by Don McLeese
“I was really inspired by Creedence Clearwater Revival illustrating that country-hyphen-rock/pop could be pertinent for a young audience,” explains Yoakam. “The Byrds were folk rock, but country rock is John Fogerty. ’Cause you can’t get any harder rockin’, and in some places more country, than Creedence—a real hybrid that was a commercial success.”
But Creedence came from the Bay Area, a long way from the bayou country that so much of its music conjured. Whatever rootsy authenticity the band’s music evoked was a geographical fantasy, an illusion—an art. And Dwight was heading for L.A., “swimming pools, movie stars,” as the theme from The Beverly Hillbillies had put it. Despite the tinsel and glitz of a city where all of the cowboys were rhinestone ones—though Yoakam, of course, was no more of a cowboy than any of them—there was another beacon of inspiration that shone as brightly as Creedence.
“That first Emmylou Harris album is what drew me out here,” he says of his move to L.A. “My junior and senior year in high school, I was in love with both Linda [Ronstadt] and Emmylou. And so, when my buddy said, ‘Man, you’ve got to come to L.A.,’ I said, ‘Yeah, I know, Emmylou Harris is out there. There’s a scene somewhere out there that I can tap into.’ ”
At least there had been. And maybe there would be, but it took another four years of scuffling—working here on a loading dock, there as a short-order cook—and playing the bars in the Valley before Dwight recorded his first demo tape and started to receive higher profile gigs at the venerable Palomino and the hipper Club Lingerie. And then it took another three years after that demo for Dwight to release Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. as his debut EP, and it was a couple years after that when his 1986 major-label album of the same name was released, adding four cuts (including the title track) to the six songs previously issued on the EP.
So Dwight may have come out of nowhere, as far as the world of music was concerned, and country music in particular, but it had been almost ten years since he had graduated from high school, and he was on the cusp of thirty by the time he became an overnight sensation. In retrospect, such success appears preordained, but at the time it seemed anything but. His career path required the patience and perseverance of an artist who had more of the latter than the former.
His friend with the car who drove him out left a month later. Before moving to Hollywood, to an apartment in the Hills that friends remember as slightly larger than a closet, slightly smaller than a garage, he was working in nearby Long Beach. There he made his initial foray into show business—not in music but in theater, with a role in a local production of Heaven Can Wait.
Dave Alvin says he likely ran into Dwight when they were both employed as short-order cooks in Long Beach, though it would be a couple of years before their more significant encounter at the Palomino. By then, the lead guitarist and songwriter of the Blasters was in a position to help unknown artists who impressed him, introducing them to the band’s roots-rocking fans with opening slots. Dwight would later repay the favor by recording Alvin’s “Long White Cadillac,” introducing the song’s narrative of the last night of Hank Williams’s life to country radio.
Given the seminal influence of Creedence on Yoakam’s music, it’s fitting that he would find musical kinship with Alvin, who mined a seam of what would subsequently become known as “Americana” for riches similar to that in the songs of John Fogerty. On the album release of Guitars, Cadillacs, Yoakam offered special thanks to Alvin and the Blasters, as part of a select few “who believed when nobody else cared.”
“I later discovered that we’d both been cooks in Long Beach in the late ’70s, worked half a mile away from each other,” remembers Alvin with a laugh. “I was a cook in a Middle Eastern restaurant that was predominantly vegetarian. And Dwight was a cook at a place called Hamburger Henry’s.
“I’d go there and get a burger after cooking vegetarian for eight hours. And Dwight didn’t get famous only for doing drinking songs, but he did quite a few. So it’s kind of ironic, this vegetarian cooking hamburgers, who had never had a hamburger in his life, and singing drinking songs, and he’d never had a drink. And singing them pretty persuasively.”
The years between driving to Los Angeles in 1977 and cutting his first demo in 1981 were plainly productive ones for Yoakam in terms of writing. All of the ten songs that Yoakam would cut for that demo would subsequently be re-recorded for his first three albums, except for “Please Daddy,” which he’d written in high school, once again using his imagination. It’s a song sung from the perspective of a young daughter who is trying to console her father (and likely herself) that things will be all right after he and her mother had split up.
To listen to those revelatory demo recordings, first issued on the four-disc, 2002 retrospective Reprise Please Baby: The Warner Bros. Years, you’d never suspect that “Please Daddy” would be the only track he wouldn’t re-record for release because it’s as good as many of them. Others more directly reflected his own experience, as he explains of “You’re the One,” a highlight ballad of the demo but not included on a Yoakam album until his third. “I’d written that in 1978 about this girl I’d grown up with, a beautiful preacher’s daughter who broke my heart,” he remembers. “She went to the prom with me. Though, again, it goes well beyond the literal. I was a senior in high school, I was crushed, and I got over it.”
Living in Southern California gave Yoakam a fresh perspective on what he’d left behind, offering even more of a contrast than he’d experienced between Columbus and Kentucky. Raised in the former, he recognized that the latter provided the inspiration that would distinguish him from the run of the country-rock mill. Not necessarily his own experiences, or even those of his immediate family, but songs in which he could use that legacy for some imaginative reshaping. “Miner’s Prayer” is two generations and a hundred miles from Yoakam’s upbringing; “South of Cincinnati,” a track from the Guitars, Cadillacs EP and LP that shows a short story’s command of detail, uses the marriage of his grandparents, together more than fifty years, to explore the alternate reality of a loving couple separated by alcohol and pride.
One of the ironies of Yoakam’s musical progression in California, when he began to write almost exclusively of Kentucky and cast himself as a pilgrim from the bluegrass backwoods, is that in urban Columbus he’d distinguished himself by his ability to channel the country-rock that had been emerging from Southern California. And that was the music he considered his strength when he made the move west.
“When I got out here, I would do ‘Carmelita,’ Linda Ronstadt’s version,” he said of the song he would later cover in a style closer to Warren Zevon’s original. “I would do the Eagles. I was always country rock, because my voice, my family, was country. So at the moment that country rock was starting to inundate AM radio, I could play the Eagles, I could sing it. That was me.”
Yet it was his writing that would allow Yoakam to discover who he really was, or at least develop a persona that would prove compelling to the indie, roots-rocking punk crowd even before he plunged into the country mainstream. Even his Li’l Abner-ish name seemed to exude authenticity, making him sound a little like the bumpkin he never was or would be. You couldn’t capitalize on a name like that by continuing to sing Eagles covers.
“With writing, I controlled my own destiny,” Dwight says. “ ‘I’ll Be Gone’ made me realize I could do it in my own way. And ‘It Won’t Hurt’ was written about the same time.”
“It won’t hurt when I fall down from this bar stool,” sings Yoakam, strumming his acoustic guitar, as we sit in his office. “And it won’t hurt when I stumble in the street. It won’t hurt ’cause this whiskey eases misery, but even whiskey cannot ease your hurting me.”
This was the second cut on the demo tape, following “This Drinkin’ Will Kill Me.” Another highlight from the demo that would wait until his third album for release, “I Sang Dixie,” recounts the story of a man from the South who had died “on this damned old L.A. street,” after �
��the bottle had robbed him of all his rebel pride.”
In those early L.A. days, he was billing his band as Dwight Yoakam and Kentucky Bourbon. Yet, as Dwight would subsequently tell any interviewer who bothered to ask, he had never touched a drop of alcohol and likely never would. First, because his fundamentalist religion prohibited it. Second, he had seen what it could do, during years of playing at bars for drunks and in close relationships with those who suffered from the disease of alcoholism.
“I wasn’t raised on it and had never witnessed alcoholism at close range until I knew a guy named Richard Christopher,” says Dwight. “He was quite a piece of work, a Runyonesque character. He was six-foot-six, and he was originally from Cleveland, Ohio. He developed coupon books to sell to people. He had a master’s degree from Ohio State and ended up being drafted into the Korean War.
“He was just this carny guy. I would listen to him tell these war stories. And he was also a severe alcoholic. But functional. He managed this apartment complex and was also wheeling and dealing with trading furniture, stuff like that. He walked with a cane and looked like Ichabod Crane. His drink of choice was vodka with prune juice or anything else. I’d stop by and listen to Dick Christopher ramble on a little bit. And I wrote ‘It Won’t Hurt’ about him.”
So, the teetotaler began to specialize in drinking songs, a venerable tradition of honky-tonk music, but one that had fallen from fashion in the sanitized country music of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The airwaves were no longer filled with the likes of neo-honky-tonker Gary Stewart, who lived the life of which he sang, and who had enjoyed considerable country success early in the 1970s with breakthrough hits including “Drinkin’ Thing” and “She’s Acting Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles).” As country was starting to veer toward soft rock, there wasn’t as much emphasis on hard liquor.
Yoakam’s subject matter and sound distinguished him as a honky-tonk throwback, and he had no problem reconciling such material and the bars where he performed it with the religion in which he was raised.
“I didn’t feel that my salvation or destiny was imperiled by that,” he says. “But I’d also witnessed enough drinking and drugging in the early ’70s, which led to the debauchery of the late ’70s, Studio 54 and all that, where there couldn’t have been a more depraved world to step into. I’d been playing this place called the Corral [where Yoakam and Kentucky Bourbon had become the house band] and watching people stumbling through it, getting through the rest of that night, and that’s what that song is about. You don’t have to live it to write it.”
But if you were going to sing it, you had to be able to sell it, to convince listeners of your sincerity, your authenticity, of your ability to know and share what they were going through because you had been there too. A cynic might claim that Yoakam was to honky-tonk what the Monkees were to a rock band. But Yoakam recognized how much craft, spirit, and inspiration had gone into those Monkees’ hits. And after decades of playing classic country records and years of playing bars, Yoakam knew how honky-tonk authenticity sounded. Even if the songs he wrote weren’t literally true to his experience, he made them ring true. Where hillbilly music is concerned, Dwight’s a believer.
4
Corvette Cowboy
DWIGHT YOAKAM DIDN’T HEAD WEST in order to plant the flag of country traditionalism and reclaim that musical territory as his own. He was smart enough to recognize that if he wanted a career as a mainstream country artist, country radio was crucial, and Nashville was the key. And that such success would likely come at a cost that a strong-willed artist, inspired by Creedence Clearwater, Emmylou Harris, Johnny Horton, and Stonewall Jackson, wouldn’t be willing to pay. So he went west to become a country-rock star, to a city that encouraged transformation, reinvention.
“I knew my singing voice could marry with a style that was not so pure country,” says Yoakam of his ability to channel the Eagles and his initial ambition to ride the next wave of country rock. “And I had the jeans, the boots . . . There was a whole Hud element to that cowboy culture that I knew that could be introduced, the Route 66 Americana, not the Nashville Dixie country. Beyond James Dean, beyond Giant. This Route 66 Corvette cowboy. So let’s just call it that—it’s beyond Cadillac Cowboy. It’s Corvette Cowboy.”
The jeans he had brought from Columbus, though Los Angeles is where he would learn to wear them so tight he seemed poured into them. The boots had come from Hollywood, from TV and movies, an image emblazoned on his retina since boyhood, decades before he’d headed west. The car . . . well, he had no car, but the Corvette was integral to the vision that he has since fulfilled. Today, he tools around L.A. in a sleek black ’vette, the latest in a series, with a teeth-rattling sound system.
Once he had a car (though not yet a ’vette), Los Angeles was where the Corvette Cowboy could drive free, unfettered by the conservative constrictions of Nashville. Los Angeles was home of the high-flying Eagles—the former backup band to Linda Ronstadt, the band that inherited the country-rock mantle from the Flying Burrito Brothers and would become a bigger success than anyone had ever anticipated for such music. They became so big that the Eagles and their ilk were widely disparaged among the roots-punk crowd that would soon become Yoakam’s breakthrough constituency. Since the Burritos, and the deification of the late Gram Parsons, the whole “country-rock” tag itself had fallen into critical disrepute. It was “rock lite” (as the mainstream country that would draw so heavily from it a couple of decades later would be), lacking the edge or the muscle of the best rock. Or the best country, for that matter. It had diluted the strengths of those disparate strains for a watered-down fusion of cocaine cowboys, tequila sunrises, and singer-songwriter mawkishness.
If country rock was the goal when Yoakam headed for Los Angeles, it was largely a mirage by the time he was making music there. The Eagles themselves had flown their separate ways in acrimonious dispute, jettisoning original members who had stronger ties to the earliest incarnation of country rock (former Burrito Bernie Leadon and Poco’s Randy Meisner) in favor of the harder rock of guitarist Joe Walsh and the R&B influence of founder (and Detroit native) Glenn Frey.
The likes of Firefall (launched by former Burrito Rick Roberts), the New Riders of the Purple Sage, and so many others were long gone and not missed, memories of an era of buckskin fringe and muttonchop sideburns. Neil Young had embarked on a series of stylistic experiments, leaving the countrier (and wimpier) Crosby, Stills, and Nash behind (though he would rejoin them on and off). When Dwight arrived in L.A. in 1977, punk was establishing itself as a rebellion against softer, flabbier rock, bloated by corporate and arena excess. But commercial success—the sort to which Yoakam aspired—was anathema to punk purity.
What punk shared with the music that Yoakam strived to make was a belief that something essential had been lost to sixteen-track studio overdubs, to larger-than-life arena gestures, to the commodification of the multiplatinum music industry. However you defined “real,” authenticity had been sacrificed to artifice. And the longer Dwight stayed in Los Angeles, the stronger his ties to Kentucky (and not Columbus) seemed to him.
The rock of that era was largely rudderless, but country music was even more without direction, still in its Urban Cowboy hangover, after the success of that 1980s movie that was so much mechanical bull to country purists. It had yet to be transformed by its savior (or Antichrist?), Garth Brooks, who would recast pretty much everything about the music—from its marketing to its stagecraft to its popular explosion—by the beginning of the 1990s.
So Dwight was largely operating in a vacuum, post-Burritos and pre-Garth, during the crucial years of his musical maturation between his pilgrimage to Los Angeles—broke, unknown, but brimming with confidence, determination, and vision—and his belated breakthrough as a mainstream country artist with hip rock credibility almost a full decade later.
In the music industry, a vacuum creates opportunity. Even though there was no place where Dwight Yoakam really fit, during that de
cade in which country rock had run its course and alternative country had yet to be labeled as such, he had plenty of company among other artists who recognized the common spirit between stripped-down rock and hardcore country, and between punk rock and roots rock.
Not long after Dwight had arrived in L.A., Texas neo-honky-tonker Joe Ely toured England and forged a bond of mutual appreciation with the Clash (whose London Calling masterwork would find some of its music steeped in what would later be called “Americana.”) Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Doug Sahm still held court over legions of cosmic cowboys based in Austin, confirming that Texas was a whole ’nother country with a decided twang to its rock.
In the Midwest, Chicago folkie John Prine joined forces with a rockabilly band and cut some tracks with Sam Phillips, founder of Sun Records. (Prine and Walker would subsequently prove influential as businessmen. They left their major labels and proved that by targeting their audience they could make more profit selling fifty thousand copies of an album by themselves than they could selling multiple times that for a major label.)
Out west, the emerging Paisley Underground revived some embers of country rock, with the Long Ryders (led by Gram Parsons acolyte Sid Griffin) and Green on Red (featuring future Alejandro Escovedo collaborator Chuck Prophet) attracting a post-punk following, some of it shared with bluesier bands such as the Blasters. And bands with country or blues roots had more in common with rockabilly revivalists such as the Stray Cats than any of them had with, say, Duran Duran.
Even in the hub of country music, a band called Jason and the Nashville Scorchers (who would subsequently be persuaded to drop the “Nashville” from their name to the eternal regret of front man Jason Ringenberg) drew a slam-dancing crowd by finding a common denominator for unbridled rock and roll and the rawest country—enough to convince some that Hank Williams had been the original punk rocker. By then, Lucinda Williams had also launched her recording career as a folk-blues revivalist (rather than the alt-country Americana queen that she would become). And there were others, here and there, throughout the country, without a category. The point is, there was a widespread recognition that rock had lost something—its urgency, its immediacy, its roll—that it could reclaim by connecting with its roots in country (and blues), and that there was vitality beyond Album Oriented Rock and contemporary categories.