On an oppressively sweaty summer night back in 1987, I saw Dwight Yoakam and his Babylon Cowboys perform at a club in Kansas City, Missouri. Yoakam was already a “star” at this point, with four or five top-10 country hits on his resume. So it was no surprise that the place was packed to the point of threatening the arrival of the fire marshal. Still, it was a relatively intimate evening: 150, 175 people tops. Such was often the scale, pre-Garth, of the country audience, even out here in the Heartland, even for “stars.”
Of course, Yoakam’s audience, then as now, included quite a few folks who wouldn’t normally have identified themselves as country fans at all, and who might’ve even told you to go to hell had you suggested otherwise. Because Dwight emerged from the postpunk Los Angeles scene that birthed X and Los Lobos and the Blasters, he was OK to like.
This placed Yoakam in an odd, possibly unprecedented position: He was certified cool by the very college radio listeners who’d have mocked the acts with whom he was sharing playlists on country radio.
Dwight made his debut on the country charts with consecutive top-5 singles — “Honky Tonk Man” and “Guitars, Cadillacs” — in the summer of 1986, when those charts were otherwise dominated by the not-at-all-cool likes of John Schneider and Gary Morris, Alabama and Lee Greenwood. For some listeners, the Kentucky-born and Ohio-raised country boy’s decision to try his luck in Los Angeles, after visiting and rejecting Nashville, only multiplied his appeal.
Yoakam couldn’t help but be aware of these aesthetic and (hardly unrelated) class fissures within his audience. Especially when he was confronted, as he was that night I first saw him, by a stage-hugging front row that included a 50-ish gentleman who stood stock still all evening in a Stetson and his best dress windbreaker, and a drunken coolie who wore a Hüsker Dü t-shirt and kept screaming “Wooo! Fuckin’ A!”
“So y’all think you like country, do ya?” I recall Yoakam asking that night to boisterous shouts in the affirmative. He was talking to the house, but he appeared to be looking straight at the coolie and his buds. “Yeah? We’ll see about that.”
Without identifying the song, Yoakam launched into a very slow and quiet reading of the 1974 George Jones chart-topper “The Grand Tour”. Most of the crowd didn’t appear to recognize the song (and “Step right up, come on in/If you’d like to take the grand tour” is a pretty easily identifiable opening), but they paid attention. When Yoakam finished, the room, coolie included, roared its approval. Fuckin’ A, indeed.
The record that kicked off this cultural exchange program was Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc. Etc., Yoakam’s staggered debut: An EP version was released on the tiny Oak label in 1984, followed by a full-length LP on Reprise in ’86. Now reissued in a two-disc deluxe edition, Guitars, Cadillacs remains, more than two decades on, a remarkable — even essential — record.
Producer and guitarist Pete Anderson would later get control of all that echo (the opening fiddle on “Honky Tonk Man” has the sonics of a Kansas album) and capture a livelier drum sound, and Yoakam quickly grew as a singer. But this is all good enough right here. The original songs are first-rate — the icon fetishism of the indelible title track, the numb, drunken futility of “It Won’t Hurt”, the sentimental tragedy of “South Of Cincinnati” — each one earning a spot in the country canon. And the smoldering covers of Johnny Cash, Ray Price, and Johnny Horton classics will continue to inspire newcomers to track down greatest hits sets by all three, just as they did twenty years ago.
One warning: If you already own the Yoakam box set, Reprise Please, Baby, then you already have most of what makes up this reissue, including the ten demo tracks Yoakam cut in 1981 with the heady likes of pianist Glen Hardin, and you also already possess all but five of the “Live At The Roxy 1986″ tracks that are here again as well. It’s good to hear the show in its entirety if only to capture just how sincerely and continuously Yoakam proselytized for the twang, covering Bill Monroe (twice) and Elvis Presley and Hank Williams, and thanking audience members John Fogerty and Emmylou Harris for their own bodies of work.
He was doing the same thing at the time in television and magazine interviews — hammering home how much he loved Buck Owens and Stonewall Jackson and how incensed he was by the assumption that country people, his people, were just a bunch of trash. He sometimes even seemed on a mission. Besides looking for a hit, he wanted to push urban folks raised on rock to lay aside their prejudices about twang.
All the more impressively, he did this not by meeting the college radio kids on their own punk-influenced and power-chorded turf (a la, say, Jason & the Scorchers), but by playing straight-up country music, replete with fiddle breaks, pedal steel licks, and a lead guitarist fond of “soloing” by simply picking out the melody.
The hipping of the allegedly hip rock audience to the presumably unhip pleasures of country music (as distinguished from country-rock music) had, of course, been attempted before — Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, Elvis Costello’s Almost Blue — but those records were mere tangents in rock-centric careers; thus, unsurprisingly, they mostly bypassed the country audience altogether. The same is true of Steve Earle, “Guitar Town” notwithstanding.
Only the Waylon & Willie era comes close to matching what Yoakam was up to, though even that example doesn’t quite get it. While the Outlaws had the good sense to notice and cultivate an audience that already existed, Yoakam more or less created one from scratch. Or, put another way, he scratched an itch a lot of people didn’t even know they had yet. And, both for better and for worse, that audience — rock-bred music lovers who hate Nashville country but love the “real” stuff — remains with us today. It’s sometimes called “alternative country.”
If Dwight Yoakam has a legacy, that’s it: Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc. Etc., and all that followed, helped a lot of people who thought they didn’t like country to listen, finally, to that “old hillbilly stuff.”
It’s a good legacy.
