Dwight Yoakam (16 page)

One of my earliest benefactors was Anthony DeCurtis, then editor of the reviews section for
Rolling Stone
. I'd begun working for Anthony while still in Chicago, but it was after my move that he proposed I write an occasional column, every couple of months, as a roots music roundup under the banner “Country & Western.” The initiative reflected a recognition that there was something happening here at the juncture of country and rock that had reached critical mass, but that the most inspired music in this amorphous category was flying under the radar of Nashville.

In fact, the very title of the “Country & Western” column was considered an anachronism by the Nashville recording industry, if not downright insulting. Commercial country had spent decades trying to distance itself from the raw, rough “western” side of its heritage, and here was a column rubbing its nose in it. (Like Yoakam and his ilk had with “hillbilly.”) One leading Nashville publicist suggested that this was akin to launching a column on contemporary R&B and calling it “Race Records.”

From
Rolling Stone
's standpoint, decisions on what to cover, both in the column and in the larger reviews section, would be made according to musical significance rather than commercial country success. And such coverage would be designed to appeal to the magazine's core readership—fans of rock, popular music, and pop culture in general—rather than the self-indentified (albeit growing) fan base of mainstream country. So, yes,
Rolling Stone
would acknowledge country music, but not necessarily in the way Nashville wanted it to. (The Garth Brooks cover story would come later.)

That lead review for Dwight reinforced the difference. “When Dwight Yoakam hoisted the ‘hillbilly music' banner in the mid-eighties,” I wrote, “the country establishment reacted with the sort of enthusiasm usually reserved for flatulence in church. As country music was homogenizing itself to win soft-rock suburbia, it wanted no reminders of its raw rural past.

“Yoakam's voice was too nasal, his subject matter too honky-tonk, his jeans too tight. Uncompromising and defiant, he sang with the conviction of a fundamentalist who felt that he was following the one true path—and that the rest of country music had gone astray.”

After introducing Yoakam to rock fans who perhaps had previously paid scant or no attention, and providing context as to his accomplishment, the review proceeded to celebrate “the finest showcase to date of Yoakam's artistry, one that downplays the anti-hero aura to focus attention on what is best in the singer and his songs . . . That he no longer sounds like an artist with something to prove represents stronger proof than ever of his artistry.”

For Yoakam, artistic growth required letting go, or at least loosening his grip. At the heart of
This Time
lies an aesthetic contradiction, one that makes him such a vital, provocative, occasionally confounding artist. For Yoakam had established his identity as the purest of honky-tonk purists (though honky-tonk “purity,” like “authenticity,” is itself a quality rife with contradiction; it exists in the ear of the beholder). And here he was positioning himself not merely “a thousand miles from nowhere,” but a couple thousand from the nearest honky-tonk.

“This was one of the more experimental songs Dwight has written,” explained Pete Anderson of “Thousand Miles” in a track-by-track analysis for the
Journal of Country Music
(Vol. 15, No. 3). “There's a long guitar outro, a la ‘Layla.' The song has a grand epic sound because it was originally inspired by and written for a movie (
Red Rock West
), although the film producers would not pay for it to be remixed for Sensurround, so we didn't let them do it.”

Anderson says that the biggest decision concerning the track was “putting this song on a Dwight album at all.” Though this risky move paid dividends for Yoakam, with “A Thousand Miles From Nowhere” ranking with his most successful and beloved country hits, it wasn't close to country in the way that Yoakam and fans had previously defined the term. It certainly wasn't rock. Perhaps it was pop, most expansively defined. But mostly it served notice that music this rapturously gorgeous required neither categorization nor justification.

“Oftentimes we're not doing country music anymore,” Dwight admitted to Steve Pond in the May 1993, issue of
Us
magazine (
Rolling Stone
's sister publication, celeb-oriented and general interest like
People
). “But that's okay. Country music is not where I'll always remain, but it's a place that I'll always return to.”

The magazine proclaimed “This Time, Dwight Yoakam Unleashes the Album of His Life,” and the artist tended to agree, saying that it was “truly, totally my voice.” He continued, “It's been a musical journey for me, and this is the most
mapless
leg of the journey so far.”

The journey begins with one of the kitschiest arrangements in Yoakam's repertoire, with “Pocket of a Clown” returning to the sort of countrypolitan backing chorus that he and Anderson had employed to such surprising (at the time) effect five years earlier on “Always Late with Your Kisses.” But where that cover took its seal of credibility from the Lefty Frizzell songbook, “Pocket of a Clown” sounds more conceptually daring, as if Dwight is working without a net, the lyrics combining a surrealistic visual image with a chorus hook that borders on haiku in its elliptical simplicity: “Hollow lies make a thin disguise as little drops of truth fall from your eyes.”

Having prepped the audience for something new with the album opener, Yoakam and Anderson threw the musical road map out the window with “A Thousand Miles from Nowhere,” the second cut. From there, he had the freedom to go anywhere, and he did.

“Ain't That Lonely Yet” even employs strings by Paul Buckmaster, best known for his work with noted honky cat Elton John. Orchestral arrangements in any sort of popular music are often referred to as “sweetening,” but there's nothing sweet about a song that would be hailed as another Dwight classic, with its beguiling, languid melody beneath a kiss-off lyric as deceptive as Bob Dylan's “Don't Think Twice, It's All Right.”

It's noteworthy that nowhere on the album did Yoakam travel into territory that could be classified as “country rock.” Instead, there are stone-cold country cuts here—“Home for Sale,” “Two Doors Down,” “King of Fools,” the closing “Lonesome Roads”—that are as timeless and tradition-bound as Yoakam's brand of country music gets.

Such performances feature Yoakam's most nuanced and masterful vocals to date, confirming that, as my
Rolling Stone
rave put it, “The man can flat-out sing . . . Though Yoakam is rarely mentioned with Randy Travis or John Anderson among the first rank of neo-traditionalist vocal virtuosos,
This Time
suggests that he has no contemporary peer, that his emotional precision and command of nuance have attained a kind of perfection—if you can imagine Buck Owens and Johnny Horton as spiritual mentors.”

He distills that perfection into one twisted phrase, in “Two Doors Down,” another of his drown-your-heartbreak-in-alcohol honky-tonk reveries. “Freedom from sorrow,” sings the hopeful vocalist, “is just two doors away,” as “two doors” somehow extends itself into more syllables than even George Jones might have thought possible. As the devout abstainer sings again about getting drunk, country vocals don't get any more convincing and emotionally compelling than this.

At the other polarity of the album's musical dynamic, the rock numbers pull out all the stops, rocking with a swagger beyond anything he'd previously written, matching the intensity of “Long White Cadillac” and upping the ante. It's certainly not rockabilly or even punk rock, let alone country rock. It carries barely a whiff of dusty anachronism, though you can hear in “Fast As You” an emulation of the driving, pulsating sensuality that Roy Orbison had brought to “Oh, Pretty Woman.”

“ ‘Fast As You' was an intelligent lyric written to an uptempo groove, which is a pretty lethal combination,” says producer Anderson. “Wow! That was a big rocket ship for that record. And then ‘A Thousand Miles From Nowhere,' that was one song where I felt I really needed to dig in, guitar-wise. Cause the chord changes were nothing that special, but the lyric was beautiful, and the melody was beautiful. So I'm very proud of that, and we had some groundbreaking stuff for both of us, as artists.

“And as a producer, I did the record in Pro Tools, which was in its infancy. And it's a massive record, a big, ass-kicking record. ‘Pocket of a Clown' was another ‘What the . . . ?' These aren't your cousin Homer writing from behind the barn. There's some thoughts going into this stuff, some twists and turns that you don't expect, and then the music was definitely up to snuff.”

“Fast As You” didn't sound nearly as country as its flip side on the single (“Home for Sale”) or the earlier single that it followed (the lush, bittersweet “Try Not to Look So Pretty”), but it proved a huge hit for Yoakam on country radio and a calling card for rock appeal. Plainly, Yoakam's hard-core country following was not only allowing him to stretch himself, it was encouraging him to do so, and rewarding him for it.

“Wild Ride” evokes the Rolling Stones, and not the countryish “No Expectations”/ “Wild Horses” side of the Stones, but the “Tumblin' Dice” side, loose and edgy and sexy. Not a hit and never intended to be, it nonetheless provides the album with both an anthem and a theme. “Are you ready for the wild ride?” the song asks the singer, who in turn asks his audience. The response would prove resoundingly affirmative.

The album's sequencing corresponds to Yoakam's quote concerning country music as the place where he'll always return. Following “Wild Ride,” the concluding “Lonesome Road” is quintessential Yoakam country—a lachrymose ballad that is almost a parody of self-pity, a song that one could imagine Hank Williams performing (though “I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry” sounds positively chipper in comparison).

“Lonesome roads are the only kind I ever travel,” sings Dwight. “Empty rooms are the only place I ever stay. I'm just a face out in the crowd that looks like trouble. Poor ol' worthless me is the only friend I ever made.”

While we ponder the unclear reference (is it the face or the crowd that “looks like trouble”? Or both?), let's agree with Yoakam that no matter how far afield he has traveled on this mapless musical journey, he hasn't betrayed his vision of country music, but extended it. He has reinforced his identity as a country artist while expanding the possibility of what a country artist could be.

That such an album could be a favorite among fans who considered their primary musical allegiance to be country, critics who celebrated the music's significance in the wider world of popular culture (and were often suspicious of commercial country), and initiates who were discovering that even if you didn't like country music or the state it currently found itself, you might just like Dwight, attests again to the singularity of the artist's musical achievement.

It isn't that often that all the stars align, that critical response, commercial success, and the artist's own view of his peak coincide. With
This Time
, Dwight scaled the summit, as the album was hailed as the high point of his career then and has become more uniformly recognized as such with the passage of time.

YOAKAM FOLLOWED THE most ambitious album of his career with his most ambitious tour to date, one that took him beyond the clubs and concert halls to the arenas of the nation. And where he showed that he could project his music to fifteen thousand or so delirious fans with the same power and intensity that he had once flashed to hundreds from a club bandstand. On the boisterous
Dwight Live
, recorded at the comparatively intimate (for this tour) Warfield Theatre in San Francisco, Yoakam acknowledges everyone who had helped make
This Time
such a success, and anybody who had ever bought any of his albums, because “you've allowed me to make a living doing what I did for a long time for free. And I thank you for that.”

Most live country albums stick pretty close to recorded arrangements of the hits, or as close as the touring band can come to the musicianship of the Nashville studio A-listers. (Even the most successful country stars rarely take their touring musicians into a Nashville studio; Dwight has always recorded with his live band.) Many sound as if they had simply dubbed in some applause. Dwight's is a live album in more of a rock sense, feeding off the audience's response, which seems to send a charge through the band and amp up the energy of the interplay. It's the sort of live album the Rolling Stones have made.

Where
This Time
was definitely a studio creation, going well beyond the dynamic of the bandstand performance captured on Yoakam's earlier albums,
Dwight Live
pulls no punches as it strips the material of its studio polish. It also leaves no doubts about the scope of his ambition. The album opens with an Elvis Presley hit—“Little Sister”—and crescendos to a climax with a more recent Elvis Presley hit, the concluding “Suspicious Minds,” with more than half of the seven-minute performance an instrumental outro that whips the crowd into a multi-orgasmic frenzy. Even when Dwight isn't singing Elvis, he might imitate him (as on the mumbling phrasing of “It Only Hurts When I Cry”).

The album spotlights Anderson's guitar as much as Yoakam's vocals, with the lead instrument filling what were the wide open spaces of “A Thousand Miles from Nowhere,” and putting the pedal to the metal on “Fast As You” and “Long White Cadillac.” Even “Please, Please Baby” accelerates to a fury beyond its earliest incarnation as a favorite from the punk rock clubs.

It's plain from the performance that Yoakam is no longer playing the rube, as he was when the tape was rolling at the Roxy for that early radio broadcast. Onstage, he isn't talking much at all, beyond offering sincere thanks. But off stage, I would discover, his mouth still operated in overdrive. When his tour came to Austin for a performance at the Frank Erwin Center—the basketball arena for the University of Texas Longhorns—his publicist told me that Yoakam would like me to come to his tour bus so he could say hi.