Urban Cowboy (1980)

directed by James Bridges

Claire Sewell

“So, how did you guys meet?”

Johnny and I have been married for ten years now, and this isn’t a question I get asked as often as I once did. Still, occasionally I’ll get to talking to another parent on the playground while our kids are running around, and it comes up.

“Well, actually we met on Yelp.”

This response elicits either surprise or confusion while I quickly clarify that no, Yelp, is not also a dating site and yes, it was more popular back in 2008 when we met. At that time, the site had a little bit of a social media component to it where users could create a short sidebar profile listing their hometown, what their last meal on Earth would be, and a current crush, among a few other impossibly quaint details. I noticed that Johnny listed his hometown as Pasadena, Texas, messaged him, and we decided to meet up in person at a gay bar that we both liked and had reviewed. Folks are sometimes not as honest about being from Pasadena as he was (1). It’s easier to just say you’re from Houston and hopefully bypass any comments about “Stink-a-dena,” the city’s nickname thanks to its proximity to numerous chemical plants.

It turned out that we grew up down the street from each other, attended schools in the same school district, and his family’s pipeline supply business is even on the same street as the house of one of my childhood best friends. So even though we didn’t meet until many years later, we have a lot of shared memories of people, places, and local attitudes and sensibilities. One place that still looms large in the collective memory of those of us who grew up in the Pasadena area in the 1980s and 1990s is Gilley’s. The 6,000-capacity country music nightclub opened in 1970 and was hugely successful. Its namesake, country musician and songwriter Mickey Gilley, served as the club’s general headliner and emcee. Gilley’s is quite possibly Pasadena, Texas’s most well-known claim to pop culture fame, and it was immortalized in all its honky-tonk glory in the 1980 film Urban Cowboy (2). The film’s tagline—“Hard hat days and honky-tonk nights”—is a perfect descriptor of the clientele and atmosphere of Gilley’s, where men like Bud Davis, the titular character played by John Travolta, would go to blow off steam after long shifts at the nearby plants.

For one reason or another, I recall that we were on a sort of Travolta bender when we watched Urban Cowboy for the first time, having also recently watched Saturday Night Fever and its truly bananas sequel Staying Alive. Was this during the boredom days of the COVID-19 lockdown? I don’t remember exactly. Probably. The years blur. We had both obviously seen Pulp Fiction several times in the past, but Johnny was maybe a little less familiar with Travolta’s career than I was. To me, he’d been Danny Zucko ever since my parents let me check out a VHS copy of Grease from the local Video Central when all I understood about it was that the songs were very catchy. Johnny and I share a fondness for movies that are so bad they’re good, and a lot of Travolta’s career certainly fits that description (3). Urban Cowboy is more good than bad, though, with New Jersey-born-by-way-of-Brooklyn-Vinnie-Barbarino Travolta affecting a southern accent better than you might expect. Gilley’s was still open during the years when we were born, and the country kitsch nomenclature seen in the film was inescapable in the Pasadena area at the time. Maybe that’s why Johnny and I can enjoy Urban Cowboy for what it is at this point in our lives. We’ve had some distance from the area yet remain both physically and nostalgically tied to it. Our immediate families still live in the area, Johnny took over running the business, and at least one day of every weekend is usually spent with our daughter visiting her grandparents.

There is a moment about 20 minutes into the film that we’ve paused multiple times. Bud and Sissy (Debra Winger) have just had their first big fight after another night out at Gilley’s. Sissy’s skinned her knuckles hitting the club’s punching bag, and she’s starting to get a bit too big for her britches. They’re at a greasy spoon with friends, and Bud tells her, “You gotta learn somethin’. There’s just certain things a girl can’t do.” Two of Bud’s old flames stroll in (played by Texas’s own Jerry Hall and her sister Cyndy), he ogles them, and Sissy gets jealous and storms out after Bud slaps her. In the parking lot she sticks her thumb out in an attempt to hitch a ride home. The camera turns, and it’s here that we pause the movie. We’re interested in the view up Spencer Highway, one of the main roads that runs through Pasadena. Brightly lit signs for Montgomery Ward, Weingarten’s, and Handy Dan glitter in the distance. There’s a Whataburger, too, and it’s the only thing in the frame that still exists today. The Montgomery Ward building is now an indoor flea market. Weingarten’s was a grocery store chain that’s long been out of business. Handy Dan was a home improvement chain, but it’s been the Alamo Thrift Store since at least the mid-nineties. Such a brief moment probably never registers with most viewers, but these shadows of Pasadena’s retail past are a kind of liminal space in our relationship—a shared time and place that we’ve somehow relied on through our own ups and downs over the years.

Bud and Sissy keep fighting, and they wrestle in a puddle in the parking lot before she finally agrees to leave with him. Once inside Bud’s pickup truck he asks her, “Wanna get married?” Where? At Gilley’s, of course. Throughout the rest of the two-hour run time Sissy argues for her turn to ride the mechanical bull, and there’s more domestic violence, lyin’, cheatin’, and a fire at the plant where Bud and his Uncle Bob (RIP) work for a touch of emotional resonance. There’s even a Dolly Parton lookalike contest because of course there is. In the end Bud and Sissy get back together, and the film ends with them pulling out of the Gilley’s parking lot in Bud’s pickup as Johnny Lee’s hit song from the soundtrack, “Lookin’ For Love,” plays over the credits.

These days the generation that actually set foot in Gilley’s, let alone remembers it at all, is shrinking. Urban Cowboy is more about the club’s heyday anyway, as it was already headed south by the time the film was shot in 1980. It closed in 1989, and a fire burned the whole thing to the ground in 1990 (4). A junior high school now occupies the land where the world’s largest honky tonk once stood, and in 2020 Pasadena named a road in Mickey Gilley’s honor. I guess that’s how you know you’ve really made it. Damn.

1 Admittedly, I’ll usually say that although I went to schools zoned to Pasadena the neighborhood I grew up in is in Houston.

2 The film is based on a true story, The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy: America’s Search for True Grit, written by Aaron Latham for Esquire in 1978. Latham also co-wrote the screenplay for the film.

3 Now that I think about it, this strange trip may have started when we happened to catch Travolta’s early career turn in the made-for-TV movie, The Boy In the Plastic Bubble, randomly playing one night on a cable movie channel.

4 Latham tried his luck writing the book for a Broadway musical version of Urban Cowboy but it was a flop, closing after 60 performances.

Claire Sewell is a librarian in Houston, TX. She is the author of The Golden Girls Fashion Corner, and her writing focuses on gender, nostalgia, and memory.