Dwight Yoakam (2 page)

Which raises another question: Why? I'd be tempted to say that the big gulf between Yoakam's achievement and the acknowledgment of it is inexplicable, but the writing of this book suggests, if anything, that there are too many explanations, a confluence of issues that are complex, contradictory, confounding, and often tinged with irony. There are considerations of authenticity, purity, persona, the essence of country music, and the calculations of the music business (a business that some alt-purists treat as if it shouldn't exist) that are easier to raise than to resolve.

So let's preview some issues that we'll more fully explore in the following chapters:

His popularity.
There is a prejudice that if that many people like him, especially that many country music fans, he can't be that good. While the whole roots-trad-alt-country corral is filled with mongrel music, there's no purist quite like an alt-country purist. (Except maybe blues purists—self-appointed Caucasian arbiters of what qualifies as authentic black expression.) And when an artist or a band finds greater popularity and wider renown by stretching their creative wings—be it Dwight Yoakam or Wilco—they face a backlash from those who once championed them, many of those fans (in Yoakam's case) strongly believing that anything that's on mainstream country radio must be dreck. Or at least compromised.

From the very start, Dwight Yoakam has approached the music business as a business—one that he has done his best to outsmart, one in which he has pursued commercial success—and he has never claimed otherwise. Purists see failure to achieve such success as a merit badge of musical integrity and a sign of their own superiority of taste. The fact that Yoakam has moved more units than so many artists of the alt-country movement
combined
confirms to some that he sold his soul to Devil Commerce.

Yet Dwight came of age when some of the best-selling music was also the best: the Beatles, the Byrds, the Stones, Creedence. Even Elvis. And his formative country influences were hitmakers all. Limiting his ambition to cult fandom was never part of the game plan.

His authenticity.
When Yoakam began drawing raves in the Los Angeles alternative press, it was almost as if he were a coal-dust baby, born to country music, as innocent to big-city ways as a latter-day Beverly Hillbilly. And there's no question that Yoakam played the part and reaped the rewards, as the press emphasized his birth in Pike County, Kentucky, while downplaying the facts that his family had moved to Columbus, Ohio, before he turned two and that he'd briefly attended
The
Ohio State University (as Buckeye natives call it) with interests in philosophy and history before heading west to find a career in show business. They also often failed to mention that he'd been just as involved in theater as he had in music in high school, and he earned a role in a Long Beach stage production before hitting the Southern California bar circuit.

Despite his occasionally exaggerated drawl and a name that seemed to combine “yokel” with “hokum,” Yoakam is nobody's rube. He wasn't a backwoods '50s hillbilly but a media-savvy child of the television generation. It's instructive that when I asked Dwight about early musical inspirations, he quickly mentioned the Monkees, the ultimate pop fabrication. Yet watching the Monkees on TV was a far more “authentic” musical experience for a ten-year-old Ohio child in the mid-1960s than listening to Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell.

Purists might denigrate Dwight as a poseur, which is rock-crit French for “phony,” but he's far more authentic as a sum of his influences and inspirations, a reflection of his place and time, than a retro anachronism could ever be. And the growth he showed with albums that would employ strings, horns, and background vocals reflected an artistic expansion that restricting himself to musical anachronism would have denied. The results, on albums that are Yoakam's most creatively ambitious, are timeless in their surrealism, like a honky-tonk dreamscape as directed by David Lynch.

So, why are the 1940s and 1950s inherently more “authentic” than the 1980s and 1990s? And didn't that cowboy hat make old Hank Williams himself something of a poseur?

His performing persona.
He had one. From the start. Even if only a few listeners were in the bar, barely paying attention, Dwight looked sharp, and his band played sharp, unlike so many other acts that took the stage as if they'd just rolled out of bed and had barely bothered to tune. Despite some of the places he played or the crowds who supported him, there was never anything vaguely “cowpunk” about Yoakam except the live-wire intensity of the performance.

As Yoakam become more popular, it became increasingly apparent that female fans liked him a lot. This meant male critics felt compelled to make some reference, usually disparaging, to his skintight jeans and twitching butt, which he turned toward the audience too often for the comfort of some. Though sexuality has long been a driving force in popular music, males tend to find qualities with such appeal to females to be spurious, suspect, all sizzle and no steak. (As if the meatiest steak couldn't also sizzle.)

I learned this lesson instinctively before I knew anything about popular music. My babysitter in the mid-1950s loved Elvis Presley, so I instinctively felt compelled to dislike him. Not because I had a thing for my teenage babysitter, a decade older than me, but I perceived that attraction as some kind of threat. Whatever girls liked, especially that much, was yucky.

Dwight has always stressed the necessity of putting on a show. A flashy one. One that would drive the girls wild. Just like he'd seen Elvis Presley do. On television.

His Pete problem.
No successful musical artist has ever done it on his own. There is always a manager, producer, bandmates—maybe all of the above—who deserve a share of the credit. Yet with Dwight, his crucial collaborations with guitarist-producer-bandleader Pete Anderson present a particular challenge in the credit-where-credit-is-due department.

Was Pete equally responsible for Yoakam's success? Or more responsible, a sonic Svengali pulling the strings? Dwight had the songs, the voice, the look; Pete had the chops and the sound that would showcase the artist at his best in both the studio and onstage, elevating the role of lead guitar as the singer's essential musical foil. Before Pete, Dwight's career lacked momentum, and his music lacked both edge and focus. The creative tension in their partnership sparked some sort of magic that neither has (thus far) been able to replicate on his own.

Nine years older than Yoakam, Anderson definitely served as a musical mentor. But they suffered a bitter split following 2003's
Population: Me
, when the guitarist sued the singer for lost revenues after Dwight decided to recoup some financial losses by touring without a Pete-led band. Neither has discussed the other much in print since then, until now.

Even so, when I started this book, Yoakam's camp would have preferred that I didn't talk to Anderson, fearing that whatever account he might provide would stir controversy, drawing the wrong kind of attention in order to spur sales. I assured them that I had no intention of writing a book exploiting any tension between Dwight and Pete. And I haven't. But Dwight himself made it plain in our interviews just how integral Pete had been to his musical development, and it would have been journalistically irresponsible to try to tell this story without attempting to incorporate Anderson's perspective.

Ultimately, Dwight and Pete, interviewed independently, had little that was negative to say about each other, and both expressed considerable pride in the music they'd made together. They collaborated for a couple of decades, almost half a lifetime in Yoakam's case. Plenty of marriages don't remain as vital for nearly that long. But, as one of Dwight's songs puts it, “Things change.”

So, just as a biography of Elvis Presley must encompass Colonel Tom and a book about John Lennon needs to include Paul McCartney (talk about your bitter splits!), this is a book about Dwight Yoakam—how his music originated, how it has progressed, what it has accomplished. And it's about a legacy that doesn't stop here, for the artist has too many ideas and too much ambition to rest on his laurels for long. Like a lot of those who follow Yoakam—critics and fans alike—I eagerly await the next chapter.

1

How Far Is Heaven?

IT ISN'T UNTIL AN HOUR into what was promised to be an interview but instead became a monologue—wide-ranging, stream of consciousness, fascinating and frustrating in equal measure—that Dwight Yoakam leaves the conference room of his business office and returns with an acoustic guitar. One that badly needs tuning. And at this point our interchange morphs into something like one of those
Behind the Music
specials.

The setting: the headquarters of Etc., Etc., the nerve center of Dwight's career, located on the fourth floor of the Sunset Boulevard building of the Directors Guild of America. The rectangular table with the marble top flanked by office chairs could pass as the meeting place of any board of directors. Yet the gold and platinum records and the movie posters covering the walls attest to the nature of this particular business—and suggest that, for Dwight Yoakam, business has been good.

The panoramic views of Sunset Boulevard below and the Hollywood Hills above reflect the sense of privilege that success bestows. The vista from a different angle extends all the way downtown, when you can see through the smog. By the window is a telescope through which perhaps Yoakam can view Venus or Mars on a clear night. Nearby are a globe and the
National Geographic Atlas of the World
.

No, from here you can't see Pike County, Kentucky, the mining region that the Yoakam family continued to call home even after moving north to Columbus, Ohio, when Dwight was two. But the real question is whether Dwight could somehow have foreseen all this back then. Could he have envisioned his career in West Hollywood, even some approximation of this office, when he decided to make music his life while still living in Columbus?

Attesting to an artistic vision that extends beyond country traditionalism, or even music, a number of coffee-table-sized art books are stacked in the conference room: Dalí, da Vinci, Warhol. And beneath one of the two speakers, a skull.
Alas, poor Yorick!
Amid the immortality of art and the infinity of the universe, here's a reminder of the end that awaits us all.

The “Etc., Etc.” on the outside door of these offices provides an oblique reminder of Yoakam's early recording days, when he released an indie EP in 1985 titled
Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.
He quickly became a national country chart topper after Warner Bros./Reprise signed the roadhouse renegade and had him expand the disc into an album with the same title and added a colorized version of the original black-and-white cover. His first full-length release with national distribution turned Yoakam into an overnight sensation, and it had only taken him a decade or so.

The funny thing about the EP and the title is that it wasn't until the expansion into the LP that Yoakam was inspired to write a song called “Guitars, Cadillacs,” with “and hillbilly music” replacing the etceteras. (In other words, the EP's title preceded the LP's title song.) His record company initially balked, fearing that the Kentucky-born artist's evocation of what the label considered trailer trash was like waving a rebel flag at the possibility of crossover mainstream success.

But Yoakam stood his ground and “hillbilly music” remained his categorical description of choice (and “crossover” an epithet). Yet the “Etc., Etc.” was more than a placeholder in the EP's title. It suggests the inner workings of a mind that sees connections everywhere, generating possibilities without boundaries, where “and so on, and so on” is the sort of transition that can leap chronology and linear logic as well as subject matter.

Start talking with Yoakam about seminal inspirations and you're as likely to hear him wax rhapsodic about the Monkees and the continental shift of television from New York to Los Angeles, thus blazing the trail for his eventual pilgrimage, as you are about the Stonewall Jackson and Johnny Horton influences that made their way from his parents' albums from the Columbia Record Club into his own music.

Hours later, ask him about the breakthrough stage of his musical development in Los Angeles, when he was embraced by the roots-punk crowd before establishing a fan base in contemporary country. Then sit back and roll tape:

“Oh, yeah, that was our crowd. We'd moved out of the brilliance of the '60s, and by then we were into the
Tusk
world of Fleetwood Mac, and nobody knew where it was going. It was over under sideways down.

“We were too country for rock and roll and too rock for Nashville. Pete [Anderson, Yoakam's longtime producer, guitarist, and bandleader] and I had gotten fired from a lot of places, because we wouldn't play that
Urban Cowboy
cover stuff. I used to be on the phone seven hours a day. I booked us. And I had records in my El Camino—the EP—and I'd be driving 'em all over town.

“I was the generation that had given us punk. If I'd gone to New York in '75, '76, it would have been CBGB. What we had was the emotion. When we'd do “Please, Please Baby,” the affinity they felt for us at the Whisky a Go Go was like,
holy shit
. They had a lot of rockabilly out here. When I first got here I saw Robert Gordon at the Whisky a Go Go, and he had Link Wray with him. 1978. And Billy Zoom's rockabilly band opened for him. And the Blasters were really rockabilly in a sense. We had the greatest affinity with the Blasters and Los Lobos. Again, guys who were more professional in their execution than Rank and File or Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

“But then Del Fuegos was an interesting band. The Plugz became Del Fuegos when the cowpunk thing started happening. Southern California has always been more of a free-association environment. The Byrds happening alongside Arthur Lee and Love. Go from Paladin and Westerns on television.