Dwight Yoakam (15 page)

Perhaps the only act that enjoyed commercial country favor A.G. with a rebellious attitude comparable to Dwight's was the Dixie Chicks. And we all know what happened to them, and how quickly country music would turn on them. With the exception of Toby Keith (who didn't exactly share Yoakam's demographic), the prototype for the emerging generation of country artists who appealed to the growing legions of self-styled suburban cowboys was the nice guy, the next-door neighbor, the type you'd invite over for beer and a backyard barbecue.

A comparative punk like Dwight had no interest in coming to your barbecue. And he wouldn't drink your beer. He would never be one of the guys, in the way that Garth or Tim would, and not just because he was a teetotaling vegetarian. Garth was a marketing revolutionary who worked within the system as a recording artist, releasing the requisite album a year, glad-handing radio, press, and fans alike, while bringing a level of spectacle to the performing stage that had long been common in rock but provided a jolt to the country circuit. Dwight was one of the few holdover artists whose live performance was already electrifying enough to hold its own in the new era.

Another distinguishing difference between the rock and country worlds, where Dwight was the rare artist who sustained commercial and critical impact in each, is that rock had long ago splintered into a variety of different formats, from alt to classic and a number of niches in between, where country remained in the stranglehold of its equivalent of Top 40.

Both Before and After Garth, if you were on country radio, you were country. If you weren't, you weren't. Despite attempts to develop more progressive formats—with “adult alternative” and “Americana” initially sharing some of the same artists—the results were commercially marginal, even negligible. Former country hitmakers of the '80s and emerging artists classified as “alt-country” (which was really more of a rock category than one that the country industry acknowledged) often found their most influential airplay support from NPR stations, where listeners who might never have listened to country radio responded to the literacy of the songwriting and the “authenticity” of the musical roots.

Many of the artists cast adrift by country radio found creative emancipation and new audiences, even new artistic identities, now that they no longer had to feed the Nashville radio beast with singles that weren't likely to get played anyway. Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, and Rodney Crowell were among those who responded with their most inspired work in years. If they'd still been aiming for country radio, Cash wouldn't have covered Nine Inch Nails, nor would Harris have worked with alchemist producer Daniel Lanois (U2, Peter Gabriel), nor would Crowell have developed such a devastatingly confessional voice.

Yet Yoakam wasn't about to give up on country radio, nor was country radio going to give up on him. His ambitions, both creative and commercial, were too big for Americana or NPR. Since the era when he might have been a country-rock artist was ancient history, he would need to be a country star. Or a rock star. Or both.

“The Americana world is great, but you're not gonna put your kids through college and retire by selling Americana records,” says Dusty Wakeman. “Our joke was that in Americana, five thousand is gold and ten thousand is platinum.” (Within the commercial music industry, a sale of half a million units is gold, and a million is platinum.)

With
If There Was a Way
, Yoakam had planned to sustain his mainstream country success and he had succeeded. But he had also provided hints of plenty of possibilities beyond commercial country. And he subsequently positioned himself for a very different market with the 1992, Europe-only release of
La Croix D'Amour
.

“The Cross of Love” (a thematically appropriate evocation of Yoakam's music to date) is one of the more curious albums of Yoakam's career, though it doesn't even exist as far as his American recording career is concerned. Mainstream country success meant little in Europe, which responded to roots-oriented, rough-hewn, anti-hero American mavericks and considered Nashville polish a mark of artistic corruption.

According to Pete Anderson, the album was a result of the success Warner Bros. UK had enjoyed with time-warped rocker Chris Isaak, who had previously attracted only a cult following in the States. Yoakam and Isaak recognized each other as kindred spirits, though the former was categorized as country and the latter as rock. They were two California-based artists with a flair for retro (fashion, music, and otherwise), an affinity for twang, and a vision for an artistry that sounded timeless rather than anachronistic.

“This was the only time we ever took a curve ball from the record industry,” says Anderson. “Chris Isaak had been having trouble breaking through in the States, but somebody at Warner Bros. in England had done something that really lit a fire for him over there. So then the suits in power thought, ‘Wow, maybe we can do this with Dwight.' So we said, ‘Okay, we'll play along, we'll be knuckleheads with you.' And that's what we did. It became knucklehead time.

“They asked everybody in the office to come up with a list of songs that they thought Dwight Yoakam should sing,” he continued. “And they're in England, for Christ's sake. Some nineteen-year-old secretary is picking songs for the next album. And Dwight said, ‘If they're gonna pay for it, let's give it a shot.' And it was completely goofy. Some of the stuff is pretty cool, but it's just a sidebar.”

Though the inclusion of some previously released material tagged it as a compilation, it has few hits, and none that would be a sales hook for the anti-Nashville European maverick music crowd. But it's more cohesive than
If There Was a Way
, combining four of the songs from that album that strayed furthest from country formula, with a selection of covers that suggested an appreciation for radio rock that extended well beyond honky-tonk traditionalism.

Beginning with “Things We Said Today,” one of the more underappreciated minor-key masterpieces in the Beatles' canon, the album continues with the Grateful Dead's “Truckin',” “Here Comes the Night” by Van Morrison's Them, and another Elvis Presley classic—“Suspicious Minds”—that would soon be bringing Dwight's live performances to an extended, show-stopping climax.

But the real sleeper here is “Hey Little Girl,” a 1966 garage-band nugget by the Syndicate of Sound, representing yet another slice of California's musical legacy. Yoakam's spoken-word sneer absolutely nails the song's pitiless putdown of a girl who played around and paid the price. The glory years of one-hit-wonder AM radio had shaped Yoakam's sensibility, as a performance like this clearly attests. The collection once again gives a prized spot to “Long White Cadillac,” making it the emphatic closer to an album that refused to submit to the yardstick of honky-tonk authenticity. And yet remained quint-essentially Dwight Yoakam.

13

Wild Ride

ALONG THE WALL OF the conference room of Yoakam's business office on West Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard, punctuating that panoramic view that underscores success, is a series of framed commemorative albums, gold and platinum, the kind so prized throughout the recording industry. They proceed chronologically, from left to right, serving as signposts to Yoakam's commercial trajectory. (As stated before, gold indicates sales of half a million units; platinum is sales of a million.)
Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.
: double platinum.
Hillbilly Deluxe
: platinum.
Buenas Noches from a Lonely Room
: gold.
If There Was a Way
: gold.

And then,
This Time
: triple platinum.

Released in March 1993, two and a half years after Yoakam's previous recording of new material, the album found the artist and producer Pete Anderson shooting for the moon. And hitting it. Even though, by Yoakam's categorization, this would be the second album in his second trilogy, it seems more like a brand new chapter, a major leap. It was not only an album where the material was all recently composed—rather than drawn from the backlog, re-recorded from the demo, powered by the muscle memory of years of live performance—but it was the first of Yoakam's albums to employ the recording studio as a creative instrument, even a magician's lab, to extend his artistic vistas much farther than he had ever done on the bandstand.

According to Pete Anderson, the album fulfilled an artistic mission that had begun with
If There Was a Way
, to take Dwight's music to a category beyond country, where his artistry would be recognized as sui generis.

“I wanted to get to a point where we made
Dwight Yoakam music
,” he explains. “First off, we made country music. We were bound by the constraints of making a good country record, so you have a fiddle, you have a mandolin, you had certain stuff to choose from. But whatever Johnny Cash was, Johnny Cash made Johnny Cash music. Was it country, was it folk, was it Americana, was it rockabilly? It was Johnny Cash music.

“And Kenny Rogers, for better or worse, made Kenny Rogers music. I wanted Dwight to be in that stratosphere. Ray Charles, all these guys that just made their own kind of music. They did what they wanted, and, eventually, ‘Ah, this is Ray Charles.' And we wanted it to be, ‘Ah, that's Dwight Yoakam.' ”

Whatever chances Dwight had previously taken, his artistry had generally been anchored in a specific place and time—the classic honky-tonk of the mid-twentieth century. Here, in the hit that would become one of Dwight's redefining signature tunes, he was floating above the earth, unmoored, as if in the suspended animation of a dream: “I'm a thousand miles from nowhere,” he croons languidly. “Time don't matter to me.” With a soaring double-tracked guitar coda (as if Anderson were channeling both Eric Clapton and Duane Allman), the song rocketed toward the top of the country charts despite sounding nothing like country music and nothing like anything Yoakam had previously recorded. Instead, it evoked a surrealistic twist on Ricky Nelson's “Travelin' Man,” filtered through Chris Isaak, exploding into Derek and the Dominos, for a film by David Lynch. As Dwight put it in his memorable chorus hook, “Oh I . . . Oh, I . . . Oh, I . . . Oh, aye-aye-aye-aye-aye-aye-aye-uh-aye.”

The album found Yoakam hitting his artistic and commercial peak at a time when the artist and country music were at a crossroads. Yoakam and Anderson spent more time and money on this than on any of his previous releases, and they had no intention of squandering those resources on an experimental vanity project. Four of the tracks renewed his collaborative songwriting relationship with country hitmaker Kostas (who also shared songwriting credit on a fifth track). Now that Yoakam had established such a consistent commercial track record, songwriters figured that working with him or placing a song with him promised a ticket to platinum royalties.

Among those Yoakam-Kostas collaborations was the title track, which hewed closely to the sound and phrasing of a Buck Owens classic. Even so, Dwight would introduce the song on his tour in support of the album as “kind of a psychobilly thing,” showing that he was thinking well outside the box of conventional categorization, without forsaking the sort of songcraft that would sustain his legitimacy as a contemporary country hitmaker.

“I think that was an attempt to ensure that they had some radio-friendly stuff,” says Dusty Wakeman of the collaborations with Kostas on the album that credited Wakeman as “associate producer” for the first time. While solidifying his country base, Dwight was in full flight creatively.

“Dwight was already a star and the budgets got a lot bigger and nobody was in a rush,” continues Wakeman. “We had time to experiment. That was kind of like our
Sgt. Pepper
period. And that was a lot of fun.”

Too many successful artists, particularly country artists, don't exercise such freedom. Success more often becomes a prison of expectations rather than a liberation from formula. There's a pressure to repeat whatever has proven so popular in the past. Particularly amid the aftershocks of Garth, the raising of the commercial stakes turned some hit acts (and those who aspired to be) even more conservative, succumbing to the pressure not only to give their audience what it wanted, but to give
Garth's
audience what
it
wanted.

The decade thus spawned countless mini-Garths, so-called “hat acts,” artists with the right look and sound to appeal to the largest audience that country music had ever known, but without the emotional depth or the working-class roots that had long defined the best country music. Garth was a commercial juggernaut, but Dwight Yoakam was a visionary artist, as he confirmed with
This Time
. And, without forsaking the country market, he was aiming for a wider world.

That wider world responded with greater recognition for Dwight than he had ever received before. Amid the new math of commerce A.G.,
This Time
didn't top the country charts, as Yoakam's early albums routinely had, settling instead in the top five. Yet sales spurred it into the top twenty-five of the pop charts as well (the first time that he'd cracked the Top 50 on the pop side of the street). And
Rolling Stone
, which had previously paid scant attention to contemporary commercial country, not only raved about the album in a four-star review, but accorded it the prestige position of the long lead review.

That piece, in the June 10, 1993, issue, is headlined “The Time Has Come for Dwight” and bylined by me. I had moved at the start of the decade from Chicago to Austin, drawn in some measure by the hothouse insurgence of music that fused country tradition with rock attitude but never settled into anything so tepid as “country rock.” In Austin, I found so many artists who were trying to do what Yoakam was, though none would enjoy anything close to his commercial success. Though I'd written about everything from punk rock to free jazz and beyond during my decade at the
Chicago Sun-Times
, I inevitably became pegged as the “Austin guy” after the move, frequently assigned to write about roots music for a variety of national publications.