by Don McLeese
Thus, the performance found Dwight poised between two worlds—the roots-rock, cowpunk crowd of his recent past and the mainstream country audience of his immediate future. “Honky-Tonk Man” was already a debut hit single and power rotation video (featuring Dwight’s own power rotation, charged by the twang), converting listeners who wouldn’t have known the Blasters from the Beat Farmers into fans of the brash young artist whose old sound was the newest thing in country music.
It would soon be branded “neo-traditionalism” and turned into something of a movement, linking Yoakam with the likes of Steve Earle and Marty Stuart, who also brandished the “hillbilly” tag as a badge of honor. But Earle, despite his base in Nashville, was too ornery to find much favor with mainstream country after his Guitar Town album (released at the same time as Yoakam’s debut), while Stuart never meant anything to rock fans. Only Yoakam made significant impact in both musical worlds.
After the Roxy show, recorded for broadcast on the Live at Gilley’s program (an irony, for Gilley’s was the Texas mega-tonk that had inspired the Urban Cowboy phenomenon to which Yoakam’s music provided an antidote), Dwight Yoakam and the Babylonian Cowboys would hit the road for their debut headlining tour: crossing the country twice, then traversing the Atlantic to introduce themselves to Europe.
All but unknown on the Los Angeles club circuit just a few years earlier while juggling an assortment of odd jobs, Yoakam would be a conquering hero upon his return from this blitzkrieg ten-month tour, with a debut album that had topped the country charts and a live show that gave both country and rock fans something to rave about. He would be leaving clubs the size of the Roxy behind, playing for thousands rather than hundreds.
The Roxy set anticipated this phenomenon, combining the bravura of a band that knew it had captured lightning in a bottle with the excitement of a crowd that recognized it was on the ground floor of something big. Not to make too much of such comparisons, but think of the Beatles in Hamburg. The Ramones at CBGB. Elvis on Louisiana Hayride. Hank Williams . . . wherever Hank Williams flashed the raw intensity of the music that millions would soon come to know through more polished recordings.
In the words of Buck Owens, to whom Dwight would pay homage in his introduction to “Guitars, Cadillacs,” Yoakam and his band had a tiger by the tail.
Almost twenty-five years later, his enthusiasm about that night remains undiminished, as we sit in his offices on Sunset Boulevard, just a short stretch down the hill from the club where he’d recorded his performance, the prime location of his business office and down-home opulence evidence of the success he’d enjoyed over the decades since. And this is when Dwight exclaimed, “When you listen to the Roxy Theatre, that bonus disc with the deluxe edition of Guitars, Cadillacs, that is the moment! We knew! We didn’t know what we knew, but we knew. We knew we were headed somewhere.”
The set starts with Pete’s coiled riffing, generating tension through repetition, sustaining a dynamic that evokes rock’s primal energy. Perhaps, in country ritual, Dwight isn’t even onstage yet, letting the band warm the crowd’s enthusiasm before the headliner’s triumphant entrance. Or maybe he is, for there is no applause signifying an entrance. Instead, the fiddle of Brantley Kearns makes its presence known, marking a dramatic shift from rock club to hoedown, providing the frame for Dwight’s high, lonesome vocals on “Can’t You Hear Me Calling,” the Bill Monroe classic that serves as his set opener.
The shift sets the parameters, establishing the common denominator for the music. For the band to be capable of rocking so hard, with the singer fronting it sounding so country, suggests a refusal to compromise in the manner of so much country rock, which had pulled its punches in a way that sounded hippie-dippy rather than authentically shit kicking or slam dancing. There was something dangerous in the music’s synergy, as if its ability to inject punk-rock energy into honky-tonk tradition—to find common spirit in categories more often considered opposite polarities—was the aural equivalent of splitting the atom.
“We hadn’t been concerned with contemporary country at all, because it was in a pretty ugly state,” says Anderson. “Which seems funny to say now, because I’m not even sure that country exists any more. But we were just concerned with playing the way we played. We’d take off the radio what we liked, but there were enough honky-tonks out here to play what you wanted. And people dug it. So you could spend the whole night playing really good, hard-core stuff.”
Though Pete had never considered himself a country player, Dwight was presenting himself as nothing but—an embodiment of country music returned to its pure, unvarnished state. With the contrast between the two powering the musical synergy, the Roxy set would underscore the crucial contradiction of Yoakam’s career: the music could be so obviously real—undeniably so, in the power that surged back and forth between artist and audience, obliterating the wall between the two—while the performance was so obviously artifice.
Such an (obvious) observation isn’t intended as criticism, though Yoakam’s detractors would level it as such. For what is show business—if not all of popular culture—but artifice that is essential to the art? Some artists gleefully rub the consumer’s nose in the contrivance—David Bowie, Madonna, Lady Gaga, even Bob Dylan—as if the manipulation of identity is the popular artist’s real art.
Others invite the audience to engage in what noted rock critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge once termed “the willing suspension of disbelief.” Whether it’s Hank Williams donning the cowboy hat that was never in fashion in his native Alabama, or Bruce Springsteen celebrating his working-class authenticity long after he became a bicoastal millionaire, or the lionization of the Clash playing revolutionary guerrillas (backed by the promotional muscle of a mighty international media conglomerate), we believe what we want to believe, what the art convinces us to believe. And our beliefs are as fluid as the identities of the artists we come to embrace, for how else could an artist reviled as the ultimate sham (Johnny Cougar) reclaim himself as the embodiment of small-town, pink-houses authenticity (John Mellencamp)?
Whatever everyone involved believed on the night Yoakam gave his triumphant 1986 performance, it’s hard to hear it now without recognizing that Dwight was putting on an act—that this intelligent, articulate man who had been raised in Columbus, Ohio, and attended his hometown Ohio State University was impersonating, a rube, a hayseed. And not just impersonating but exaggerating: “Wuhl, thank you. We’re just tickled you came out tonight. Listen to yuhs carry on.” And, later: “Now they’re getting ugly, yelling stuff . . . acting like you’re at a honky-tonk. On the Sunset Strip!”
So the audience was acting as well? Maybe they were all in on the act. Yoakam was acting as if he was a guy who had somehow fallen off the back of a turnip truck instead of an artist capable of conjuring a musical ethos that had been popular around the time he was born, a music that this audience had never experienced firsthand. And so the audience was acting as if Yoakam was a real honky-tonker—whatever that might mean amid the Hollywood glitz of the mid-1980s—and that the Roxy had transformed itself into a real honky-tonk. For one night at least.
Was there anything real in this? Of course, indisputably, as stated before, the galvanizing power of the music was real, particularly in comparison with the safe, sanitized version of contemporary country that had smothered that original hillbilly spirit. Or the rootless, multi-tracked arena rock that had no more spontaneity than the computers linking the keyboards to the lights. And the connection that Yoakam and band forged with the audience that night was as real as the musical muscle that had forged it. This was hardscrabble, angular artistry, music without fat or filler, music that felt like the real thing to an audience too late to have experienced the real thing. In an era of commercial calculation, there was nothing safe about it.
There’s an apocryphal quote often (if ironically) attributed to Hank Williams: “The key to country music is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
As Richa
rd A. Peterson describes the phenomenon in his brilliant Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (University of Chicago Press, 1997), “Authenticity is not inherent in the object or event that is designated authentic but is a socially agreed-upon construct in which the past is to a degree misremembered.” Which is exactly what Hank Williams would have meant, if he had ever said what he never said.
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 d
ebut 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.