Dwight Yoakam came along at just the right time for me, in the mid Eighties, launching a lifelong love of country music.
There was a little period when a bunch of country-rock bar came to prominence, championed by Andy Kershaw on radio and TV (during his brief stint on the OGWT). They included bands like the Long Ryders, Lone Justice, Beat Farmers, Blasters, Los Lobos, Green On Red, Jason & The Scorchers.
Around the same time I was discovering the country side of roots music – hillbilly, honkytonk, bluegrass, Western swing – at my friends Steve and Jo’s club Son Of Redneck. So when Dwight Yoakam came along – a young, good-looking guy reclaiming country music for a new audience – the scene had its first star.
Dwight didn’t draw the same sort of crowd as the likes of Nashville superstar Garth Brooks, who turned country music into a kind of light entertainment package. He attracted people like me: ex-punks who had started to delve into different genres, discovering the roots of soul and blues and country.
There was even a name coined for them – cowpunks – and many of us dressed the part, at least at gigs and on club nights: I had a fringed jacket made of leather and cowhide, snakeskin boots, and a big cowboy hat like Dwight’s that I’d bought in Texas, decorated with a rattlesnake head picked up in New Mexico.
It was a thrilling moment when a real cowboy, the guitarist in Tex-Mex accordion player Flaco Jimenez’s band, glanced over at the bar in the Sir George Robey pub one night and touched his own hat, Western-style, murmuring: “Nice rattler.” The conversation took a peculiar path when he inquired: “D’you ever eat one?” I confessed I had not, and asked how they tasted. “Rubber,” he replied.
But back to Dwight, whose debut album – Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc, Etc – opened with a statement of intent in a cover of Johnny Horton’s long-forgotten classic: “I’m a Honky Tonk Man.” In his self-penned title song he elaborated by laying out his own template for life: “Guitars, Cadillacs and hillbilly music – the only thing that keeps me hanging on.”