20 Years Ago: Dwight Yoakam & Guitarist Pete Anderson Split

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Throughout the history of country music, there have been some legendary pairings of frontmen and side players that resulted in some of the best country music ever made. The best example is probably Buck Owens and guitarist/harmony singer Don Rich. Clint Black’s long time co-writer and lead guitar player Hayden Nicholas is another good example. Willie Nelson and his drummer Paul English resulted in some of the best country music ever made, including the song “Me and Paul.”

For Dwight Yoakam, it was his right hand man Pete Anderson who helped make all those amazing songs and albums from the very start of Yoakam’s career. As Dwight’s lead guitar player, bandleader, and producer, Pete was fundamental to forging the revitalized Bakersfield Sound that put a neotraditionalist like Yoakam at the top of country starting in the mid ’80s, and kept him there into the early 2000s.

Dwight Yoakam was originally from Pikeville, Kentucky, grew up in Ohio, but relocated to Los Angeles to start his country music career. This is where he would meet Pete Anderson in 1983. Anderson was nine years Yoakam’s senior, but they hit it off immediately. Pete Anderson grew up in Detroit, but his father was from the South, so he was raised listening to the Grand Ole Opry. Before anything else, Pete Anderson was a guitar player, and moved to L.A. to pursue his passion.

“He just needed a guitar player,” Pete Anderson explains about meeting Dwight. “Through a mutual friend, he called me up and said he’d heard I was looking for work. I wasn’t playing with anyone specifically, the phone would ring, and I would go play. We were playing three or four sets a night at blue collar bars playing country music.”

At the time, Dwight Yoakam was mostly playing cover songs since this is what the country bars required. But he also had about 20 original songs he’d work into his repertoire. According to Anderson, they were excellent songs, but needed a little tweaking. Anderson didn’t consider himself a songwriter or a producer. “I was a song doctor,” he says, refining and arranging tracks to make them as good as they could be.

“They were a little bit scattered with verse, chorus, bridge, and solo, but not many bridges because he didn’t have many bridges back then, just guitar riffs. I was coming up with the signature lines to wrap it up in a nice little package. My job was arranging, and Dwight acquiesced to that.”

When Dwight Yoakam was signed to Reprise Records and recorded his 1986 debut album Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc. Etc., Pete Anderson was in the producer’s chair, and was credited along with Dwight on all arrangements. The album was a landmark release in country music, and the combination of Dwight Yoakam and Pete Anderson became one of the hottest collaborations in the genre. Pete Anderson would produce the next 13 studio albums for Dwight, and play guitar with him on stage for nearly 20 years.

But it all officially came to an end on August 31st, 2004. This was the day that Dwight Yoakam and his touring company Dwight Yoakam Tours Inc. was officially sued by Pete Anderson in California Superior Court. Their friendship and working relationship had deteriorated significantly leading up to that moment, and it had been over really since the summer of 2002. But the lawsuit is really what made it official and any reconciliation unlikely. There would be no more Dwight Yoakam and Pete Anderson, in the studio or on the stage.

The conflict all stemmed from the making of the 2000 film South of Heaven, West of Hell. Though Yoakam had already landed numerous acting gigs by that time, this was the first film that Yoakam starred in, co-wrote, and directed. Yoakam devoted a significant amount of time and money to the film, even selling his home in Malibu just to finance it.

Pete Anderson explained the matter further in a 2024 interview, saying, “As a result [of the film], [Dwight] needed to trim down his touring expenses, which meant that the band had to take a big cut in pay. I wasn’t super happy with the way that it ended, because I’d been there for over 20 years.”

Pete Anderson sued Dwight for $44,285 in salary, $1,085 in per diem expenses, and the 25% of the net proceeds he was promised from the tour in what he said was an oral contract. It’s interesting to note that even though it was the South of Heaven, West of Hell film that helped end the Anderson/Yoakam partnership, Pete Anderson was the person who produced the film’s soundtrack.

Despite Dwight Yoakam’s best efforts on the film, it was heavily panned by viewers and critics alike. It holds a terrible 14% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and made less than $30,000 against a $4 million budget. After the release of the film, the production company Dwight created with Billy Bob Thorton for the project had to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The film not only lost Dwight Yoakam a lot of money, he also lost his major label deal at the same time, along with Pete Anderson.

After some back and forth legal negotiations, Dwight Yoakam and Pete Anderson settled out of court for Pete’s loss of touring revenue. Thought the two didn’t remain friends, they both remained proud of the music they made together, and complimentary of each other’s work over the years. In the Don McCleese book A Thousand Miles from Nowhere, Yoakam concluded that the collaboration with Anderson had gone about “four albums too long.”

Pete Anderson says, “It all worked out okay in the end. I got to concentrate on doing other things that I hadn’t done before, and I can’t imagine that I could’ve carried on stuffing myself into a tight pair of jeans and putting cowboy boots on, getting the gig bag and flying to North Dakota to play the Indian casino or whatever.”

Dwight Yoakam ended up signing with New West Records, and self-produced his 2005 album Blame the Vain, which many Yoakam fans consider one of the best of his later career.

Even though it ended poorly, the 20-year collaboration between Dwight Yoakam and Pete Anderson resulted in an incredible catalog of country music that will outlive both men and the rest of us. The two struck country music gold in California, and it’s hard seeing either man succeeding as much as they did isolated out in Los Angeles from the rest of the country music industry without each other.

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