Dwight Yoakam (18 page)

“It's just movement, and it's as if the universe is on this massive journey. From where and to where, I don't know, but we're all part of that journey, and if we feel that things are accelerating, I think that's just the nature of existence. Now it may implode on itself sometimes, may collapse, but maybe
that
is the natural progression of existence, and I don't think it's a downer. I would give over to it, not fight with it so much?”

So what can a poor boy do, except to sing for a honky-tonk band? And maybe peer through the telescope pointed out the window of his West Hollywood office.

“I don't think I've come up with anything besides the work,” he said in the same exhaustive profile. “But perhaps the work is its own justification, because I don't look at it as work. I don't want to be frightfully over-romantic about it, but it's kinda what I do. It's what I did when I was not getting paid for it, and what I did when I was a kid. I always wanted to stand there and make this noise.”

Or, as he explained of his music to frequent interviewer Patrick Carr, for a profile in
Country Music
(“Semantics & Style,” November–December 1995), “It's a melting pot . . . I don't think I'll ever be able to escape that. I think it'll become more and more that. The first three albums were probably my need to express the cornerstones, my foundation musically and the things I first heard from my parents growing up in Ohio, the things they brought with them from Kentucky, the things that I still use as a primary foundation for what I do musically, but beyond that . . .”

(Let's pause here. Just try to read that last sentence aloud—recognizing that it isn't even a complete sentence—without stopping at least once for a deep breath.)

“. . . Pete and I have talked about it, that I come from that time when music just exploded on AM radio. You would hear Buck Owens come right behind the Beatles or the Stones and lead them into Van Morrison, and then go into maybe the Statler Brothers doing ‘Flowers in the Wall,' Henson Cargill doing ‘Skip a Rope.' All that stuff. King Curtis, of course, the ‘Soul Twist' stuff, and Booker T. and the MG's, Otis Redding, the Box Tops; that Motown thing exploded. Motown, too. From '63 to '67 Motown was all over the place.
Everything
was going on.”

There are times when I think that Dwight Yoakam and Tom Petty are musical brothers, kindred spirits who happen to find themselves on opposite sides of the categorical tracks. Both are deeply steeped in the eclecticism of '60s AM radio. Both are very intelligent and intuitive Southern guys who feel an affinity for a white-trash sensibility (and perhaps have a chip on the shoulder reflecting that). Both owe a deep debt to the music of the Byrds (as the jangle of early Petty attests on hits like “American Girl”). Both have high foreheads and similar builds. They even look a little alike.

“I get stopped occasionally from people who think I'm him,” says Yoakam when I mention the comparison. “I don't know if he gets that about me. I've always dug his whole thing with the jangly, Byrds-style guitar. One of the songs of his I thought of covering years ago was [searches for the right key, tunes again, starts singing], ‘You think you're gonna take her away, with your money and your cocaine.' ”

Though Yoakam never has gotten around to covering “Listen to Her Heart”—which he absolutely nailed, from memory, for me—“Never Hold You” on
Gone
would fit just fine on a Petty album, a hopped-up cousin of “Don't Come Around Here No More,” with a guitar figure from Anderson straight from the AM '60s of “Over Under Sideways Down” by the Yardbirds (another favorite Petty band, whose version of “I'm a Man” he's long covered in concert).

As Anderson explains, perhaps one of the reasons that
Gone
sounds significantly different from any Yoakam album that had come before, or would come after, is that Dwight wrote these songs differently, on electric guitar rather than his usual acoustic.

“He was really getting into electric guitar then, and he had a different one in every room of his house,” says Pete. “After that, I'm glad he got away from it, because I think his strength is writing on an acoustic. But he came up with ideas, because just strumming the different guitars puts you into a different frame. So he was really flexing his muscles. And he was learning the tricks.”

Reinforcing the melting-pot motif, “One More Night” is a soul-shuddering ballad that features both a Stax/Volt horn chart and a lead sitar from Anderson. Which might seem all the more peculiar until you recall Joe South's use of the instrument on “Games People Play,” a recording that we'd now call country but then knew as a '60s AM smash. (South would also make crucial contributions to Bob Dylan's
Blonde on Blonde
, recorded in Nashville, at a time in the mid-1960s when so much seemed up for grabs.)

As the country music critic for Nashville's
Tennessean
(the journalistic equivalent of covering the automobile industry for a Detroit paper, or the film industry as a Hollywood journalist), Robert K. Oermann put Yoakam's achievement into country-music perspective:

“Yoakam's new
Gone
CD comes in the wake of 1993's
This Time
, the biggest-selling album of his career. Instead of duplicating the earlier effort, the California maverick has smashed all musical borders and concocted a brew of startling diversity and originality.

“Tom-toms pulse beneath his voice, strings sigh, an organ hums darkly, horns punctuate the mix. Is that an Indian sitar we hear? Bongos, Mexicali trumpets, and electric guitars swirl through the album, creating hypnotic sonic textures. Riding above it all is the unmistakable hillbilly drawl of a man who has made a career of defying expectations.”

In retrospect,
Gone
represents the point where his career went south—in terms of commercial country hits, that is. His music would never again scale the heights of country success that it previously had done routinely.
Gone
found Yoakam generating more publicity than ever, but
This Time
remains celebrated as his creative and commercial peak, the album where he put it all together. Which makes
Gone
, in comparison, the album where he threw it all away.

“I was truly disappointed in the lack of success of
Gone
,” says Anderson. “And it wasn't a slow decline. We went from a triple platinum record to a record that sold three hundred and fifty thousand copies. And then sold more through record clubs than it did at retail. What does that tell you? It tells me people didn't even know the record was out.”

Even if it reached more people through record clubs—those “buy ten records for a penny” deals that once stocked the music library of the Yoakam household—the daring brilliance of
Gone
remains its own reward. None of the principals who worked on it consider it anything like a mistake or a failure; all are proud of its achievement more than fifteen years later. No one was suffering from the delusion that “startling originality” was a sure bet for country acceptance.

Whatever the album's commercial fate, Yoakam had other fish to fry. He'd been interested in acting even longer than he'd been performing music, and he'd been amusing himself with bit parts in interesting flicks such as
Red Rock West
. Yet he was making a greater commitment to this sidelight with a key role in a film by his buddy (and sometimes fellow musician) Billy Bob Thornton, a forthcoming movie that every profile timed to the release of
Gone
referenced as
Some Folks Call It a Slingblade
.

Released the following year as
Sling Blade
, the film would establish Yoakam's credibility as an actor (one who was willing to play a really bad guy and even take off his hat!) and would profoundly affect his career trajectory. It also earned Billy Bob Thornton a screenplay Oscar and a best actor nomination, with the whole cast recognized with a Screen Actors Guild nomination for best ensemble acting.

Yoakam insists that making movies never compromised his focus on music or provided a distraction. But it did give him other options beyond touring and making albums. And there's no question that it would ultimately put a strain on his working relationship with Pete Anderson.

15

Act Naturally

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT Dwight Yoakam's music. It is tangentially about the music business. It is barely about his private life: his loves, his friends, his outside interests. But it necessarily must touch upon his movie career, for a couple of different reasons. One is that the more serious Dwight became about acting in particular and making movies in general, the less he focused his artistry exclusively on music. He remained a musical artist with an acting alternative, but there were times when he seemed more intrigued by the alternative than by his bread-and-butter career.

The second reason is that some—particularly some who are critical of Dwight—insist that these aren't two separate creative outlets at all. They are the ones who dismiss Dwight as a poseur who had been acting the part of a honky-tonk traditionalist from the start of his career.

When I was talking to one veteran musician who had been part of the same SoCal roots-country scene as Dwight, and asked in passing if he had anything to say about Yoakam, he said he didn't. This was a surprisingly common response from those who hadn't worked directly with Dwight, and even from some who had worked closely with him decades ago, and seemed to reflect the advice I'd heard long ago from my mother: “If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.”

But then the musician offered, deadpan, “He's a pretty good actor.” And I don't think he was referring to the movies. Or at least not exclusively.

Let's remember that it was acting that led Yoakam into performing music in the first place, that it was his high school theater background that gave him the confidence to assume the role of lead singer in a Sha Na Na–type band for his school's talent show. And that the reaction he generated changed the course of his life. But even after he arrived in Southern California, he took a role in a community stage production before he formed a band and began playing the honky-tonks.

In one of the first “local boy makes good” profiles back home, in the Sunday magazine for Louisville's
Courier-Journal
(“Hot Honky-Tonk,” August 3, 1986), Dwight's younger brother David told reporter Ronni Lundy, “Drama was a big thing for him. He's been a ham all his life. When he was little, about in second grade, we'd come home from church, and the other kids would change into play clothes. Here would come Dwight with his little bow tie on, just like he was onstage.”

And whether others meant it as dismissal, a sign of his lack of authenticity, Dwight showed early on that he
is
a good actor, and an ambitious one, for all the right reasons. His acting ambitions and range extend well beyond playing a version of his musical persona in order to cross-promote his celebrity. He's had twenty-five roles since his 1993 debut in
Red Rock West
, but the one that really opened eyes was the redneck loudmouth Doyle Hargraves in 1996's
Sling Blade
, the breakthrough for Dwight's buddy, fellow actor-musician Billy Bob Thornton.

Balding, evil, and decidedly unromantic, Doyle showcased a whole different side of Dwight than the honky-tonk heartthrob his fans had embraced. And critics and movie fans who might only have been dimly aware of Yoakam's brand of country music took favorable notice of his performance. One critic who had plainly been aware of Dwight was Janet Maslin, who had written mainly about rock before becoming a film critic (and now a book critic) for the
New York Times
, and whose
Sling Blade
review praised Dwight's “strong, solid” acting as “the teasingly malevolent Doyle.”

For purely commercial reasons, Pete Anderson didn't see much benefit in Dwight's choice of roles. “If that was his sidebar, what he wanted to do, fine,” he says. “I was initially hoping, just from the perspective of a producer who had points [a percentage of profits] on the record, that it could really help record sales. But he was pretty bent on not being himself in a movie or taking advantage of that. He wanted to truly be an actor and disguise himself in a part, as opposed to, ‘Why don't you do a singing cowboy movie? And we'll do a soundtrack and sell more records!' ”

So Dwight's acting career became a whole separate thing, one in which he eagerly submitted to character parts that forced him to stretch rather than higher profile productions in which he could play a version of the guy fans knew from his music videos. And he resisted any suggestion that his work on the film soundstage and on the concert stage had much in common, that each found him playing a role.

“No, I'm not different,” says Yoakam, responding to a question about any difference between Dwight off stage and his persona (the role he plays?) on the concert stage. “The context is different. It's like the difference between sitting down and playing the acoustic guitar in concert and then standing up and performing is like the difference between throwing the long pass and when you bootleg or hand off. If it's a short route, I'm already looking to throw it by the second step. But if it's a post route, I don't look for it until I'm four steps back. To use the analogy of sports, because it's a physical thing that we're talking about. It's a physical performance.

“And like you, you have to be different when you lecture,” he continues (since we've discussed how my main job these days is teaching journalism). “You're not different; your approach to delivering information is different, based on the necessity of context, environment. I have to capture your attention from the stage. It's not like a record where you open it, take it out, put it on, and play. You're intent on listening. If the kids pick up a book you wrote on a subject, you don't have to contextualize it the same way you would in a lecture. You're imparting information in a different context. So no—I'm not different, context is different.”