Dwight Yoakam (13 page)

Such is the age-old authenticity argument, as if there's a dichotomy between a calculated and “natural” performance, as if Bruce Springsteen hadn't also showcased his butt (on album covers and video) in some pretty tight and expensive jeans. As if these charges weren't the same ones Elvis Presley had stared down. Perhaps a crucial difference was that Yoakam, like Elvis, was perceived as pandering to a female audience (and everyone knew that anything that made girls squeal couldn't be taken too seriously), while Springsteen retained his reputation as a man's man.

Marsh, again: “Yoakam, who pranced on at nine, wearing butt-hugging jeans and a Stetson pulled over his eyes . . .” Stetson be damned, real men don't prance. Or pose.

Producer Pete Anderson put a different spin on Yoakam's increasingly common practice of turning his butt to the audience. “Back when I was growing up in Detroit, the hottest act around was Billy Lee and the Rivieras, who later became Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels,” he told journalist Todd Everett (“Dwight Yoakam: Not Just Another Hat Act,”
Journal of Country Music
, Vol. 15, No. 3). “As each show began, they'd come out onstage and perform the entire first number with their back to the audience. I never forgot that image, of the defiant attitude it conveyed.”

Whatever Yoakam's sins of authenticity, they didn't seem to bother the venerable Alvis Edgar Owens Jr., himself a reinvented transplant to California (from Sherman, Texas). Nobody knew better how contrived this business could be than the
Hee Haw
host who had built a multi-million-dollar, multimedia empire (publishing, radio, TV, et al.) by putting a rube's mask over the mind of a canny businessman.

Not only had Buck's work with Don Rich provided inspiration for the musical dynamic between Dwight Yoakam and Pete Anderson, but he had provided a road map for how a renegade artist could conquer country music from a California outpost far removed from Nashville, and how a guy who presented himself as unsophisticated could prove time and again that he was the smartest man in the room.

Buck was nobody's fool, and neither was Dwight. That some critic (or many critics, almost all of them middle-aged males) might criticize a showman for putting on a show suggested just how out of touch such scribes were with the nature of show business. Born in the year of the Elvis scare, Dwight had come of age with televised guitar slingers, and he made no apology for trying to excite others in the way that such performers had excited him.

“Every performer has a public presentation,” he insists. “It's
performance
of the material. It's like saying J.J. Cale [the laid-back Oklahoma artist whose songs are better known in renditions by Eric Clapton] might have had a better career as a recording artist if he'd had a better way to publicly perform other than sitting around an amp, hidden. That's not going to do much for your career as a public performer. They are distinct environments, and they require distinct abilities. Hopefully you have the talent to present your music. Think of Elvis or the Beatles without their ability to present themselves. There were arguably equally great writers at the time the Beatles hit, but they didn't present themselves like the Beatles did, those four guys at that moment . . .

“Attitude is what everything from Elvis Presley forward was. Delivery was an integral part of the validity of musical performance,” Yoakam continues. “And when color exploded on television, it sure was exciting. It's like saying, ‘Do you really need color?' Well, I guess you don't [he laughs]. You could just use that graphite stick. But Kandinsky over there has got some crazy stuff going on. Don't know whether you want to compete with that. It was a jet-age world. It's really that moment that shifts postwar America into supersonic gear.”

With Yoakam himself shifting into supersonic gear, his teaming with Buck, the chart-topping single and album, the triumphant tour all seemed to elevate Dwight's stature—as if he was no longer emulating his heroes but had joined their ranks. To many listeners, “Streets of Bakersfield” might have seemed like a new song, maybe even a Yoakam original. It had in fact been recorded by Owens in the early '70s but never released as a single, buried instead as a track on his 1973 album,
Ain't It Amazing, Gracie
.

Yoakam had previously solicited Buck's seal of approval by arranging a meeting with him a year earlier and inviting him to guest with Dwight at a local fair performance, an invitation that Owens had surprisingly accepted. The bond led to their teaming in the recording studio, and the subsequent hit reinforced the blood ties of their artistry.

“Not since Don Rich had Buck felt such a kinship with a young musician, and he and Dwight became fast friends,” writes Eileen Sisk in
Buck Owens: The Biography
. “Buck told A&E
Biography
, ‘Dwight should have been one of my sons.' ”

My
No Depression
colleagues David Cantwell and Bill Friskics-Warren included the hit in their
Heartaches by the Number: Country Music's 500 Great Singles
(at #361). Writes Friskics-Warren, “Nothing Dwight Yoakam has recorded better captures his outsider ethos than his 1988 duet with Buck Owens. ‘I came here looking for something I couldn't find anywhere else,' Dwight declares to open the record, and despite the fact that Buck first sang the line sixteen years earlier, it's plain that Yoakam identifies with it as if it were telling his own story. Which, of course, it was.”

He subsequently writes of Yoakam's early rejection in Nashville and pilgrimage to the West Coast, “He found north Hollywood's cowpunk scene much more receptive to his expansive artistic vision, which wed country and rock, hungering to see how far each could bend without breaking. It's an approach certainly evident here, as Yoakam and producer Pete Anderson reinvent Owens's sprightly original as a slashing, accordion-driven polka worthy of L.A.'s post-punks Los Lobos.”

While the album remains best remembered for the hit with Owens and Jiménez, it also represents a distinct departure from Yoakam's previous work, away from the
audio verité
of the bandstand (despite Wakeman's assertion) for a more cinematic expanse that would mark his subsequent artistic progression. You might not know it from Flaco's uptempo accordion, but the material is almost relentlessly bleak, occasionally lethal, a descent into the depths of honky-tonk hell.

It's a mark of the contradiction and complexity that contributed to Yoakam's mystique that the album escalating his commercial triumph was also the darkest of his career, pushing past the heartbreak that had always been a cry-in-your-beer honky-tonk tradition into more dangerous, edgier territory. He marks that emotional terrain with the opening “I Got You,” which passes as a love song only in the “thank heaven for small favors” sense, with the singer mainly recounting what he hasn't got, in terms of financial security.

“Hey, I know my life seems a mess,” he sings over the hard twang of Anderson's guitar and the bare bones of the production. “But, honey, things to me still look real swell. 'Cause I've got you to see me through. Yeah, I've got you to chase my blues. I've got you to ease my pain. Yeah, I've got you, girl, to keep me sane.”

Such meager consolation is conspicuous by its absence through the rest of the album, with was plainly envisioned as a cohesive song cycle (like the releases of the most ambitious rock artists) rather than a collection of hits and filler (which was more the country norm). The title aside, this is no
buenas noches
, but a dark night of the musical soul. The brooding title ballad, perversely released as a single, ends on this cheery note: “In the cold morning silence I placed the gun to her head. She wore red dresses, but now she lay dead.”

A lyric worthy of Raymond Chandler, it comes after a pair of cheating songs, “One More Name” and “What I Don't Know” (“might get you killed”). Within such a context, the covers of Johnny Cash's “Home of the Blues” and Lazy Lester's “I Hear You Knockin' ” might sound comparatively cheery, though the lyrics of both reinforce the emotional bleakness. “It's too late, baby,” he sings in the latter, an inspired choice for an artist pigeonholed as a country purist. “Your calling is all in vain.”

The album also makes the final dips into the 1981 demo, for the skid-row lament of “I Sang Dixie” and the equally funereal “Floyd County.” The former had been the only song to spark a smattering of interest in Nashville, in Yoakam as a songwriter but not as singer. After it never ended up on that Hank Williams Jr. album, it provided Dwight with a follow-up chart topper to “Streets of Bakersfield” (which, if you listen to the lyrics, is equally down in the mouth).

Says Pete Anderson, “ ‘I Sang Dixie' I'd always set a little bit aside, because I thought it was his best song. And I didn't want to put it on the first or even the second album, because I thought this is a number one record. And you've got to beat the doors down with the other material so that they're ready to listen to you.”

As for the album's thematic cohesiveness, Anderson didn't necessarily hear it the way that Dwight did (or I do): “Dwight went into the third record and, in his mind, he made it a theme record. I don't know if some of it's thematic, but you don't really care what someone's motivation is. Five or six of those songs had been written for quite awhile. And he slid in ‘She Wore Red Dresses' and a couple of other things that made it a thematic record—in his mind. I just looked at it as a collection of really good songs that worked together.”

After all of the album's scuffling, woe, heartbreak, and lethal revenge, it concludes with a two-song coda of sorts, in tribute to the homefolks. Reunited with Maria McKee (now that Dwight was the star and Lone Justice had gone nowhere), they revive Hank Locklin's “Send Me the Pillow,” the song he remembers his mother and aunt “bellerin' ” at the record player. He follows that with “Hold on to God,” a rare reflection in his recording career of his formative days in church, “written and performed for my mother, Ruth Ann.”

Dwight summarized the album's narrative progression to
Billboard
(October 15, 1988): “I get moody. I kill someone. Then I get religion in the end. This record's more me—there are expressions of me that people have never heard before.”

They'd soon learn just how much more there was to Dwight than the honky-tonk traditionalism that had been his calling card. This was his third straight album to top the country charts. It would also be his last. Yet Yoakam's artistic vistas would continue to expand as his popular profile rose. There was a whole wide world to conquer beyond the conventional strictures of country music.

11

Bonus Cut

NOTHING DISTINGUISHED the difference between rock and country recording artists more than the greatest hits album. Since the late 1960s and early '70s, rock had primarily been an album-driven music, while hit singles remained the currency of country. Since other tracks that hadn't been designed for single release were plainly filler, country fans who wanted the most for their dollar often waited until the artist had enough hits to warrant a compilation of those singles.

Such collections in rock circles were (like live albums) seen as signs that the artist needed a creative breather, was switching labels, or was nearing the end of a commercially successful string. Thus, they typically came later in a rock artist's career, though, even in country, it was uncommonly early for an artist to package his greatest hits after only three releases.

Then again, Dwight had already had a lot of chart success, enough to warrant the release of
Just Lookin' for a Hit
in September 1989. And perhaps he needed a creative breather as well, a chance to replenish the stockpile of original material now that the 1981 demo had finally been exhausted (except for “Please Daddy”).

For all of his radio success, Dwight was among a “raised on rock” generation of emerging country artists, ones who paid attention to albums as coherent wholes rather than hit-and-miss selections of singles and filler. Steve Earle, Rosanne Cash, (her then husband/producer) Rodney Crowell, Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith, and others who were enjoying success or were attempting to establish themselves as country artists in the pre-Garth period all carefully conceived of albums as albums. Not necessarily concept albums, with which Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and Willie Nelson had previously built artistic parameters beyond country convention, but albums that held together as albums.

To trace the careers of such artists through a succession of singles would be sketchy, incomplete. And so it was with Yoakam, who had been conceiving of each album as an album, paying particular attention to the sequencing of material as well as the selection of it. But the market must be served, and the country market dictated that an artist with enough hits must package them into a greatest-hits compilation, bringing potential fans to the cash register that had previously restricted their consumption of the artist's music to the radio.

Another convention of the greatest-hits album is that it should have at least one track available for the first time—a hoped-for hit-to-be, or something to make the diehard who already had all of this music on album buy the hits package as well. And here's where Yoakam threw his fans and the Nashville music establishment another curve ball, kicking off the collection of otherwise familiar material with “Long White Cadillac.”

It was an inspired choice on multiple levels. As an account of the last night in the life of Hank Williams, it reinforced Dwight's connection to another outsider Nashville had never embraced and to musical values to which contemporary country barely paid lip service. As a number well known to fans of the Blasters, it showed that Yoakam hadn't forgotten that formative stage of his career and the L.A. roots-punk crowd that had embraced him when Nashville wanted nothing to do with him. And as one of the many great songs written by Dave Alvin, it would put some cash into the pocket of a benefactor who had recognized Yoakam's potential when few others did and who had given his career a crucial boost.