variety.com
10.10.2022 / 22:57
82%
Inside the Country Hall of Fame’s California Country-Rock Exhibit: From Gram Parsons to Dwight Yoakam and Lone Justice
Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic California is in the house, and will be for the next three years, at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. A major exhibition, “Western Edge: The Roots and Reverberations of Los Angeles Country-Rock,” has just opened and will run through 2025. The must-see walk-through traces a history of roots music in L.A. rock that expands to include the Byrds, Flying Burrito Brothers and Michael Nesmith in the 1960s; the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris in the ’70s; and Dwight Yoakam, Lone Justice and Los Lobos in the ’80s, among many other influential and sometimes commercially impactful figures. Variety recently visited the museum and spoke with co-curators Michael Gray, the facility’s executive senior director of editorial and interpretation, and Michael McCall, the museum’s senior editor, about why the ’60s through ’80s were a golden age for country-inflected rock in Los Angeles. The two curators also spoke about a number of the artifacts on display, from numerous Nudie’s-tailored jackets that set the visual tone for the era to key musical instruments to handwritten scores and setlists and even band flyers — see the gallery of photos below.
