Dwight Yoakam

by Don McLeese

  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.”

  As for the sense of direction that distinguishes album two from its predecessor, its signpost comes with its concluding acknowledgment on the liner credits: “VERY SPECIAL THANKS: to Buck Owens for all his records that still serve as an inspiration for the California honky-tonk sound.” Buck had been conspicuously absent from the list of country recordings that Yoakam remembered hearing in his Ohio boyhood from his parents’ collection. (Like Merle Haggard, he was a Capitol recording artist, so not as likely to be featured among the Columbia Record Club offerings as Johnny Horton, Stonewall Jackson, or Marty Robbins.)

  Neither the material nor the arrangements on Yoakam’s 1981 demo betrayed much influence of Buck’s Bakersfield sound. Yet like all fans who came of musical age in the 1960s, Dwight was familiar with Buck’s music through the Top 40 success of “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail” and through the Beatles’ cover of his “Act Naturally.” He had acknowledged Buck at the Roxy performance as an influence among many. And, perhaps most crucially, his teaming with Pete Anderson had found its template in Owens’s long-standing musical association with guitarist Don Rich.

  Just as Buck’s diehard fans never spoke of his artistry without celebrating the crucial contributions of guitarist Rich, so had Anderson established himself as Yoakam’s essential foil, with the assertive voice of his guitar in frequent call-and-response duet with Dwight’s lead vocal. Anderson was not only the architect of Yoakam’s arrangements, his guitar was the lead element within them.

  Whatever Owens’s influence had been implicit in Yoakam’s music became explicit with the kickoff track to Hillbilly Deluxe. “Little Ways,” one of four of the ten tracks on the album that would become a Top 10 country hit, is distinctly an homage to Buck, a signature combination of the drawn-out phrasing and hard-twanging guitar that had distinguished so many of his hits. With the album’s dedication and kickoff track, Yoakam seemed to be connecting himself to Owens as directly as Asleep at the Wheel had to Bob Wills or early Aerosmith had to the Rolling Stones. “Little Ways” was a new number written by Dwight, but it was unmistakably a Buck Owens song. After this, it would be harder to think of Yoakam as anything other than an Owens acolyte.

  “Most of the album was what the band did live, but they were trying to capture a sound in the studio, that Bakersfield sound, an updated version,” says Wakeman. “Because Buck and the Buckaroos had played the Fillmore and stuff like that. When they played live, they played hard and loud. They were rockin’.”

  For Dave Alvin, Yoakam’s earliest influential fan, those two albums are the ones that fulfill the promise he had seen in Dwight the first time he heard him at the Palomino: “To me, those are the two impact albums. He walked up to the plate and hit a couple of home runs. And then he may have hit some triples and doubles, and a couple home runs after that, but those are the first two—the rookie goes up and bats it out of the ballpark. And part of the charm of Dwight in the early days was the band. Those two records sounded like a band playing band music. It was a motherfucker band. And that’s hard to keep up over the course of a career.”

  Whatever calculation went into Yoakam’s success distinguished him from Alvin’s Blasters and most of their brethren on the roots-rock circuit that had given Dwight his first audience. It was a mark of integrity in that crowd not to care too much—about your presentation, about your commercial prospects, about anything more than the rush of the night’s performance, getting yourself and your audience off. Dwight had his eyes on the bigger picture. He knew where he was going and how he was going to get there.

  “Everything that I wasn’t, he was,” says Alvin. “He was a good-looking guy, he was smart about his career. I’m a meat-eating, cigarette-smoking drinker. And I don’t plan things. People I’ve known who become big stars tend to have five-year plans. Even before Dwight signed to Warner, when we’d be out drinking—I’d drink and Dwight would get drunk [on the intoxication of his own projected future, whi
le leaving the alcohol to Alvin]—he would tell me what songs were gonna be on his second album. And he was pretty close to right. Where me, I don’t even know what songs are gonna be on the album I’m in the middle of working on. So he was always driven like that, and people who are that driven either fail miserably or succeed very well.”

  Failing miserably was never an option for Yoakam. Now that he’d captured the attention of mainstream country without losing his foothold in the cutting-edge, roots-rocking camp, Yoakam delivered a follow-up that achieved a perfect balance—between traditional and original material, between pensive balladry and frenzied rockers, between the dynamism of the live performance and the subtleties that distinguished Yoakam as a vocalist (and continued to provide the essential tension between his laconic understatement and the live-wire charge of Anderson’s guitar).

  The first single provided a double-barreled jolt, with a cover of Elvis Presley’s “Little Sister” backed with Yoakam’s own “This Drinkin’ Will Kill Me.” For those who would peg Yoakam as a country traditionalist, a honky-tonk anachronism, the Elvis connection not only reinforced the smoldering sexuality Yoakam exuded on the cover of Hillbilly Deluxe, it reminded us that Elvis had come to fame as the original “hillbilly cat,” well before he was crowned the King of Rock and Roll.

  Presley would remain a reference point throughout Yoakam’s career, but another cover proved every bit as prophetic, as Yoakam and Anderson revived Lefty Frizzell’s “Always Late with Your Kisses,” which found the arrangement pushing the countrypolitan envelope toward the extreme of classic kitsch. The highlight of the arrangement has Yoakam, Anderson, and Wakeman crooning the “always late” background chorus like modern day Jordanaires. Whatever the punk crowd would have thought of it, these guys were obviously having some fun in the studio and refusing to take themselves too seriously. If hard-core honky-tonk was fastball music, high and hard, up and in, this arrangement threw the audience a roundhouse curve. It wouldn’t be the last time.

  For all of Yoakam’s uncompromising instincts, he wasn’t a purist, one of those self-righteous preservationists who embalm in the name of revival. If there be complexities and contradictions between the hardest of hard twang and corniest of kitsch corn, well, let them be. You couldn’t come of age in the era of television and AM radio without being something of an eclectic, a magpie.

  I met Yoakam for the first time in the wake of Hillbilly Deluxe, and the encounter left me surprised, delighted, and confounded. Off stage, he felt little need to play the part, look the part, act the part. When we convened for an interview in the lobby café of Chicago’s very posh and un-honky-tonkish Ritz-Carlton Hotel, I had to look twice when he came down from his room to make sure I recognized him. Sure, the jeans were tight, but tight jeans were the fashion of a generation, not a stage costume.

  It was the ball cap that threw me, emblazoned with the logo of the Houston Colt .45s, who had long since changed their name to the Astros. (Dwight later explained that he favored the cap not only because it was more Old West than New Frontier, but because 45 evoked r.p.m., those singles with the big holes.)

  I’d never even seen a picture of Dwight without some sort of cowboy hat, which reinforced his image as the lean, laconic cowboy—the strong, silent type. So I was hardly prepared for this chatterbox who would bend my ear for more than two hours, until we had exhausted both the patience of our waitress and what I’d thought would be an oversupply of blank tape. He had a lot to say about honky-tonk and hillbilly music (which he loved with a passion) and about Nashville (which he treated with suspicion), but he also had plenty to say about popular culture and literature and baseball and everything else under the sun.

  You’d ask him a question and then you’d listen to the monologue unfold, unwind, in thinking-out-loud fashion that was usually incisive, often intriguing, given to flights of creative fancy. Any interviewer knows to save the tough questions for last (because if the first question is too challenging, it may well be the last), so by the end of the interview we’d established such a rapport—him talking, me listening—that I hit him with it: would he take off his cap? Could I see what he was hiding under there?

  Not that I really cared about the state of his locks (or lack thereof), but his response would be indicative of how closely he guarded his image. He smiled and tipped it without hesitation. Yes, Dwight Yoakam had a thinning, receding hairline that might have undermined his image as a sex symbol, though he was far from going bald. But the real revelation was that he had no problem showing a reporter who’d been a stranger just a couple hours earlier that there was a distinct difference between onstage Dwight and off stage Dwight, and that the latter had no confusion about which was which.

  In subsequent years, Dwight was inevitably linked in the press with a number of high-profile romantic partners, some of whom may have simply wanted the publicity (and maybe he did as well). One of them later complained about Dwight’s vanity, that it took him so long to get ready to go anywhere, that he spent far more time in front of the mirror than she did.

  The guy on the cover of Hillbilly Deluxe looks like the sort of pretty boy who would spend a lot of time in front of the mirror. The artist I interviewed at the Ritz was a regular guy who was talking too much and too fast to calculate how he was coming across or to care much. And like any journalist blessed with such a surfeit of material, I appreciated him all the more for it. As for vanity, he was willing to reveal what was underneath the baseball cap. Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen, nobody’s idea of a sex symbol (and a songwriter whose “I Want You to Want Me” subsequently provided a left-field hit for Yoakam), never would.

  10

  Streets of Bakersfield

  NOW THAT YOAKAM had transcended the dreaded sophomore slump, as if the possibility of such a setback could have ever occurred to him, his third album found him at a pivotal juncture. Almost a quarter century later, the question remains whether 1988’s Buenas Noches from a Lonely Room represents the culmination of something, the final ascent to the top of this particular peak, or the beginning of a new musical adventure.

  Yoakam leans toward the former. “I look at it this way—those albums are trilogies, in a sense, in retrospect,” he says of his musical progression. “It’s like, I told ’em what I was gonna tell ’em [on Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.]. I told ’em [on Hillbilly Deluxe]. And then I told ’em what I’d just told ’em [on Buenas Noches from a Lonely Room]. And so in the first trilogy, I was telling ’em where I’d come from, the legacy and culture that shaped my music.”

  Dusty Wakeman agrees, “The first three albums through Buenas Noches, that was a band playing their set, basically.”

  If that was how it looked from the inside, an outside perspective is that Yoakam’s third release has some radical differences from the first two. It’s the first to feature a personnel shift in the Babylonian Cowboys, with the departures of bassist J.D. Foster and fiddler Brantley Kearns. After two albums with a stable lineup, half the band from the clubs was gone, leaving only producer-guitarist Anderson and drummer Jeff Donavan, with new bassist Taras Prodaniuk, mandolinist Scott Joss, and keyboardist Skip Edwards (previously credited as an “honorary” Babylonian Cowboy) now listed as members of the expanded band.

  Though such changes might only be noticeable to close readers of liner notes, the sessions also featured a couple of ringers whose key contributions would give Dwight the first chart-topping single of his career. The song was “Streets of Bakersfield,” and the guests were Buck Owens and Tex-Mex accordion kingpin Flaco Jiménez. The latter’s virtuosic progressions added an element never previously heard on Yoakam’s records, though Jiménez was already well known among roots-music aficionados for his work with Doug Sahm and Ry Cooder. He would subsequently reunite with Sahm in the Grammy-winning Texas Tornados, and he was as synonymous with Tex-Mex conjunto music as Clifton Chenier was with Louisiana zydeco. In other words, he was musical royalty, but a stranger to mainstream country.

  Most significan
tly for country music, this was the album that brought Buck Owens out of musical semi-retirement and back to the top of the charts for the first time in sixteen years, reinforcing a relationship between artists of different generations that seemed less like mentor and acolyte than father and son. Even their names had a soundalike quality to them (DWIGHT YOAK-am, BUCK OW-ens). The pairing proved so successful that Owens went on tour as Yoakam’s special guest, where he received a regal welcome from a generation of fans who knew him only as legend (or from Hee Haw), while reinforcing a passing-the-torch claim to Yoakam’s honky-tonk ascendance.

  Underscoring the music’s lineage and the album’s rite-of-passage significance, studio musicians additionally included steel guitarist Tom Brumley, an alumnus of Buck Owens’s Buckaroos, and Dobroist Al Perkins, a former member of the Flying Burrito Brothers. Among the emerging generation were harmony vocalists Jim Lauderdale and Randy Weeks of the Lonesome Strangers. It was as if a like-minded musical community had coalesced around Dwight Yoakam, and his artistry now stood for something bigger than itself.

  Yet Yoakam’s higher profile and legitimization by the blessing of Buck Owens sparked a backlash in some critical quarters. Writing in the Village Voice, rock critic (and Bruce Springsteen biographer) Dave Marsh said that sharing the stage with Owens “exposed Yoakam’s hokum. Dwight’s voice is richer and stronger than Buck’s, and he has considerable obnoxious, ass-twitching stage presence. Yet everything he does is hyper-calculated . . . all part of the pose.”

  Such is the age-old authenticity argument, as if there’s a dichotomy between a calculated and “natural” performance, as if Bruce Springsteen hadn’t also showcased his butt (on album covers and video) in some pretty tight and expensive jeans. As if these charges weren’t the same ones Elvis Presley had stared down. Perhaps a crucial difference was that Yoakam, like Elvis, was perceived as pandering to a female audience (and everyone knew that anything that made girls squeal couldn’t be taken too seriously), while Springsteen retained his reputation as a man’s man.