The Legendary Razz Band Is Set to Party Like It's 1978

 June 4, 2025

   Our goal from here on out is to kick out the jams at least once a year. And, believe it or not, it's getting close to that time of year.

The Razz Band Gets Ready to Party

Like It's 1978!

  Led by the legendary Jack Alves, with master hot licks from Rooster Rob Mathiasch and Danny Romero, the Razz Band is going to tear it up at Sharlot Hall in Prescott on June 10. Details at:

Twilight Tales: Bob Boze Bell and the 66 Kids
Date: June 10
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: Sharlot Hall Museum, Prescott, AZ
Tickets & Info: sharlothallmuseum.org

"My friends are gonna be there too. . ."

—ACDC, Highway to Hell

The 66 Kids Are Going to Rock Sharlot Hall

 June 4, 2025

   The Billy issue is out the door and on press even as you read this. Meanwhile, it's time to shift gears and peel out for another blacktop showdown.

The 66 Kids Roadshow is pulling into Prescott on June 10th at the Sharlot Hall Museum. We are going to be celebrating the Mother Road and what she taught us.

   Sharlot Hall Museum's Executive Director Stuart Rosebrook has a fast-action call with True West magazine's Bob Boze Bell and Country-Western musician Danny Romero about growing up along Route 66 and their show "Bob Boze Bell and the 66 Kids" at Sharlot Hall Museum at 4 pm on June 10, 2025. To get tickets go to SharlotHallMuseum.org

"There I was just minding my own business and now you tell me 1965 was sixty years ago!"

—A MCUHS classmate who looks like this guy

Dead Man's Dinner

 June 2, 2025

   At some point, as we age, our skills begin to decline. And although I still think I have it going on, sometimes I see something I did in the past—in my younger years!—and I think to myself, How in the hell did I pull that off? Case in point:

Daily Whip Out:

"Dead Man's Dinner"

   I had read with some interest that Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid ordered sardines and beer at San Vicente on the night they both died. And that inspired me, so I went out an purchased an old beer bottle at an antique store and then I procured an old school can of sardines and semi-opened it, and then placed them both right on the counter in our kitchen. And then I painted it. So this is totally plein air, Baby! The dripping juice, the metal tears, the hint of bones, the dark, opaque glass. All I can say is, I was in the zone. It's the transitions that make it especially good. The highlights on the rim of the tin, the solid table with just a hint of a crack. Yes, whoever did this was younger than I am now!

"Ah, I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

—Bob Dylan, My Back Pages

El Guero de Divisadero

 June 1, 2025

    A friend of mine recently bought one of my favorite daily whip outs and got it framed.

Daily Whip Out:

"Divisadero Guero"

(Barbara Zimet owns it now)

   It goes with a story I am developing.

   In the heart of the Sierra Madre at the very top of the uppermost ridgeline, lays the village of Divisadero and just beyond it, to the east, is a narrow pass to freedom.

   El Guero slows his tired pony to a trot to give him a breather, and as he rides through the all but deserted plaza he gets a chill. He sees nothing but empty windows and shattered door frames. He had heard the rumors of a village with 300 widows and he now wonders if this could be it? He suddenly senses something behind him and turns in the saddle to see a weird, old woman closing in on him on foot, wearing a red, tattered shawl. 

Daily Whip Out: "La Bruja de Divisadero"

   Her eyes are beady and intent and she speeds up her walk now that he has noticed her. Turning to spur his horse up the trail and out of town he spies four stout women walking towards him, shoulder to shoulder, armed to the teeth. He reins his tired pony sharply to the right and gallops down a narrow side street. Three empty buildings down he sees a young girl about his age hanging up wet clothes in the back of a crumbling adobe. As he rides by she shouts something to him but he rides on until he comes to a complete dead end. He turns to ride back out and now he sees the same girl in the road. She gestures for him to come quick and as they make eye contact, she mouths the word "Ven."

Daily Whip Out: "Ven"

"Whenever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed."

—Joseph Campbell, "The Hero With A Thousand Faces" 

More Bell Mell Sugarloafs

 May 31, 2025

Maybe twenty years ago, my old studio mate, Edmundo Mell visited me in Cave Creek.

Ed Mell at Rancho de los Caballeros

outside Wickenburg, Arizona

I took him up the ladder in my upstairs morgue area, opened the trapdoor and, on the roof top deck I showed him the Sonoran Desert vista to our north. He took a photo of the view which he later painted as "The Mountains of Cave Creek." This is a detail from that painting, a close up on Sugarloaf.

  Ed also took a photo of me up in the Crow's Nest, as we call it, and I used his photo on the back of my last Billy book:

Photo by Ed Mell

(looking north toward Sugarloaf

from the Crow's Nest)

  Recently, I realized my obsession with the Sonoran vaquero hat style—and, or, the mountain butte version—would be a cool logo for my Western stories.

Sugarloaf Suprema

Daily Whip Out: "Sugarloaf Logo #7"

  And, by the way, the hat style and the butte monikers take their name from the shape of a loaf of sugar, which was created in the form of a rounded cone, the most common way of distributing sugar until the late 19th century.

An actual sugarloaf

In Other Loafing News

Someone I know who really despises my artwork called me a "childish finger painter" and just to prove that point, here is my art desk this morning before I cleaned it:

Daily Whip Out:

"Master Finger Painter"

"Green-eyed lady, passion's lady
Dressed in love, she lives for life to be
Green-eyed lady feels life I never see
Setting suns and lonely lovers free. . ."

—Sugarloaf, 1970

How The Buckeye Blake Wake Project Finally Happened

 May 30, 2025

   Perhaps you are curious about how Buckeye Blake's "cryptic" defeat in Old Fort Sumner turned into a win for all of us who love history.

   Here's the backstory.

   After Buckeye struck out with the Chamber folk in Old Fort Sumner, back in 2014, a new Chamber of Commerce president arrived on the scene. 

Daily Whip Out:

"Mexican Mourners for The Kid"

   Her name is Mary Ann Cortese and when she heard about the Buckeye Blake wake concept, she took up the banner and championed it relentlessly. She brought in Mayor Louis Gallegos and the entire city council, who then approached Tim Roberts at the State of New Mexico about collaborating on something that would honor the Kid without opening old controversies. This is a key line on anything involving BtK in New Mexico: "without opening old controversies."

   Good luck with that one! But, I digress. 

   This led to an interpretive exhibit concept floated by Tim Roberts who brought on his brother Billy Roberts along with Scott Smith and the late Drew Gomber to develop the concept. They, in turn contacted me and I worked with Dan The Man Harshberger on creating a courtyard view capturing the moment when the Kid walked across the parade ground, along the picket fence and on the way to his doom.

Daily Whip Out: "The Midnight View"

(A night at the museum)

  This is my sketch of the three walls in the portico of the museum leading to a facsimile of the Maxwell porch and into Pete Maxwell's bedroom.

And here is a video of the room in question:

The Midnight Men

   Three lawmen come in from the south. They have taken the back trails and now they slip silently onto Pete Maxwell's south porch. While one of them goes inside, the two deputies crouch in the gate and spy a lone figure walking towards them in the moonlight. He is buttoning his trousers.

   Dan took these images and pieced together a wall montage that museum goers will walk through on their way to view Buckeye's sculpture. We wanted you to see what the Kid saw on his last walk. Here is our rough of that concept.

Three walls on the way to Maxwell's bedroom

Designed by Dan Harshberger

(this is actually looking back at the door you will enter, which is where the Death Riders are)

 The city then pursued and won grant money to fund the project. Buckeye's sculpture will be unveiled at the Graveside Museum in the spring of 2026.

   In the meantime you will be able to see all of this artwork, including the sculpture, on the Traveling Wake of Billy the Kid Art Show in the following locations (this is a tentative list and more locations may be added):

The Lamy Church, in Lamy, New Mexico, on July 4, 2025. At the Raton Museum on August 23 and at the Scottsdale Museum of the West on October 3rd.

"Be there or be square."

—Old Beatnik Saying

More Tales From The Crypt Featuring Billy the Moron!

 May 29, 2025

   Here's more insight into the crypt of Billy the Kid madness from that video interview Ken Amorosano did with Buckeye back in 2014. It has been edited from the transcripts for clarity.

Buckeye Gives Us What For

   "It all starts with that only known photo of Billy the Kid. He is standing there with a rifle, right? That’s what everyone’s seen from the start—old newspaper clippings, whatever. But even when that photo was first taken, they doctored it. Tried to fix it right out of the gate. They botched it. It was badly done. So instead of seeing this smart little Irish kid, America saw a moron. 

Billy The Moron

Just one of numerous botched drawings

from the only known photo.

Don't believe me? Okay, how about this one?

Noah H. Rose "Retouched" Billy

1920s

Dumb & Dumber Billy

1964

"Billy the Kid," by David William Cale

Wichita Art Museum

David E. and Vivian L. Bernard Print Collection.

   "And that’s what stuck. 'Dirty little Billy killer.' 'Look at him—he’s a moron.' Well, that was total B.S. Nothing could be further from the truth. So, right then I thought, oh my God, an entire country got fed this false picture. Doesn’t matter if it’s important or not—it’s American history. Western history. It’s valid. You don’t have to be proud of it, but it’s there. And that kid was not a moron. So, I got into it. Read everything I could. Turns out he was really likable. A good-looking young Irish kid.
There was this whole other side nobody talks about. All the Mexicans held him in high esteem—he was their guy—a folk hero—and none of that shows up. It's  just, 'Oh, he was some dirty outlaw.' So that got me thinking: what was he really like? Why’d he become who he was? And all those little misfortunes and accidents—niche things that shaped the guy. That’s what intrigued me and that's what set me out on this path."

—Buckeye Blake

Special thanks to James B. Mills for finding the extra dumb and dumber Billys. I thought I had seen them all, but nooooooo. . .

"I knew history could be ugly, but dang dude, those bad Billys take the cake."

—Old History Guy Who Thought He Had Seen It All

The Resurrection of Billy the Kid: The Dead End Is Rescinded

 May 28, 2025

   Who exactly was the finger painter who declared he had spoken his "final word" on Billy the Kid?

J.W. (BBB) Bell and Billy Bonney

at The back door of the Lincoln County Courthouse in 1991, 110 years after you-know-damn-well what happened.

Dead End Again

   The Kid backs into Pete Maxwell's bedroom. Garrett, engulfed in the darkness, freezes. "He came directly towards me," Garrett recounted. "Came close to me."

   Garrett said he dared not speak because his own gun was in its holster, and he was sitting on it!

   "He came close to me, leaned both hands on the bed, his right hand almost touching my knee."

   "The Kid must have seen, or felt, the presence of a third person at the head of the bed. He raised his pistol, a self-cocker, within a foot of my breast."

   The Kid jumped back, but instead of firing, he demanded in Spanish one more time, "Quien es?"

"Quien es, Pete?"

   Big mistake.  Garrett drew his revolver and fired twice.

   "The Kid fell dead. He never spoke. A struggle or two, a little strangling sound as he gasped for breath, and the Kid was with his many victims."

   Thus ends the sheriff of Lincoln County's version of the events in Pete Maxwell's bedroom in the early hours of July 15, 1881.

   So, what, pray tell, is the reason for revisiting all of this for the eighteenth-hundred time when I recently claimed I had written my final word on the subject?

Finally, A Fitting funeral for Billy the Kid!

   We all know the Kid was put in the ground with modest fanfare. "Practically every man, woman, and child in town followed the body to the little cemetery," remembered Paulita Maxwell. Okay, but that is still roughly only about 170 souls, certainly not the crowd Billy deserved then, or now. It has been Buckeye Blake's dream to fix that, to make it right for the Kid with a show of proper respect and honor.

   Several local hispano women begged Garrett to allow them to remove the body, which he did. Jesus Silva and a couple others carried the Kid's slender body to the old carpenter shop across the parade ground, near the quartermaster's corral and placed Billy on a sturdy workbench. The fatal exit wound was plugged with a rag (it did not bleed out until two hours after the shooting perhaps from the jostling) A clean shirt was produced from Pete Maxwell that was too large. The women prepared the body for a wake, placing lighted candles all around his lifeless body while several Fort Sumner residents, both men and women kept a quiet vigil over their friend's body.

   A hastily held coroner's jury led by Alcalde Alejandro Seguro and ordered by Pat Garrett viewed the body of Billy Bonney in the carpenter's shop to confirm the cause and manner of death.

   Jesus Silva constructed the coffin and then he and Vicente Otero dug a grave in the old post cemetery.

After Billy's body was placed in his coffin, it was moved to Beaver Smith's saloon, where it remained until time for burial. The funeral took place in the afternoon. Garrett gave Pedro Maxwell $25 to get some proper clothing for the dead boy.

 Otero used his wagon to transport the body from the saloon to the graveyard and almost everyone in the small community followed the procession.

   The next day, a marker made of a stave from the picket fence he walked by the night before, was placed at the head of the grave. The marker had no last name or date, just the words, "Billy the Kid."

   And, that was the end of that.

   Or, was it?

   Eleven years ago, in 2014, Buckeye Blake wanted to give the Kid a proper graveside crypt and he went to the powers that be in Fort Sumner and they flat turned him down. As he put it in an interview with Ken Amorosano back in 2014: "It didn't go over well. They didn’t know what a crypt lid was. Thought I was part of the forensic crowd who wanted to dig up Billy. And then you’ve got the religious side—sanctity of the dead. Plus, the locals—Mexican families especially—held the Kid in high esteem. He was their hero. They weren’t gonna let just anybody mess with him. 'We don’t want dead people in our cemetery,' they said. I told them, 'Well, most of them live there already.'"

   And so, Buckeye went home to Texas and destroyed his clay sculpture.

Buckeye Blake sadly gave up the quest

   But, believe it, or not, that was then, and Buckeye's old idea has been dusted off and approved by a new set of crypt keepers in Fort Sumner! What was dead has been resurrected. Both the outlaw and Buckeye's project. 

   And now do you understand why this is the cover we need right now?

   And, now do you get why this is the art show honoring the wake of Billy the Kid that we need as well? Especially from the guy who claimed he had uttered his final word on the subject.

A proper send off for Billy the Kid

"Everything comes to the man who is patient—and stubborn!"

—Old Vaquero Saying