Dwight Yoakam (14 page)

The years since had seen the former running buddies follow divergent career trajectories and pretty much lose touch with each other. After Dwight, Warner Bros./Reprise would also sign the Blasters and Los Lobos. And though the Blasters had been club kingpins in Los Angeles, both Yoakam and Los Lobos would reap far more national success than the Blasters ever did. Critics had long hailed Alvin as one of America's greatest roots-oriented songwriters since Creedence's John Fogerty (reinforcing the Yoakam-Alvin connection), but critics got their records for free.

A contentious relationship with his older brother Phil—who fronted the band and gave voice to Dave's songs—a desire to explore different musical avenues, and perhaps some commercial frustration would push Dave to split from the band. Though it seemed like the Blasters were going nowhere, commercially at least, Dave's solo career (after a brief stint in X) had difficulty gaining traction as well.

“So, I'd quit the band, I'd done a record on Epic, and to make a long story short, I was about forty grand in debt, living hand to mouth,” remembers Alvin. “And I get a phone call from Dwight saying, ‘I'm cutting “Long White Cadillac.”' And I saw a yacht in my future! And whatever anger I'd had at the record industry dissipated. It was a lifesaver. I'd sold almost all my guitars at that point.

“And he said, ‘We're cutting it down at Capitol, you want to come down to the session?' And I went, ‘Fuck yes!' So I went on down there, and they'd already cut the track and Dwight was putting on harmony vocals. As I'm driving over, I'm kind of imagining how it's gonna work as a country shuffle. And then I get there and hear this six-minute long psychedelic thing! And all I could do was think like a radio programmer—can we add more fiddle? [He laughs heartily.] Maybe shorten it a little? I'm trying to get a yacht here. Maybe just a rowboat.

“And Dwight said to me, ‘This is my
fuck you
to country radio.' And my innermost thought was, ‘Could you pick someone else's song to do that with?' [Alvin laughs again.] I could really use the money! But in hindsight, it was a great thing. It's probably his rockingest track, and I'm very proud of it. He was very sweet. The return favor was extremely appreciated.”

At five and a half minutes long and with a harder-rocking arrangement than country radio could tolerate, Dwight's version of “Long White Cadillac” would never be a hit. But the album was, charting top three, and each one of those album sales put some royalty money in Alvin's pocket. Dwight insists that he never thought that cutting the track was repaying a favor.

“I did it because I loved that song,” he says with a smile. “I thought it was one of the greatest songs ever written. A rock and roll homage to Hank Williams, who was essentially the first rock star. He was a hillbilly singer, but he was a rock star. As Chet Atkins said, the year that Elvis hit, it ruined country music. Because they had rural America and southern America's teenage audience. And then they couldn't keep them. Elvis had changed everything.”

12

“Well, I'm Back Again . . .”

ONE OF THE REWARDS of immersing yourself in a project like this is the revelation of retrospect. I would have initially been tempted to give
If There Was a Way
short shrift, in comparison with the albums that frame it, because it hadn't left an indelible impression like
Buenas Noches
had nor had it issued an artistic proclamation the way
This Time
would. And its packaging had Dwight looking even more like a male model, striking poses that would make Madonna envious (from “come hither” on the back to the chain-link crucifixion in the booklet).

But when I listened to it with fresh ears after a couple decades of neglect, I was impressed by its durability, its depth, its quality. It features some of Yoakam's strongest writing and most subtly soulful singing, and it finds Anderson and the band bringing a creative renewal to the arrangements. At various stages of this writing, I'd find recurrent tunes running through my brain, then I'd hear the hooks of “The Distance Between You and Me” or “Turn It On, Turn It Up, Turn It Loose” or “It Only Hurts When I Cry” or the title track, and I'd remember that they all came from this one album that I'd previously dismissed.

It was released in October 1990, more than two years after
Buenas Noches
, almost twice as long as Yoakam had previously gone without issuing an album of new, original material. And with the hits package as a stopgap that marked the end of something (an era, a chapter, a decade) for Yoakam,
If There Was a Way
almost demanded to be perceived as the start of something new.

But what? Instead of focusing, like its cohesive and cinematic predecessor had, it offered a little something for everyone, or at least for every faction of Dwight fandom. It was less a road map toward a musical destination than a Rorschach test where you could hear what you wanted. And if you thought of yourself as more of a country purist who preferred Dwight the traditionalist, Yoakam had never sounded more like classic country than he did on about half the album, while on the other half he offered a rapprochement of sorts with musical Nashville by co-writing for the first time on record (standard practice in Music City) and recording outside material by contemporary writers rather than reviving country chestnuts.

So you might say that this album found Dwight behaving and sounding more like a conventional country artist than he had in the past. Yet the album also showed him expanding his aural vistas, with the Hammond B-3 organ on the title track sounding a whole lot more like Muscle Shoals or Memphis than Nashville.

“That title track is Percy Sledge!” agrees Yoakam. “It's really an R&B groove, where we introduced the Hammond B-3 for the first time. That's soul, that's Stax. And I that's where I said, ‘Here we go . . .' ”

Prominently featured on background vocals throughout were Emily Saliers and Amy Ray, better known as the Indigo Girls, alt-folk lesbians whose status as Lilith Fair darlings made for an unlikely but inspired match with Dwight's brand of honky-tonk. David Leonard, who mixed the album (and would often work on subsequent Yoakam albums), had previously been celebrated for his credits with Prince.

As for the closing, workmanlike cover of “Let's Work Together,” written by Wilbert (“Kansas City”) Harrison—a 1970 hit for Canned Heat, subsequently reworked by Roxy Music's Bryan Ferry—it mainly served to show that there were interpretive limits to what Dwight could do. He was far more convincing when brooding about dark nights of the soul than celebrating the brotherhood of man.

Whatever the musical direction, Dwight's material rarely veered from the thematic road on which true love never runs smooth. His hit co-write of “It Only Hurts When I Cry” with the legendary Roger Miller holds its own with the best songs of either, and in it Dwight adapts the phrasing of an Elvis impersonator to a lyric steeped in reversal and denial: “The only time I feel the pain is in the sunshine or the rain. And I don't feel no hurt at all, unless you count when teardrops fall.”

He tries a similar strategy with a more contemporary co-writer, the Nashville hitmaker Kostas, with “Nothing's Changed Here,” which mainly details how everything changes after a lover's departure. Kostas also contributes the signature “Well, I'm back again . . .” on “Turn It On, Turn It Up, Turn Me Loose,” making this the first album in which Dwight sang new songs that he didn't write, but sound like he could or should have.

Yoakam recalls that producer Pete Anderson brought the tune to him, saying, “People don't realize that your writing is your strength, and so they throw covers for you to do. But this is one song I've come across that sounds like something you would have written for yourself.”

And then Dwight starts strumming and singing a snippet: “ ‘Well I'm back again . . .'—with that Johnny Cash melodic moment, but then it gets a little more lilting. Like me.”

Beyond collaborating with and covering songwriters from Nashville, Dwight seemed to make another concession to commercial country convention with his duet with country songstress Patty Loveless on “Send a Message to My Heart,” the third song on the album that bore the Kostas imprint. Though released as a single, it barely cracked the Top 40, and in retrospect seems more like a move by Loveless toward Yoakam's brand of creative independence rather than a commercial ploy by Dwight.

Throughout the rest, Yoakam showed he could make the heartbreak of love lost sound existential (the album-opening “The Distance Between You and Me”), metaphoric (“The Heart That You Own”), drunk and defiant (“Since I Started Drinking Again”), haunted (the soulful title track), and absolutely gorgeous, with the string-laden balladry of “You're the One.” That song demonstrated that Yoakam hadn't exhausted his storehouse of early material, since it predates the 1981 demo (with an inspiration that reaches back to high school) but was inexplicably not recorded during those sessions.

It proved to be the album's highest charting country hit, though “Turn It On, Turn It Up, Turn Me Loose,” “It Only Hurts When I Cry,” and “The Heart That You Own” all joined it in the top ten (the last just barely and briefly). For all its variety, the album ranks with Yoakam's most consistent in terms of the inspired quality of his material.

In a cover story for
Country Music
(July–August 1991), Patrick Carr praises the album thusly: “as wonderfully non-countrypolitan, kick-ass classic as ever, and even more intelligent, vivid, and precise than his previous work. It sounds as if he's really powering up, really finding his groove and focusing his vision.”

Says Pete Anderson, “Dwight wrote a plethora of new songs, mining new ground with all the things he had learned. Because up through
Buenas Noches
, like I've said, we'd had twenty-one of his songs to record, and he wrote some new songs along the way. But not a whole album of new songs. And Kostas had come into the picture. We were painting with a broader brush and more colors on our palette. We could be a little bolder in what we did and how we did it. We had the Hammond organ, and it was like,
Whaaat
?”

Yoakam had now released four albums (not including the hits compilation), each sharing a common ethos but all distinctly different. And none offered more than a taste of what would come next, when Yoakam would release the biggest and arguably the most ambitious album of his career two and a half years later.

THOUGH
IF THERE WAS A WAY
wasn't a game-changer in the way that 1993's
This Time
would prove to be, it did arrive during the year that would transform the world of country music. For 1990 was the Year of Garth, in what would prove to be the Decade of Garth. While Garth Brooks had emerged the previous year with his self-titled debut, which included four hits, including two chart toppers, that album gave little hint of what a behemoth he was destined to become.

With the one-two punch of 1990's
No Fences
and 1991's
Ropin' the Wind
, Brooks recast country music in his image with the same sort of impact that the Beatles had on rock and roll in 1964. In both cases, the popular triumph of such dominating artistry (and/or marketing) provided a line of demarcation between before and after.

Before Garth (and after
Urban Cowboy
), country music had experienced a creative renaissance, as progressive acts with some appeal to rock fans enjoyed considerable success in Nashville. The king and queen of that brief era were Rodney Crowell (whose 1988
Diamonds and Dust
contained an unprecedented
five
number-one country hits) and Rosanne Cash (Johnny's daughter and Rodney's wife at the time), with Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett, Foster and Lloyd, the O'Kanes, Nanci Griffith, and others combining country airplay with a popular base that included fans of folk and rock and music that transcended category.

Thus, Before Garth (or B.G.), many artists found the door open, at least a sliver, between the smaller country community and the larger world of rock. After Garth (or A.G.) that door slammed shut again, while the comparative sizes of the musical communities shifted significantly. It no longer seemed to make much sense for Nashville to aspire for crossover success, as country itself became the most popular music on the airwaves and at the cash register. It attracted converts with the popular craze of line dancing (suburban disco with a twang) and the “Achy Breaky Heart” of Billy Ray Cyrus and the new generation of country hunks.

Credit changing demographics, credit changing musical trends (as pop stations began to feature more hip-hop, much to the disdain of listeners raised on classic rock), or credit Garth alone. Whatever the cause, the sales figures that were considered a success in '80s Nashville were dismissed as pocket change in the 1990s. According to the bible of country music history,
Country Music, U.S.A.
(third revised edition, by Jocelyn R. Neal and original author Bill C. Malone), “By 1996, Brooks's accomplishment of over sixty million album sales had been surpassed only by the Beatles and Billy Joel, but he had achieved this spectacular figure more rapidly than any other artist in any field of music.”

After Garth, Nashville had little interest in trying to sell a few hundred thousand albums by Steve Earle or Lyle Lovett, both of whom were subsequently shifted from their label's Nashville base to its Los Angeles pop/rock division. Country radio was far more receptive to a new generation of artists who would dominate the charts A.G.—Tim McGraw, Alan Jackson, Brooks & Dunn (assembled with as much calculation as Dwight's beloved Monkees), Faith Hill (who later married McGraw), Shania Twain—than to the more independent, creative types who had somehow found country favor during those days when there didn't seem to be as much at stake.