TRACK 12: "The Bozo Buck Stops Here"
Don't seethe too long. It's not good for you
Well, I've been seething for so long that it is branded in my face
It seem that nothing ever goes my way
But I've -got this old guitar and a muse from outer space
And I've gotta lotta things I wanna say
I've had it up to here with all these governmental androids
Who got nothin’ plugged between their ears
Pretty soon they're gonna see that when they're shuffling me
That the Bozo Buck stops here
Once upon a time I thought I really had it made
I guess I wasn't well prepared for any shocks
Sometimes I feel I'm in that jungle gulping down that Purple Kool Aid
But everybody needs some hard knocks
Some turn to angel dust and some go to discos
And some would sell their sister for a beer
But as long as I can sing you're gonna hear that Voodoo sting
When the Bozo Buck stops here
Bridge [spoken]:
Some say the heart's like an 8-track tape
When you slice it
You can't splice it
But my love for you is real, too real
And my heart is like a cartridge that's been eaten
I never could pull off any John Denver image
I'm not as sensitive as Jackson Browne
And as hard as I may try, I'll never look like Linda Ronstadt
So they won't let me play my tunes in this here town
I'm sick and tired of trying hard not to scare the tourists
When maybe all's they need's a shot of fear (“BOO!")
Just keep 'em out of touch and it won't hurt 'em very much when the Bozo Buck stops, here .
copyright Sidhe Gorm Music (BMI)
(written 1979)
“Your songs are pretty funny, but some of them are, uh, maybe a little too strong. You think you could throw in a few non-originals? You know, for people not familiar with your music. We get a lot of tourists in here, you know. Maybe like something by The Eagles …”
That’s not an exact quote. I wasn’t a trained journalist at the time and I didn’t record this downtown Santa Fe restaurant manager that afternoon in the early summer of 1979.
But that was the gist of what he told me after my audition that day in the bar section of his establishment.
He wanted me to play some fucking Eagles!
It was years before the song below had been released, but had it been available, it would have been the perfect answer, the perfect way to end my failed audition:
This was a dormant period in my so-called music career. I mentioned in the prelude to this Substack that for several months in late 1978 I had a regular Sunday night gig at a little shopping mall bar called Faces.
That Faces gig was my first taste of having a small but boisterous following that showed up just to hear my golden words and questionable music skills, my very first time I’d experienced the thrill of hearing the laughter and applause from an enthusiastic audience.
But it ended abruptly, sadly and violently.
One Sunday night in the autumn of 1978 I was playing my regular gig at Faces when a boisterous bunch of guys on some municipal basketball team came in. They seemed pretty happy, so I assumed they were celebrating a victory.
Go team!
But before long, things got hostile.
At some point during my performance I heard these basketball shitheads arguing with the bouncer. But then things quieted down. During my next break I learned that one of the teammates got in some kind of hassle with someone and the whole group was 86ed from Faces.
After my set I was packing up my guitar and saying goodnight to some friends, one of the Faces regulars, who had left the bar moments before, came barging back inside.
“Those assholes smashed every windshield of every car in the fucking parking lot!”
He was right. And those windshields included the one on my new Ford Fiesta, which I’d just bought a couple of months before. Replacing it cost a lot more than I made for the gig that night.
We all assumed this was the work of the belligerent basketball bros. But I can’t honestly say for sure.
Within a couple of weeks, the management at DeVargas Center Mall evicted Faces. I’m not sure the windshield massacre was the stated cause of that action. But it couldn’t have helped.
This was the first in a series of personal “shocks” for which I wasn’t well prepared. At this point in my life I found that Murphy’s Law was being strictly enforced.
One major “shock” was self-inflicted.
At this point in my life I was managing a tobacco store at DeVargas – only steps away from the ill-fated Faces. But, having earned my college degree in education a couple of years before, I also was trying to get hired as a high school teacher.
Around the same time as my Faces gig ended, there were openings for an English teaching spot as well as a librarian job at my old alma mater Santa Fe High.
The principal told me that I was one of two finalists for the job – but if he decided to hire the other finalist, he’d hire me as a librarian.
So I was planning to give notice at the tobacco store as soon as I got official word from Santa Fe Public Schools.
But one day I’d found a bunch of bugs in the boxes of cigars that had been delivered that morning. I called the district manager who told me just to brush off the bugs and go ahead and sell the cigars.
I thought this was a rotten way to treat our customers, so I refused. And then, thinking the high school job was within my grasp, I quit and walked out of the tobacco store.
Then a few days later, I called the high school principal – only to learn that he’d given both the teaching job and the librarian job to others.
Without a full-time job, I fell behind on my car payments. So one day in early January 1979, I lost my Ford Fiesta, new windshield and all — to this guy:
Yep, the Repo Man.
Pam and I had to scramble for a few weeks, until we were able to afford a run-down used Plymouth station wagon. It was an awful gas hog – and we were constantly running out of gas – with a battery that quickly needed replacing.
Just a joy to drive.
With my teaching position gone, I started working at Coronado Bowling Center, at barely above minimum wage.
At the bowling alley, I was the night desk man, working the cash register, spraying the bowling shoes with Lysol, and commanding a small army of “concourse boys” who were responsible for cleaning up the seating areas around the actual lanes.
Sometimes I had to act as an unofficial bouncer when some drunk in the adjoining bar was getting out of hand. They stopped making me do this after the second time I asked to be compensated for a shirt that got torn during these skirmishes.
Just a dream job.
So this was my life from late 1978 through most of 1979. Broke and frustrated with a shitty job and a shittier car.
On top of that, nobody would hire me to play my silly songs. After that restaurant manager asked if I could learn some Eagles, I truly was an angry young man.
Thus I wrote this song, lambasting the “governmental androids” who wouldn’t hire me at the public schools and the music venues that wanted me to clean up my act for the tourists.
I felt trapped, like the Jonestown denizens whose only way out was to gulp that purple Kool Aid.
I took out my rage on the likes of of John Denver, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, etc.
Except for Mr. Denver, I actually do grudgingly appreciate some of Browne and Ronstadt’s music (especially Linda’s earlier stuff).
I was bugged at the whole gimpy wimpy Laurel Canyon scene — or “El Lay,” as Robert Christgau called it — that seemed to take over the musical sensibilities of My Generation who were too stodgy for punk rock or even New Wave.
Eagles-adjacent music still bugs me!
Even though deep down I actually like this Ronstadt song, I used it as an ironic model for the song’s spoken-word bridge.
Forgive me, Linda …
But what’s that got to do with Bozo Bucks?
More to the point, what the bloody Hell, is a goddamn Bozo Buck?
My brother Jack, the producer of Potatoheads and lead guitarist on all the songs, invented the Bozo Buck, one day in a class at Santa Fe High School.
“I don't recall any obvious external influence, aside from the general sense of humor of the era,” Jack told me in a recent text.
What was this “general sense of humor of the era” of which Jack speaks?
One obvious example is The Firesign Theatre, those surreal rock ‘n’ roll comedians who I basically idolized during their glorious heyday.
In 1971, the year I graduated from high school, the Fabulous Firesigns released an album titled I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus.
It looked like ths:
I was such a Firesign fanatic that I bought their 1972 Big Book of Plays (which, by cracky, is available to read for free on the Internet Archives!)
There, the group defines what a “Bozo” is:
Bozos are people who band together for fun and profit. They have no jobs. Anybody who goes on a tour is a Bozo. Why does a Bozo cross the street? Because there's a Bozo on the other side. It comes from the phrase *vosotros*, meaning others. They're the huge, fat, middle waist. The archetype is an Irish drunk clown with red hair and nose, and pale skin. Fields, William Bendix. Everybody tends to drift towards Bozoness. It has Oz in it. They mean well. They're straight-looking except they've got inflatable shoes. They like their comforts. The Bozos have learned to enjoy their free time, which is all the time.
I was so inspired by this, I began identifying as a “Bozo” — even without any inflatable shoes.
Other friends picked up on it. Right before Halloween 1972, about 10 of us bought cheap hard-plastic Bozo the Clown masks and on Halloween night we used them to go trick or treating in our off-campus dorm. We hauled in several joints and beers.
We formed a short-lived college softball team called the “Bozo Bombers.” and actually won one game. My neighbors and I in the dorm referred to our floor as “Sector R,” which we got from another Firesign Theatre album.
So when Jack, still in high school, showed me his Bozo Buck creation and showed me how easy it was to make, I embraced it wholeheartedly. On a wild Sector R trip to Juarez not long after my introduction to the concept, several of us got change for $20 bills and turned each one into a Bozo Buck to flood the border town.
Real life funny money.
When I started writing my song in 1979 — most of it written during my shifts at the bowling alley, the aroma of Lysol and bowling shoes fresh in my nostrils — I suppose I was using the “Bozo Buck” as a cryptic metaphor for my own individuality, spirit and determination.
Sure, I was down on my luck, but with my “muse from outer space” and my “voodoo sting,” it was going to take more than a bad luck streak and The goddamn Eagles to keep me down!
I’m not trying to claim that this song, or any other Potatoheads song was punk rock. But by this time, punk and New Wave was starting to seep into my songwriting. A couple of lines in “Bozo Bucks” definitely were influenced by angry young Elvis Costello.
I’m talking specifically of the first and last lines of the song:
“Well, I've been seething for so long that it is branded in my face” and …
“Just keep 'em out of touch and it won't hurt 'em very much ... ”
I’ve always found that last one especially to be extremely Costelloesque.
Here’s one of his songs that I’m sure influenced “Bozo Bucks”:
I’m fairly sure that I first publicly played “Bozo Bucks” at the private party I was hired to play in the summer of 1979 — the party I mentioned in the prelude to this Substack, to which I invited freelance journalist Greg Van Pelt, who was writing a profile on me.
I guess it made an impression on Greg. He ended the story, published in August of that year, quoting the last verse of the song, And the headline of the article was “The Bozo Buck Stops Here.”
About a year later when recording the tune, The Whereabouts and I sped up the pace, while Jack and I added “Bozo bucks, Bozo bucks, Bozo bucks, Bozo bucks” to the vamp that kicks off the tune and plays between the first two verses.
Skip ahead to the mid ‘90s, when we were remixing the album for the CD re-release: We decided to add some samples Jack had recorded of a dunk-tank clown at the New Mexico state fair.
Read more about the noble profession of dunk-tank bozos HERE and seek out the 1980 movie Carny, which stars America’s greatest thespian, Gary Busey.
So on the CD version, the song starts with one of these clowns taunting some midway mark with, “Hit the red, Meathead!” He’s heard later in the song saying”High and dry,” which is commonly said by such clowns when a throw misses.
“Bozo Bucks” is the last song on the original release of Picnic Time for Potatoheads.
But keep coming back. The songs of Pandemonium Jukebox are coming soon. I won’t leave you high and dry.
Now enjoy my song:
Get your own copy of Picnic Time for Potatoheads & Best-Loved Songs from Pandemonium Jukebox HERE
Credits:
Steve Terrell, lead vocals, acoustic rhythm guitar
Jack Clift: lead guitar, harmony vocals, producer
Mike Roybal: bass
David Valdez: drums