In 1989 Garth Brooks had a song called "Much Too Young to Feel This Damn Old." It was about a rodeo cowboy, and one of the lines went, "a worn-out tape of Chris LeDoux, lonely women and bad booze/Seem to be the only friends I've left at all."
Bill Taylor and Barry Michaels used to play the song on their morning show at KMLE-FM, and one day got to wondering aloud, "Who in the hell is Chris LeDoux?"
It didn't take long for the calls to start pouring in. Taylor and the Bear discovered that Chris LeDoux was a rodeo cowboy turned singer from Kaycee, Wyoming (population 250). They discovered he had a devoted following, albeit one confined almost completely to the rodeo circuit. In fact, Chris LeDoux was much better known as a rider than a singer, having won a World Championship in bareback riding in 1976, rodeo's equivalent of the Grammy.
Using the kind of aggressive techniques a new radio station needs, KMLE-FM flew LeDoux to Phoenix for an on-the-air interview, and arranged for a concert that night at Toolies Country.
"It was the biggest show I ever had here," Toolies owner Bill Bachand recalls.
A year and a half later, the roll that started with Garth Brooks' mention of LeDoux has brought the Wyoming cowboy to the brink of the big time--he has just signed a contract with Capitol Records.
In signing him, Capitol will be unveiling for the general public one of the most successful singers no one has ever heard of. An underground legend for twenty years, Chris LeDoux has 22 albums and a $4 million gross to his name.
So guileless is the man, however, that the notion of LeDoux's signing with a major record label cannot help but evoke images of the country boy headed for the sins of the city. Or maybe even the lamb led to slaughter.
Chris LeDoux, after all, is a cowboy who recorded his first album at the family farm--his mother used a kitchen timer--and who used to cut one record every year in the rodeo off-season. He did it to raise money for travel and entry fees on the rodeo circuit. He'd sell the tapes to other cowboys out of his rigging bag, and he billed himself as "the singing bronc rider." When his father Al got the bright idea of mail order, he advertised in Western Horseman and Rodeo Sports News. If you called the phone number on the tapes, you got Chris' house.
But Chris LeDoux is not the kind of man whose heart will be broken if fame doesn't come calling. In fact, he seems like the kind of man who might not be willing to pay the price.
"He doesn't go out of his way to shake anybody's hand," KMLE's Taylor admits. "It's an interesting attitude. I don't know anybody else in show biz that has that attitude. Whatever comes along is fine with him."
LeDoux calls his music "Western," and for him, authentic lyrics are of prime importance. "I'm singing stuff that really relates to a lot of people out there that just aren't being touched," he says. He's talking by phone from his father's place in Tennessee, where he has been recording his first album for Capitol. "Most people, they sing about love, and hurting and stuff. I'm singing to them about going down the road, riding bucking horses or working on a ranch."
Musically, his style is an eclectic one. He laughs when he talks about how concertgoers familiar with his earlier work ("pretty slow and kind of quiet") are often surprised when they see him in concert. "We're a little louder than they expect and kind of move around a little more."
He talks of admiration for Bruce Springsteen's "poetry" as easily as he talks about Marty Robbins. Rodeo cowboys, he reveals, are far from the hard-line country-music consumers one would expect. There's more than one pickup truck with a Bon Jovi tape next to the saddle.
LeDoux appeals to the rider and roper audience with songs like the rock-influenced "Hooked on an Eight-Second Ride"--that's how long a rider has to stay on a bucking horse. His material tends to be long on such themes as the freedom of the cowboy ("Running Through the Rain") and the noble qualities of the Western way of life ("Homegrown Western Saturday Night"). At their best, his uptempo songs can be fun and his ballads sweetly touching, like "Seventeen," the story of a young cowboy leaving home, or "Riding for a Fall," the song-cum-video that brought LeDoux as close to the big time as he's been so far. At their worst, his melodies can be forgettable and his lyrics generic. The lack of specifics in much of his writing is odd, considering LeDoux's long experience on the rodeo circuit.
The son of an Air Force pilot, LeDoux found his calling after his family settled in Texas when he was twelve. Some of the kids in the neighborhood were in Little Britches Rodeo, and LeDoux went out, tried it himself and ended up following the professional circuit for ten years.
He always managed, however, to have a life outside the arena. He combined college with riding for three years, until a $400 purse in Fort Worth convinced him to turn pro. Then he managed to combine marriage and rodeo. Once his wife came to Denver to see him ride. "I said, `Shoot, we have $115, I got a good horse in Amarillo, hell, let's just go.'" She traveled with him after that.
Like ballplayers, rodeo cowboys spend time on the disabled list, and LeDoux once missed four months with injuries to his elbow and knee. Another time he and his wife figured out a way to tie his dislocated collarbone in place so he could ride. LeDoux was getting toward the end of his career and suffering the effects of, as he says in one song, "getting snatched around and throwed," when it all came together and he won the World Championship for bareback riding in 1976.
"Anybody with a world title is at the top of his sport," says Gavin Ehringer at the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association in Colorado Springs. LeDoux came up with what Ehringer calls "one of the toughest classes of bareback riders," going head to head with such stars as Joe Alexander, J.C. Trujillo, and Larry Mahan.
In the music business, his competition is just as tough. Once content to depend on tapes and word of mouth to spread his music, LeDoux has been touring for the past four years. Perhaps optimistically, he's hoping to combine family life with life on the road. "Family's first," he says unequivocally. "I'm gonna try to keep it down, maybe 80 shows a year, maybe 100. Summertime, I'll try and take the family with me. We've been trying to treat this just like rodeo."
Bill Taylor, the KMLE-FM disc jockey who brought Chris LeDoux to Phoenix, has doubts about the former cowboy's future. "He does not have broad appeal," he says. "He writes about cowboys, and people are not interested in that."
But Taylor's partner Barry Michaels disagrees, preferring to see the neglect of LeDoux's music as a comment on radio stations across the country and their devotion to a limited playlist. "All the media want to play it safe," Michaels says. At KMLE-FM, he says, requests for LeDoux's music are frequent and the station plays a handful of songs regularly, among them "Copenhagen Junkie," "Hooked on an Eight-Second Ride," "Sons of the Pioneers," "Photo Finish," "Cadillac Cowboy," and the most requested, "Wild and Woolly."
On one thing everyone agrees. "He's just a good ol' boy," is how Toolies' owner Bachand puts it.
The place Chris LeDoux is happiest is a ranching community small even by Wyoming standards, with two bars, two churches, a gas station and a cafe. The town hall consists of an answering machine and a promise to get back to you. While he was still in high school in Texas, LeDoux went to Kaycee with a couple of friends. "At that time, shoot, all the kids were chewing Copenhagen and talking about riding broncs. I thought, `This is where I want to live.'" He eventually married a local girl and built his first house out of logs he cut with his father-in-law on a forest service permit. He now runs sheep on a 500-acre ranch seven miles out of town.
"He comes to school ball games and he's pretty active in the community," says Kaycee town clerk Laurie Staub.
Do people talk about Chris around Kaycee very much?
"Only when he first won his championship," she says, ignoring his musical career.
That lack of interest, perversely, is why Kaycee appeals to LeDoux. "People in Wyoming, you know, it's hard to impress them," he says. "It's the cowboy way that everybody's on equal terms. It doesn't matter if you got a million bucks or you're poor, it's who you are personally, what kind of character you have."
In Kaycee, he says, "I'm just the ol' boy that lives up the road and has a few sheep and a bunch of kids."
Music is just part of a life that encompasses a lot more. Things would have been rougher without the money LeDoux's made from his albums, and he's already had to sell some land to make ends meet. Hence, the singer thinks he can keep things in perspective, now that fame is on the horizon.
"I feel like I've got a pretty firm foundation on who I am, where I've been and where I'm going," he says. "If I was twenty years old, it might be different. I might be kind of blinded by the romance."
Chris LeDoux will perform at Toolies Country on Friday, March 22. Showtime is 8 p.m.
LeDoux is one of the most successful singers no one has ever heard of.
He talks of admiration
for Bruce Springsteen's "poetry."
LeDoux is on the brink
of the big time.
Chris LeDoux has 22 albums and a $4 million gross to his name.
