RODEO ACTIVE : Mainstream Success Hasn’t Corralled Chris LeDoux Away From His Love for the Cowboy Way of Life

In Garth Brooks’ first hit single, 1989’s “Much Too Young (to Feel This Damn Old),” the singer is an aging rodeo rider at the wheel of his truck. He can’t stop to sleep if he wants to make his ride in Denver the next night, there’s been no answer at home for two weeks (but he’s surprised that she stuck around as long as she did), and the competition is getting younger and the broncs tougher. Then he lists his few comforts:

A worn-out tape of Chris LeDoux, lonely women and bad booze

Seem to be the only friends I’ve left at all

*

It was a fateful couplet.

Brooks has generously said that his mention of LeDoux helped his career by giving him credibility with a hard-core audience, but it really turned things around for LeDoux, boosting him out of cultdom and putting him in the mainstream of country music.

A few years later, LeDoux was a label-mate of Brooks at Liberty Records, and he would have his own country hit--a duet with Brooks called “Whatcha Gonna Do With a Cowboy.”

Not that LeDoux had been hurting, exactly. He still hadn’t paid off his 500-acre ranch in Wyoming, but every year he recorded a self-financed album, and every year it would go into the distribution pipeline to Western merchandise stores. His fans knew where to go to find his latest set of songs celebrating rural traditions.

LeDoux started this cycle in 1972, when he was a professional rodeo bareback rider. He recorded 11 songs in a basement studio in Sheridan, Wyo., with a local highway patrolman on bass and a rancher on guitar, and started selling copies at rodeos out of the back of his truck.

Then his mom and dad got involved. They bought the equipment to turn out eight-track cartridges at their Nashville-area home, gluing the labels on by hand. His father, Al, wrote mail-order ads in the form of stories about the West, and placed them in such magazines as Rodeo Sports News, Hoof and Horns, Rodeo News and Western Horseman.

They sold $6,100 worth of his debut, “Songs of the Rodeo Life.” The second album brought in $13,000, then sales jumped to $32,000 for the third. Along the way, distributors came calling, and all from the fifth album on sold more than $100,000.

“Well, they have credibility,” LeDoux says of those early albums now. He has mixed feelings about the reissue of all 22 of them on CD, part of his Liberty Records deal, but he can live with it.

“They say somethin’ that I wanted to say at the time, but I can’t really listen to ‘em.” he said. “I wasn’t a singer back then. I rode buckin’ horses for a livin’, and I wrote a few songs. I never was a performer. What they said was exactly what I had in mind for the time. . . . They were ragged, but they were real.”

LeDoux’s audiences are bigger now that he has records on the charts than when he was a bona fide cult hero, and the subject matter isn’t always so specific. But the young guys in Wranglers and Stetsons are still there at the core, singing along loudly with LeDoux’s flavorful accounts of life in the rodeo trenches and on the ranches.

When LeDoux--who plays two sold-out shows at the Crazy Horse in Santa Ana on Monday and returns there in June--cranks up the amps and gives his music rock dynamics, his show takes on a celebratory edge that makes it more than entertainment. It’s a resounding affirmation of a way of life.

“You know, there’s a lot of cowboys and cowgirls out there,” LeDoux said by phone during a tour stop in Austin, Tex. “Ranch people, people involved in agriculture. We also get people who live in town that still love the rural lifestyle and imagery that comes through the songs. . . . The one thing they 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.”

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Al LeDoux was an Air Force pilot; so he, his wife, Bonnie, and their three kids moved around a lot--Mississippi, Long Island, France, Pennsylvania, Texas.

It was in Austin that 12-year-old Chris got hooked on rodeo. He finished high school in Cheyenne and went on to the University of Wyoming on a rodeo scholarship, settling in the small town of Kaycee. He got married at 23 and kept riding.

“That first year of bein’ married was pretty tough,” he recalled. “Drew some sorry horses, didn’t win much. . . . The winter went well, but then April came and we were about to starve out. Livin’ in the truck. My wife was pregnant, startin’ to show.

“Even though we were pretty well broke, we loved it. Sleep in the truck, get up in the mornin’, I’d start a fire. My wife would get the fryin’ pan out, and we’d have French toast along the highway.

“Her clothes didn’t fit ‘cause she was pregnant, so she had to wear my pants and shirt. I still have this picture of her in my mind, seein’ her on an Oregon highway walkin’ along with my shirt sleeves rolled up and the cuffs on my pants, her head down, just kickin’ through the grass, her belly stickin’ out with this new baby.”

LeDoux pauses.

“I suppose the memories are more fond now than they were makin’ them. But I think it was a good time for us to go through. It tested both of us.”

It also gave LeDoux things to write about.

“I just loved that life so much I wanted to express it, through poetry or music or somethin’. I can remember bein’ a young kid in school, I’d write stories about bein’ in the jungle, huntin’ lions or somethin’, and eventually honed in on this rodeo thing. And eventually it turned into songs.

“I was kind of writin’ for myself, then I’d sing these songs for my friends in room parties after the rodeo or drivin’ down the road, and I’d see their reaction. I never planned on makin’ a career out of it. It just kind of happened. At that time, all I wanted was to ride buckin’ horses in the rodeo. That’s the frame of mind most cowboys are in in their 20s.”

LeDoux won the world bareback riding championship in 1976. But after he tore up a knee in the Astrodome, hyper-extended an elbow in Denver and jerked loose a collarbone in Phoenix, he eased out of rodeo competition to focus on the music and the ranch.

LeDoux, 45, has the handsome chiseled features of the cowboy matinee idols who fascinated him as a child. His sparkling blue eyes are open and candid, and although he can be laconic as a Gary Cooper, he’ll also drift into reveries of reminiscence.

He’s admittedly bull-headed--he spent 5 1/2 years hand-building his house with logs he cut and stones he gathered--and his upright, solid demeanor carries the unusual mix of bedrock traditionalist and tolerant free spirit.

“Chris was what I’d call very investigative,” said his mother, Bonnie, in a separate interview from her home near Nashville. “He was always into all kinds of things. He wanted to explore and find out what was over there or what was around the corner.”

Says LeDoux: “Travelin’ around in a military family . . . we were exposed to a lot of different lifestyles, so I’m able to take things as they come. It’s great to live in one place all your life, but you can get very narrow-minded. Because that is your little world and sometimes you might not try to understand the way other people live. Maybe you hear someone with a different accent in your area and immediately it’s foreign to you, so you think it’s wrong. I think all the travelin’ around was real good for me. To accept people for who they are inside.”

LeDoux and his wife, Peggy, now have five children, all of whom study piano or take fiddle lessons or bang on drums.

“They try a little bit of everythin’, and I just sort of give ‘em free rein on that,” LeDoux said. “But we tell them to stay away from certain things; you know, if it’s vulgar or anythin’ I don’t want it in the house. And they’re pretty good. . . . You can’t stifle ‘em, pull on the reins too hard, or they’re gonna bust loose and no tellin’ what they’d do.”

At least MTV isn’t an issue.

“We have one channel where we live. We’ve thought about gettin a satellite dish or somethin’, but shoot, damn TV, one channel’s plenty.”

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So far on the Liberty label, LeDoux has released two albums and a best-of collection, and he’s just finishing an album that should come out in June. He says his label deal hasn’t changed his life too much: The audiences are bigger, the operation runs more smoothly, he doesn’t have to do everything from driving the rig to booking the shows.

He makes sure there will be time off to spend with the family, but the heavy recording and touring pace has left him with one big frustration:

“It’s really hard to get in that songwriter’s frame of mind when there’s so many other things goin on. . . . It’d be nice to have some time off to write. But then again, you kinda want to be out there takin’ the music to the people.

“It seems like when I write best is when I have like four months of nothin’ to do and am hungry. But I’ve got lots to do, and I haven’t been hungry for quite a while. . . .

“It takes me a long time to write a song. I’ll fool with a melody and come up with some story line, and it might not feel right and then I’ll hammer away and try to do somethin’ else with it. I really slave over a song. A song like ‘Hooked on an 8 Second Ride,’ it took about eight months. Just livin’ with it and tryin’ to hammer out each detail to where it felt exactly right.

“I’ve done most of my writin’ up there at the ranch. . . . I’ll just go in the basement or I’ll go out in the pasture, and once I get tired of sittin’ there with a guitar I might just take a walk through the hills, take a piece of paper and a pencil. You kinda get into your own preoccupied twilight zone. It’s almost like a spiritual place or a yoga exercise, I guess. A meditation thing. It’s pretty weird. It’s kind of a neat place to go to, but it’s hard to get there.”

Is there a central theme in his music?

“Well, I’m probably too close to it to really be able to say. There’s a lot of the West, a lot of cowboy in it in some form, especially the songs we do at our live show. But still there’s a kind of universal appeal. You know, we all have emotions. You might take a song like ‘Hooked on an 8 Second Ride.’ It talks about ridin’ bulls, but still it’s an emotion of passion and desire that everyone can relate with.”

But in the beginning, the focus was strictly rodeo.

“I didn’t care if anybody understood it except my peers. And then I started writin’ about subjects that still had a Western attitude but might be a little more wide-rangin’.

“We all are human and we all have the same emotions, and hopefully those emotions come through no matter what the subject of the song is.”

If he’s broadening his artistic horizons, does he ever feel stuck with that image as the rodeo cowboy guy?

LeDoux seems surprised by the question, maybe even offended. He answers quickly.

“No, that’s what I am. So no, I don’t feel stuck with it.”

Who: Chris LeDoux.

When: 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. Monday, April 11.

Where: Crazy Horse Steak House, 1580 Brookhollow Drive, Santa Ana.

Whereabouts: Take the Costa Mesa (55) Freeway to the Dyer Road exit. From the north, go right on Grand Avenue, then take the first right, Brookhollow Drive; from the south, go left under the overpass, right on Grand and right on Brookhollow.

Wherewithal: $29.50

Where to call: (714) 549-1512.