Jeremy Porter & The Tucos Christmas song he had written for the annual Suburban Sprawl Music Christmas Compilation. Jeremy recruited drummer and multi-instrumentalist Gabriel Doman (The Hotwalls) and bassist Jason Bowes (The OffRamps, Fidrych, Culture Bandits) to round out the trio for the recording session. The lineup would remain intact for four years. The band's name is based on the character Tuco Ramirez, played by actor Eli Wallach in "The Good, The Bad & The Ugly" and was an alternative to a suggestion by original bassist Jason Bowes, who proposed The Mortimers, after the Lee Van Cleef character when the band found that a punk
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (theme) version "...was done in one day. I think it was all day one Saturday at RCA." Similar to Morricone's original composition, Montenegro and a few session musicians sought to recreate this record using their own instrumentation. The opening two note segment was played on an ocarina by Art Smith; Morgan provided the sounds that followed on a harmonica. He was quoted as saying: "I knew it was live, so I had to do this hand thing, the 'wah-wah-wah' sound." Hyatt's book states that Montenegro himself "grunted something which came out like 'rep, rup, rep, rup, rep'" between the chorus segments.