An Innovative Singer Shares Truth and Pain on New Album

Call it Western Beat, that distinctly local musical hybrid of country, blues and rock ‘n’ roll. And why not? asks singer Rosie Flores, who was never really comfortable with that aging New Traditionalist label anyway, particularly now that it’s been adopted by much of the Nashville mainstream.

“California country is more innovative,” Flores said. “It stretches its boundaries. It has a folk influence, a blues influence, and rockabilly is a bigger part of it. They don’t try to fit in with the boundaries that Nashville has put up for the songs that can only be played on the radio. I think that’s kind of limiting.”

Flores herself has remained among the local country-rock scene’s guiding forces at least since the mid-1980s, when her songs of freedom and loneliness were first attracting diverse audiences at North Hollywood’s Palomino and the rock clubs of West Hollywood. Those country roots had been in Flores’ music since her high school days, when she sang and wrote for an all-girl band, and later during her four years playing Hollywood rockabilly with the Screamin’ Sirens.

Southern-born country artist Jim Lauderdale, who sings a duet with Flores on her new “After the Farm” album, has said it was watching a performance by Flores that first persuaded him to remain on the local country-music scene.

The new record, due for release next week from Hightone Records, is her first since 1987’s “Rosie Flores” from Warner/Reprise. In those days, she was being labeled the female Dwight Yoakam, another Los Angeles country artist whose tastes actually leaned more toward the Bakersfield sound epitomized by Buck Owens. “He’s more hillbilly than I am,” Flores said.

But she soon left Los Angeles for two years to move to Austin, Tex. “I wanted to go there and rediscover my roots,” she explained. “I was born in San Antonio, and I felt there was a part of my life I was leaving undiscovered. I wanted to get back in there and check it out and see why my influences were the way they were.”

While there, Flores became reacquainted with relatives, and often played three times a week, compared to three times a month in Los Angeles. She met and played with new musicians, but usually returned to her Los Angeles band--including guitarist Greg Leisz, drummer Donald Lindley and bassist Dusty Wakeman--when she toured across the country or Europe.

“There was just something very unique about the way they played,” she said. “And L.A. was such a big part of who I am, anyway.”

Two years ago, she returned to Southern California, after taking eight months to make the decision. “I probably could have stayed at least another year, but I was real anxious to get back with my musicians. And I felt I was really on the right track with the sound and the style we were building on before we left.”

In February, 1991, the reunited band entered a studio for two weeks to record “After the Farm” for a Swiss record company in time for a tour through Switzerland. And like most of the group’s live shows, the record contained only original songs, all written or co-authored by Flores.

“I’ve really grown as a writer,” she said. “I had some really great influences in Texas, and I worked on my guitar playing and songwriting while I was there, so when I came back here, it seemed like I had grown.

“I’m just trying to be true to who I am, and I don’t think you can get any truer than singing the songs that you’ve written. This album has a lot of pain in it, and I’ve definitely gone through some of that. But it’s part of who I am. . . . As a writer, it’s sort of your duty to tell the truth. And there are some positive songs on the record, but that’s just not always how I’m feeling.”

The album includes the song “The Price You Pay,” an upbeat rock number that frets about the underlying danger of living in Los Angeles and the recent grim business of sending young men to wage war in the desert.

That may put Flores at odds with the sentiment of such mainstream country tracks as Hank Williams Jr.’s wartime booster “Don’t Give Us a Reason.”

Yet, she says, she believes she and other musicians like her have helped the mainstream country sound in Nashville return to its roots.

“I think I helped cause that, and Dwight helped cause that, and Steve Earle, and all the New Traditionalists,” she said. “We helped out a lot in bringing back the basic simple sound of the roots of country. People like Garth Brooks and Clint Black have helped make that sound important again. That pop element is still there in Nashville, but it’s not as bad as it was.

“Right between the ‘70s and the ‘80s there was this Gawd-awful pop sound coming out of Nashville, and that didn’t have anything to do with country music at all. That’s changed a lot.”

Rosie Flores and her band perform with Ronnie Mack and the Barndance Band March 17 at the Palomino, 6907 Lankershim Blvd., in North Hollywood. Admission is free. Call (818) 764-4010.