Dwight Yoakam (10 page)

“The country music industry, in Yoakam's opinion, has ignored the obvious: namely that music appeals to a young audience (that is, the audience that buys records), when it's made by reckless, young artists,” wrote Paul Kingsbury before the album's national release in the Nashville-based, historically minded
Journal of Country Music
. He proceeds to quote Yoakam: “ ‘If country music is going to gain the attention and respect of a young audience, they're going to have to address what I call the “emotional integrity” of the music,' he says. ‘It's extremely important that honky-tonk music have youth involved in it . . . We have an opportunity to reclaim some territory and reintroduce it to those kids, that young audience.' ”

Kingsbury asks: “Is middle America ready for Dwight Yoakam? The question is not as silly as it sounds, because by signing with a Nashville label, Yoakam is aiming himself squarely at working men and housewives, when his only proven audience has been young rock fans.”

Dwight responds: “We are not cowpunk. We are a classic hillbilly act. That's what we do. We are a honky-tonk band. That being the case, this music has a natural and rightful kind of audience—in Sapulpa, Oklahoma; Louisville, Kentucky; Birmingham, Alabama; or Odessa, Texas. Those people understand it . . . We've achieved a certain teaching process with the young people we've been doing it for in L.A. And we had the opportunity to sign with a couple of West Coast labels. But country music is, was, and always will be the music of middle America.”

If we leave a certain inscrutability of syntax aside (“achieved a certain teaching process”?), Dwight was ready to bring his music back home, to Ohio (and Kentucky), to the people he knew best. To confirm his convictions, country music would need to change. Significantly. Quickly. Like flooring a red-hot Corvette out of a deep rut. In the meantime, things were changing for Dwight in Los Angeles, where he'd long been ignored, had later been accepted, and was now starting to get a taste of what the life ahead might be like.

Remembers Dave Alvin, “Right before Dwight's Warner Bros. LP came out, he and I went to see George Strait at the Universal Amphitheatre. And suddenly this guy who had been playing to forty people at the Palomino has carte blanche backstage. And I realized that he is being groomed here. There's that grace period in the music industry, where three months before your album is released, and two weeks after it's released, everybody loves you. 'Cause they all know you may be the next big thing. ‘Hey, man, can I get you a drink? My girlfriend? Fine, take her.' So we were totally ‘in crowd' at this George Strait performance, and I felt totally out of place.”

Dwight didn't, and this was a crucial difference between Yoakam and Dave Alvin, the Blasters, and pretty much anyone else who would attempt to find commercial stardom without sacrificing rootsy integrity. Dwight could straddle two worlds—be they hillbilly and Hollywood, punk rock and mainstream country, authenticity and flash—the way few others could. He blazed a trail that many others would try to follow, but they'd take a few steps and falter. He was somehow able to climb to the top.

8

“It's Jes' Ol' Hillbilly Stuff”

IN THE RECORDING STUDIO, Dwight Yoakam and the Babylonian Cowboys had become a finely tuned, well-oiled machine, able to stop on a dime. Onstage, the band was a supercharged muscle car with the potential to recklessly careen out of control (or at least create the illusion that they might). And they drove the audience wild in the process.

If Dwight was sitting behind the steering wheel—determining the course of his artistry through his songs, his voice—Pete was riding shotgun. The latter's guitar plainly provided the pedal-to-the-metal acceleration, bringing a live-wire charge to the performance that was only a hint in the recorded arrangements. Impulse and adrenalin ignited his progressions, as if the guitar were playing him, or playing
through
him.

But Dwight remained a master of reserve, in full command of his craft, his vocal phrasings and shadings, the material he wrote, even of the crowds that were growing larger and more excited at the prospect of an emerging phenomenon. Though Pete's current could surge through Dwight as well, turning him into a whirling dervish during instrumental breaks, it was the tension between the two of them onstage—latent, laconic Dwight and kinetic, explosive Pete—that powered the pistons of this musical dynamic.

Where the first disc of the deluxe edition of
Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.
documents the big leap that Dwight's music had made in the studio from the 1981 demos to the 1986 release of his major-label debut, the second disc provides even greater revelation. It's amazing in retrospect that it took two decades for this recording to see release, for if there is one document that could testify to the singularity of Dwight's significance, of his music's potential to merge the rawest rock with the most commercially successful country in a way no one had done before and hasn't since, this is it.

Recorded live at the Roxy on West Hollywood's Sunset Strip, a different world entirely from the Palomino in North Hollywood, it captures Yoakam and band as they prepare to widen their orbit, just weeks following the album's release. The launching pad wasn't a country club, and this wasn't a country crowd. The Roxy was the epicenter of neon hip in the capital of the entertainment industry, though to Nashville this scene meant little or nothing.

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 Richard 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.