Dwight Yoakam (23 page)

Label head Cameron Strang didn't need to think twice when the opportunity to work with Yoakam presented itself. “For me, this was a total no-brainer,” he says. “I'm just a huge fan. When I was running the label there were a few artists who I felt that if I could just sign that person, how fantastic would that be.”

Yoakam could have been the biggest commercial catch for the label, but it was never a natural fit. Yes, New West could offer him complete creative freedom, but so had Warner Bros. New West had no connection to country radio and the country music industry at large, and that's still where Dwight's commercial significance lay. What had made him singular was his ability to straddle mainstream country and progressive Americana.

Now he fell into the gulf in between, no longer a major-label hitmaker, but also lacking the stature in Americana circles accorded not only some of his New West label mates—Buddy Miller, in particular—but also creatively rejuvenated artists such as Rodney Crowell, Rosanne Cash, Emmylou Harris, and others who had given up on making music for country radio and were making some of the most inspired music of their careers—for themselves. Even the venerable Johnny Cash had been taking radical chances with his music, recording with cutting-edge producer Rick Rubin, covering material from the likes of Nine Inch Nails.

By contrast, Yoakam still had his ear toward country radio—a commercial ambition that made Americana suspicious. But trying to invade that mainstream music monolith from an indie outpost was like attacking a fortress with a slingshot. New West had no connection to country radio, and fans of Americana were but a fraction of Yoakam's former constituency.

He certainly hadn't broadened that constituency with the 2004 release of
Dwight's Used Records
, his contract-fulfilling departure from Audium. Its fourteen tracks were all covers and mostly previously issued, on non–Warner Bros. tribute albums (to Webb Pierce, Johnny Cash, Bob Wills, ZZ Top) and one-off projects. Only Dwight's biggest fans would ever know it existed.

As Dwight would later acknowledge, “I tend to have a broader commercial appeal than an Americana label like New West might have realized.” Or at least he previously had, when he had the promotional muscle of a major behind him, and he was making music that the major felt it could sell to country radio.

Since the dual trajectory of creativity and commerce had once given Yoakam his stratospheric ascent, it's easy to confuse one with the other after the two veered in different directions. Yoakam's career continued its nosedive in terms of commercial success, one that had begun with the comparative failure in the marketplace of
Gone
, and that Yoakam wouldn't be likely to reverse by going the indie route.

Yet the music itself retained its consistency, its commitment to quality, its adventurous spirit. If anything, Dwight's indie albums were more inspired than his last few albums on a major. And his first album ever to carry the credit “produced by Dwight Yoakam,” and first under his deal with New West, is work of which he remains justifiably proud.

At the time, guitarist Keith Gattis had replaced Anderson in Yoakam's band, and Dwight says it was Gattis's suggestion that the artist produce himself rather than inviting someone else. One senses that Yoakam didn't need a whole lot of persuasion.

Whether it was because he was free of Pete or because he had learned so much by working with Anderson, 2005's
Blame the Vain
was both recognizably a Dwight Yoakam album, an extension and continuation of the music he had made for two decades with Pete Anderson, and a liberating experience for its artist-producer. Just as there are cuts here that would have been highlights on any Yoakam album, there are others that reflect the idiosyncrasies of Dwight's personality, independent of Pete, and that would never have appeared on any other Yoakam album.

Fresh and familiar merge on the album-opening title track, where the first fuzz-toned guitar note seems to channel the Beatles tune “I Feel Fine,” and then proceeds into a song that Warner Bros. might have been able to promote into a radio hit. It remains a staple of his live performance. At least half of the cuts seem to retain the sound and style that were Yoakam's signature, suggesting that even with a new label and without his producer of two decades, this was still the same artist. These were fastballs, right down the middle.

But what makes the album more interesting are the wicked curves. Just as the early demos demonstrated what Yoakam's music was like before Pete, thus underscoring what sort of focus as a producer and arranger Anderson brought to the picture, Yoakam's first self-produced album shows what his music would be like unyoked from Anderson.

There's an unbridled lack of restraint on a couple of cuts that listeners could dismiss as self-indulgence but which plainly sound like freedom to the artist. The hard-rocking, harmony-laden “International Heartache” tells a tale of a woman scorned who pursues her vengeance with reckless abandon, climaxing with a spoken-word play-by play-that makes a pretty funny song even funnier. Likewise, “She'll Remember” opens with a deadpan comic turn by Dwight in a quasi-British accent, before reverting to honky-tonk shuffle mode.

“We were just fooling around in the studio,” explains Yoakam. “And [keyboardist] Skip Edwards was doing this kind of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer synth thing, like ‘Lucky Man.' Just to amuse myself, I started playing the clown, with an absurd, stream-of-consciousness in an over-the-top British accent, like Monty Python's interpretation of the Moody Blues. And then drummer Mitch Marine began to play kind of a ‘Ticket to Ride' pattern. And it just became part of the track.”

A playful, off-the-cuff, in-the-studio part of the track that likely wouldn't have been included with a more regimented, disciplined producer like Pete Anderson. Likewise, the piano break on “Does It Show?” finds Edwards coming closer to evoking Errol Garner (or even Bill Evans) than Floyd Cramer, in an arrangement that exudes the atmospherics of a surreal supper club. The languid “Just Passin' Time” captures a similar feeling, reinforcing the stylistic kinship between Yoakam and California retro-crooner Chris Isaak.

Sandwiched between those two cuts there's “Three Good Reasons,” which extends the strategy of “Sorry You Asked” from
Gone
, taking country convention and pushing it to the limits of lyrical absurdity. “I'll give you three good reasons for leavin', and number one is that I've forgotten number two,” sings Yoakam. “Number three is in a place that's been kept hidden for so long I can't remember, but it's true.”

So there: the Zen koan as country song craft. And a sign that Yoakam was a long way from settling into creative complacency. He never intended this to be the last album of original material he would release. And he still doesn't. Yet, six years later, there has been no more new music from Yoakam. He insists that the problem isn't lack of material or lack of label options, and that there will be newly recorded original material available in 2012.

In the mean time, let's allow Yoakam to reflect, at length, on how it felt to serve as his own producer. In order to keep this manuscript as timely as possible, Yoakam and I had a long, late phone conversation the week before the book's initial deadline. The experience was so characteristically Dwight—when the time that had been scheduled a full week earlier came for me to call, Dwight was on another line but was “just wrapping up.” Call back in fifteen minutes.

Which I did, and Dwight was still “just wrapping up,” according to his assistant, who suggested he would call me as soon as he was through. So forty-five minutes later, I received a call from Dwight, who explained that he was still on that conference call (that he'd put on hold), “just wrapping up,” but was wondering if it might be better for us to reschedule later in the week. No problem, though the time he spent explaining why we couldn't talk right then and trying to figure out when it would be best for us to talk was longer than many full phone interviews I've conducted.

He finally decided it would be best if he just called me back in an hour. And so he did—two hours later, apologizing profusely for all the delays and complications. But Dwight's mind is itself a complication of wonders. So, here's how producing himself differed from recording with Pete Anderson as producer:

“I think I did some things with EQ differently,” he explains. “On
Blame the Vain
, I was doing things with the bass, specifically. The frequency of the bass response was more akin to something you might hear in 1968 than you would in the mid-1970s, when tape heads were wider and you went to twenty-four-track, so you were playing with sonics differently.

“I mean,
Blame the Vain
clearly sounds like one of my records. Pete was always good—the way that Pete and I had worked over the years was that Pete was specifically hired to produce, I didn't demand any co-producing credit, but I signed off on every mix. I went specifically to the mastering lab for each of my albums, starting with
Guitars, Cadillacs
. So, it would have been more different moving from Pete Anderson to a different producer. And I'll still probably co-produce with somebody some day.

“If you listened to
Bridge Over Troubled Water
, which was recorded in like 1971, there was this recording technology that we kind of slipped beyond in the mid-1970s, and everything got overly thick. And we lost the beauty of melody. When we were making
Blame the Vain
, I was talking with David Leonard [who mixed the album] and listening to Connie Francis albums.

“And listening to the Beatles, because Paul McCartney was [initially] a guitar player, and so the way he played bass was different from a lot of quote ‘bass players.' And Chris Hillman and I talked about that. In the Byrds he was a mandolin player who wanted to play guitar but got stuck on the bass. He had a hollow body bass because he wanted it to look like a guitar! But that's what made him such a great bass player. You listen to ‘Turn, Turn, Turn,' he played with a pick!

“So when we were mixing the
Blame the Vain
album, with Jack White [of the White Stripes], there is no bass! But I love the sound of guitar players who end up being bass players. And when you listen to Simon and Garfunkel, to ‘Cecilia' on
Bridge Over Troubled Water
, it has no bass! It has kick drum. So I was in the throes of kind of clearing out the middle. There was just more me, and I was free to experiment.

“Pete and I were both admirers of arrangers, and an acumen for arranging was one of his great gifts, laying out how we were going to arrange tracks, which allowed me to flip paint over my shoulder because of his meticulous attention to detail,” he continues.

“For better or worse, having my way with things led to a somewhat different end than previously. I'm a vocalist, so I tend to approach vocals a little more [at a rare loss for words, he pauses here for a good thirty seconds, searching for the right one]
egocentrically
. That would stand to reason, I guess. I don't know in just listening that you would think it was that removed from any other Dwight Yoakam record.

“The more dramatic change was with the Buck album . . .”

21

The Buck Stops Here

BUCK OWENS DIED ON MARCH 26, 2006. Dwight spoke at his memorial service and sang “In the Garden.” He had been touring when he received the news, playing a gig in Orlando, Florida. That very day, he and his band began their own personal tribute, performing Buck's songs at sound check, working them up for possible performance or just playing some for their own enjoyment. That
Dwight Sings Buck
would be his next album was inevitable, the only surprise was that Yoakam hadn't attempted such a project earlier in his career, back when he and Pete Anderson were doing their best to emulate Buck Owens and Don Rich.

“I was trying to pay great respect to Buck and that sound and that feel, but to live in the moment for me. It literally took shape at sound checks and onstage after Buck died. So it was born out of the moment I was in, which is how I generally tended to approach what I was doing,” Yoakam explains (actually continuing the monologue from the last chapter).

“I'm very proud of the Buck album. I hope it does justice to his memory. I never touched his material before he passed, other than material he brought to me. We weren't mimicking and copying the Buck records. We were making it fresh for 2007. It was really in the spirit of what Buck did. It kind of became its own album; it lived independent of what I was trying to do as a tribute to Buck.”

It's an album that takes great liberties with the arrangements, with Yoakam bringing a depth of feeling to vocal performances that rank with his best. You'll hear echoes of the Beatles (who of course had introduced so many '60s rock fans to Buck's “Act Naturally”), the phrasing of Elvis, the Southern rock of the Allman Brothers, the soulfulness of Ray Charles, in Yoakam's musical transformations.

It was as if the songs of Buck Owens contained multiple musical universes, as if everything Dwight loved in music he could hear in Buck. There was no reason to mimic Owens—Buck had already done his own versions to perfection. Dwight and band would have to make the music sound as contemporary and vital as Buck had. Yoakam wanted to renew and extend Buck's musical legacy.

If we permit Dwight to continue his monologue on the recording of the album, here's the way his mind works as far as connecting the dots—in a manner that may often sound like it has nothing to do with his musical tribute to Buck Owens. Or maybe everything.

“In a weird way this was a homage to his late '60s records, were there was bass and drums,” he continues. “If you hear ‘Here, There and Everywhere,' you realize that
Revolver
changed all of that. In addition to the tape-head size being different and vinyl mastering techniques changing, you also had physically miking techniques that changed with Geoffrey Emerick, a nineteen-year-old who, because he didn't go by the rules, grabbed the kick drum microphone and dragged it to the head of the bass drum. And on
Revolver
stuffed the bass drum full of sweaters. And changed the sound of pop music then and forever, with close miking technique.