(WESTERN THEME, CATTLE, HORSES, WHOOPS)

TR: THE LIVES OF THE COWBOYS.....brought to you by Odessa Vacation Homes and Condos......if you're looking for sunshine and inexpensive real estate, you almost can't do better than West Texas......and now as we rejoin Dusty and Lefty (OUTDOOR AMBIENCE, CA TTLE IN DISTANCE), we find them making camp for the night at Yellow Springs on the Lonesome Trail south of Amarillo....

(OUTDOOR AMBIENCE, CATTLE. THEN THE RATTLE OF COOKWARE)

.... TR: This is the worst song I ever heard in my life. Absolutely the worst. I'd rather listen to sheep than listen to this.

GK:

He'd been caught that morning, with a paper shirt and vest,
He wore paper boots and spurs and pants, so they made an arrest,
And charged him with rustling, which apparently he did:
That afternoon they strung him up, the Amarillo Kid.

I can hear the people coming from every neighborhood
And I long to be in Austin when the party's getting good.


TR: I sincerely hope this is the end.

GK:

They strung him up, and shot him, and were about to give him poison,
And then one cowboy rose up in his saddle and cried, "Boys, in
All my days on lynch mobs, there was one sure way of lynchin'
That's to lock him in the outhouse with the works of Thomas Pynchon.

So they put the Amarillo Kid in the little house out back
With the works of Thomas Pynchon, a solid four-foot stack.
And he commenced to read The Crying of Lot 49,
And he groaned so loud and mournfully, they knew that he was dyin.

He finally finished that one but on Gravity's Rainbow,
They could hear him sighing and his breath was coming slow.
When they opened up the door, he had passed to his rest,
He had died of suffocation for the book lay on his chest.

He could see the ladies singing, he could smell his long-lost friends,
And his spirit went to Austin where the party never ends.


TR: Is this finally the end now?

GK: All over except for the yodel....


from:
A Prairie Home Companion, Cowboys,Saturday, June 6, 1998