Ex-Rodeo Champ LeDoux Rides the Charts

Chris LeDoux recorded his first album 20 years ago in a basement in Sheridan, Wyo., with a highway patrolman playing bass and a rancher on lead guitar. He sold the cassettes out of the back of his van at rodeos.

LeDoux made his latest album in a Nashville studio with his full-time band and a guest vocal from Garth Brooks on the title song, “Whatcha Gonna Do With a Cowboy.” Now the major label Liberty Records is doing the selling, and the album and the title single both made the Top 10 on the country charts.

“I never realized that it would come to this,” said LeDoux, 43, a former rodeo rider whose lyrical emphasis has been the celebration of the rodeo and cowboy lifestyle. “I never planned on making a career out of music. It just kind of happened. (At the beginning) all I wanted was to ride buckin’ horses in the rodeo. That’s the frame of mind most cowboys are in in their 20s.”

But LeDoux’s music continued to thrive alongside his rodeo career through the ‘70s, and soon he was recording an album a year. His parents were his managers, and they got the tapes placed in Western shops and feed stores. A major distributor stepped in, and overall LeDoux’s growing cult spent $4 million on his 22 albums.

One fan, Garth Brooks, gave a nod to LeDoux in his early single “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old),” singing, “A worn-out tape of Chris LeDoux, lonely women and bad booze seem to be the only friends I’ve left at all.” LeDoux, having gone as far as he could as an independent, soon ended up as a labelmate of Brooks on Nashville-based Liberty. Besides releasing his new music, the label has reissued the singer’s entire back catalogue.

LeDoux, who performs on Sunday at the Riverside Cowboy in Riverside and Monday at In Cahoots in San Diego, has retained the artist-audience bond characteristic of cult heroes. At his most recent Southern California club shows, his young fans reacted with rock show-like intensity to his Western-themed tales of struggle and idealism.

Says LeDoux: “The one thing they all tell me at the autograph lines is they like the music ‘cause it’s real. For me it’s got to be real. That’s all I’ve known my whole life. Maybe just being out there living that life made (the songs) come easier to me. Just the gut-level living in the dirt and the sweat and the blood.”

While the rodeo life wasn’t always easy--physically and financially--it was perfect for LeDoux, who became the world champion in bareback bronc riding in 1976.

“I loved it so much, and I just wanted to express that, either through poetry or music or something,” says the singer, who lives on a 500-acre ranch in Kaycee, Wyo., with his wife and five children.

“I remember being a young kid in school, I’d write stories, about being in the jungle hunting lions or something, and eventually I honed in on this rodeo thing. And eventually it turned into songs. I was writing for myself, then I’d sing these songs for my friends in room parties after the rodeo or drivin’ down the road and see their reaction.

“In the beginning I didn’t care if anybody understood it except my peers. And then I started writing about subjects that still had a Western attitude but might be a little more wide-ranging. So it’s gettin’ a little broader. But still I’m a cowboy and I can’t get away from that.”