Dwight Yoakam (11 page)

Within this “socially agreed-upon construct,” we collectively ignore the obvious—that faking it, or putting on an act, is just another term for putting on a show. However authentic (or not) Dwight may have been, he was undeniably sincere. He sincerely wanted to be a star—a country rock star when that had seemed to be a possibility, a country star now that it wasn't, at least according to the formatted dictates of commercial radio. He sincerely refused to compromise his principles in order to achieve that goal of stardom. He sincerely fronted a smoking-hot band. And he sincerely thought that country music had strayed from its rightful path, that it had betrayed its better self politically, geographically, generationally, artistically.

And he sincerely believed, deep down in his bones, that his music represented a corrective—a power that could not be denied, a charisma that could not be ignored, a flash that obliterated any distinction between the real and the surreal. For what Dwight was conjuring was a parallel dimension, one where country music hadn't decamped to the suburbs, where rock and roll shared a common spirit with it, and where punk energy could be harnessed to restore something rather than destroy it. And where retro honky-tonk was the hippest new trend in Hollywood.

Throughout the performance, Dwight invoked the inspirations that his singular musical dynamic was channeling. There was Kentucky homeboy Bill Monroe, of course, who shared Dwight's audacity and had all but invented the music known as bluegrass, but whose stiff, autocratic demeanor was at odds with Yoakam's. There were Buck and Merle and the rest of the Bakersfield crowd, whose California legacy would come to provide such a strong imprint for Dwight's own, so much so that Buck would subsequently be perceived as Yoakam's main musical mentor, and Dwight would be known as the guy who had rescued Buck's reputation from
Hee Haw
corn.

And there were the two artists whom he'd acknowledged as the twin beacons of musical inspiration that had drawn him to California, both in attendance that night at the Roxy, as if passing the generational torch. Dwight toned down the hokum as he acknowledged their presence: “There's a couple of folks here tonight that were a big influence to me in the late '60s and early '70s . . . John Fogerty and Miss Emmylou Harris. I think you both gave a lot of people a lot of hope that there was still room for youth in country music.”

There's revisionism in that tribute, because even Dwight acknowledges that when he first listened to Creedence, the hope the band's string of hits instilled was that there was room in
rock
for considerable country influence, that a young artist could synthesize the most powerful rock and the purest country into something other than the trifle that country rock had become. The initial goal had been mainstream rock success rather than anything to do with Nashville. And Emmylou's emergence with Gram Parsons initially made a much stronger imprint in rock circles than in country.

But even now that country stardom had become the quest, the frenzied response that Yoakam's music generated in live performance was like nothing Nashville had seen, nothing that Fogerty or Harris had experienced, nothing like what rock audiences too typically accepted. No, as the song that followed Yoakam's introduction underscored, this artist had bigger fish to fry. What's obvious in retrospect, even if it wasn't at the time, is that the main comparison to what Yoakam was doing was to Elvis Presley, circa '56, the year Dwight was born, the era when television so significantly extended the power of the music through its reach. The year of the swiveling hips.

Yoakam never mentioned Elvis Presley that night, but even before he and the band launched into “Mystery Train,” following his nod to Fogerty and Harris, it was evident that the specter of Elvis hovered as powerfully over Dwight's music—and would through the years to come—as any of the rest of his more often acknowledged influences. From the time that Yoakam became a national breakthrough artist, early Elvis's essence and contradictions would most closely parallel his own: a Southern boy who had arrived out of nowhere to transform the musical landscape to his dictates, the one who combined rock's unbridled sexuality with courtly country manners—as if he were an animal in heat onstage and a gentleman in church off it. The artist who initially had no idea where his career trajectory would take him but who never lost touch with his mythical roots. The guy whose music combined rock and roll, rockabilly, country, blues (through Pete), aggressively sexual and transcendently religious elements into a seamless whole. The cultural rebel who conquered the mainstream. The guy whose hip shake drove the girls wild.

There are times—particularly in the breathy coda to his version of Hank Williams's “My Bucket's Got a Hole in It”—when Yoakam practically sounds like an Elvis impersonator. Within this parallel dimension, Yoakam was Elvis in reverse. Where Elvis had been a rock and roll sensation belatedly embraced in his maturity by the Nashville country establishment, Yoakam was presenting himself from the outset as a country artist, albeit one with more rock and roll sizzle than most contemporary rock.

For those of us across the nation who knew Yoakam only from his recorded music—first the EP, then the LP—the tour following the Roxy date would not only confirm that he and the band could deliver the goods, but that the recordings barely provided a hint of the incendiary quality of Yoakam's music live. It's this spirit that burns through the Roxy recording, and which gave me my baptism by fire when Yoakam made his Chicago debut on that first tour.

It was a steamy June evening when Yoakam took the stage at the Vic, a restored theater that often brought cutting-edge rock acts to this hip neighborhood toward the south of Wrigleyville, but rarely country artists, particularly the type of artist likely to be played on country radio. (It would subsequently feature renegade Texans such as Joe Ely and Billy Joe Shaver as alternative country gained critical mass.)

Seeing Yoakam for the first time was like my first Clash concert. I was blindsided, because Yoakam's studio sessions gave little hint of the mayhem this music was capable of inspiring from the stage. Only in my imagination had I experienced one of those buckets-of-blood joints where the band played from behind chicken wire to protect the musicians in case the crowd got too boisterous and started tossing beer bottles.

The Vic was by no means that sort of club, and there was no danger of bottles being thrown.
But it felt like there was.
There was such wild, crazy energy to the music that it felt like anything could happen. And that Yoakam and his music were encouraging the crowd to let loose, egging them on.

In his 2011 memoir,
See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody
, renowned rocker Bob Mould remembers a similar dynamic when Yoakam opened for Hüsker Dü, Mould's stalwart Minneapolis band that drew a crowd that couldn't have contained a single mainstream country fan: “Our special support act . . . was Dwight Yoakam, who had just signed with Reprise Records, another Warner label. The punks down front were yelling at Dwight to play faster, and he handed the situation very well—by playing faster.”

Well before conquering the country charts, Dwight had developed an unshakable confidence in the power of his music to turn skeptics into converts. I'd gone to the Vic show expecting to enjoy it—hell, I'd loved seeing Ernest Tubb and George Jones when they'd played more predictably suburban country venues before older, mind-your-manners crowds. But this was something entirely different, something unhinged. I left the show drained, spent, soaked with sweat. But cleansed in a way. Baptized, initiated. Knowing that I would never again hear traditional country music in quite the same way.

9

Hillbilly Deluxe

YOAKAM'S RECORD LABEL had been gun-shy about the “hillbilly” reference in what had belatedly become the title song of his debut album. But his instincts had paid such dividends that his sophomore album flaunted the term. Recorded just thirteen months after the debut's release,
Hillbilly Deluxe
represented the work of a successful, confident hitmaker with attitude to burn.

There's a cliché in the music industry that helps explain the dreaded “sophomore slump”: you get your whole life to write your debut album, and then you get six months to scrape together material for your follow-up. Maybe you're rushed into the studio after writing feverishly from the road, trying to force yourself into creative mode for the second while you're still tirelessly hustling the first. Such a career pace can be a little like riding a rodeo bronco, and it's no wonder that so many get bucked off—if not for good, at least suffering some significant bumps and bruises in the process.

By contrast, Yoakam showed no sign of sophomore slump with the release of
Hillbilly Deluxe
in April 1987, following his first extended stint of hard touring as a headliner. Rather than succumbing to any pressure about following the chart-topping success of
Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.
, he seemed even more cocksure.

“We were gold, going on platinum,” remembers Pete of how much things had changed when it was time to record the follow-up. “When we started, Dwight had twenty-one songs that were really good, that we played on the bandstand. So I said to him, ‘Let's do seven of your songs and three covers on every album. So right now you've got three albums' worth of material.' So he had ‘South of Cincinnati,' ‘I Sang Dixie,' and ‘Johnson's Love' that were all slow tempo tunes. And it wasn't that any of them was basically better, but we couldn't put all three on the same record.”

So
Hillbilly Deluxe
wasn't an album of leftovers, songs not considered quite as good as those on the debut. It was a triumph of selection and sequencing from an artist and producer who had already been thinking a couple moves ahead.

It shows an artist in full command of his music, his persona, his identity. Before he'd signed with Reprise, Yoakam had been a novelty, an anomaly, a cowboy hat on the Los Angeles punk circuit. Now he was quickly a mainstream country star, with an audience that had both changed dramatically and expanded exponentially through radio play, live performance, and video exposure. That last element would become as crucial in country music as it had already proven in pop rock, hastening the obsolescence of a wrinkled generation of performers (some of the same ones whose legacies Yoakam's music tapped into) for a younger, more videogenic stable of stars.

A child of television, Yoakam embraced the medium; he had been born to it. During the years before the advent of Garth—whose country concerts would become as filled with special-effects spectacle as a Kiss extravaganza—there were already artists who could employ video as image enhancement and others who considered it a curiosity at best, a burden, a challenge, or even a corruption. On radio, some fans might have considered Dwight Yoakam and, say, Randy Travis, to be kindred, neo-traditionalist spirits. On video, they inhabited different planets.

As in rock, so many of those who emerged in video's wake had little to offer beyond looks. If they looked good, Nashville could make them sound good, at least by the commercial standards of country radio. Yoakam may have looked like a male model on the cover of his second album, head and hip cocked; jeans studded and fashionably torn; hat, coat, and bolo tie completing the requisite ensemble. The chip on his shoulder firmly in place, though invisible. But the music inside confirmed that he was the complete package. This was the work of an artist, producer, and band that knew exactly what they were doing.

There is more of a sense of direction here than on the debut, which had augmented his indie EP with four cuts subsidized by the label and subsequently recorded at Hollywood's Capitol Studios. Two of those four cuts, “Honky-Tonk Man” and “Guitars, Cadillacs” had given Yoakam his breakthrough hits. Those sessions had also marked the first time that Yoakam and Anderson would enlist the services in the studio of a third crucial collaborator, engineer Dusty Wakeman, whose role on subsequent releases would be elevated to associate producer.

Recalls Wakeman, “I met Pete and Dwight for the first time through the first
South of Bakersfield
record [an anthology of SoCal progressive country kindred spirits]. And they liked my work and wanted to record in L.A. with a rock engineer rather than going to Nashville, which was still in the very mellow
Urban Cowboy
era. Now Nashville's a world-class recording center, but back then they kind of had one way of doing stuff, and that didn't include playing loud. And I was making punk records at the time, so I was used to that.”

Not only did Yoakam and band have the confidence of an act that had achieved power rotation on the country airwaves and proven even more powerful on the concert stage, they still had a backlog of material. After all, their club residencies had required them to perform far more music than they could have ever squeezed onto the debut.

“This Drinkin' Will Kill Me,” the kickoff track to the 1981 demos, became the album closer for
Hillbilly Deluxe
. It was as if the song had been held in reserve for the crucial second album that the success of the first would ensure. The smoking “Please, Please Baby” had long been a favorite with Yoakam's punk-rock fans. “Johnson's Love,” which sounds like Yoakam's version of George Jones's classic “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” is yet another song steeped in the Kentucky memories of his coal-mining grandfather, Luther Tibbs.

“ ‘Johnson's Love' and ‘South of Cincinnati' are both about my grandparents, but those songs have nothing to do with them, the facts of their lives,” says Yoakam of these two songs about love's estrangement and endurance. “They were together forever, over fifty years. My grandfather is the central character in ‘Johnson's Love,' but it's not him literally. It's just the tool that allows the writer to move beyond himself to something larger than himself. That's the task at hand. And that's what the best writing can be, using what you know to think beyond yourself.”