Behind the Song “Guitars, Cadillacs” by Dwight Yoakam

Back in 1986, Dwight Yoakam told CMT, “That Cadillac meant you made it. If you came out of the hills of Kentucky and you had a Cadillac, you were somebody.”

The skinny singer with the tight pants was another one of those overnight successes a decade in the making. When Yoakam started playing his brand of country music, he was reaching back two or three decades and drawing from the artists of his parents’ and grandparents’ generations. He combined those influences with some of the rock music around him growing up in Kentucky and Ohio and leaned on the Bakersfield sound to develop his own brand of country music. It stood out compared to the Urban Cowboy movement dominating the country charts of the time.

Yoakam found his home in Southern California playing around the rock clubs in the early ’80s.

Girl, you taught me how to hurt real bad and cry myself to sleep
You showed me how this town can shatter dreams
Another lesson about a naive fool that came to Babylon
And found out that the pie don’t taste so sweet

In an interview with Dan Rather, Yoakam noted, “There’s a great legacy in California. Across America, there’s the same legacy. Every generation, every decade or so, especially though in Southern California, there was a reawakening of an awareness about country music in some form. … There was a scene that blossomed in the early ’80s, 1981, 1982, and they called it cowpunk because a lot of punk rock bands began to play country music. They were former punk bands like The Dils [that] became this band called Rank and File. The Plugz became Los Cruzados, and they all began to explore performing their version of country music.”

Yoakam joined forces with guitarist/producer Pete Anderson, in putting together the group Dwight Yoakam and the Kentucky Bourbon. They joined a scene that included the bands mentioned above, as well as others such as X, Los Lobos, and The Blasters. 

“There was this great moment—and you know, Los Lobos had just broken through with their first nationally acknowledged album, and there was this wonderful moment of eclectic embrace of country music in the rock clubs in LA, sort of like it had happened in the late ’60s, early ’70s,” Yoakam told journalist Drew Millard in 2013. “There had been this moment that gave birth vis-à-vis Chris Hillman. First, initially, Chris Hillman and the Byrds and that bringing about—in deference to Chris, he hates the term “country rock”—but there, it really did create a form of music that was uniquely country music played by rock musicians, with a rock emotional aesthetic, or emotional component that actually became, I think, it’s own genre.”

Now it’s guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music
Lonely, lonely streets that I call home
Yeah, my guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music
Is the only thing that keeps me hanging on

It was not a case of instant success. Anderson offered Yoakam a place to sleep, but it was hardly luxurious. It was a closet. Anderson believed in the young singer and shared the vision. The band played its brand of honky tonk ‘n’ roll as Yoakam wrote new material. Sherman Halsey agreed to manage the singer. 

With financial help from drummer Richard Coffey’s $5,000 credit card advance in exchange for a part of the publishing, Anderson, Yoakam, and engineer Brian Levi gathered musicians, went into Excalibur Studio in Studio City, and recorded six songs.

There ain’t no glamour in this tinseled land of lost and wasted lives
And painful scars are all that’s left of me
Oh, but thank you, girl, for teaching me brand new ways to be cruel
If I can find my mind now, I guess I’ll just leave

As the funds started running low, the duo switched to Hit City West to mix the songs in a series of overnight sessions. 

Anderson remembered, “There was no automation, so there we are, the three of us on our knees in front of the board at four in the morning, holding down mutes, going, ‘OK, ready? Un-mute the mandolin! Did ya get it?! Ride it up! Pull it down!’ All night long.”

Oak Records agreed to press 5,000 copies of the six-song E.P Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc. Etc. The band pushed on playing five nights a week, five sets a night.

Yoakam told Rather, “We believed that if we had the right set of opportunities with a label that believed, that we could succeed and it would resonate and it did beyond what we could have imagined.”

Enter Warner Brothers/Reprise Records, who agreed to release the six songs as they were and pay for another four songs to be recorded at Capitol Studio B. Two of those songs would be “Honky Tonk Man,” the 1956 Johnny Horton hit that would be the lead single, and “Guitars, Cadillacs.” Yoakam moved to Southern California when he was 20, and he signed his record deal when he was 29.

“Dwight was really into Capitol,” said Anderson, “The live echo chambers they had under the parking lot, the whole vibe—it was perfect for what we were trying to accomplish.”

Halsey directed music videos for both “Honky Tonk Man” and “Guitars, Cadillacs.” “Honky Tonk Man” was the first music video by a country artist to receive airplay on MTV.

The full-length album was released in March 1986 and eventually peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart. “Honky Tonk Man” his No. 3, “Guitars, Cadillacs” hit No. 4, and “It Won’t Hurt” reached No. 31 on the Billboard Hot Country chart. All of this added up to a healthy return on Coffey’s $5,000 investment.

Oh, it’s guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music
Lonely, lonely streets that I call home
Yeah, my guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music
Is the only thing that keeps me hanging on
It’s the only thing that keeps me hanging on

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Photo by Terry Wyatt/Getty Images