Dwight Yoakam (22 page)

“So he toured for the summer [of 2003] after saying he wasn't going to tour, and I sent him a fax that said I'm out X amount of dollars, a big pile of money. And they made a counteroffer that was really weak. It escalated from there, and then we settled out of court. And now all's good. I can separate business from friendship and relationships. There was the music, there was the making of the records, but there was also the touring behind the records. Those were two separate things, and I had a deal to tour.”

It's worth noting again that Dwight has nothing bad to say about Pete for publication, and that Pete really doesn't have anything bad to say about Dwight, except his disappointment over the way things ended. Maybe they didn't need to end. Maybe, as Dwight has suggested, they should have ended earlier. Though neither Dwight nor Pete has enjoyed anything near the commercial success apart that they shared at their peak, both the art and the commerce were on the decline during their last years with Warner Bros., well before the split. Maybe it's just the arc of a career—you rise, you fall. You get older. You develop different interests and goals. You grow in different directions.

“I wish it had been a more amicable split,” says Dwight. “But you know what? I'm proud of everything we did together. And I'll always feel that my music is better for having known him. Would I have been more or less without Pete? I don't know, because it didn't happen any other way.

“It would have been different, that's all. In some ways. In some ways not. You hear the demo, you hear the record. What he was able to do was pull a tight focus on technical aspects, what we were going to do in terms of execution. And that allowed me great freedom as a song creator and singer. And he allowed you your say—it was a collaborative effort. But things ran their course, and it was time for us to work outside of one another.”

Maybe more than money was involved, as even Pete acknowledges.

“If I had to make my guess, he probably got tired of me being Pete,” says Anderson. “Or his feeling constrained that he couldn't produce himself.”

Anderson insists that money shouldn't have been the stumbling block, that he was prepared to make short-term sacrifices for the sake of the long-term relationship. And that he would have convinced the band to do the same.

“When he said he needed to make a little money to pay off the film and blah blah blah, I said, ‘I know I'm making a lot of money,' ” remembers Anderson. “ ‘Would you like me to adjust my earnings, call the guys, go down to a four piece?' Basically, ‘Do you want me to help you to get out of this?'

“I had a position of obligation in my mind,” he continues. “I could have gotten the band to say, ‘Let's have everybody go out on tour for expenses and get Dwight out of debt. And when it's over, you'll be paid back in spades.' But that just isn't what he wanted to do. In his mind, what he wanted to do is exactly what he did. He wanted to go do his own thing the way he did it. He didn't want me around anymore. There could have been a better way to say it, but okay. It's not like I dwell on it or lose sleep over it.”

The split offers another chance to assess what each of them brought to the table, though the differences in Yoakam's music aren't as significant after Pete, when the artist began producing himself, as they were before Pete.

By all accounts, including their own, the two were both strong willed and like-minded, and they shared a vision of how the music should sound and how it should progress, rarely butting heads in the studio. Even to the end, Anderson remembers few cross words. Any frustrations were generally put aside for the sake of the bigger picture.

“There was never tension, up to the very end, that I noticed,” insists Anderson. “The working relationship was always the same. In twenty years of working together, we only had cross times once or twice in the studio, where I got really frustrated or something. We were aware of, like, Keith and Mick and, like, Buck and Don. And after Don [Rich, a guitarist and harmonizer with Buck Owens] passed, what happened to Buck. So Dwight was cognizant of that. This works.”

Until, in Dwight's mind, it didn't. Maybe some of that's a result of growing up. After a couple of decades together, the nine-year age gap and the original contrast in experience didn't seem to mean as much. Pete could hardly remain the mentor he had been in the beginning. But likely a bigger part was diminishing returns, the lack of hits and radio play, a commercial decline that was all but inevitable for a country artist of Yoakam's generation. Hell, even Vince Gill, the ultimate company man, nice guy, and hit machine (and an extremely gifted guitarist and vocalist), was feeling those same frustrations with a fall from commercial grace.

“I knew the music was great,” says Anderson. “But there was starting to really not be a radio format for us anyway.” Too old for contemporary country, too young for oldies (not that the classic country format has much traction anyway).

It's fitting that the relationship would rupture over touring rather than recording. Neither Dwight nor Pete (nor those who worked with them) recalled serious disagreements in the studio. The division of labor remained clear: Dwight wrote and sang the songs; Pete arranged and produced the music. As long as those lines weren't crossed, there was no need to argue, and as long as the records kept selling more and more each time, there was no need to cross those lines.

Yet Pete insists that his first love all along was playing the guitar, preferably in front of an audience. And that even though his work with Dwight established him foremost as a producer, his aim from the time he started working with Dwight was to ensure himself plenty of opportunity to pursue that first love.

“To be truthfully honest, everything I ever did was to play guitar,” he says. “That's all I ever wanted to do. Producing came easy for me. Guitar playing was difficult; I practiced really hard. Because I loved it. I'd been in bands way before Dwight, but you can't speak up when there's five supposed equals in a room. You're just the guitar player, you can't tell the drummer what to do. And once I got the clipboard that had my notes on it, I called that the mantle of authority. Once Dwight gave me the mantle of authority—‘Pete's producing this'—I had no problem telling people what to do or what to play.”

Pete's success with Dwight led to other offers to provide similar direction for other artists, leading to a career he'd had no intention to pursue: “After Dwight's first record, Warner Bros. asked if I'd do a record with Rosie Flores,” he continues. “And I knew Rosie, we were pals, but I really didn't want to do it. Even after Dwight's record was successful, I think I was still sorting out what a producer was, to be honest with you. I hadn't figured out how this was a job and you made money.

“So once I made the record with Dwight, it was like, let's go out and tour the world. I want everybody to hear me play guitar. And then they came to me and said, ‘We'll give you $25,000 to produce Rosie,' which at that time could have been a million dollars. So I said, ‘Sure, I'll take it.' Then I started to formulate what a producer was. But, yeah, Dwight's success meant everything for my world as a producer. It was a rocket launch.”

The rocket launch subsequently led
Rolling Stone
to dub Anderson its “hot producer” in an annual “Hot” issue, for his work with Michelle Shocked as well as the Dwight hits, and he eventually amassed production credits that extended from Steve Forbert to the Meat Puppets. He also became a mini-mogul, signing artists and producing them for his Little Dog Records. Yet he never felt he spread himself so thin that his work with Dwight suffered. (And when his studio commitments kept him from the road, the late Eddy Shaver provided an electrifying replacement, and many Dwight fans might not have even known the difference.)

“I kinda wanted to have my cake and eat it too,” admits Pete. “Producing records was cool, but I really didn't look on it as much of a job. And then eventually it became a job. And it's odd that I probably made a name more for myself as a producer than a guitarist. But Dwight's records were always the high-water mark, because I was so involved with them.

“The good thing for Dwight's career was that everything I learned on someone else's sessions I would bring to his next record. I started to understand all the things that would make the records better, production-wise, and more competitive. I learned how competitive sonics were in record making. And we made our records definitely from a rock, West Coast perspective, not from a Nashville perspective. We made them like we were rock and roll guys.”

How involved was Dwight in the sound of Dwight Yoakam's music? The artist and the producer started out with a single vision, using Buck Owens and Don Rich as the model. Success encouraged them to extend their aural horizons, and such progression brought more success. Pete always knew that they were Dwight's songs, his voice, his album, his baby—and that one of the producer's main mandates is to please the artist. And the busier that Dwight got with acting, the more responsibility Pete assumed for thinking for both of them.

“As much as Dwight was paying attention, he trusted Pete to do what Pete was going to do,” recalls Dusty Wakeman. “It wasn't like Dwight was sitting there all the time. He was pretty much not there except for vocal time or when we had a guest star come in to play. With the building and framing the house, he just trusted us. And he'd come in when the decorator was there, you know what I mean?

“And Dwight's a guy who on any given day can come in and do an amazing vocal on a couple of passes,” continues Wakeman. “By the second batch of records, he'd gotten into the acting thing, plus these guys were touring like crazy. So he had a lot on his plate besides just making the records. The big picture focus was there, but day to day—when he'd been on the phone with managers and agents all morning—it was hard for him to shut that down and say, ‘Okay, I'm gonna sing now.'

“It would take more time to get his vocals done, because he might have been talking for three hours, and his voice was tired. And with his voice, it's like there's 90 percent and there's 100 percent. And everybody else might be perfectly happy with his 90 percent, but he wouldn't be.”

So, the pair of ambitious, hard-working perfectionists made a perfect team, as long as the records were selling and radio was playing them and Dwight was receiving positive response for his film endeavors. When the major-label recording career tanked and Dwight lost his shirt on his film, it was time to question a relationship that had been impervious to challenge from the start. Even Pete knew that things had to change. He just figured he'd still be an integral part of that change. And he proposed a big idea about how to keep the show rolling while circumventing the normal channels of record labels and radio play.

“I had this idea for this thing with the working title
The Death of Country Music
,” says Pete. “I wanted to do a stage play. What you needed was something he didn't have to write any new material for but would be great in and attract a lot of attention. Something a little different from the usual record-tour routine. So, you have this stage play, and you start it with Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman, and you end it with Merle Haggard. And go through five guys, loosely, from Jimmie to Hank to Lefty to Buck to Merle, something like that. Because after Merle, it was over.

“So you'd have a stage play, a DVD, a soundtrack record, then wrap that up and go play casinos. We'd do a set of each guy and end with Dwight Yoakam music. And that could be a two or three year turnaround, and you could go back to it whenever you wanted to. And he could act in it, being Hank in the back of a Cadillac. But he wasn't interested.”

Despite Pete's attempt to suggest a vehicle in which Dwight could combine music and acting, such a project would seem to be a creative dead end. And if Dwight didn't have any more country hits in him—due to changing demographics, record company politics, promotional budgets, and a variety of different factors that have little to do with the quality of music—he felt that he still had plenty of songs to write. And a loyal audience that would continue to support him. And a musical future without Pete Anderson. (Though increasingly it has been in casinos, which pay well for established country names.)

Pete sued, Dwight settled, and that was that. They don't talk, though others who knew them together remain friends with both. Neither sees much possibility of ever working together again.

And the music they made together?

“It's timeless,” says Dusty Wakeman, who had the closest view of the collaboration at its peak. “Those guys made history.”

20

Produced by Dwight Yoakam

IF
POPULATION: ME
REPRESENTED something of a fresh start for Dwight,
Blame the Vain
was an even fresher one. After a couple of decades of continuity with a major, he'd jumped from one indie deal to another, this time with New West, an artist-friendly label with offices in both Los Angeles and Austin. The latter city had long positioned itself as the anti-Nashville, the place where rougher-hewn creativity resisted the assembly-line polishing of the mainstream country machine.

New West would establish itself as the premier indie label for the emerging “Americana” movement after the turn of the millennium, cornering the market on this artistry much as Rounder had with folk in earlier decades. It provided refuge for artists who had once enjoyed Nashville country success (Kris Kristofferson, Steve Earle), for artists who resisted categorical niches (John Hiatt, Delbert McClinton, the reunion of the Flatlanders with Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore), and for artists who came to twang with a younger perspective (Drive-By Truckers, the Old 97's).

The label also launched a series in association with the
Austin City Limits
program, releasing classic performances (including an early one of Yoakam's) on CD and DVD. And it would subsequently enjoy great success with the Oscar-winning music from the
Crazy Heart
soundtrack, a film steeped in the honky-tonks.