Theme song of "The Big Valley" (adapted by Beer band)

Beer’s version of the theme from The Big Valley is a loose, comic reworking of a television-western tune that doubles as a local band’s unlikely expression of belonging. Rehearsed in the garage at Aunt Reet’s house, it folds bar-band practicality, regional memory, and Scott Oof’s sense of having roots in a place he says he barely knows into one sprawling performance.

Rehearsal at Aunt Reet’s

When Doc visits Aunt Reet’s place later in the afternoon, he finds his cousin Scott Oof and the members of Beer in the garage. The band had taken shape after half of Scott’s former group, the Corvairs, joined the northward migration toward Humboldt, Vineland, and Del Norte. Scott, who regarded redwoods as an alien species, stayed at the beach with drummer Elfmont; they recruited the rest of the group by posting notices on school bulletin boards. Beer played mostly covers at local bars and was beginning to make enough to pay its rent month to month.

That day’s rehearsal had an immediate, unglamorous purpose: the musicians were trying to learn the correct notes to the theme from the television western The Big Valley, recently returned to reruns. The garage’s shelves held jars of purple pork rind, Aunt Reet’s bait for reservoir bass, brought back from her periodic trips to Mexico. In the dimness, the jars seemed to Doc almost luminous. The setting puts the band’s pop-cultural task alongside the eccentric clutter of family life, without separating music-making from the ordinary business of trying to get by.

Beer’s Version of the Theme

Beer’s front man Huey sings while rhythm guitar and bass fill in behind him. The performance lurches through emphatic fragments of the title, guitar breaks, and loosely assembled lines about how big the valley is, riding all night until dawn, and finding nowhere to score. Its exuberance comes less from polished fidelity than from the band’s effort to make a familiar television theme stretch into a noisy, locally flavored bar-band number.

The song’s repeated return to The Big Valley gives the performance its comic shape: the title becomes refrain, punch line, and destination, while the lyrics wander around it. The scene does not present the song as a finished recording or a formal release; it is heard as work in progress, with the musicians still trying to get the notes right. Its roughness is part of its character, turning rehearsal itself into a performance.

Scott’s Sense of Place

After the song, Scott explains that his feelings about the San Joaquin are like roots: his mother dislikes the region, but whenever he goes there—to play gigs such as one at the Chowchilla Kiwanis—he has a strange sense that he used to live there. Doc answers that he did live there. The exchange gives the cover song a small but pointed resonance: its valley is not just the setting of an old television western or a convenient lyric, but a place implicated in Scott’s own past.

Scott’s claim and Doc’s correction leave the feeling of familiarity suspended between intuition and memory. The tune’s comic exaggeration does not resolve that uncertainty; instead, the performance and conversation place regional identity beside a half-recognized personal history. The Big Valley theme thus becomes, briefly, a vehicle for a question of belonging that the band’s playful refrain cannot quite settle.