by Don McLeese
Yet radio play of some sort was crucial to Dwight Yoakam’s career vision. And rock radio, amid the proliferation of arena rockers and MTV haircut bands, no longer played anyone who sounded remotely like Dwight. The rock artists with whom Dwight had something in common had been (and would continue to be) relegated to the commercial fringes. Though country seemed like a tighter format, locked perennially into a Top 40 mode—still stressing hit singles rather than albums—it actually offered more opportunity for a troubadour with an independent streak through much of the 1980s.
Again, this was the era post–Urban Cowboy and pre-Garth, a brief window of opportunity when the country industry would be surprisingly open to new ideas, fresh sounds, and artists who didn’t seem much like the country stars who had preceded them. From the mid through the late ’80s, the husband-and-wife team of Rodney Crowell and Rosanne Cash were the reigning couple of this emerging country music, both with ties to tradition (he from Emmylou Harris’s Hot Band, she as the daughter of Johnny), but with an album-oriented appeal to those who had outgrown what rock had become.
Mavericks such as Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett were initially targeted toward mainstream country in the mid-1980s, though rock-and-roll-influenced duos such as Foster and Lloyd and the O’Kanes enjoyed greater commercial airplay. Earle and Yoakam would provide provocative parallels and initially seem like rivals of a sort, each reclaiming the “hillbilly” tag that the smoother countrypolitan types of the last decade or two had done their best to bury. Yet Earle defended Nashville, where he had moved from his native San Antonio (following the path taken by fellow Texans Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark), when Yoakam vocally decried it.
“We butted heads a little bit, which was turned into this feud by some people, but there was never any personal animosity between us,” says Earle of his relationship with Yoakam. “What we had in common is that we used the term ‘hillbilly,’ which pissed George Jones off. He said one time, ‘We spent all these years trying not to be called hillbillies, and Dwight Yoakam and Steve Earle fucked it up in one day.’ ”
Laughing, Earle continues, “We were definitely the same graduating class, but I think we disagreed about why we were doing what we were doing. He was trying to make country records, and I was operating under false pretenses. I was always a folk singer, but I’d had a rockabilly band, and I got a record deal, and then I got another record deal. But I was making a singer-songwriter record, and what Dwight did was based on honky-tonk music as a specific art form. What I was trying to do was sneak a singer-songwriter album in on Nashville, and dress it up as a honky-tonk record. And I’m unapologetic about that now. Whatever it takes!”
And then there was the matter of Nashville: Yoakam attacking it, Earle defending it. “He pushed my buttons that way, and I resented it,” admits Earle, who later relocated from Nashville to New York. “Nowadays, I sort of wonder what I was defending, because I defended that town right up to the time I left. And I don’t really anymore.
“But Dwight and I did a double bill years ago. We played first, and then he went onstage and said, ‘Okay, you’ve heard from Nashville, and now we’re gonna show you the real thing.’ First thing out of his mouth! And, okay, I did write ‘Dwight Yoakam eats sushi’ on the wall of the dressing room of the Forum. And I love sushi! But, at the time, it just seemed like a good thing to say if you were fucking with a ‘new traditionalist.’ Or whatever we were supposed to be.”
Yoakam’s disdain for Nashville notwithstanding, a decade after his brief, tentative foray into Nashville, it appeared that country radio had its ears open wider to a surprising variety of singer-songwriters than the rock industry based in Los Angeles did. The rock artists who shared Dwight’s rootsy, rebellious spirit were deemed noncommercial (and not very interested in becoming commercial). The country airwaves had room for a creative rebel, if only for a brief interval, before Garth would render what passed for commercial success in the country music of the ’80s as chump change.
Remaining in Los Angeles distanced Yoakam from the Nashville industry he would need to advance his recording career through radio play, but it allowed him to develop as a live performer, to work the circuit, sharpen his chops, find his audience, forge his own path. Nashville remained an industry hub of recording studios and Music Row offices without much of a club circuit or any sort of nightlife. It was a city of churches, not honky-tonks.
Not until Dwight had been in Southern California for four long years, writing songs, honing his craft, putting his music to the test of the honky-tonk crowd, seeing what worked and what didn’t, would he have the opportunity to enter a recording studio and cut the ten tracks that would not only lead to his national breakthrough but provide the blueprint for his first three albums, the ones that would establish his persona and make him a star.
He had come to Los Angeles with the jeans and the boots. Now he had the songs. Soon he would have the sound.
5
From Kentucky Bourbon to Babylonian Cowboys
DWIGHT YOAKAM SHOT OUT of nowhere to national prominence in 1986—a supernova, so fresh, so exciting, so new. If he hadn’t existed, somebody might have been tempted to invent him. And, given the nature of the music business, others would quickly try to reinvent him, as every Nashville label schemed to market its own hunky, honky-tonk throwback, making music that seemed to exist in a pre-countrypolitan time warp. Some enjoyed considerable commercial success (Ricky Van Shelton), others didn’t (Stacy Dean Campbell).
But before anyone could try to reinvent Yoakam, Dwight had to invent himself. Rather than an artist out of nowhere, adrift from time and place, he was very much an artist of his formative years—a child of the ’50s and ’60s, of cowboys on TV and in the movies, of the Monkees on the radio and Creedence on the stereo—and of his pilgrimage, to Hollywood, where a Midwestern kid with family roots in rural Kentucky could fulfill his destiny. He only seemed like an “overnight sensation” to those who hadn’t watched his artistry germinate in Los Angeles for almost a decade, until he was almost thirty. And, really, nobody had been monitoring Dwight that closely, until the demo he cut in 1981—his first recording session—paid such serendipitous dividends.
Even in the wake of Dwight’s subsequent commercial success, when he opened the door for some artists (e.g., Marty Stuart) who proceeded to forge distinctive paths of their own, none of those others created the sort of bridge that Yoakam did. Nobody else who revived a retro sound on commercial country radio enjoyed anywhere near the critical respect and hip cachet that Yoakam would sustain among rock critics, roots rockers, alternative radicals, and audiences likely to embrace artists on the commercial fringes (perhaps because they were on the commercial fringes, wearing the lack of multiplatinum success as a merit badge of integrity).
Yoakam’s breakthrough was something of a game changer. Yet, as documented in previous chapters, it was a long time coming, beginning with his aborted trip to Nashville after his 1974 graduation. Through his years of obscurity, working his way up from clubs in the San Fernando Valley and outskirts—like his stint fronting the house band at the Corral in Lakeview Terrace—he generated little press attention or cult buzz whatsoever.
Even after he started playing semi-regularly at the legendary Palomino—the closest thing to a traditional honky-tonk in the L.A. area—he was mainly an opening act with a day job. Located in the unfashionable remove of North Hollywood, the Palomino seemed a whole lot closer in spirit to Bakersfield, a hundred miles away. A blue-collar bar by day (when it opened at 6 a.m.), the club had been around since the early ’50s, hosting the likes of Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash, offering a home away from home for the harder-edged sounds of Bakersfield’s Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. It had been reclaimed by the early ’70s generation of country rockers, with Linda Ronstadt, the Burritos, and Emmylou Harris all gracing its stage. By the time Dwight started playing there in the early ’80s, country rock had become passé, and the scenesters had moved on.
The teetotaling artist christ
ened his band Kentucky Bourbon, reinforcing his ties to the bluegrass state (which he had visited mainly on weekends), as well as his credentials as a one-hundred-proof honky-tonker. Not that Dwight pretended to be something he wasn’t. From his earliest interviews he would talk about being raised in Ohio amid a conservative Christianity that prohibited alcohol. But drinking was integral to the honky-tonk ethos, just as integral as the cowboy hat and boots that had never been part of his wardrobe in Columbus. His audience was drinking, and Dwight was fine with that. And the more they drank, and the more he sang about drinking, the better they liked him.
Kentucky Bourbon was a bar band, assembled to support a singer whose pinched phrasing and strong sense of yearning had become more pronounced, more distinctive, the longer and farther away he was from home. Whether opening for the club’s headliners or performing all night in smaller bars, Yoakam played a utilitarian role, drawing dancers to the floor like a jukebox, but not really building much of a fan base through the original material he sprinkled in.
“All through the Urban Cowboy craze, Yoakam slogged through country gigs in Southern California, enduring requests to play Kenny Rogers and Eddie Rabbitt when he was offering his own songs and those of Johnny Horton, Flatt & Scruggs, and Ray Price,” wrote Paul Kingsbury in the Journal of Country Music (“The Old Sound of New Country,” Vol. XI, No. 1). “Meanwhile, the hip kids of L.A. were following hardcore, nihilist punk bands. That audience seemed as far out of earshot as Yoakam’s honky-tonk could get.”
Caught between soft, commercial country and the harder place of rock, Yoakam may have generated little attention through the early ’80s, but fellow musicians who hung around the Palomino were starting to know who he was and notice how good he was. There was no inkling at the time that his music would ever find favor with a rock crowd or that there was any future in beating the dead horse of country rock, but maybe Yoakam could show country music what it was missing.
Joe Ely had already been straddling that seam between rock and country, and his Texas roadhouse music was generating a lot of press attention. He remembers Yoakam playing the Palomino as his little-known opening act.
“He was kind of a shy little guy who played a great set,” says Ely. “He had that Bakersfield thing that was really interesting, because the Texas guys were more attracted to the blues and Willie and Waylon. So I thought Dwight was completely unique, with different inspirations than we had. I was really intrigued by his songs, and how he’d taken the rockabilly thing and the Bakersfield thing and turned it into his own style.”
Was Ely surprised when that unique style made Yoakam a huge mainstream country star? “I guess I was surprised and not surprised,” he replies. “Because even in those early days, he had huge determination, and he wouldn’t let anything get in his way. And that’s the way he’s always been.
Such success was still a few years down the road, when Dwight would get his first recording shot in 1981. Gordon Schyrock, an engineer at United Western Recordings, offered Yoakam free time for sessions that he would produce when he wasn’t booked with paying customers. If those tapes led to a deal, then Schyrock would receive his reward and produce his label debut. According to the liner notes by Holly George-Warren for the 2006 reissue of Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc., Schyrock had become impressed with Dwight after filling in for Kentucky Bourbon’s regular bassist at the Palomino, an enthusiasm he shared with local guitar hotshot Jerry McGee.
McGee was familiar to six-string aficionados as a latter-day member of the Ventures, the legendarily twangy instrumental combo, and had worked in the studio with artists ranging from Elvis Presley to Bobby Darin. In the ’80s, the Ventures were enjoying something of a revival and were gigging regularly at the Palomino with McGee playing lead. But it’s likely that McGee’s credit that cut closest to Dwight’s heart was his guitar intro to the Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville.”
While using Yoakam’s Kentucky Bourbon drummer Stu Perry and bassist Robert Wilson, Schyrock recruited an all-star array of area session vets. Pianist Glen D Hardin (who had played with Elvis Presley), pedal steel guitarist JayDee Maness (who had played with Hardin in Emmylou Harris’s Hot Band and with Yoakam’s future mentor, Buck Owens, as a Buckaroo), and multi-instrumental prodigy David Mansfield (who had worked with T Bone Burnett in Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue and the Alpha Band that it spawned) joined McGee to provide Yoakam with the sort of backing he’d never previously received. The session may have been Yoakam’s, but he was far less heralded than so many of the musicians in the studio with him.
The ten cuts they recorded first surfaced for public consumption on 2002’s four-disc Reprise Please Baby: The Warner Bros. Years, the boxed-set compilation of hits, rarities, and previously unreleased recordings that served as Yoakam’s swan song from the label. But it’s the deluxe reissue of Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc., released in 2006 to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of that full-length debut, that puts those first recordings in their proper context.
That two-disc set serves as a Rosetta stone for Yoakam’s artistry, tracing his five-year progression from virtual unknown to hot new star, framing that 1986 release with the demos that led to it and a triumphant live performance at the Roxy in Hollywood, one of the trendiest rock clubs on the Sunset Strip.
That early demo shows just how much Dwight had going for him when nobody was paying attention, how he was already a compelling vocalist with full command of his delivery and a bunch of original songs so strong that they would highlight his first three albums. But they also show what was missing, the dynamics that would make him appealing to mainstream country and roots-rocking fans alike, and would turn him and the new band recruited after those sessions into a performing powerhouse.
“You can hear me really trying to figure me out,” he explained to George-Warren in those deluxe edition liner notes. “In some ways, there’s a reckless kind of innocence in those sessions that belie the more planned, later versions of the songs . . . I was twenty-four years old, and I went in there late at night after I’d get off my air-freight driving job.
“Gordon was from Tulsa and part of that eclectic musical mix of Leon Russell, J.J. Cale. Gordon allowed me to gain an introduction into the world of professional recording in a way that permitted me to be left to my own devices—for better or worse, at any given moment. I wasn’t experienced enough to edit myself. Ultimately, it was a healthy approach for me personally.”
In retrospect, knowing that those sessions failed to land him a deal, and comparing them with the subsequent recordings that would succeed, one finds the strengths of the singer and his songs diluted rather than enhanced by the support he received. Too many arrangements show musicians competing for space, sometimes as if they were racing each other. And there’s a self-consciousness to some of the retro flourishes, as if the arrangements were evoking the cornball affectation of Hee Haw or The Beverly Hillbillies. You can hear all the promise of what Yoakam would become in those tapes, but you can also see why those sessions didn’t take him there.
“Gordon was a proficient engineer, but those demos didn’t have the technical architecture,” explains Yoakam. “Architecture” is a term that Dwight and others who worked with him frequently employ when discussing the progression of his recording career, one that suggests a crucial distinction. Dwight was already the artist—the guy with the voice, the songs, the nascent charisma. But he desperately needed a partner who could fulfill the role of sonic architect, who could lay the foundation, frame and scaffold the musical structure, supply what was necessary to give the songs the spare, sturdy support they required.
As detailed by George-Warren in the deluxe edition notes, that demo was targeted specifically toward Nashville, and that’s where it was shopped, because there appeared to be no way that an artist who had come to Los Angeles with country-rock aspirations would find an audience in the rock world with his honky-tonk twang and pinched, nasal tenor.
She writes, “It’s hard to believe t
hat such an impressive batch of songs performed by, as Dwight calls them, ‘exceptionally gifted musicians,’ fell on deaf ears in Music City. But that’s exactly what happened in 1982. The closest Yoakam came to a deal while shopping the tape in Nashville was the slight interest shown by one label exec to get Hank Williams Jr. to record ‘I Sang Dixie.’ ‘Lucky for me that things didn’t fall into place at the time,’ Yoakam says today with a laugh.”
Lucky because the song would become a signature chart topper for Yoakam himself, his biggest hit of his early career, though it would take until 1988 (and his third album) to do so. Lucky because the future held something brighter for Dwight than settling for songwriting credits on other artists’ albums. Lucky because the demo’s failure led another struggling Los Angeles transplant to recognize exactly what those tapes were missing.
Pete Anderson later explained that he’d been interested in hearing the tape because of Jerry McGee. Nine years Yoakam’s senior, the guitarist had come to Los Angeles as a rhythm and blues acolyte rather than a country fan, but Detroit had long been a mecca for Southerners looking for work in its auto plants and remained perhaps the strongest Rust Belt market for hardcore, gutbucket country (as immortalized in Bobby Bare’s classic “Detroit City”).
In the liner notes to the Reprise Please Baby anthology—also by Holly George-Warren—Anderson jokes that he’d been intrigued by the tape because of McGee’s imprint: “I was always looking to steal [guitar] licks.” He heard a role for himself as guitarist and producer, a place where the twang of a Telecaster—which had once played such a prominent role in hardcore country and the Bakersfield sound in particular, but had all but disappeared from the contemporary country airwaves—could reassert itself.
