Dwight Yoakam (9 page)

“And I had arranging skills,” Pete continues. “If he was like the agent, I was the manager. If he was the singer, I was the guitar player. If he was the songwriter, I was the arranger. If he was the artist, I was the producer. And at that time, he didn't want to do any of the things I wanted to do, and I didn't want to do any of the things that he wanted to do, which made it noncompetitive. I mean, I'd written a few songs, but I knew from hearing his songs that I'm not a songwriter like that. So I was smart enough to know I'd never go, ‘Hey, man, let's do some of my songs.' And he was smart enough to know that he didn't understand arranging and he didn't want to play lead guitar. So we were uniquely two pieces of a puzzle.”

What Anderson added to the mix extended beyond sound. Since he'd been around the L.A. scene longer than Dwight, he had some experience with the industry that Yoakam lacked. Not much, but just enough.

“I'm about nine years older than Dwight and had been playing on the scene a little longer, with a little more overall savvy of the business,” he says. “But, believe me, both of us were very, very green in the business, even though I had a little more experience than he did. I remember going off with him to eat one night and explaining to him what publishing was. 'Cause he was working with a guy who said, ‘Hey, man, if I take you into the studio late at night, can I have all your publishing?' And, he'd said okay. And I said, ‘You did
what
?!' 'Cause I wasn't really sure what it was, but all my friends go, ‘Never sell your publishing.' I had a friend who had a friend whose wife worked at Warner Bros.—you know, you're in the fringe of it in L.A., everybody's in the entertainment business in one aspect or another. So I'd heard certain things were important. And even though I was in my thirties and Dwight was in his twenties, we were really young. We were playing bars for thirty to forty bucks. And the top of that was, ‘Can we get fifty bucks?' ”

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 late 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.