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“It became something entirely different when that movie came out,” he says. Actor Barry Corbin, one of the Gilleyrats who also had a role in the film, mourns what the popularity did to the club. “It was probably my favorite film experience to do as an actor,” says Travolta in the CMT documentary. Ralph Lauren collections from the early Eighties boasted thousand-dollar prairie dresses and thick silver belt buckles. In addition, clothing pieces like the bolo tie and cowboy boots went from being mocked as hillbilly to haute couture. Indeed, the spotlight from Travolta’s Urban Cowboy allowed Gilley to make Gilley’s into a merchandise machine, peddling everything from branded patches to panties, and turning the onetime local honky-tonk into a full-scale cultural temple where wannabe cowboys flocked in their crisp new denim, looking for redemption on the back of its mechanical bull (which, also, was branded and sold). He’s the one who brought it front and center.’ Every night when I go to bed, I thank John Travolta for keeping my career alive.”

“There was a guy on there who said, ‘I want to thank you for all you did for Western wear.’ And I said, ‘You need to thank John Travolta. “I was in an elevator in Nashville one day back in Eighties,” Gilley says. While the disco aesthetic, the predominant music style at the time, was all about indulging hedonism and dancing your cares away while wearing tight and/or short polyester pieces and towering shoes as painful as they were high, the Wranglers, cowboy boots, and leather accessories of Urban Cowboy provided an authentic and all-American alternative. Like other films whose score spawned a movement ( O Brother, Where Art Thou? nudged Americana up the charts), the music and the fashion took on lives of their own. Suddenly, the charismatic crooner started logging Number One hits, including “Stand by Me” from the Urban Cowboy soundtrack, which also featured tracks by the Charlie Daniels Band and Kenny Rogers. “It launched me into the stratosphere,” Gilley tells Rolling Stone Country of Urban Cowboy. When Urban Cowboy premiered, however, Gilley’s career reignited. At the center was singer-pianist Mickey Gilley (a cousin of Jerry Lee Lewis), who invested in the club with his business partner, Sherwood Cryer, when his music career had stalled.

The action was all set in Gilley’s, where real-life “Gilleyrats,” as they affectionately named themselves, spent their nights and money dancing, drinking beer, and riding the bar’s famed mechanical bull. It also looks at the real-life “urban cowboys” that inspired the film - most of whom went back to their normal lives on the oil rig while the rest of America became enamored with every stitch on Travolta’s collar and finally welcomed country music into the mainstream.īased on a 1979 Esquire Magazine story, Urban Cowboy told the tale of a country music love affair between Travolta’s Bud and Debra Winger’s Sissy in the town of Pasadena, Texas.
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Directed by the same team that produces the innovative 30 for 30 series on ESPN, the documentary features interviews with Gilley, Travolta, and others who were integral to the Urban Cowboy scene. In 2015, CMT premiered a documentary about the film and its culture, Urban Cowboy: The Rise and Fall of Gilley’s, exploring the origins of Gilley’s and the implications of how national attention, followed by rampant commercialization, can be a lifetime boon for some - and a downfall for others. This year, the 1980 John Travolta film Urban Cowboy marks its 40th anniversary. But you could link one item - that leather-stringed Western bolo tie cinched loosely around Duckie’s neck - directly to a honky-tonk named Gilley’s and the movie that brought Western fashion and country music into the mainstream. Jon Cryer’s iconic Duckie Dale from the Eighties John Hughes classic Pretty in Pink might not seem to have a lot in common with a dance hall on the fringes of Southeast Texas.
