Viva Lone Justice Delivers First “New” Music from Cowpunk Legends in Decades

For a short time in the mid-1980s, Lone Justice had everything going for them. They’d been signed to a major label at the suggestion of Linda Ronstadt, endorsed by no less than Dolly Parton, and were at the forefront of a movement to return authenticity to both country and rock’n’roll. Even so, the band endured for just one album; by the time of their second release, only one founding member remained, and the western edge they’d briefly brought to radio and MTV had been sanded down to a synth-filled sheen. Just two years after their debut, by 1987, the band’s members had gone their separate ways.

Still, there was a moment in 1993 when Lone Justice almost came together again. While lead vocalist Maria McKee was recording her second solo album, You Gotta Sin to Get Saved, bassist Marvin Etzioni had an idea. “A friend of mine was in the middle of a divorce,” Etzioni recalls. “And he temporarily parked his vintage recording studio in my dining room.” That friend was David Vaught, a producer and engineer who’d worked on records by everyone from the Association to Toad the Wet Sprocket. (He was also the Vaught of Lone Justice’s 2014 archival release, This is Lone Justice: The Vaught Tapes, 1983.) 

Etzioni invited the musicians that were working on McKee’s album – McKee, Lone Justice drummer Don Heffington, Benmont Tench, and Tammy Rogers (now of the SteelDrivers) – over to this house to mess around between the more formal Sin sessions. “We were all in LA,” Etzioni recalls. “Whoever was there that day was on the recording. It was really loose, spontaneous, and fun.” It was a way to blow off steam by running through familiar old country, folk, and gospel tunes, all cut live to two-track. The only piece missing was Ryan Hedgecock. “I can remember Maria going, ‘Hey, where’s Ryan?’” Ezioni says. “He had moved to New York. I don’t know why we didn’t just pick the phone and call him. Who knows what would’ve happened? It could’ve been the reunion moment.”

Instead, those tapes remained stored in Etzioni’s garage for 30 years. He found them after Heffington passed away in 2021. “Marvin and I were getting together quite a bit after Heffington passed to process it,” McKee explains. “And he said he had all these tapes lying around and they’re really great, a lot of great energy.”

Over the last couple of years, Etzioni assembled an album’s worth of material from the sessions and presented them to McKee. “I said, ‘Whatever you want to do with them is fine with me,” he explained. The music resembled the band’s early days: suped-up rockabilly, frenetic gospel shouting, and hard and fast country rave-ups. McKee suggested, “‘Why don’t we just get Ryan to do more on the tracks and then we can release it as Lone Justice?’” Etzioni reached out to Hedgecock, and the final piece was in place.

The result is Viva Lone Justice, a collection of ten tracks that not only include those ’93 sessions with Hedgecock seamlessly layered over them, but also a frenetic live take on the George Jones classic, “Nothing Can Stop My Loving You” (a studio version of which appeared on the Vaught Tapes collection) with the late Jo-El Sonnier, and a relatively more recent track, the old folk tune “Jenny Jenkins,” that McKee, Hedgecock, and Heffington recorded about ten years ago.

The music on Viva Lone Justice recaptures the early days of the band, before the major labels and politics got in the way, when they were navigating the intersection of rockabilly and hard country. 

A Sock Hop Meet-Cute

It all started at a drive-in sock hop. Lone Justice was formed in the early 1980s by a group of like-minded musicians drawn to rockabilly music while unhappy with the current state of Urban Cowboy country. “I was thinking about, where did country music lose its youthful exuberance?” Hedgecock explains. “The rockabilly stuff – Conway Twitty started off rockabilly. But then, how did it end up here?” 

McKee and Hedgecock met at a place where other kindred spirits would hang and share their love of rockabilly and hillbilly music, an American Graffiti-type drive-in diner. 

“It was out in Orange County, probably 30 miles from me,” Ryan recalls. “A bunch of rockabilly guys. Very Happy Days. I went there with some friends, and Maria got up to do a couple of songs. I was like, ‘Hey, she can sing!’ So, I got her number from somebody.”

Hedgecock sequestered at McKee’s house as they listened to old records and bonded over bands like the Blasters and X, groups that were mixing punk energy with an early rock’n’roll/hard country attitude. Before long, the duo were performing acoustic sets wherever they could. Six or eight months in, they started thinking about a full band. 

Meanwhile, Etzioni was playing solo acoustic sets at Cathay de Grande, a club in Los Angeles, known at the time for showcasing mainly punk bands. He and Hedgecock initially bonded over George Jones records – “The ones produced by Pappy Daily,” Etzioni recalls. He gave up his slot at the club the following week to Hedgecock and McKee, who used it to play Hank Williams and Gram and Emmylou covers. “It was really innocent and charming – right up my alley,” he admits. Soon after, Hedgecock recruited drummer Don Willens from his former band, Bedrock; bassist Dave Herrington was hired after placing a classified ad; and Etzioni was initially brought in as a songwriter and arranger. 

“I think in the post punk environment, rockabilly was kind of the new sort of underground movement, rockabilly and goth,” McKee explains. “And we kind of just started becoming more and more country as time went on.”

‘We Don’t Really Get This’

By 1983, things started happening quickly for Lone Justice. Listening to the material that’s now available from that time, both The Vaught Tapes and The Western Tapes, 1983 (which featured the original rhythm section of Herrington and Willens) and Live at The Palomino, 1983 (with Willens still on drums and Etzioni settling in on bass) burn with energy both in the studio and on the stage. 

Etzioni believes those recordings should have been released at the time, independently, when they could have reached fans more directly. By 1984, Lone Justice signed a label contract with the rock-leaning Geffen. They initially brought those 1983 recordings, The Vaught Tapes, to Geffen. “That was us playing live like we had been doing a lot,” Hedgecock says. “They were like, ‘We don’t really get this.’ Those tapes were one of the better representations of what the band was about.”

Instead, Jimmy Iovine was brought in to produce their self-titled Geffen debut. He smoothed out more than a few of the band’s rough edges. When it was finally released in April of 1985, rather than reflect the energy of their live shows or the excitement of the Vaught demos from ’83, Lone Justice was crafted to reflect more of the heartland rock popular at the time, like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (whose Benmont Tench played keys on the album).

“Jimmy Lovine was the biggest mistake the band made,” Hedgecock says. “He didn’t understand anything about country. He just had no idea. To him, country was Creedence [Clearwater Revival].”

Still, Etzoni doesn’t blame the band’s demise on outside factors. “Anything that goes wrong with a band is the band’s fault. That’s my point of view. Why didn’t we self-release a record in ’83? That was on us. No one stopped us from doing that.” 

A year later, Geffen released Shelter, the follow-up to their self-titled debut. The polish on their debut was nothing compared to their sophomore release. The only Lone Justice member on the album, aside from McKee, was Ryan Hedgecock, and only sparingly.

“I was heartbroken,” Hedgecock confesses now. “I didn’t know what to do because it was my band and all of a sudden, I had no place to go. It was like I built this house and now there’s no room for me. And I’m looking over at Shayne Fontayne…I mean, the first time I did a gig with him, I sat outside the room, and I cried. I was so devastated.”

Viva Lone Justice

Now though, when you hear McKee and Hedgecock kicking it up on a feisty take of “Jenny Jenkins” on Viva Lone Justice, it’s like they’re back in the clubs again, trading lines and stealing hearts. “That’s the only song on the album we had on multi-track,” Etzioni says. “So I added bass [with Heffington’s drums] to give it that Lone Justice point of view.”

There’s also an acoustic tear through “Rattlesnake Mama,” the gospel standard “Wade in the Water,” and the rockabilly swagger of “Skull and Crossbones.” Viva Lone Justice also reminds us of McKee’s incredible range, with the stunning opener, “You Possess Me” and a bold version of “I Will Always Love You” that stands proudly alongside any other. (Dolly Parton, a longtime fan, offered her endorsement after catching an early club show.) They also show off their harder side with their take on the Undertones’ 1978 classic,“Teenage Kicks,” which puts the punk in cowpunk. 

Viva Lone Justice represents a bittersweet moment. While fans finally have a new album, Don Heffington is no longer around to share in the experience. “The positive thing is that for the first time, Maria, Ryan, and I were united behind an album that got released,” Etzioni says. “Maria and Ryan love the album, as I do, and I think Heffington would love it, too.” Hedgecock agrees, adding, “We’re all happy with how it turned out. I mean, Maria has not been exactly the most anxious to dive back into Lone Justice, but she’s singing great on this. She sounds fuckin’ great.” While there’s no talk of a full-scale reunion or any live appearances, there is the strong possibility of more archival material on the way. In the meantime, Viva Lone Justice successfully adds to the legacy the band began building over 40 years ago.