Jason Buchanan rocks the rodeo

Rodeo is all about bulls, broncs and barrel racers, but a big part of the show is the crowd. When a packed-house Sisters crowd gets to stomping its feet and cheering, the arena is electric with excitement - and that excitement pulls the best performances out of the stock and the cowboys and cowgirls.

Jason Buchanan can get that crowd revved up with the click of a mouse. As the proprietor of Pro Rodeo Sound, LLC, Buchanan provides the music that thunders out of the cluster of powerful speakers hanging in the center of the arena.

That music might be hard rock to spur a bull rider to a 90-point ride or a sad country ballad to soothe the pride of a cowboy who just ate a mouthful of arena dirt. Or it might be a bit of "dialogue" with rodeo clown J.J. Harrison.

"I try to make it feel like it's a produced event," Buchanan says.

Buchanan is so successful at that endeavor that people marvel at how perfectly his song selections fit the action in the arena. During Friday night's performance, a bronc rider leapt from his bucking horse and landed with both feet planted firmly in the dirt.

Inevitably, Harrison started making cracks about womens gymnastics: "The Russian judge is going to hate that dismount. You had some separation between your feet."

Quick as lightning, the Olympic theme boomed over the loudspeakers. Folks in the crowd shook their heads. How does he do that?

Buchanan says it's all spontaneous.

He has 11,000 songs programed into his computer "and I know exactly where every single one is at," he says.

Buchanan has honed his craft to the precision of a rodeo drill team, but his start was modest.

Eleven years ago, Redmond rodeo announcer Kedo Olsen asked Buchanan to help him out with music, since Olsen was going to be on horseback in the arena.

"He said, 'I'll pay you $50 a performance,'" Buchanan recalled. "I was like - '50 bucks!' For 2-1/2 hours work, that was pretty good!"

A stack of CDs and a couple of players was all he had to work with, but he had fun and the crowd seemed to like it. He got a couple more rodeo gigs and decided he needed to get more efficient.

Buchanan was working at the time as a chemist at Bend Research, so he asked an IT guy to help him get computerized. More work was on the horizon and Buchanan started contemplating buying a sound system.

"I was sitting on a bubble thinking this could be a good business," he said. "Sisters was the first (rodeo) that called that was a big job."

He took the plunge, borrowed money to buy equipment and hasn't looked back. He's worked rodeos from the Columbia River Circuit to Walla Walla, and the demand was great enough that as of March 31 he quit his day job at Bend Research to do sound full-time.

"Sound is my passion and that's really what I want to do," he said.

Buchanan has a set of skills and experiences that make him a perfect fit for rodeo sound and music.

"It's kind of a niche job," he says. "There's not too many people out there who know sound systems, know music and know rodeo, how rodeo flows."

Buchanan rodeoed in high school at Mountain View in Bend (along with football and wrestling).

The music man believes that Sisters Rodeo is special, drawing urban folks and country folks together for a weekend of top-drawer entertainment. The interplay between Buchanan and Harrison is a critical means of engaging the crowd.

"He's a good friend of mine," Buchanan said. "We talk daily. We work together a lot and I think that shows in the arena."

Buchanan loves to spring an appropriate (or perhaps inappropriate) piece of music on Harrison and see the clown crack up.

Buchanan's music selections are wildly eclectic, from classic rock to rap to classic country, oldies to head-banging anthems.

"If you keep it mixed up, every couple of minutes people will hear something they know and like," he said. "If you do that, you keep people hooked, is what I've found."

He loves to get the crowd stomping and roaring, cheering the cowboys on and having a great time.

"It's a pretty cool feeling," he said. "It's very rewarding and kinda feeds my soul. It really does."

Author Bio

Jim Cornelius, Editor in Chief

Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.

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