THE VOICE ON the other end of the line is weary and gravelly, just as I had imagined a hobo would sound. For Zebu Recchia, a.k.a. Eddy Joe Cotton, that would be a compliment as he is, in fact, a hobo. The real deal. And not only did Cotton ride the rails around the country with the Kerouacesque goal of reaching Mexico, when his feet finally hit dirt, he published a book about his adventures, Hobo, written here in an 8-by-12, four-bit room.
But, to butcher Tom Waits now rather than Roger Miller, his wanderlust won’t let him settle down. Today finds Eddy Joe Cotton as the titular king of the Eddy Joe Cotton and The Yard Dogs Show, a traveling medley of burlesque and vaudeville acts and sideshow oddities that is on the road every spring and summer, playing small towns and big cities across the land.
Don’t mistake The Yard Dogs for one of those neo-pagan freak shows that have become so popular over the last decade, the ones featuring men with pierced penises lifting weights. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
“That’s the same tribe of people, and we do work with those people a lot,” says Cotton. “But my main goal from the beginning was to make [our show] available to a diverse group of people. I didn’t want to offend people, I wanted to entertain people.”
Cotton isn’t alone in his goal. Also making up the show are sword-swallower Tobias the Mystic Man, fire-eater Hellvis and the Hellvettes, and the Black and Blue Burlesque girls. And what show would be complete without the Norton P. Electric Sideshow Museum: the Mermaid of Atlantis, the Mummy of Ophari, and naturally, a two-headed chicken.
With such a large, varied troupe, the Yard Dogs Show is in a state of near-constant flux. “Everything kind of metamorphoses as we move along,” says Cotton. “The acts change as we get on the road more and stay on the road longer.”
New members approach the show, thankfully. After all, it’s tough to put a classified ad in the local paper looking for a sword-swallower and expect results. And it helps that the Yard Dogs home base is San Francisco, “where there’s a lot of performers,” Cotton says, in a masterful demonstration of understatement. The idea of putting an ad out also is anathema to the group’s basic philosophy, or so says Micha Devlin, a Yard Dogs musician.
“We’re coming from a philosophy of totally doing it ourselves. Most of us are, in some ways, artists, tramps, hobos, traveling people. We try to find ways to make it without having jobs, so that we can, at the drop of a hat, leave and go entertain or perform,” says Devlin.
“We do play a lot of little dive bars and weird little places, and it gets a little bit rowdy,” says Cotton. “The lifestyle that we live is much more comparable to that than it is to the big vaudeville houses of the ’20s. We just have enough money, and our vehicles barely run, and we get from saloon to saloon, whereas the big vaudeville houses, when it got really big, they were making a lot of money and living good. So I feel like that’s kind of the era we’re at, with what’s going on with this new thing here.”
But, will the Yard Dogs wind up following the same path as the hoofers, jibbers, alley-oops and girl acts before them, winding up in the big houses, and in the big money? Are the Yard Dogs the next Cirque du Soleil?
“That’s definitely one of the questions we’re facing right now as a growing entity,” says Devlin, “that people, all kinds of things are attracted to that growth, and one of those things is corporate sponsorship, and bigger gigs with more corporate flavor. And definitely, we’re thinking about that. I have always looked up to the people and the groups that have stayed away from all that stuff. I would much rather keep it for the people, with the people, down at the grassroots style. I’ve always been way more attracted to that. But at the same time, I also practice the philosophy of unattachment and letting things happen as they do, and just keeping love and creativity as the main source of inspiration.”