Chords for Dwight Yoakam on Country Rock and His Hit Song, 'Guitars, Cadillacs' | The Big Interview

As we sit here, we're halfway through the second decade of the 21st [G#] century.
Long way from the Dust Bowl, long way from the mean streets of Bakersfield,
long way from your father's Texaco station.
So the question now is, who are you?
Who is Dwight Yoakam, the person? _ _
_ At—I mean, I started to say—I started to answer you very quickly, and it wasn't—
not to be flippant, I was just going to say, I don't know.
And then I thought, no, _ _ _ it's that kid that—
[C] I used to say we were tail-like babies that would, on Friday night,
often during the year, multiple times during the year, we would—
when we'd move to Columbus, Ohio, be on Route 23 headed south,
cross the river, and what my mom would always refer to as going home.
We're going home this weekend.
It's like, well, our home was now where we were, but never for them.
You know, my mother, my aunts—
So you were in Ohio, and they were going to go home to Kentucky.
Yeah.
Cross the river.
Right.
Yeah, cross the river and go home.
And so I'm that kid that was—you know, I'm that.
I guess that's who I am.
In the race of the Church.
Race of the Church of Christ, you know, acapella music.
From the time of my—some of my earliest memories,
_ _ that's probably _ [N] the distillation of me is that, you know.
Because we all are.
We don't escape who we were at four and five and six years old,
I mean, emotionally and otherwise, probably.
I was lucky.
I had _ no malice.
My parents were not perfect by any stretch of the imagination.
None of us are, and nobody is.
But _ _ _ I was really, really fortunate to not have any kind of malicious hurdle to overcome.
Now, professionally, I asked you who you were personally,
and you were kind enough and generous enough to answer it.
But professionally, what are you?
You used the phrase pop rock.
Well, now, I was—you know, I really broke—
in the L.A. scene, there's a great legacy in California. _
Across America, there's this same legacy.
I think that every generation, every decade or so,
especially, though, in Southern California,
there was a reawakening of an awareness about country music in some form.
If you look at it, the Dust Bowl begat sort of _ the Maddox brothers and Rose.
And so, what Buck talked about with me, he said he would see them tour the camps.
Well, they would leave Arizona, where they actually ended up living for a time,
but they would go into California and work up and down the San Joaquin Valley.
Buck would, during the picking season, with his family.
And in those labor camps, these bands would come through and play.
And that's where Buck started playing instruments.
He started learning in the labor camps.
And he saw Rose and the Maddox brothers and Bob Wills.
He told me, he said, Bob Wills could look at you in the audience,
and you thought he was looking at only you.
He said he had that ability to do that.
So there was that in the 40s, 30s and 40s, there was that incarnation. _
Late—again, a decade and a half or so later, there's this explosion,
starting with Tommy Collins and then Winn Stewart in Capitol Records in Hollywood,
signing these guys from Bakersfield.
The Bakersfield Sound was actually recorded in Hollywood, most of it.
And then people—even Merle's great anthem, Okie from Muskogee, _ ironically—
and he said to me, he really wrote it tongue-in-cheek, he wasn't serious.
And then it became an anthem for the right.
And it was recorded down the street from the hippies he was talking about on Sunset Boulevard.
He was right up the street from—so he—you know, there's this—
there's that moment, the late 50s, early 60s Bakersfield Sound.
And then by the late 60s, you had another generation of young people in LA.
Chris Hillman in The Birds doesn't get the credit he deserves.
He had been a bluegrass mandolin player,
and he was chosen to be a member of this band they were putting together, The Birds. _
_ And as he worked through The Birds for the first couple of years,
he kept introducing or trying to introduce country music into that rock band.
It was our American Beatles, The Birds.
And he achieved it by the time they did the album, Sweethearts of the Rodeo.
Now, he didn't like the hyphen term.
He said to me—he still kind of rubs him wrong—country rock.
But he created it with The Birds.
And without them, in that moment in Southern California,
in that whole late 60s, early 70s movement, which _ begat—
in the end, you know, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, and The Eagles
had this _ stratospheric rise, you know, to what pop culture changed with that.
[F#] So again, it was based out of [G] _ kind of the country music culture in California that began at that.
I then, a decade later, show up.
I dropped out of Ohio State and left and arrived there.
After going for a short time to Nashville and looking around, I went to L.A.
And there was a scene that blossomed in the early 80s, 1981, 82, and they called it cow punk
because a lot of punk rock bands began to play country music.
I never heard the phrase [F#] cow punk.
It was called cow punk.
Punk music, I understand.
Cow punk, I never heard of.
They called it because they were former punk bands, like the Dills became this band called Rank and File,
a punk band.
The Plugs became Los Cresados.
And they all began to explore performing _ their version of country music
because their parents, a lot of those former Oakies, Arkies, and Texans
that had moved their grandparents, in many cases, from the Dust Bowl,
but their parents, post-World War II, would come out there to work in the—
So the music resonated from previous generations.
_ _ [C] _ _
[D] Then came a defining moment in Yoakam's career.
It had taken nearly a decade of playing L.A. nightclubs,
but Yoakam's raw lyrics and ragged guitar helped him develop a devoted and eclectic fan base
who [G] loved his wide variety of music.
[D] And major record labels, like Warner Brothers, would finally take notice.
He was signed [G] and cut his first album.
_ [D] _ _
[G] Then you [C] explode on the scene with the guitars [D#] and Cadillacs.
It took nine years before I signed.
But I began to play the nightclubs in and [F#] around Southern California.
Five sets a night, fist fights galore, and you know—
Maybe a beer bottle full at your time, too.
Yeah, well, never had the chicken wire experience.
That didn't actually—I never experienced that, even in Ohio when I played bars.
In about 1981, 1982, the scene in the rock clubs broke out
and allowed me, in Access Point, to take the kind of neo-honky-tonk
that I was—because I never did the urban cowboys.
I got fired a lot because they would hire us expecting, in 79, 80, 81,
the music that was on commercial country radio.
It never appealed to me.
It didn't resonate with me.
I was doing _ music that was 30 years, 40 years old at that point.
But then you reached the point where you make this recording of guitars, Cadillacs.
Yeah.
Did it stun you how quickly it went to the top and how big it became?
We believed—I say we, the band and myself, myself and my producer, principally, Pete Anderson—
we believed that if we had the right [F#]
set of opportunities with a label,
that we could succeed and it would _ _ resonate.
_ And it did beyond what we could [E] imagine.
♪ Lord, [A] hey, guitars, [E] Cadillacs, good Williams music.
♪ The one and only street you do [A] not go home. _
_ _ Guitars, Cadillacs, [E] went double platinum
and was [B] named by Rolling Stone as one of the 100 greatest country [A] songs ever.
It was also the first of three consecutive number one Billboard [E] country albums for Dwight Yoakam.