Dwight Yoakam (21 page)

Though Pete produced it, the album serves as a response to those who might think that Yoakam's success was primarily a result of Anderson's production. Strip everything away and you've got those songs, that voice, the qualities that convinced crucial supporters at an early stage that Yoakam had what it took to be a big country star. And though the solo acoustic arrangements here ensured that country radio would never touch this, it provides evidence of the enduring power of those songs and that voice, all the way to the a cappella finale of “Guitars, Cadillacs.”

Along the way, it inspires some reassessment. In the solo acoustic rendition, “Readin', Rightin', Rt. 23” sounds monumental and deeply heartfelt, with not a hint of anachronism. On the other hand, “A Thousand Miles from Nowhere,” a smash that would expand Yoakam's musical world significantly, offers barely an indication of the majesty it achieved through its studio arrangement. Nice tune, but you wouldn't necessarily single it out as a highlight amid the strong, more traditional competition surrounding it.

With a full-fledged studio album in the pipeline, set for release just months ahead, the label (and the artist) didn't want the marketplace confused, so there was little attempt to make anyone aware of the release. Yet it remained a nice souvenir for diehard fans and is a revelation for those who subsequently happen upon it.

And its credits provided cross promotion for his website
(www.dwightyoakam.net),
as well as the one for his burgeoning biscuit company
(www.bakersfi
eldbiscuits.com,
where you can still find an array of selections ranging from chicken fries to breakfast burritos in “Dwight Yoakam's Family of Quality Foods”).

With
Sling Blade
,
The Newton Boys
, and a couple of lesser TV roles under his belt, Yoakam had plainly been bitten by the acting bug, and perhaps was considering this a more viable medium in which to age gracefully and mature creatively, particularly now that his recording career had plummeted from its chart-topping peak. If he had sounded a little distracted on the off hand
Tomorrow's Sounds Today
, he was plainly preoccupied with
South of Heaven, West of Hell
—a film written, directed, and produced by Dwight Yoakam, starring Dwight Yoakam, with music by Dwight Yoakam.

Maybe Yoakam hoped the movie would do for him what
Sling Blade
had done for his buddy Billy Bob Thornton, who had also leapt from the bandstand to the big screen, was attempting to balance the two careers, and was riding shotgun on Dwight's film. Other noteworthies among the cast included Peter and Bridget Fonda, Paul “Pee-wee Herman” Reubens, a moonlighting Warren Zevon (payback for “Carmelita”?), and an emerging Vince Vaughn.

“He asked me to be in his movie, which was unfortunately an ill-fated experience for him,” says Texas roadhouse mainstay Joe Ely. “He would have so many takes of the same scene that everybody wondered how he was going to make it through. But he was such a perfectionist, he wanted it to be exactly the way he saw it. And by doing that, I think that's what made him run out of money and lose control of the project. Somebody else took it over because he couldn't finish the movie. I wish that he could have, because it was an interesting twist on a Western, but whoever took it over edited the real story completely out of it.”

Wherever credit or blame is due, the finished product wasn't widely released or reviewed, and the few aware of it critiqued it as incomprehensible or called it a vanity project. There are even conflicting dates for the release, 2000 or 2001, since it mainly bypassed the big screen and went straight to the small, for home consumption.
TV Guide
dismissed it as “what happens when grown-ups with more money than inspiration get the notion to dress up like cowboys and bandits and make their own variation on
The Wild Bunch
(1969), with vaguely supernatural undertones.”

And despite Pete Anderson's earlier advice that Dwight make a singing cowboy movie that might pay promotional dividends for their music careers, this wasn't exactly what he had in mind: “We had discussions about it, and I encouraged him about his scriptwriting and his writing abilities,” says Anderson. “He'd started a film company with Billy Bob Thornton, and I thought it was a great opportunity for the two of them. But I said, ‘Just don't be in it.' That'll come later. Have a little film company and develop something and get your name away from the splatter if it blows up. If you write, direct, produce, act, tap dance, costume—man, every finger's going to point at you if it's not successful. And there's so many reasons why something cannot be successful other than its quality. Which we had learned in the music business.”

A soundtrack to a hit movie might generate a hit single or two, but the 2001 album “with songs and score from and inspired by the motion picture” met the same fate as the film. It never even cracked the country music Top 50 on
Billboard
charts. It marked the end of the Warner Bros. contract. Yet some of the few who have heard it place it with Yoakam's best music.

“Minus the nine snippets of film dialogue interspersed throughout, it ranks as one of the artist's deepest, most stirring albums,” opines David McGee in
The New Rolling Stone Record Guide
(2004), and goes on to praise one of the tracks, “Somewhere,” as “an instant Yoakam classic.”

Like the tree falling unheard in the woods, can a song be a classic if known to no one? Yet the music merits wider exposure, despite how inscrutable those inserted bits of dialogue will sound to those who haven't seen the film—in other words, almost everyone. In addition to bringing the West back into country and western, the music steeps itself in both gospel and Southern rock. Rarely had Dwight illuminated the religious underpinnings of his music as brightly as he did on “Who at the Door Is Standing” and “The Darkest Hour.” Rarely had he rocked as hard as he did on “The First Thing Smokin' ” or evoked the era of the Allman Brothers as strongly as on “No Future in Sight.”

Both served to showcase the guitar of Anderson, the album's producer. In retrospect, it might have made sense—or at least been a neater split—for the artist and producer to end their relationship with the end of the major-label contract. Unless Dwight signed with another major, he would be less likely to have any shot at radio and require the services of a producer well compensated for the previous commercial success they'd enjoyed together. And if Dwight was as interested or more interested in making movies, there was less opportunity to hit the road, where playing guitar on tour remained Anderson's major passion.

“With the Warner career over, maybe it would have been a good time to leave. But it would be like, ‘Once you don't have Warner Bros. on your side, Pete's gonna quit'?” hypothetically asks Anderson, who doesn't consider himself a quitter.

So when Dwight signed to Audium/Koch, which treated him as a huge priority (after he'd become an afterthought for Warner), but lacked the muscle to get him the radio play that would re-establish him, Pete continued as Yoakam's producer, with a budget considerably downsized from Dwight's latter albums with Warner (where the budget had already been downsized in light of the artist's commercial descent).

“After losing his deal with Warner Bros., he thought he had a shot that was more than what it was with Audium/Koch,” continues Anderson. “I thought we could make a great record, but I didn't think they could get us on the radio. 'Cause that's a political thing. Dwight could have songs on the radio every day, and people would love them. It's not a question of quality. It's arm twisting and money and all that other bullshit.”

Maybe Anderson should have seen the album's title,
Population: Me
, as prophecy. Not that
Population: Me and Pete
would have been as catchy, but it was hard to resist the implication of the lone man making a last stand against the world. Not the two as a team, the way it had begun, when each was bolstering the other's confidence while the rest of the world didn't pay much attention or share any faith.

As the only album of new material Dwight would record for the indie label, the 2003 release calls in some significant markers in terms of guest support, with Willie Nelson contributing a duet vocal on “If Teardrops Were Diamonds,” Timothy B. Schmit of the Eagles providing harmonies throughout, and the venerable banjo virtuoso Earl Scruggs helping Yoakam transform the Burt Bacharach standard “Trains and Boats and Planes.” Even if the budget was indie, the credits aimed at a higher profile.

The results were promising, more inspired than the lackluster
Tomorrow's Sounds Today
. In a departure from precedent, Yoakam aligned himself with the alt-country flank that looked up to him the way that he'd always looked up to Buck Owens and Johnny Horton, opening the album with the stirring anthem “The Late Great Golden State” by the young Los Angeles singer-songwriter Mike Stinson. Those who don't read credits would have mistaken it for one of Yoakam's own, even one of his best.

“I ain't old, I'm just out of date,” sings Yoakam with a mixture of defiance and regret, amid an arrangement with the buoyancy of up-tempo Eagles, while the lyric laments that the era of country-rocking at the Palomino is long gone.

Writer Stinson remembers Yoakam coming to one of his club dates because the girlfriends of the two were close. Dwight plainly heard echoes of his earlier days in the lesser-known artist's musical dynamic.

“Incidentally it was the same night that Dwight met Keith Gattis, who went on to play guitar in Dwight's band for a few years,” says Stinson. “Well, Dwight loved the show and was super cool and encouraging to me and the band. He gave me his number and said, ‘Let me know when you're playing.'

“Man, I left that gig walking one foot off the ground! I mean, this was the guy who saved '80's country music all by himself, the coolest cowboy singer to come along in a couple of decades. I had every record he'd made and had seen him live several times, the first bona fide musical hero of mine to attend one of my shows. And in my opinion, no finer songwriter could have walked through that door and liked my show either.”

Things got better for Stinson when he heard that Dwight had bought a copy of his album at Amoeba Records in Hollywood. And better still when Dwight said he wanted to record the cut, make it the kickoff track on the album, and even ended up playing it on
The Tonight Show
. It was like another passing of the torch, with Dwight now the established veteran giving a boost to the up-and-comer.

“How often does your work get validated by one of the true masters of your craft?” continues Stinson. “I could have died and gone to Houston right then! That song has paid a lot of rent and a lot of bills for a lot of years. And he gave my credibility a bump that it sorely needed.”

Like “Late Great Golden State,” the album's title cut continues that theme of last man standing, in a song so forlorn it could have fit amid the darkness of
Gone
, and with an arrangement that mixes banjo (more prevalent on this album than ever before) with what sounds like tuba (though there are no credits for such). The sound of the album and its songs seem like something of a fresh start for Yoakam, unbroken after his demotion from the major-label ranks.

“I'm proud of that last record we made,” says Anderson. “It was made under more constraints, because we didn't have the budget we'd had. It was close to a third, much less than half, of what we'd had from Warner. And I was there every day, overseeing every penny, every note. If you thought we were working hard before, now we really have to work hard.

“I come from blue-collar working class and I want to get it done,” he continues. “I don't want to be lighting candles and caring about who's doing the catering. We've been given a great opportunity, let's get in here and do the job. And Dwight's the same way. He always focused and worked hard in the studio.”

So the studio sessions gave no indication that this would be their last project together, at least not in Anderson's mind. The budget was tighter, but otherwise it was business as usual. The rupture would come in the album's wake, when Dwight resumed touring, following an extended hiatus from the road while focusing on
South of Heaven, West of Hell
. This time, he'd decided to go out without Pete and the band.

19

Splitsville

AFTER TWO DECADES, the relationship ended not with a bang or a whimper, but with a flurry of faxes. Pete's were scrawled in furious Sharpie. Such was his response to the news that Dwight had decided to tour again in support of
Population: Me
, but that he'd be going out with a stripped-down two-piece instead of Anderson and band.

Maybe there were musical reasons for the decision, but certainly there were financial ones. Yoakam had made a substantial investment—financially and professionally—in
South of Heaven, West of Hell
. And he hadn't recouped. To the contrary, the movie had reportedly been taken away from him when he could no longer pay the bills.

It's a whole lot cheaper to hit the road with a couple of musicians than it is to mount a full tour with a full band. And if fans were paying to see Dwight Yoakam, maybe they wouldn't care and maybe as many of them would show up anyway. But for a guy like Pete, the decision not only left a big hole in his calendar and his bank account, it deprived him of what he loved to do most—go out and play the guitar.

“Dwight had told me he wasn't going to tour,” says Anderson. “I'd lost a month of work the previous year [because of the film], but it was always like, ‘This is a long-term relationship and we'll catch up, something's gonna happen.' And then he wanted to go out with a duo because he needed to make some money.