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most consistently successful commercial acts of the 1970s. Creedence gave Dwight some hope that he could do what they had done; mainstream country simply wasn’t on his radar at the time. The hard-edged country music he’d loved was no longer in vogue in Nashville or on the airwaves. “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” was a Creedence hit, and it was more country (“listenin’ to Buck Owens”) than country.
    â€œI was really inspired by Creedence Clearwater Revival illustrating that country-hyphen-rock/pop could be pertinent for a young audience,” explains Yoakam. “The Byrds were folk rock, but country rock is John Fogerty. ’Cause you can’t get any harder rockin’, and in some places more country, than Creedence—a real hybrid that was a commercial success.”
    But Creedence came from the Bay Area, a long way from the bayou country that so much of its music conjured. Whatever rootsy authenticity the band’s music evoked was a geographical fantasy, an illusion—an art. And Dwight was heading for L.A., “swimming pools, movie stars,” as the theme from
The Beverly Hillbillies
had put it. Despite the tinsel and glitz of a city where all of the cowboys were rhinestone ones—though Yoakam, of course, was no more of a cowboy than any of them—there was another beacon of inspiration that shone as brightly as Creedence.
    â€œThat first Emmylou Harris album is what drew me out here,” he says of his move to L.A. “My junior and senior year in high school, I was in love with both Linda [Ronstadt] and Emmylou. And so, when my buddy said, ‘Man, you’ve got to come to L.A.,’ I said, ‘Yeah, I know, Emmylou Harris is out there. There’s a scene somewhere out there that I can tap into.’ ”
    At least there had been. And maybe there would be, but it took another four years of scuffling—working here on a loading dock, there as a short-order cook—and playing the bars in the Valley before Dwight recorded his first demo tape and started to receive higher profile gigs at the venerable Palomino and the hipper Club Lingerie. And then it took
another
three years after that demo for Dwight to release
Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.
as his debut EP, and it was a couple years after that when his 1986 major-label album of the same name was released, adding four cuts (including the title track) to the six songs previously issued on the EP.
    So Dwight may have come out of nowhere, as far as the world of music was concerned, and country music in particular, but it had been almost ten years since he had graduated from high school, and he was on the cusp of thirty by the time he became an overnight sensation. In retrospect, such success appears preordained, but at the time it seemed anything but. His career path required the patience and perseverance of an artist who had more of the latter than the former.
    His friend with the car who drove him out left a month later. Before moving to Hollywood, to an apartment in the Hills that friends remember as slightly larger than a closet, slightly smaller than a garage, he was working in nearby Long Beach. There he made his initial foray into show business—not in music but in theater, with a role in a local production of
Heaven Can Wait
.
    Dave Alvin says he likely ran into Dwight when they were both employed as short-order cooks in Long Beach, though it would be a couple of years before their more significant encounter at the Palomino. By then, the lead guitarist and songwriter of the Blasters was in a position to help unknown artists who impressed him, introducing them to the band’s roots-rocking fans with opening slots. Dwight would later repay the favor by recording Alvin’s “Long White Cadillac,” introducing the song’s narrative of the last night of Hank Williams’s life to country radio.
    Given the seminal influence of Creedence on Yoakam’s