Dwight Yoakam (19 page)

Point taken. When he's onstage, Dwight isn't
playing
Dwight, Dwight
is
Dwight. At least according to Dwight. For Yoakam, making music is an entirely different occupation from making movies, where his job is to play someone else, often someone very different than Dwight. And both Yoakam and Anderson maintain that, initially at least, the acting detour had no detrimental effect on the musical career. Even with a full career of recording and touring, Yoakam had some down time. And if he chose to spend that down time as an actor, so be it.

Yet
Sling Blade
was released the year after the disappointing commercial reception to
Gone
, the first of Dwight's albums that had tanked, at least in comparison with expectations. Country music was increasingly becoming a younger person's game, and Dwight wasn't getting any younger. In the wake of Garth and the new generation that followed, you could no longer grow old on commercial country radio, but you could age gracefully as a character actor.

However, a career as a character actor not only shifted the primary focus from music, it left no room for Pete. And not to get ahead of our story, but the more time (and, eventually, money) Dwight invested in a film career, the less he would think of himself exclusively as a musical artist, particularly as it became apparent that he wasn't likely to enjoy the consistent commercial success post-
Gone
that he had from the start of his recording career.

In a 2003 interview with
About.com
before his split with Yoakam, Anderson seemed both frustrated and mystified by his longtime partner's acting-career detour, responding to a question from Kathy Coleman this way: “My only, I don't know if it's a frustration, but . . . Dwight has, still has and has had the potential to be, you know, the most important country artist of his time,” said Anderson. “And that's my personal opinion, and why he would leave, or descend from, or not maintain a mantle of that stature to become a—um, no, I barely, I don't know what kind of—a character actor? A sub-player? You know, he's sort of gotten typecast pretty rapidly as like, kind of a psycho or he plays these mean parts, or hurting people or yelling and screaming and throwing tantrums and shooting and killing and . . . I don't see the movies, I'm not, haven't been attracted to them.

“I saw
Sling Blade
, and I thought
Sling Blade
was okay, I thought the short, the initial short, I thought was really good, the movie was good, but—and Dwight did well in
Sling Blade
, but Dwight sort of . . . Billy Bob, it was a low-budget, low-pressure situation, and I think Billy Bob let Dwight just kinda do his thing, and he was acting, you know, on a lot more casual basis. But, you know, I can't . . . it'd be like somebody saying you know, why do I play so much basketball, I love to play basketball, but I'm not trying to be in the NBA, 'cause that's not gonna happen. I mean, I don't even play in leagues, but it is exercise for me, so maybe it's some sort of exercise for Dwight, I really don't know, I just don't understand why being the most important country artist of your decade isn't as important or something that you could maintain and then control your acting career.

“But he seems to wanna act no matter what, you know, there—he gets some enjoyment out of it, and acting is difficult, I've asked him that, I said, ‘Man, how do you do this?' 'Cause he's not one that's prone to get up at seven in the morning and go sit in makeup and be on the set for fourteen hours, so, there must be something about it that I don't understand.”

In short, if you could be Hank Williams. Or Lefty Frizzell. Or Buck Owens. Why would you decide to become Steve Buscemi?

16

The Same Fool

HOWEVER SIGNIFICANT the shift in Yoakam's career focus as he flirted with cinema, there's no question that his position in the world of commercial country music had changed precipitously. He had been a breakout star from the start of his recording career, riding high through “Streets of Bakersfield” and “I Sang Dixie” and soaring even higher with “A Thousand Miles from Nowhere” and “Ain't That Lonely Yet.”

And, then, with
Gone
, he was gone—at least from the ranks of the reliable hitmakers, the ones that radio would add right out of the box and keep in power rotation through the climb to the top of the charts. Again, not that anyone connected with the making of
Gone
expresses the slightest reservation about it. It's a daring album, and it's a great one. It's the record Dwight had to make, and it's one that his Nashville label had no idea how to sell, no luck in selling, or no interest in selling.

In the music industry, there's a familiar term, “turntable hit,” which is used to describe songs that have gotten tons of airplay (through heavy promotion, even payola) but which never came close to moving commensurate copies at retail. Listeners might think of the song as a hit; the cash register knew better.

For Yoakam,
Gone
was what we might call a “newsstand hit,” generating the most press of his career—and some of the most favorable—yet never getting the radio boost that might have extended his string as a country hitmaker. Instead, it ended it.

“Jim Ed Norman had always been a real big champion of me as a producer and for Dwight's career,” says Anderson of the head of the Nashville division of Dwight's label. “He was like a cool guy who had lived in L.A. and worked on the Eagles stuff back in the day, and he said, ‘Let 'em go. Let 'em do their thing.' And we did. We always made the record that we wanted to make in the fashion that we wanted to make it.”

But in the latter half of the 1990s, it became plain that the game-changer in country music was Garth, not Dwight. And those who became the reliable hitmakers in Garth's wake—Alan Jackson, Brooks & Dunn, Tim McGraw, Kenny Chesney, et al.—may have made some good records (you can read diminishing returns in the order of that list), but none were likely to rock the boat the way Dwight did. As long as Dwight sold a ton of product, he was worth the trouble, but as soon as he didn't, he wasn't. There was more money to be made in country music in the 1990s than ever before, but the music had reverted to the sort of formula that Dwight had resisted from the start.

Likely Yoakam was no longer the priority he had once been at Warner Bros. Nashville, which helps explain why 1998's
A Long Way Home
wasn't a huge hit album, though it was plain to those who made it and to listeners who heard it—then or later—that it ranks with one of his best. If the producer and artist were still committed to making “Dwight Yoakam music,” that music had again become more recognizably country, conforming to the conventions of the genre, celebrating them rather than challenging them in the way that
Gone
had.

Maybe if Dwight had followed
This Time
with something closer to
A Long Way Home
, he'd still be having hits for a major label, still working with Pete Anderson. But if he'd done that, we wouldn't have
Gone
, an album that was as much of a creative triumph as it was a commercial disappointment.

There was another two-and-a-half-year interval between
Gone
and
A Long Way Home
, as there had been between
This Time
and
Gone
. Such an extended period between albums had become standard in rock, but it was an eternity in the country market, so the artist and his label filled the gap with two releases in 1997, within two months of each other:
Under the Covers
(July) and
Come On Christmas
(September). The latter was the obligatory holiday album, which artists issue in order to sell for years to come, and which, in this case, is very good and very Dwight, if little heard.

The former is strange, even by the standards set by
Gone
. It gave the first American release to a couple of cuts from the
La Croix D'Amour
import (“Here Comes the Night,” “Things We Said Today”), returned to the inspiration of Johnny “Honky-Tonk Man” Horton with “North to Alaska,” resurrected the Roy Orbison/Everly Brothers classic “Claudette,” and offered Dwight's take on a couple of contemporary ballads: Jimmy Webb's “Wichita Lineman” and Danny O' Keefe's “Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues.” And Dwight enlisted Sheryl Crow to play Cher to his Sonny for “Baby Don't Go,” the kind of duet that might have once provided a crossover hit but wasn't released as a single.

Where most of those cuts played things pretty straight, the radical rearrangement of the Kinks song “Tired of Waiting for You” sounds like a Rat Pack/Vegas miscalculation that wouldn't have a prayer of connecting with either rock fans or country radio. Explains Anderson, “Dwight came to me and said, ‘Man, I want to do something like Louis Prima, kinda swinging.' ” And when Pete subsequently heard the Kinks song on the radio, he had an idea for how to give it that feel. Which explains how the track came about, but hardly excuses it.

Equally radical but more successful is the recasting of the Clash's “Train in Vain” as a bluegrass breakdown, featuring banjo and harmonies from Dr. Ralph Stanley. Continues Anderson, “Dwight brought in the bluegrass version of the Clash. He was of the Clash generation. I certainly wasn't. He's younger than me. Nothing against the Clash, but I go from Muddy Waters to Buck Owens.”

In addition to these recording projects that didn't make major demands on his songwriting services, Yoakam was filling his time making
The Newton Boys
with Austin director Richard Linklater. The film generated mixed reviews and mainly seemed to give the director a chance to work with his buddies Matthew McConaughey and Ethan Hawke, who overshadowed Yoakam.

Roger Ebert wrote in the
Chicago Sun-Times
, “Dwight Yoakam is their explosives expert, who pours nitro as if intensely curious about what it would feel like to be vaporized in the next nanosecond.” Janet Maslin's review in the
New York Times
offers, “The film is often straightforward bordering on sedate. (Dwight Yoakam and Chloe Webb, as the group's nitroglycerine expert and his insinuating wife, seem to have wandered in from a kinkier, possibly more interesting movie.)”

Both Linklater and Yoakam would recover. And if the movie didn't do much to raise Yoakam's thespian profile, the down time that making a movie involves made him more prolific than ever as a songwriter.
A Long Way Home
was the first (and rare) Yoakam album to credit all material solely to the artist. And the consistently high level of the writing suggests that, if anything, making movies was having a beneficial effect on Yoakam's music.

Yoakam agrees. “Yeah. Absolutely. I wrote some of the best material I've ever written while shooting in Austin, Texas. Just waiting around a lot, you'd have days when you're just staring out at the Colorado River. [He starts playing the intro to the album opening “Same Fool”]. So, I think I wrote more. Because touring interrupts writing. Writing is stationary; it allows me to ponder and think outside myself. And I'd hope I was getting better at it.
A Long Way Home
had thirteen songs on it, and they were all mine. First one where I had no covers.”

If we reconsider Dwight's journey a metaphor for his music, the full-circle implications of this title are plain, suggesting how far he'd strayed from the straight and narrow on previous releases. “And with
A Long Way Home
, we knew we'd probably taken it as far as it could go,” he agrees. “I'm proud of the other things, but . . . you could feel that the journey was completed.”

While in no way a repudiation of the detours, side trips, and creative skyrocketing that had come before,
A Long Way Home
suggests a return to traditional country classicism, reinforcing that Dwight was the same guy (or the “Same Fool,” as he sings in his most Buck Owens–esque phrasing) who made
Guitars, Cadillacs
and
Hillbilly Deluxe
. It could have passed as a natural progression from those.

It's also far lighter (not lightweight, but buoyant) than the noirish streak that ran from
Buenas Noches
through
This Time
and
Gone
. Even the design of the packaging is whiter and brighter, recalling the early days, while the (airbrushed?) photos of Dwight appear to have turned back the hands of time. In his early forties when making the album, Yoakam could have passed in these photos for mid-twenties.

Though the road of love remains rocky in Yoakam's material, the arrangements reinforce the lighter touch. The lyric to the title track is one of Yoakam's best in haiku mystic mode (“Hate is deep, and its pull is strong. But the passion's short, then it's a long way home.”), but the melody suggests something out of the Lovin' Spoonful. And the Chet Atkins–style picking of “These Arms” recalls that goodtime band's “Nashville Cats,” which of course was homage to an era of country classicism.

The opening steel run of “Same Fool” evokes the “Rainy Day Woman” of Waylon Jennings, the following “The Curse” proceeds at a Johnny Cash lope, and the majestic “Things Change” and the string-laden “Yet to Succeed” rank with definitive Dwight. Everything he'd ever done well before, he did as well or better here—even out-punking the adrenalin fury of “Please, Please Baby” with “Only Want You More,” which is reprised as the final “Maybe You Like It, Maybe You Don't” as an unmistakable Elvis Presley impersonation.

“
A Long Way Home
was one of my favorites, the last full album I worked on with them,” says Dusty Wakeman. “There's a real introspective, retrospective quality to that album. As soon as I heard the title cut, I knew what that album was about. And Dwight was really involved in the production of that record. It was a great last record for me to be involved with, because it kind of summed up those nine records.”