jerry Lee Lewis's cousin. Um still is possibly is he's still alive? Yeah, Mickey Gilly is eighty five and he had that big crossover hit with Looking for Love or from the soundtrack, right, Uh, I don't Yeah, it was it on the Urban Cowl Sounds. I'm pretty sure was on the Urban Cowboys soundtrack yea yeah? Or is is Buckwheat would call it? Uh booking panubub and um. He was no slouch though he had forty two top forty country singles in his career. So what's funny is if I've read an interview with him, I think in Texas Monthly on like the thirty fifth anniversary of Urban Cowboy, and he basically talks about how, you know, he was looking for love but it was an all all the wrong places um he uh he he was looking for stardom and he just could never quite get it. So I guess he was one of those unsung like highly successful people who never became a huge star. And apparently he was trading on being Jerry Lee Lewis's cousin, was doing like tribute shows, cover shows, that kind of stuff. It was doing fine. But so when Um Sherwood Cryer met up with him, informed a partnership with them, he he became the namesake of Gail Least, this incredibly popular honky talk outside of Houston. Um that that became the setting for Urban Cowboy thanks to randomly enough uh an Esquire article. Yeah, this reminded me very much. And it's weird that they're both Trivolta. But Saturday Night Fever it's tied even more closely than that. The very editor who ran that Esquire article was the same co founder of New York Magazine who ran Tribal Rights of the New Saturday Night that gave rise that was the basis of Saturday Night Fever. All right, so it all comes full circle. I have I printed that out, the Tribal Rights of Saturday Night back when we talked about it. I have not read it yet, And now I'm going to pronout the ballad of the Urban Cowboy in America's Search for True Grit. And I'm gonna have just both those articles sitting on my desk forever, probably, but I want to read. I want to read them both because they were both the basis of two sort of landmark seventies movies that became cultural touchstones, and John Travolta was in both of them. Yeah, it's really weird, but it's basically the same thing, except one is disco said at a disco nightclub. The other one is country music said at a country western bar. But it's the same exact thing, same format, love, um, fighting, rivalry, jealousy, competition on its basically on a weekend night while everybody's getting trashed at a bar. It's just and they were separated by two years. I think UM seventy six was the Saturday Night UM New York magazine article and seventy eight was the one that featured Gillies. Yeah, it's really pretty interesting time in our country's history that they're almost two sides of the same coin. And again, like I mentioned earlier, this is all going on at the same time that like punk music is is saying I hate all of you people exactly and for good reason, looks so so. This guy can't remember his name. Um, Irving. No, he was one of the managers or promoters or he had a lot to do with the Eagles. Um. He bought the rights to that article for like two hundred thousand dollars, which is a lot of money to spend on a magazine article option at the time. And he he just knew that no matter what happened, he was going to have a huge soundtrack on his hands, just like Saturday Night Fever. Um. And it worked twice. It did work. He apparently wanted it to be all Eagles, and the Eagles were like, no, that's okay. We suck so terribly. We even we wouldn't want to do a whole soundtop um. But I ended up being like a really great soundtrack. I've never heard it, but I mean, just looking at the roster. Kenny Rogers, Charlie Daniels, Bonnie rate Um and Mickey Gilly had Looking for Love on it as well. Yeah, it was. It was great. We had the record in our house. Uh. Like you said, they shot the movie, a lot of it was shot at Gilly. Uh. That was the bar scene that you know was predominant in the movie and the competition between Scott Glenn and John Travolta. As you know, they battled for for bragging rights, cash money, and Deborah Winger's heart and glory of course the well the glory men. Scott Um Scott. Yeah, I can't believe he just forgot his last name. I think he's one of the coolest actors ever. Yeah. Not a Carrodean, No, No, he's a Carredan plus yeah. He. I think Scott Glenn was one of those that was always I think he was always confused as a Carrodeine with a lot of people because he sort of has that look for sure. So it was the big success of this movie that made Crier say, I need to secure this patent because this thing is about to explode. And I think by that point, uh, the gentleman who he who held that patent, Yeah, Joe Turner said well, let's up the price a little bit to to thirty thou and criers Or still said, yeah, that's don't tell this guy. But that's still a pretty good deal. Yeah. Because the mechanical Bull is basically a third lead character in this movie. Debra Winger, John Travolta and this mechanical bull El Toro, the real mechanical bull at Gillies um and became a huge part of the pop culture. And in Sherwood Cryer was smart enough to realize how big of a deal it was going to be bought the patent for it. And now if you wanted a mechanical bull for your bar that you just converted over to a honky Tonk format, you had to go buy one from Sherwood Cryer. And he made a lot of money off of those, from what I understand he did. Uh. I think he even won lawsuits when people tried to dodge his license. And uh, yeah, he made a lot of money off of this fad and it was indeed a fad um for sure. Yeah. But like I said, you go to Johnny Utahs. There was one on the Sunset Strip to I don't know if it's still there. There was a what's the name of that place? Another canon Johnny movie I can't remember, but there was a country western bar on the on the Sunset strip that had a mechanical bull as well. Uh, I can't remember. I can't remember either. I Um, I know exactly what you're talking about and I can't remember the name of it. It's super famous, right, it was for a while, and it wasn't even that long ago, Like I think when I lived there, it was still there super cuts, No, not hogs and heifers. That was in the meatpacking district in New York. But uh, this is what genuinely kicked off that whole movement that we talked about at the beginning, with Southern culture and Western culture kind of being at the forefront and all these people doing crossover records and uh, pop music and country sort of intertwining and the lines being blurred, and the Dallas Cowboys and JR. Eu ing like this sort of all started with Urban Cowboy and this mechanical bull El Toro. I would argue that it started before that, and that or been Cowboy was was catching a wave that was developing. Yeah, yeah, and gets credit. But I mean, like if you look at Convoy, that Chris Christofferson movie, so that was a couple of years before that, but it was the same year that article was published in Esquire, So it was all kind of coming together congealing at the same time. Yeah, every we didn't kick it off, it capitalized early on on what it was coming, for sure, but it came in a like at a time when it could still be considered cool and a huge contributor to the spread of it, right, Yeah, And this was like, it's it's funny, Like I kind of looked back with some fondness, even though it's it wasn't my scene. But if you talk to any of the old timers from back then, they called him Gilly Rats. He's real. You know, these these local bar patrons that was, they were the real deal. They hated all this stuff, man, Yeah, because it brought in all the posers and the tourists and yeah, you know people people on business trips passing through Houston had to go to Gilly And I'm sure it just took something that was really sacred and special to them and and commodified it in a really sad way. I'm sure it was terrible at least for a while. And then I'm sure it went back to normal again generally, and they were still on that bar stool in the same place exactly. It's just all kind of happened around him. Um. But speaking of that kind of country chic trend, that urban cowboy was a huge part of I saw a reference to a Fantasy Island episode from called Everybody Goes to Gillies. Mickey Gilly played himself and his fantasy was to make it big in the country music scene, and I think may have gotten it. I think it was successful. I wonder if Tattoo got up on that thing. I don't know. I could not find the episode. I just was reading about it, which is kind of disappointing, right it comes to Fantasy Island. I wanted to see that movie, the Lache movie with Peter Dinklage, but I never got around to it. Did you see that? I forgot that they made that. No, I haven't seen it. So as far as Gillies goes, um, I wondered. You know, I wasn't sure the deal and I was like, surely you can still go to Gillies. But you can't because Gillies burned to the ground. It did suspiciously. Apparently it was ruled in Arson and this came after there was a dispute between Mickey Gilly and Sherwood Cryer, and apparently Mickey Gilly, who had been approached by Sherwood Crier to basically come in as a partner on his bar, came out victorious, triumphant, and UH ended up on the winning end of this this dispute and apparently walked away with most of the profits. And I guess Gilly said in at least one interview that, um he he expected that it was Sherwood Crier who had burned Gillies to the ground in n It's quite an accusation, it really is. But I was reading again that Texas Monthly article. I think it's called Urban Cowboy turns thirty five. It's like an oral history, which is the la easiest form of journalism, but it's still do Yeah. Well, then I explained why they keep making them. I thought it was just like I don't feel like actually writing today, I'm just gonna transcribe. It's them. Well, you would like this, you should read. It's very long and it's really in depth. And they talked to some of the original Gilly rats, and a couple of them who worked for Sherwood Cryer have to say like this, this guy was an amazing human being, but he was also somebody who would beat someone with a pool que if like they were causing trouble at Gillies and did do that, and like you did not want to run a foul of this guy. Um, but was also like a really fascinating, interesting, smart human being too. Yeah, shout out to Texas Monthly too, that's a really good rag. I really I read a couple of things from there for some podcasts we're developing a couple of years ago, and it was really good. They did these great deep dive not not oral histories, but like you know, long form. Yeah, there's a guy named Skip something. Oh man, I can't remember Skip's name. I'll look it up. Everybody, don't worry about it. But Skip Hollandsworth or something like that. He's one of their better journalists for long form at Texas Monthly. He's great. But there's a lot of them. They have a good, good stable there. Um. And then uh, they announced that there would be a new Gillies but it's not just gonna be a bar, it's gonna be a sixteen acre multi use development. And apparently El Toro survived the fire and they're bringing the original El Toro back just to put on display. So I found one reference that El Toro survived the fire. It was in the Ocalis Star banner. What does anybody in Ocaliflorida. Now I don't know, but they said that El Toro survived fire and then it was moved to Cowboy Jack's in Woodberry, Minnesota. So it looks a Cowboy Jack's. There is a cowboy right, I thought so too. Cowboy Jack's makes no men and of having the original or El Toro at any point, that's suspicious because you would really lean into that. Oh dude, it's all I would ever talk about to anybody. But that's that's what the Ocalistar banner says. Cowboy Jack's does not back it up. So who knows exactly what happened to El Toro? That's right, Like, don't get on that bullet Johnny Utah's, you're gonna catch something. You come right, El Toro, You're gonna catch some Johnny demonic on that thing. Uh. There was there were some injuries though that we um would be remiss without mentioning there have been plenty of lawsuits over the years. There was a woman in Santa Barbara County that was left a quadriplegic when she landed on her neck. So obviously if you get thrown off something, if you land wrong, that can be bad news. Uh. A man in Bergenfield, New Jersey, in Bergen County that was left with permanent injuries. And then at Johnny Utah's, a New York woman won seventy thousand dollars because she tore her a c l at Johnny Utah's, and her lawyer said this, they just kind of throw people around while they're drunk. I think that summed up the mechanical bull about as good as anybody ever had. Yeah, that was how he described the operators. He said, they just kind of throw people around. And then I went to YouTube looked up Johnny Utahs and if you want to spend some time looking at very bad camera phone videos of drunk friends filming drunk friends writing very slowly on these mechanical bulls to bad music, you can do it. But you can sort of see and a few of these videos that would be some drunk lady or a drunk guy who was just you know, being kind of obnoxious, and you could tell that the but they weren't coming off, and you could tell that the operator was would get sick of it and they were going real slow. Then there'd be like a and just a really quick little flick of that switch and it would just like toss him off of their real fast. There's no way that there's not a term long mechanical bull operators for that move. For that move, there has to be I wonder what it is. If you know, please let us know because we have to know. We got gillid Yeah, that's right. Um, you got anything else? Thankfully? No? Okay, Well that's it for mechanical bulls. If you want to know more about mechanical bulls, then start watching throwing off mechanical bull videos. There's, like you said, a lot of them. Uh. And since I said throwing off mechanical balls, it's time for listener mail. You know what. I was just thinking this could be the jackhammers of the next generation of stuff. You should know, listeners. Mechanical bulls, I don't know. I think urban cowboys saved it without urban cowboy absolutely, I think, and to save the day again. And then it hit me, I was like, the common denominator hydraulics. We got to avoid hydraulics from here on out. I think you might be right. All right, so where are we listener mail? Yep? I think Jerry already did the China all right, I'm gonna call this c I a correction from anonymous. Oh hey, guys, have been a stuff you should not listener for years. I love the work you do. Someone who was formally employed by the CIA, I particularly enjoy the latest episode on Havana Syndrome. Have since left that job because of ethical concerns. But I've one nit to pick, and that's when you talk about people who work in the CIA. Uh, you call them agents, which is not right. They're actually officers. There's no such thing as the CIA agent. H this is this is basically ruined the entire episode for them. That one thing. No, they're nice, but I mean we always say CI agent because we're children of television and film. I didn't know if that's not even a thing. Everybody says that. Uh, they say this. I know the media gets wrong, gets this wrong a lot, so it's understandable that's the terminology that folks use. But in the interests of always learning and improving, I thought I'd passed this along. Um, Josh actually did say officer a couple of times somewhere in the middle, and that was the exception for you guys. That's great. Other than this admittedly small quibble, I love everything you guys do, and often use my favorite old episodes to calm my anxiety or to help is I fall asleep? Uh? Currently in the heavy rotation of the max setterm incident in Star Wars Holiday special episode. Those are that that will calm you down for sure. Yeah, thanks very much for reading the message. All the best, Anonymous and uh. Initially Anonymous said maybe use my initials because it might be a little paranoid about this being former CIA, but then they said, you know, how about just no initials. I think that's smart. Just go with anonymous exactly. In fact, I made this whole thing up. There is no former officer that left for ethical concerns. This listener mail will self destruct in three seconds. Two one. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, we love hearing from people, whether they are from the CIA or the n s A or the FBI. Who else, chuck oh a t F sure and that's it, no one else? Okay, Um, if you want to get in touch with us and send us some trade secrets, we would love to hear that stuff. You can wrap it up, send it in an email off to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you should know is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.