Dwight Yoakam by Don McLeese Read Free Book Online Page B

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 decade 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