Tag: Pete Anderson

Dwight Yoakam – Guitars, Cadillacs

Buck Owens made the Bakersville sound popular and it’s one of my favorite types of country. My friend deKE mentioned this one on a list and again I’m surprised I haven’t posted it already. Yoakam and Steve Earle came out at around the same time and they were not like everyone else (George Jones has a funny quote about that at the bottom of the page). They were a breath of fresh air in country music and they crossed over genres as well.

It was released in 1986 and was the second single off of his debut album Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. This song was written by Dwight Yoakam. Pete Anderson (producer) was a huge help in the making of the album. He provided some ideas music-wise, played the guitar, and even sang background vocals.

The two of them were surprised that the album had as much success as it did. Country music at the time was geared more toward country-pop and Dwight wrote these honky tonk type songs that weren’t popular at the time.

It originally came out as a six-track EP in 1984 on a small label. Warner Brothers were listening as he made it into a full album and it was released in 1986. The album peaked at #1 on the Billboard Country Charts, #61 on the Billboard Album Charts. The song Guitars, Cadillacs peaked at #4 on the Billboard Country Charts, and #2 on the Canadian Country Charts in 1986.

Rolling Stone magazine ranked this song as number 94 in their list of the 100 greatest country songs.

Dwight Yoakam:  “We were reinterpreting the Bakersfield ‘shuffle sound’ of Buck Owens and what he was doing with that terse kind of shuffle.”

Pete Anderson: “I was a guitar player for hire in the early ’80s in Los Angeles, and I played mostly country music. I played some blues gigs and kind of roots rock Americana gigs. He needed a guitar player to play a gig, and we played together. He was playing some of his original songs and I got to hear the songs and said..Man, these are really good songs.”

George Jones: ‘We spent all these years trying not to be called hillbillies, and Dwight Yoakam and Steve Earle fucked it up in one day.'”

Guitars, Cadillacs

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

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

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

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

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

…

Blue Rodeo – Til I Am Myself Again ….Power Pop Friday

Happy Friday to you all! Today and Saturday I will be out of town but I will keep checking when I can.

This song could fit into different categories…country, country-rock, and power pop. It has a touch of the Byrds in this because of the 12-string Rickenbacker sound. Its melody is the reason that I like this one so much. This one (and a Sloan song) was going to go in Canadian Week but I ran out of days.

Blue Rodeo is a Canadian country rock band formed in 1984 in Toronto. Jim Cuddy and Greg Keelor, have been friends since high school, having both attended North Toronto Collegiate Institute.

Their record company did try to break into America because they hired Danny Goldberg as their US manager. Danny Goldberg was involved in some giant bands. He got his start in the 1970s with Led Zeppelin and later on, went to The Allman Brothers and then to Nirvana. Unfortunately, Goldberg left after the Casino album was released. He didn’t end up having much to do with the band according to Jim Cuddy.

This song was on their album Casino and it was released in 1990. The song peaked at #3 in Canada, #1 in the Canadian Country Charts, and #2 in the Canadian Adult Contemporary Charts. The song was on the Casino album released in 1991. The album peaked at #6 in Canada. The song was written by Jim Cuddy and Greg Keelor. Cuddy and Keelor are the two main singer/songwriters in the band.

They got Pete Anderson to produce the album. Anderson produced Dwight Yoakam, Roy Orbison, Jackson Browne, Buck Owens, K.D. Lang, and Lucinda Williams. He took the approach to Blue Rodeo as if they were recording 10 singles. He said their songs were entirely too long at that point and the band worked to tidy the songs up to under 4 minutes as you can see in the quote below.

Pete Anderson: “They loved to jam, but the songs were way too long. They were ahead of bands like Phish and The String Cheese Incident. They were not a jam band per say, but they were on the front-end of that jam-band world. Those bands are not on the radio. A programmer looks at the back of the record and sees songs that are over four minutes and they will not play those songs unless it is hippy radio. We were going for a three-minute and 20-second consciousness for this record.

Jim Cuddy: “That was a very tumultuous time. Our manager [Danny Goldberg] quit right when we had finished recording; he really never had anything to do with us. That was a lesson learned. We did not make that record to break into the U.S. market or cater it for radio. That idea was imposed on us. We thought all our records would be accessible in the States. We made Casino based on records we liked such as Dwight Yoakam’s Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc. Etc. That was a guy Anderson worked with. We wanted to sound like that sonically and artistically. Pete came up before we went to L.A., made extensive notes, and shared them with us. We did some demos on an eight-track machine in our studio on Sorauren Avenue. Those demos are interesting to go back and listen to now. For example, ‘What Am I Doing Here.’ I remember Pete cut out one of the bridges in that song. I thought that was a great suggestion. We never were good with self-editing.

Bass Player Bazil Donovan: “That’s one of Jim (Cuddy’s) songs that came out of the time when we first toured the States and we were gone so long, that we became disconnected with reality. We spent so much time on a bus, in a plane or going to a gig somewhere, and we were new to all of that. It took its toll on us, we weren’t taking care of ourselves and we were probably drinking too much, and on the long road depression sets in. The song captures that, about how you can lose your spirit. We had spent like a whole year on the road. It’s funny how a dark experience can result in a great song. People dance to it like it’s a happy rocker, but the lyrics remind me of that dark time.”

Bazil Donovan:  “Pete had a concept. I remember one night we went to eat at El Pollo Loco and he said to us, ‘I want to make a record with you guys that has 10 singles on it. I don’t want to make stuff that is not going to get played. I don’t care if you have one arty tune that is an album track. My idea is to make hit songs.’ Listen to that record today and you can hear that. They are all three-minute pop-rock hits, which Pete was very good at. Some of our biggest songs came out of that record. I learned a lot from him. Before that, I didn’t know a lot about arranging. After I watched Pete work with arrangements it opened up the door for me and I thought about arranging myself. A lot of the stuff I learned there I have applied to stuff I’ve done since.”

Til I Am Myself Again

I want to know where
my confidence went
one day it all disappeared
and I’m lying in a hotel room
miles away
voices next door in my ear

Daytime’s a drag
nighttime’s worse
hope that I can get home soon
but the half-finished bottles of inspiration
lie like ghosts in my room

I wanna go
I know I can’t stay
but I don’t want to run
feeling this way
til I am myself
til I am myself
til I am myself again
There’s a seat on the corner
I keep every night
wait til the evening begins
I feel like a stranger
from another world
but at least I’m living again

There are nights
full of anger
words that are thrown
tempers that are shattered and thin
but the moments of magic
are just too short
they’re over before they begin

I know it’s time
one big step
I can’t go
I’m not ready yet
til I am myself
til I am myself
til I am myself again
I had a dream
that my house was on fire
people laughed while it burned
I tried to run but my legs were numb
I had to wait til the feeling returned

I don’t need a doctor
to figure it out
I know what’s passing me by
when I look in the mirror
sometimes I see
traces of some other guy

I wanna go
I know I can’t stay
but I don’t want to run
feeling this way
til I am myself
til I am myself
til I am myself again