Dwight Yoakam by Don McLeese Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    â€œI 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