In Bud, two stories combine to make many. On the one hand, there is a tale of six performers in a Garden City, haunted by their life-changing experiences of a mysterious green-fingered cowboy called Bud. On the other, there are fragments of Mad Dog Blues: a madcap caper of a play by Sam Shepard populated by an assortment of lost and drifting casualties of popular culture.
At the heart of both stories if a quest: For a new Bud, and for treasure. And, as with all picaresque journeys, the path is never easy. Our own search for Bud has been a strange one. We have been intrigued by the tautologies of the Garden City, and seduced by Shepard's gorgeously trashy renderings of the stubbled face of the American mythic. For us, these things combine in the Singapore Cowboy: not merely the local Cn'W singer of yesteryear, but the repository of a hundred urban legends, and the spur (haha) to hundreds more. Take the stablehand who dressed as a cowboy and rode a horse down the BKE heading for Malaysia. Deplore the cruelty to the horse, but applaud the leap from the mundane into the mythological. We did, and that's where Bud came in.
