Free Dwight Yoakam by Don McLeese

A few years before Nashville would hear any commercial potential in Yoakam’s music, the streamlined urgency of the Babylonian Cowboys would receive a boisterously receptive embrace from a club scene that had forged a common bond between roots rock and punk rock, and was ready to welcome hardcore country into that circle as well. Other Los Angeles acts were flirting with incorporating country elements into a sound aimed at rock fans (with Lone Justice featuring Maria McKee the most highly touted at the time), but Yoakam was country incarnate.
    He was the real deal.

6
    Who You Callin’ Cowpunk?
    DAVE ALVIN HAS TOLD THIS STORY many times before, and it seems to get better every time. Dave’s a natural storyteller. It’s a talent he first flashed when he was lead guitarist and songwriter for the Blasters, the kings of the Los Angeles roots-rock scene of the 1980s, and has continued to demonstrate through his solo career as a troubadour, one whose finely detailed narratives draw from country, blues, folk, and rock alike.
    After Gordon Schyrock and Pete Anderson, Alvin was the third major figure in short succession that would have a profound impact on Yoakam’s career trajectory. And, in some ways, he was the least likely, for the Blasters, with the raw intensity their bluesy revivalism, drew mainly a punk rock crowd. And the only hint of country this crowd seemed to embrace was an emerging L.A. hybrid called “cowpunk,” which was frequently as sloppy, anti-slick, and anti-commercial as the punk rock from which it had morphed. (Most of the early cowpunks had been in blitzkrieg bands before embracing the twang.)
    Dwight wasn’t sloppy. Dwight wasn’t cowpunk. And Dwight wasn’t in league with any subculture that had a profound disdain for selling records and having radio hits. Yet Alvin heard something
real
in Dwight, something undeniable, and the Blasters adopted Dwight as their opening act, giving him the opportunity to make their crowd his crowd. Since Yoakam had no other crowd, beyond the fellow musicians who recognized his talent, some of whom had been involved with the failed bid to win Nashville’s ear, he wasn’t about to be picky.
    So let’s listen to Dave tell the story of how he met Dwight Yoakam (again): “The first night I ever saw Dwight perform, my fiancée at the time and I had broken up, so I went into the Palomino to get drunk. There were maybe thirty people there, including the band, and I just sat at the bar and watched this guy deliver a totally complete, professional show, as if there were a thousand people. And it was
the band
—Brantley, Pete Anderson, J.D. Foster, Jeff Donavan—and they sounded like they would three years later when he was a star. Exactly the same show, pretty much.
    â€œAnd I was floored. After their first set, I went backstage. I’d wallowed in my misery enough, [and] I’m normally pretty shy, but I didn’t feel any qualms. I just walked up to Dwight and said, ‘Order the limousine now! You’re gonna be a star.’ And so that kind of kicked off our friendship.”
    What’s most significant about the story is that Alvin didn’t simply believe that Yoakam was destined to become a star, but that he would become a
big country star
. When rock and country elements had previously commingled, the music had mainly won more favor with rock audiences than with the country crowd. Country was like a whole other country—with its own radio stations, dance halls, fan press, and audience base. You practically needed a passport to go there.
    And Alvin didn’t have one, though he plainly loved the country music from a decade or two earlier and found a common spirit between that and the blues base of the Blasters. For him to think an artist the Blasters would soon adopt as their opening act—introducing him to roots and punk audiences, where his music was embraced more enthusiastically than it