Dwight Yoakam (4 page)

So there you have it. The promise of a better life up north is an illusion. Any nostalgia for a better life down south would be a lie. What's real is the character of the people forged by such tough circumstances, the warmth engendered by families who have only each other as respite from the cold, hard facts of life. And even if these words have been written and sung by a city kid, every last one of them rings true, the hillbilly legacy he claims for himself a birthright, as the grandson of a coal miner—his mother's father, Luther Tibbs—whose life would influence much of his music.

Pikeville without Columbus might not have produced the music of Dwight Yoakam; Columbus without Pikeville
never
would have. Except as the home of Ohio State—which vies with the University of Texas at Austin as the country's largest university, with both accommodating some fifty thousand students—Columbus lacks much in the way of urban identity, not to mention artistic imprint. Few know that in a state with more than its share of sizable cities—Dayton, Toledo, Akron, Canton, and so on—that Columbus is the largest, with a population of 770,000, greater than the populations of Cleveland and Cincinnati combined (if we disregard the surrounding metro areas). Yet those two are major league cities, where Columbus is Big Ten, state fair, state capital, where Wendy's was founded. It's almost smack dab in the middle of a state that is Rust Belt to the north, bluegrass to the south.

“Quick, what do you think about when you hear the words ‘Columbus, Ohio'?” begins a
New York Times
story from July 30, 2010, on the city's indistinct image. “That's the problem that civic leaders here hope to solve.” The article proceeds to mention various slogans the city has attempted to promote—“Discover Columbus” and “Surprise, It's Columbus,” before the current “There's No Better Place”—and then concludes with a native's sardonic suggestion: “Columbus, We Are So Not Ohio.” It also quotes the local head of tourism: “Columbus has not had a bad image. It has just had no image.”

Little wonder, then, that when Dwight Yoakam established a strong image as an artist, first in Los Angeles and soon in the wider world of country music, it was stamped by a tiny hamlet of Kentucky, which he'd left as a toddler but returned to often, rather than by the largest city in Ohio, where he was raised and schooled, where he was a member of the school drama club and a drummer in the concert band.

“I had a real Rogers snare because I'd started playing in school, where you could be part of instrumental music,” Yoakam remembers. “For me, it had to be either guitar or drums because that was the rock and roll world. Those were the only instruments I was interested in. And school didn't encourage guitar slinging.
No siree
! You could play that clarinet, but you don't see a whole lot of clarinet on
The Ed Sullivan Show
or
Hullabaloo
.”

Dwight remembers himself in Ohio as someone who never quite fit. “In Columbus, believe me, they looked at me like I was a little odd,” he says. “I was queer, in that sense. I was an odd bird.” But what might have been considered odd was the part of Dwight that he didn't necessarily show at school. Some of it was the fundamentalist Christianity that the family had brought with them from Kentucky, their worship at the Church of Christ in Columbus where other Southern transplants congregated.

Music at the church was unadorned with instrumentation, and the purity of that music (as well as some of the melodic progressions) stayed with Dwight. He also mingled at church with plenty of students from Ohio State, even grad students, who shared his interest in music and could show him a trick or two on guitar, which he'd started trying to play while still in grade school. When he made his first tentative foray into Nashville after graduating from high school, connections from church provided him with what he calls a “safe landing.”

Yet the musical influence of his religion started even earlier and ran deeper: “My family read the Bible constantly, and it gave me the ear for rhyming schemes,” he explained. “The King James Version is musical. So I've got that from three or four years old, hearing that read aloud.” (It also influenced his personal habits; even after he became the master of the drinking song and made his living in honky-tonks, he never touched a drop of alcohol, and never indulged in drugs.)

There was plenty of secular influence as well. His parents had a lot of country and western music around the house, much of it acquired from the Columbia Record Club, then ubiquitous with its offers of a dozen albums for a penny (with the commitment of buying a dozen more at list price with exorbitant shipping and handling charges, and if you didn't remember to return the card every month, you'd get records you had no interest in owning).

Johnny Horton's Greatest Hits
was one of the most played (it was on Columbia, and the record club tended to favor releases on its own label). It was one that my family got from the Columbia Record Club as well, and which I remember playing to death, having no idea that Horton was considered to be in a different musical category than any of the other hits in power rotation on Top 40 radio. “North to Alaska,” “Sink the Bismarck,” and “The Battle of New Orleans” were hugely popular story songs, just like Marty Robbins's “El Paso,” another AM hit that I never knew was considered country.

I paid less attention to the earlier stuff on the album, such as “Honky-Tonk Man,” a breakthrough hit for Horton in 1956 that would become Yoakam's first signature tune, attracting fans that had never heard the original. The year it climbed the charts for Horton was the year that Yoakam was born.

Plenty of other music made a strong impression on him: “One of my earliest memories is my mother and aunt sitting on the sofa and singing at the phonograph player,” he says. “We didn't sing
with
it. We sang
at
it. And the song was Hank Locklin's ‘Send Me the Pillow You Dream On.' And just
bellerin'
it to the heavens!”

If music could make you feel the way you wouldn't otherwise, it could also help you say what you couldn't otherwise: “I was listening to everything on the radio. But I would listen alone to Stonewall Jackson albums that my parents had,” he continues. “We had this one around the house that my dad bought as this anniversary present for my mom, with this song ‘Don't Be Angry' as a love note to her. It was sweet. They broke up some years ago, but I still remember this as a comment on what music is to people in their lives. He was a rough, tough guy, but [the lyric] ‘Don't be angry with me darling' let him say something to my mother that he was incapable of saying on his own.”

So much more attention has been paid to the place Dwight comes from (or at least the place where his music has its strongest roots) than the times that shaped his life, but his experiences as a child of the 1950s and '60s left an artistic imprint every bit as strong as the geographical one. On Top 40 radio, you could hear Buck Owens as well as the Beatles, Stax/Volt records, and garage-band psychedelia. Those genres and more would find their way into Yoakam's own music—where the honky-tonk meets the garage band meets the countrypolitan polish—representing a natural outgrowth of his formative listening experiences.

Radio was a powerful influence on Yoakam and on practically every American music fan of his (and my) generation, but television made an impression that was every bit as strong, possibly even more so where his performing persona is concerned. He was born into the television era and came of age with the explosion of color. Television made the Monkees a more powerful—or at least more intimate—influence on Yoakam than the Beatles. The Beatles were just a little bit before his time, while the Monkees arrived when he was just the right age.

Let's let Dwight riff a little: “I was a Monkees kid. For a ten-year-old like myself, the Monkees were a cultural access point that the Beatles weren't. I was an oldest kid, teaching myself, and the Beatles were a little bit beyond my grasp. Television delivers the Monkees to me in a different way;
A Hard Day's Night
was not on TV in 1965. And I was not old enough at eight to take myself to the movies. I could see them on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, but that was too godlike. The Monkees, on the other hand, came inside my living room, and there was a familiarity that allowed me to really understand what this new thing was.

“I had the first two Monkees albums, and I couldn't have gotten a better education, retrospectively, in songwriting, when you think about it, than listening to Neil Diamond, Carole King, Boyce and Hart compositions. The world told in two-and-a-half to three minutes. And Mike Nesmith brought that Texan's aesthetic, and he was an accomplished songwriter. Country rock really owes a debt to Mike Nesmith for writing ‘Different Drum,' the first hit by Linda Ronstadt when she was with the Stone Poneys. So listening to that at ten or eleven years old, with this half-baked set of drums, I'd literally play along.

“Mike later became a friend of mine, introduced to me by my dear friend Dennis Hopper,” he continues. “Mike told me one time, he was out here on a motorcycle trip with his girlfriend in northern California, and he sees a guy with a bunch of kids and says, ‘I think that's Mel Gibson.' And Mel looked around and said, ‘I know you.
Oh my God, you're a Monkee.
' And that was, like, thirty years later.”

So, by the standards of Columbus kids in the 1960s, Dwight's cultural experiences were pretty much in the mainstream. Maybe he heard a little more Stonewall Jackson at home than some of the others, and practiced a more fundamentalist religion than most, but he listened to the same radio, watched the same TV. And these experiences became as authentically his as his family's Kentucky legacy and their weekend drives south down Route 23.

Just look at Yoakam onstage or on video. Consider the way he wears his cowboy hat, twitches his leg, cradles and thrusts his guitar. He didn't get any of that from Kentucky. Or Ohio. Or even from the radio. He got it all from television, where gunslingers and guitar slingers all but merged in his mind into a single heroic image.

“I was influenced by every guitar slinger I ever saw on television,” he agrees. “I was born in 1956, and TV kind of exploded in the late '50s, when it was firing on all eight cylinders. From
Cheyenne
to
Sugarfoot
to
Have Gun, Will Travel
to
The Rifleman
. And TV had moved to the West Coast and had almost become an exclusive province of Hollywood. TV moves from that theatrical-like soundstage to the film-like execution of serialized television.

“So my life, oddly, because of the medium of television, was profoundly impacted and influenced to always come [to Los Angeles]. By the look, the swagger, the explosion of the cowboy TV series, this gunslinger imagery that dovetails on any given weekend night with Ed Sullivan and any other guitar slinger performances. I have a picture from when I was eighteen months old with this big old guitar and trying to cock my leg to impersonate what I saw on TV.”

When he made the big leap in high school from watching music to performing it, impersonation rather than self-expression was the impetus. Except for his drumming in the concert band, his major artistic pursuit was theater. He'd played Charlie in
Flowers for Algernon
and James in
The Miracle Worker
as a student at Northland High School in Columbus (class of '74).

He'd received musical encouragement from his theater teacher, and he'd hosted the school's variety show, where making music was like playing dress-up. In the wake of Sha Na Na, he had a '50s-style rockabilly band, Dwight and the Greasers, whose debut at school established the course his life would take. “That was what I'd been living to do,” he remembers. “At sixteen, I realized I'd been waiting the first fifteen years of my life for this band, this moment, this stage. Three hundred and fifty non-related people and the place went a little berserk.
The girls did!
And I did become fascinated with what possibilities were there for me if I had the necessary guidance and focus.”

The guidance and focus would require a move to the West Coast, but the drive was already there.

3

South of Cincinnati, West of Columbus

WHEN DWIGHT YOAKAM LAUNCHED his recording career and quickly won fans in both the country mainstream and the alternative fringes, his music sounded as if it had been forged in the coal mining country of Kentucky. But it was really in Southern California where Yoakam developed his signature style and found his destiny. He was a musical product of Los Angeles, defined by how different he was from all the other musical products of Los Angeles, which itself was another world from the assembly-line production of Nashville.

If this were a different sort of biography, one encompassing the minutiae of the life rather than focusing on the progression of the music, we'd have to devote a chapter or more to Nashville, where Dwight made his first stab at a musical career after a brief stint at Ohio State in his hometown of Columbus convinced him that higher education was not for him. His house had never been filled with books, though Dwight's inquisitive mind found kindred spirits among the grad students from the near South who attended their church, and his vague plans to pursue a degree in history or philosophy suggested some direction after his graduation from Northland High School in 1974. To what goal?

“Oh, man I had no idea,” admits Yoakam, whose restless spirit led him to quickly abandon his studies. So he decided to seek musical fame and fortune in Nashville. Why Nashville? Because it was close, a short day's drive from Columbus, less than four hundred miles. (A pudgy, Indiana high school dropout named John Hiatt had decided to relocate to Nashville for pretty much the same reason. It seemed a whole lot easier and less extreme for a Midwest kid than trying to tackle New York or L.A.) Plus, Dwight had what he called a “landing spot” in Nashville—friends from his church had family there.