by Don McLeese
Perhaps even more crucial than career advice was the confidence Anderson had in Yoakam, a confidence that reinforced the artist’s own: “One person can have a dream,” says Pete. “And depending on your age and when you have it, people can beat it out of you. Peer pressure. But two people with a dream, that’s a lot tougher. Because you’ve got somebody to turn to and say [of the doubters], ‘He’s nuts.’ You become like a little mini gang. Instead of saying, ‘Maybe they’re right. Maybe I should go back to school. Maybe my hair is too long.’ Whatever.
“Because I was a little older and a good guitar player on the scene, he had that respect for me. And I gave him all the support that he needed. I was being honest, bringing up little things, but basically I was saying, ‘Hey, buddy, these songs are great. Don’t let anybody tell you differently.’ ”
Would those songs and their singer have found an audience without Anderson? Hard to tell. They deserved to, but so do the songs of a lot of unheralded writers. If the pre-Anderson demo is any indication, they almost certainly wouldn’t have found the roots-rocking, punk-rocking audience that gave Yoakam’s music its first popular base, a base that would generate considerable press attention (where there had been none before) and would provide a launching pad for his unlikely ascent into mainstream country stardom.
Whatever polish Pete provided, his guitar gave Yoakam’s songs more raw intensity than anything on those 1981 sessions. Pete was an unrepentant bluesman rather than a country session player, and his guitar served to unbridle Yoakam’s musical spirit, giving it an edgy, dangerous quality that the punk crowd embraced as kindred. The rawer he sounded, the purer he sounded, and the purer he sounded, the more he appealed to a crowd that championed authenticity while rejecting the polish of commercial compromise.
What Anderson subtracted was as essential as what he added. There was now a primal purity to the interplay, where the demos had all sorts of very good musicians getting entangled with each other. Despite the augmentation of a few supporting musicians on the recording sessions that would produce Dwight’s debut—including pianist Glen D Hardin, steel guitarist JayDee Maness, and multi-instrumentalist David Mansfield from the demo sessions—the basic band was a four-piece with each member making indelible, crucial contributions.
Anchoring the arrangements was the killer rhythm section of bassist J.D. Foster (whose MVP career would also include stints with the Silos, Lucinda Williams, the True Believers—with Alejandro Escovedo and Jon Dee Graham—and other critically acclaimed acts) and powerhouse drummer Jeff Donavan.
In the notes to his four-disc Reprise Please Baby box set, Yoakam explained his musical dynamic like this: “You combine drummers with mountain people, and you’ve got hillbilly music. That’s what we’re doing: Bill Monroe with drums.” Of course, in geographical terms, what Yoakam was doing—or would soon be—had a whole lot more to do with hardscrabble Bakersfield than mountain-music Kentucky (where he’d often visited but barely lived). And one of the defining characteristics of Bill Monroe’s music is that it would never have been able to accommodate any drummer, let alone one who played as fiercely as Donavan.
“Boy, he was a swingin’ drummer,” agrees Yoakam, himself a drummer back in his high school days and one who recognized the importance of percussion. “And had that great rim shot.”
The front line teamed the guitars of producer Anderson—sometimes twang, sometimes scorch—with fiddler Brantley Kearns, the most recent addition to the band. And it is here that Anderson’s production distinguishes itself from Schyrock’s demos. The most striking example is the chiming riff that opens the love-’em-and-leave-’em tune “I’ll Be Gone.” What sounds like hokum, fiddle-driven overkill on the demos becomes a subliminal hook on the released version. Throughout the sessions, the spotlight focuses plenty on Kearns’s fiddle, but he never sounds as if he is competing with or racing against the other instruments. From the handclaps to the backbeat, this is a band that plays like a band—whipcrack tight.
“He had twenty-one songs of his own when I met him, and the rest were Bill Monroe, Merle, old country stuff, and old bluegrass stuff that we kinda revved up,” says Anderson. “And as we played them, I got a grip on them, but it wasn’t until we decided to record them where we really defined them, arranged them, boxed them in. ’Cause we still had been jamming off the bandstand. So we started working from that perspective, and got Brantley Kearns, so we had fiddle and guitar, bass, drums, and acoustic. And we figured out what the head was and who played what solos and how long the solos were and how did we get from verses to choruses and things of that nature.”
So they approached the recording project as something different from just capturing the band’s onstage sound in the studio? “Oh, absolutely,” responds Anderson. “Yeah, making it cohesive in terms of intros, outros, and solos, that was done on that record, every song.”
Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. had two separate iterations. The six-track 12" version released in 1984 had limited distribution through the tiny independent label Oak Records and a pressing reportedly of five thousand. Like a lot of press people, and as a fan of punk and roots rock, I tracked down the EP primarily because of Yoakam’s association with the Blasters, whose pianist Gene Taylor guested on “Ring of Fire,” the lone cover on what was otherwise a showcase of Yoakam originals.
My initial impression was positive—I loved the stripped-down sound and the stoic, reedy plaintiveness of Yoakam’s voice—but the artistry seemed something of a throwback curiosity, particularly coming from L.A. To my ears, the music lacked the supercharged Texas twang of the Joe Ely Band or the punk urgency of Jason and the Nashville Scorchers (who would drop their own incendiary cover of “Ring of Fire” from their repertoire along with the “Nashville” from their name). It would take my first exposure to Yoakam live—a dynamic documented on the deluxe edition’s second disc, the one that makes the set essential—to turn me from a fan into a raving apostle.
Other than “Ring of Fire,” the only cut not previously demoed by Schyrock was the beautiful, bittersweet balladry of “South of Cincinnati,” an acoustic change of pace that puts an interesting twist on the songwriter’s dual heritage in urban Ohio and rural Kentucky. It’s a border song, one that evokes the palpable change that occurs below the Mason-Dixon line, “south of Cincinnati, down where the dogwood trees grow.”
He sings the chorus from the perspective of a young woman whose boyfriend had left her to go north some fourteen years ago. She’s been waiting, perhaps without hope, for his return ever since. Even if he’d asked, she wouldn’t join him up there. For her, Kentucky is home. But if he ever decides to come back to his roots, she’ll be there for him. Biographically, Yoakam is the guy who left, but the conviction he brings to the sentiments of the song suggests that he knows Ohio can never be home in the way that Kentucky was.
The release of the EP spread the word on Dwight beyond the hipster circles of Los Angeles, with Jack Hurst of the Chicago Tribune, a critic who generally covered country from a mainstream perspective, syndicating a particularly influential rave. So it was time for Yoakam to take his show nationwide for the first time, but since he’d yet to find any support system (or safety net) in the country circuit, he depended on his roots-rocking benefactors, the Blasters.
“We’d done that previously with Rank and File and [Los] Lobos, so it was like, ‘Okay, here’s another guy we like that we can help,’ ” remembers Dave Alvin. “We got him a couple of California gigs, but the really big one was [when] we put him on a bunch of national dates that went from Texas all the way to the Ritz in New York City. When Dwight and the band opened up at the Ritz, there was a large Warner contingent there, and that was the first time the East Coast contingent of Warner people saw him. And within a month he was on the label.”
In a 1985 interview with Yoakam, the Chicago Tribune’s Hurst writes, “Except for a rockabilly rearrangement of Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring of Fire,’ the six cuts are as country as country’s Top 10 was in the la
te 1950s and early 1960s: wailing fiddles, howling steel guitars, and a nasal enunciation and utter intensity that bring to mind the late Johnny Horton, early Merle Haggard, or the eternal Lefty Frizzell. The music of such people was great, as connoisseurs and long memories will affirm. But a modern reincarnation of it wowing young audiences of punkish bands with names such as Rank and File, Lone Justice, Blood on the Saddle, the Blasters, and Nick Lowe and His Cowboy Outfit?”
That such early praise should come from a mainstream country critic reinforced Yoakam’s potential, which would ultimately be realized in sales of more millions than some of these other acts would ever sell in thousands. (Blood on the Saddle?) If the punk following made Yoakam a newsworthy novelty, commercial country was where his future would lie, though his music would retain an uncompromising spirit more common to punk and resist the formula of the Nashville assembly line—the sound that dominated country radio and had driven it into a rut.
While he was by no means alone in this, Yoakam saw country’s future in reviving its past. Whether Hurst was prescient or had been tipped, the key to that commercial country breakthrough would come from the songbook of Johnny Horton. “Honky-Tonk Man” was the kickoff track to the major-label release of Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc., the first single, and Dwight Yoakam’s first signature tune. The song would spend six months on the country charts, falling just short of the top (it reached number three, a career launch).
It was one of only four tracks added to expand the EP into an LP, which was otherwise reissued in close to identical packaging and gave Dwight the distinction of being one of the few artists whose major-label debut carried the note that it contained previously released material.
Anderson and Yoakam returned to the demo for another song, “Bury Me,” teaming him with Maria McKee of the highly touted Lone Justice, a country-tinged band aimed at the rock market, where it would generate tons of publicity (mainly because of McKee’s looks and voice) but never come close to enjoying the success that Yoakam did.
“Maria McKee was definitely a critics’ darling and everybody wrote about Lone Justice,” says Anderson. “Dwight kinda got into booking agent mode, where he’d call places and bend their ear until they’d say, ‘Okay, come in and play.’ We’d slip in under the more popular bands. So Dwight got us on a bill opening for Lone Justice at the Palomino, and the place was packed, and we started to get noticed by writers. So that’s how we’d gotten on the radar.”
Closing the ten-cut version was a fairly straightforward rendition of the Harlan Howard chestnut, “Heartaches by the Number.” The remaining cut new to the LP was the title track, one that drew the line in the sand of the contention that would define Yoakam’s relationship with country orthodoxy.
There had been no title song to the EP, but Yoakam provided one for the LP, with “Guitars, Cadillacs” filling in “and Hillbilly Music” in the place of the “Etc., Etc.” Nashville blanched. The “hillbilly” tag was something that country had made a concerted effort to ditch, from the countrypolitan sophistication of Chet Atkins and Billy Sherrill productions through the slick suburbanization of Urban Cowboy. And here was this punk upstart, tracking manure all over the split-level home that country had built for itself, reminding listeners of the music’s outhouse era.
“They asked Pete if he could get me to change it, take the ‘hillbilly’ out,” says Yoakam. “And Pete knew better. He said, ‘No way.’ ”
Proudly emphasizing the hillbilly and the honky-tonk, Yoakam was prepared to launch himself after a decade of scuffling in Los Angeles. The question was whether the country—country music, in particular—was ready for Dwight. Sharing fans with the Blasters and Los Lobos made Yoakam an interesting phenomenon in the Los Angeles club circuit, but such associations were more likely to be a liability than an asset in mainstream country. For Dwight, the edge and energy he could bring to country music were not merely positives, they were crucial.
“The country music industry, in Yoakam’s opinion, has ignored the obvious: namely that music appeals to a young audience (that is, the audience that buys records), when it’s made by reckless, young artists,” wrote Paul Kingsbury before the album’s national release in the Nashville-based, historically minded Journal of Country Music. He proceeds to quote Yoakam: “ ‘If country music is going to gain the attention and respect of a young audience, they’re going to have to address what I call the “emotional integrity” of the music,’ he says. ‘It’s extremely important that honky-tonk music have youth involved in it . . . We have an opportunity to reclaim some territory and reintroduce it to those kids, that young audience.’ ”
Kingsbury asks: “Is middle America ready for Dwight Yoakam? The question is not as silly as it sounds, because by signing with a Nashville label, Yoakam is aiming himself squarely at working men and housewives, when his only proven audience has been young rock fans.”
Dwight responds: “We are not cowpunk. We are a classic hillbilly act. That’s what we do. We are a honky-tonk band. That being the case, this music has a natural and rightful kind of audience—in Sapulpa, Oklahoma; Louisville, Kentucky; Birmingham, Alabama; or Odessa, Texas. Those people understand it . . . We’ve achieved a certain teaching process with the young people we’ve been doing it for in L.A. And we had the opportunity to sign with a couple of West Coast labels. But country music is, was, and always will be the music of middle America.”
If we leave a certain inscrutability of syntax aside (“achieved a certain teaching process”?), Dwight was ready to bring his music back home, to Ohio (and Kentucky), to the people he knew best. To confirm his convictions, country music would need to change. Significantly. Quickly. Like flooring a red-hot Corvette out of a deep rut. In the meantime, things were changing for Dwight in Los Angeles, where he’d long been ignored, had later been accepted, and was now starting to get a taste of what the life ahead might be like.
Remembers Dave Alvin, “Right before Dwight’s Warner Bros. LP came out, he and I went to see George Strait at the Universal Amphitheatre. And suddenly this guy who had been playing to forty people at the Palomino has carte blanche backstage. And I realized that he is being groomed here. There’s that grace period in the music industry, where three months before your album is released, and two weeks after it’s released, everybody loves you. ’Cause they all know you may be the next big thing. ‘Hey, man, can I get you a drink? My girlfriend? Fine, take her.’ So we were totally ‘in crowd’ at this George Strait performance, and I felt totally out of place.”
Dwight didn’t, and this was a crucial difference between Yoakam and Dave Alvin, the Blasters, and pretty much anyone else who would attempt to find commercial stardom without sacrificing rootsy integrity. Dwight could straddle two worlds—be they hillbilly and Hollywood, punk rock and mainstream country, authenticity and flash—the way few others could. He blazed a trail that many others would try to follow, but they’d take a few steps and falter. He was somehow able to climb to the top.
8
“It’s Jes’ Ol’ Hillbilly Stuff”
IN THE RECORDING STUDIO, Dwight Yoakam and the Babylonian Cowboys had become a finely tuned, well-oiled machine, able to stop on a dime. Onstage, the band was a supercharged muscle car with the potential to recklessly careen out of control (or at least create the illusion that they might). And they drove the audience wild in the process.
If Dwight was sitting behind the steering wheel—determining the course of his artistry through his songs, his voice—Pete was riding shotgun. The latter’s guitar plainly provided the pedal-to-the-metal acceleration, bringing a live-wire charge to the performance that was only a hint in the recorded arrangements. Impulse and adrenalin ignited his progressions, as if the guitar were playing him, or playing through him.
But Dwight remained a master of reserve, in full command of his craft, his vocal phrasings and shadings, the material he wrote, even of the crowds that were growing larger and more excited at the prospect of an emerging phenomenon. Though Pete’s current
could surge through Dwight as well, turning him into a whirling dervish during instrumental breaks, it was the tension between the two of them onstage—latent, laconic Dwight and kinetic, explosive Pete—that powered the pistons of this musical dynamic.
Where the first disc of the deluxe edition of Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. documents the big leap that Dwight’s music had made in the studio from the 1981 demos to the 1986 release of his major-label debut, the second disc provides even greater revelation. It’s amazing in retrospect that it took two decades for this recording to see release, for if there is one document that could testify to the singularity of Dwight’s significance, of his music’s potential to merge the rawest rock with the most commercially successful country in a way no one had done before and hasn’t since, this is it.
Recorded live at the Roxy on West Hollywood’s Sunset Strip, a different world entirely from the Palomino in North Hollywood, it captures Yoakam and band as they prepare to widen their orbit, just weeks following the album’s release. The launching pad wasn’t a country club, and this wasn’t a country crowd. The Roxy was the epicenter of neon hip in the capital of the entertainment industry, though to Nashville this scene meant little or nothing.