Dwight Yoakam (5 page)

Otherwise, he had no more of a sense of destiny than most other high school grads that had given college a try before deciding that since they no longer
had
to go to school they didn't want to. Only in retrospect did the sojourn to Nashville become symbolic in the Dwight Yoakam mythos, some saying that he had somehow been spurned there so he had to find somewhere else where his music would receive its proper embrace.

Nashville didn't reject Yoakam. Nashville didn't even notice him. It offered him a job as an extra at Opryland, the theme park surrounding the suburban relocation of the Grand Ole Opry from the venerable Ryman Auditorium. (Opryland has since become a shopping mall, and, yes, there's a metaphor here.) He was an eighteen-year-old kid with no band, no connections, no songs—well, a few formative efforts, but Yoakam wouldn't really begin to mine the musical possibilities of Kentucky and establish a hillbilly persona to fit until his subsequent move two thousand miles west would give him greater perspective on what he'd left behind and what he could make from it.

Yoakam's music most certainly would have turned out differently if he'd found an enthusiastic reception in Nashville, with its recording industry more interested in polishing brand new urban cowboys than reincarnating the raw-edged, age-old music of the honky-tonk man. And his life could have turned out very differently had he remained at Ohio State, where he would have been one of the many who had once dabbled in music and theater but had left them behind in high school.

But neither Nashville nor Ohio State had panned out, so when a musician friend in Columbus with a car urged Dwight to accompany him on a cross-country joyride to Los Angeles in 1977, Yoakam didn't need a whole lot of convincing. After his brief anonymity in Nashville, he continued to play music in Ohio, singing the songs of Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, things that were closer in spirit to what would become neo-rockabilly than contemporary country.

Oddly enough, one of the hits that had convinced him that he had something special to offer was “Rock On” by David Essex, where the hitch in the voice of the Brit, almost a hiccup, was something akin to the choke you'd hear in the vocals of the Appalachian bluegrass Dwight had heard in Kentucky. What seemed exotic to the rock fans in Columbus sounded familiar to him.

Even greater validation came from the popular dominance of the roots-oriented Creedence Clearwater Revival, a band that bridged FM album acceptance and AM single hits and had become one of the most consistently successful commercial acts of the 1970s. Creedence gave Dwight some hope that he could do what they had done; mainstream country simply wasn't on his radar at the time. The hard-edged country music he'd loved was no longer in vogue in Nashville or on the airwaves. “Lookin' Out My Back Door” was a Creedence hit, and it was more country (“listenin' to Buck Owens”) than country.

“I was really inspired by Creedence Clearwater Revival illustrating that country-hyphen-rock/pop could be pertinent for a young audience,” explains Yoakam. “The Byrds were folk rock, but country rock is John Fogerty. 'Cause you can't get any harder rockin', and in some places more country, than Creedence—a real hybrid that was a commercial success.”

But Creedence came from the Bay Area, a long way from the bayou country that so much of its music conjured. Whatever rootsy authenticity the band's music evoked was a geographical fantasy, an illusion—an art. And Dwight was heading for L.A., “swimming pools, movie stars,” as the theme from
The Beverly Hillbillies
had put it. Despite the tinsel and glitz of a city where all of the cowboys were rhinestone ones—though Yoakam, of course, was no more of a cowboy than any of them—there was another beacon of inspiration that shone as brightly as Creedence.

“That first Emmylou Harris album is what drew me out here,” he says of his move to L.A. “My junior and senior year in high school, I was in love with both Linda [Ronstadt] and Emmylou. And so, when my buddy said, ‘Man, you've got to come to L.A.,' I said, ‘Yeah, I know, Emmylou Harris is out there. There's a scene somewhere out there that I can tap into.' ”

At least there had been. And maybe there would be, but it took another four years of scuffling—working here on a loading dock, there as a short-order cook—and playing the bars in the Valley before Dwight recorded his first demo tape and started to receive higher profile gigs at the venerable Palomino and the hipper Club Lingerie. And then it took
another
three years after that demo for Dwight to release
Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.
as his debut EP, and it was a couple years after that when his 1986 major-label album of the same name was released, adding four cuts (including the title track) to the six songs previously issued on the EP.

So Dwight may have come out of nowhere, as far as the world of music was concerned, and country music in particular, but it had been almost ten years since he had graduated from high school, and he was on the cusp of thirty by the time he became an overnight sensation. In retrospect, such success appears preordained, but at the time it seemed anything but. His career path required the patience and perseverance of an artist who had more of the latter than the former.

His friend with the car who drove him out left a month later. Before moving to Hollywood, to an apartment in the Hills that friends remember as slightly larger than a closet, slightly smaller than a garage, he was working in nearby Long Beach. There he made his initial foray into show business—not in music but in theater, with a role in a local production of
Heaven Can Wait
.

Dave Alvin says he likely ran into Dwight when they were both employed as short-order cooks in Long Beach, though it would be a couple of years before their more significant encounter at the Palomino. By then, the lead guitarist and songwriter of the Blasters was in a position to help unknown artists who impressed him, introducing them to the band's roots-rocking fans with opening slots. Dwight would later repay the favor by recording Alvin's “Long White Cadillac,” introducing the song's narrative of the last night of Hank Williams's life to country radio.

Given the seminal influence of Creedence on Yoakam's music, it's fitting that he would find musical kinship with Alvin, who mined a seam of what would subsequently become known as “Americana” for riches similar to that in the songs of John Fogerty. On the album release of
Guitars, Cadillacs
, Yoakam offered special thanks to Alvin and the Blasters, as part of a select few “who believed when nobody else cared.”

“I later discovered that we'd both been cooks in Long Beach in the late '70s, worked half a mile away from each other,” remembers Alvin with a laugh. “I was a cook in a Middle Eastern restaurant that was predominantly vegetarian. And Dwight was a cook at a place called Hamburger Henry's.

“I'd go there and get a burger after cooking vegetarian for eight hours. And Dwight didn't get famous
only
for doing drinking songs, but he did quite a few. So it's kind of ironic, this vegetarian cooking hamburgers, who had never had a hamburger in his life, and singing drinking songs, and he'd never had a drink. And singing them pretty persuasively.”

The years between driving to Los Angeles in 1977 and cutting his first demo in 1981 were plainly productive ones for Yoakam in terms of writing. All of the ten songs that Yoakam would cut for that demo would subsequently be re-recorded for his first three albums, except for “Please Daddy,” which he'd written in high school, once again using his imagination. It's a song sung from the perspective of a young daughter who is trying to console her father (and likely herself) that things will be all right after he and her mother had split up.

To listen to those revelatory demo recordings, first issued on the four-disc, 2002 retrospective
Reprise Please Baby: The Warner Bros. Years
, you'd never suspect that “Please Daddy” would be the only track he wouldn't re-record for release because it's as good as many of them. Others more directly reflected his own experience, as he explains of “You're the One,” a highlight ballad of the demo but not included on a Yoakam album until his third. “I'd written that in 1978 about this girl I'd grown up with, a beautiful preacher's daughter who broke my heart,” he remembers. “She went to the prom with me. Though, again, it goes well beyond the literal. I was a senior in high school, I was crushed, and I got over it.”

Living in Southern California gave Yoakam a fresh perspective on what he'd left behind, offering even more of a contrast than he'd experienced between Columbus and Kentucky. Raised in the former, he recognized that the latter provided the inspiration that would distinguish him from the run of the country-rock mill. Not necessarily his own experiences, or even those of his immediate family, but songs in which he could use that legacy for some imaginative reshaping. “Miner's Prayer” is two generations and a hundred miles from Yoakam's upbringing; “South of Cincinnati,” a track from the
Guitars, Cadillacs
EP and LP that shows a short story's command of detail, uses the marriage of his grandparents, together more than fifty years, to explore the alternate reality of a loving couple separated by alcohol and pride.

One of the ironies of Yoakam's musical progression in California, when he began to write almost exclusively of Kentucky and cast himself as a pilgrim from the bluegrass backwoods, is that in urban Columbus he'd distinguished himself by his ability to channel the country-rock that had been emerging from Southern California. And that was the music he considered his strength when he made the move west.

“When I got out here, I would do ‘Carmelita,' Linda Ronstadt's version,” he said of the song he would later cover in a style closer to Warren Zevon's original. “I would do the Eagles. I was always country rock, because my voice, my family, was country. So at the moment that country rock was starting to inundate AM radio, I could play the Eagles, I could sing it. That was me.”

Yet it was his writing that would allow Yoakam to discover who he really was, or at least develop a persona that would prove compelling to the indie, roots-rocking punk crowd even before he plunged into the country mainstream. Even his Li'l Abner-ish name seemed to exude authenticity, making him sound a little like the bumpkin he never was or would be. You couldn't capitalize on a name like that by continuing to sing Eagles covers.

“With writing, I controlled my own destiny,” Dwight says. “ ‘I'll Be Gone' made me realize I could do it in my own way. And ‘It Won't Hurt' was written about the same time.”

“It won't hurt when I fall down from this bar stool,” sings Yoakam, strumming his acoustic guitar, as we sit in his office. “And it won't hurt when I stumble in the street. It won't hurt 'cause this whiskey eases misery, but even whiskey cannot ease your hurting me.”

This was the second cut on the demo tape, following “This Drinkin' Will Kill Me.” Another highlight from the demo that would wait until his third album for release, “I Sang Dixie,” recounts the story of a man from the South who had died “on this damned old L.A. street,” after “the bottle had robbed him of all his rebel pride.”

In those early L.A. days, he was billing his band as Dwight Yoakam and Kentucky Bourbon. Yet, as Dwight would subsequently tell any interviewer who bothered to ask, he had never touched a drop of alcohol and likely never would. First, because his fundamentalist religion prohibited it. Second, he had seen what it could do, during years of playing at bars for drunks and in close relationships with those who suffered from the disease of alcoholism.

“I wasn't raised on it and had never witnessed alcoholism at close range until I knew a guy named Richard Christopher,” says Dwight. “He was quite a piece of work, a Runyonesque character. He was six-foot-six, and he was originally from Cleveland, Ohio. He developed coupon books to sell to people. He had a master's degree from Ohio State and ended up being drafted into the Korean War.

“He was just this carny guy. I would listen to him tell these war stories. And he was also a severe alcoholic. But functional. He managed this apartment complex and was also wheeling and dealing with trading furniture, stuff like that. He walked with a cane and looked like Ichabod Crane. His drink of choice was vodka with prune juice or anything else. I'd stop by and listen to Dick Christopher ramble on a little bit. And I wrote ‘It Won't Hurt' about him.”

So, the teetotaler began to specialize in drinking songs, a venerable tradition of honky-tonk music, but one that had fallen from fashion in the sanitized country music of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The airwaves were no longer filled with the likes of neo-honky-tonker Gary Stewart, who lived the life of which he sang, and who had enjoyed considerable country success early in the 1970s with breakthrough hits including “Drinkin' Thing” and “She's Acting Single (I'm Drinkin' Doubles).” As country was starting to veer toward soft rock, there wasn't as much emphasis on hard liquor.

Yoakam's subject matter and sound distinguished him as a honky-tonk throwback, and he had no problem reconciling such material and the bars where he performed it with the religion in which he was raised.

“I didn't feel that my salvation or destiny was imperiled by that,” he says. “But I'd also witnessed enough drinking and drugging in the early '70s, which led to the debauchery of the late '70s, Studio 54 and all that, where there couldn't have been a more depraved world to step into. I'd been playing this place called the Corral [where Yoakam and Kentucky Bourbon had become the house band] and watching people stumbling through it, getting through the rest of that night, and that's what that song is about. You don't have to live it to write it.”

But if you were going to sing it, you had to be able to sell it, to convince listeners of your sincerity, your authenticity, of your ability to know and share what they were going through because you had been there too. A cynic might claim that Yoakam was to honky-tonk what the Monkees were to a rock band. But Yoakam recognized how much craft, spirit, and inspiration had gone into those Monkees' hits. And after decades of playing classic country records and years of playing bars, Yoakam knew how honky-tonk authenticity sounded. Even if the songs he wrote weren't literally true to his experience, he made them ring true. Where hillbilly music is concerned, Dwight's a believer.