Guitars Cadillacs Etc (Dig)

Produced by Pete Anderson, the disc's sinewy mix of traditional honky-tonk, red-hot Bakersfield twang and rock n' roll attitude spawned a trio of hits including a cover of Johnny Horton's "Honky Tonk Man", "It Won't Hurt", and the title track. In the bigger picture, its stripped-down sound twisted together strains of Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, Elvis Presley, and more--with a roots driven rawness, it changed and revitalized country music.

Though most of these recordings have previously been anthologized, this two-disc set puts Dwight Yoakam's emergence and progression from the roots-punk circuit to the country mainstream in context. It begins with the 1981 demos that earned him a recording contract, showing that his artistry as a retro-hillbilly honky-tonker was already in full bloom, with both his singing and his songwriting conjuring an era that otherwise seemed long gone. Yet it was his pairing with guitarist/producer Pete Anderson for his debut album, Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.--here remastered and reissued in its entirety--that gave Yoakam's music that hard-twanging edge that found him sharing fans on the L.A. circuit with the Blasters, Los Lobos, and X. For Yoakam completists, the real treat here is disc two, a 1986 performance in the wake of that album at Hollywood's Roxy (not exactly your typical honky-tonk). With nine of the twelve tracks previously unreleased, Yoakam acknowledges a debt to Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, and the Bakersfield sound on "Guitars, Cadillacs"; pays tribute to the influence of John Fogerty and Emmylou Harris, apparently both in the audience, before "Mystery Train"; and then barely stops for breath before blazing into Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire." The urgency of the live-wire performance makes it easy to see why the rock crowd embraced him first, but he ultimately compromised little as he conquered the country airwaves as well. --Don McLeese