Dwight Yoakam (6 page)

4

Corvette Cowboy

DWIGHT YOAKAM DIDN'T HEAD WEST in order to plant the flag of country traditionalism and reclaim that musical territory as his own. He was smart enough to recognize that if he wanted a career as a mainstream country artist, country radio was crucial, and Nashville was the key. And that such success would likely come at a cost that a strong-willed artist, inspired by Creedence Clearwater, Emmylou Harris, Johnny Horton, and Stonewall Jackson, wouldn't be willing to pay. So he went west to become a country-rock star, to a city that encouraged transformation, reinvention.

“I knew my singing voice could marry with a style that was not so pure country,” says Yoakam of his ability to channel the Eagles and his initial ambition to ride the next wave of country rock. “And I had the jeans, the boots . . . There was a whole
Hud
element to that cowboy culture that I knew that could be introduced, the Route 66 Americana, not the Nashville Dixie country. Beyond James Dean, beyond
Giant
. This Route 66 Corvette cowboy. So let's just call it that—it's beyond Cadillac Cowboy. It's Corvette Cowboy.”

The jeans he had brought from Columbus, though Los Angeles is where he would learn to wear them so tight he seemed poured into them. The boots had come from Hollywood, from TV and movies, an image emblazoned on his retina since boyhood, decades before he'd headed west. The car . . . well, he had no car, but the Corvette was integral to the vision that he has since fulfilled. Today, he tools around L.A. in a sleek black 'vette, the latest in a series, with a teeth-rattling sound system.

Once he had a car (though not yet a 'vette), Los Angeles was where the Corvette Cowboy could drive free, unfettered by the conservative constrictions of Nashville. Los Angeles was home of the high-flying Eagles—the former backup band to Linda Ronstadt, the band that inherited the country-rock mantle from the Flying Burrito Brothers and would become a bigger success than anyone had ever anticipated for such music. They became so big that the Eagles and their ilk were widely disparaged among the roots-punk crowd that would soon become Yoakam's breakthrough constituency. Since the Burritos, and the deification of the late Gram Parsons, the whole “country-rock” tag itself had fallen into critical disrepute. It was “rock lite” (as the mainstream country that would draw so heavily from it a couple of decades later would be), lacking the edge or the muscle of the best rock. Or the best country, for that matter. It had diluted the strengths of those disparate strains for a watered-down fusion of cocaine cowboys, tequila sunrises, and singer-songwriter mawkishness.

If country rock was the goal when Yoakam headed for Los Angeles, it was largely a mirage by the time he was making music there. The Eagles themselves had flown their separate ways in acrimonious dispute, jettisoning original members who had stronger ties to the earliest incarnation of country rock (former Burrito Bernie Leadon and Poco's Randy Meisner) in favor of the harder rock of guitarist Joe Walsh and the R&B influence of founder (and Detroit native) Glenn Frey.

The likes of Firefall (launched by former Burrito Rick Roberts), the New Riders of the Purple Sage, and so many others were long gone and not missed, memories of an era of buckskin fringe and muttonchop sideburns. Neil Young had embarked on a series of stylistic experiments, leaving the countrier (and wimpier) Crosby, Stills, and Nash behind (though he would rejoin them on and off). When Dwight arrived in L.A. in 1977, punk was establishing itself as a rebellion against softer, flabbier rock, bloated by corporate and arena excess. But commercial success—the sort to which Yoakam aspired—was anathema to punk purity.

What punk shared with the music that Yoakam strived to make was a belief that something essential had been lost to sixteen-track studio overdubs, to larger-than-life arena gestures, to the commodification of the multiplatinum music industry. However you defined “real,” authenticity had been sacrificed to artifice. And the longer Dwight stayed in Los Angeles, the stronger his ties to Kentucky (and not Columbus) seemed to him.

The rock of that era was largely rudderless, but country music was even more without direction, still in its
Urban Cowboy
hangover, after the success of that 1980s movie that was so much mechanical bull to country purists. It had yet to be transformed by its savior (or Antichrist?), Garth Brooks, who would recast pretty much everything about the music—from its marketing to its stagecraft to its popular explosion—by the beginning of the 1990s.

So Dwight was largely operating in a vacuum, post-Burritos and pre-Garth, during the crucial years of his musical maturation between his pilgrimage to Los Angeles—broke, unknown, but brimming with confidence, determination, and vision—and his belated breakthrough as a mainstream country artist with hip rock credibility almost a full decade later.

In the music industry, a vacuum creates opportunity. Even though there was no place where Dwight Yoakam really fit, during that decade in which country rock had run its course and alternative country had yet to be labeled as such, he had plenty of company among other artists who recognized the common spirit between stripped-down rock and hardcore country, and between punk rock and roots rock.

Not long after Dwight had arrived in L.A., Texas neo-honky-tonker Joe Ely toured England and forged a bond of mutual appreciation with the Clash (whose
London Calling
masterwork would find some of its music steeped in what would later be called “Americana.”) Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Doug Sahm still held court over legions of cosmic cowboys based in Austin, confirming that Texas was a whole 'nother country with a decided twang to its rock.

In the Midwest, Chicago folkie John Prine joined forces with a rockabilly band and cut some tracks with Sam Phillips, founder of Sun Records. (Prine and Walker would subsequently prove influential as businessmen. They left their major labels and proved that by targeting their audience they could make more profit selling fifty thousand copies of an album by themselves than they could selling multiple times that for a major label.)

Out west, the emerging Paisley Underground revived some embers of country rock, with the Long Ryders (led by Gram Parsons acolyte Sid Griffin) and Green on Red (featuring future Alejandro Escovedo collaborator Chuck Prophet) attracting a post-punk following, some of it shared with bluesier bands such as the Blasters. And bands with country or blues roots had more in common with rockabilly revivalists such as the Stray Cats than any of them had with, say, Duran Duran.

Even in the hub of country music, a band called Jason and the Nashville Scorchers (who would subsequently be persuaded to drop the “Nashville” from their name to the eternal regret of front man Jason Ringenberg) drew a slam-dancing crowd by finding a common denominator for unbridled rock and roll and the rawest country—enough to convince some that Hank Williams had been the original punk rocker. By then, Lucinda Williams had also launched her recording career as a folk-blues revivalist (rather than the alt-country Americana queen that she would become). And there were others, here and there, throughout the country, without a category. The point is, there was a widespread recognition that rock had lost something—its urgency, its immediacy, its
roll
—that it could reclaim by connecting with its roots in country (and blues), and that there was vitality beyond Album Oriented Rock and contemporary categories.

Yet radio play of some sort was crucial to Dwight Yoakam's career vision. And rock radio, amid the proliferation of arena rockers and MTV haircut bands, no longer played anyone who sounded remotely like Dwight. The rock artists with whom Dwight had something in common had been (and would continue to be) relegated to the commercial fringes. Though country seemed like a tighter format, locked perennially into a Top 40 mode—still stressing hit singles rather than albums—it actually offered more opportunity for a troubadour with an independent streak through much of the 1980s.

Again, this was the era post–
Urban Cowboy
and pre-Garth, a brief window of opportunity when the country industry would be surprisingly open to new ideas, fresh sounds, and artists who didn't seem much like the country stars who had preceded them. From the mid through the late '80s, the husband-and-wife team of Rodney Crowell and Rosanne Cash were the reigning couple of this emerging country music, both with ties to tradition (he from Emmylou Harris's Hot Band, she as the daughter of Johnny), but with an album-oriented appeal to those who had outgrown what rock had become.

Mavericks such as Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett were initially targeted toward mainstream country in the mid-1980s, though rock-and-roll-influenced duos such as Foster and Lloyd and the O'Kanes enjoyed greater commercial airplay. Earle and Yoakam would provide provocative parallels and initially seem like rivals of a sort, each reclaiming the “hillbilly” tag that the smoother countrypolitan types of the last decade or two had done their best to bury. Yet Earle defended Nashville, where he had moved from his native San Antonio (following the path taken by fellow Texans Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark), when Yoakam vocally decried it.

“We butted heads a little bit, which was turned into this feud by some people, but there was never any personal animosity between us,” says Earle of his relationship with Yoakam. “What we had in common is that we used the term ‘hillbilly,' which pissed George Jones off. He said one time, ‘We spent all these years trying not to be called hillbillies, and Dwight Yoakam and Steve Earle fucked it up in one day.' ”

Laughing, Earle continues, “We were definitely the same graduating class, but I think we disagreed about why we were doing what we were doing. He was trying to make country records, and I was operating under false pretenses. I was always a folk singer, but I'd had a rockabilly band, and I got a record deal, and then I got another record deal. But I was making a singer-songwriter record, and what Dwight did was based on honky-tonk music as a specific art form. What I was trying to do was sneak a singer-songwriter album in on Nashville, and dress it up as a honky-tonk record. And I'm unapologetic about that now. Whatever it takes!”

And then there was the matter of Nashville: Yoakam attacking it, Earle defending it. “He pushed my buttons that way, and I resented it,” admits Earle, who later relocated from Nashville to New York. “Nowadays, I sort of wonder what I was defending, because I defended that town right up to the time I left. And I don't really anymore.

“But Dwight and I did a double bill years ago. We played first, and then he went onstage and said, ‘Okay, you've heard from Nashville, and now we're gonna show you the real thing.' First thing out of his mouth! And, okay, I did write ‘Dwight Yoakam eats sushi' on the wall of the dressing room of the Forum. And I love sushi! But, at the time, it just seemed like a good thing to say if you were fucking with a ‘new traditionalist.' Or whatever we were supposed to be.”

Yoakam's disdain for Nashville notwithstanding, a decade after his brief, tentative foray into Nashville, it appeared that country radio had its ears open wider to a surprising variety of singer-songwriters than the rock industry based in Los Angeles did. The rock artists who shared Dwight's rootsy, rebellious spirit were deemed noncommercial (and not very interested in becoming commercial). The country airwaves had room for a creative rebel, if only for a brief interval, before Garth would render what passed for commercial success in the country music of the '80s as chump change.

Remaining in Los Angeles distanced Yoakam from the Nashville industry he would need to advance his recording career through radio play, but it allowed him to develop as a live performer, to work the circuit, sharpen his chops, find his audience, forge his own path. Nashville remained an industry hub of recording studios and Music Row offices without much of a club circuit or any sort of nightlife. It was a city of churches, not honky-tonks.

Not until Dwight had been in Southern California for four long years, writing songs, honing his craft, putting his music to the test of the honky-tonk crowd, seeing what worked and what didn't, would he have the opportunity to enter a recording studio and cut the ten tracks that would not only lead to his national breakthrough but provide the blueprint for his first three albums, the ones that would establish his persona and make him a star.

He had come to Los Angeles with the jeans and the boots. Now he had the songs. Soon he would have the sound.

5

From Kentucky Bourbon to Babylonian Cowboys

DWIGHT YOAKAM SHOT OUT of nowhere to national prominence in 1986—a supernova, so fresh, so exciting, so
new
. If he hadn't existed, somebody might have been tempted to invent him. And, given the nature of the music business, others would quickly try to reinvent him, as every Nashville label schemed to market its own hunky, honky-tonk throwback, making music that seemed to exist in a pre-countrypolitan time warp. Some enjoyed considerable commercial success (Ricky Van Shelton), others didn't (Stacy Dean Campbell).

But before anyone could try to reinvent Yoakam, Dwight had to invent himself. Rather than an artist out of nowhere, adrift from time and place, he was very much an artist of his formative years—a child of the '50s and '60s, of cowboys on TV and in the movies, of the Monkees on the radio and Creedence on the stereo—and of his pilgrimage, to Hollywood, where a Midwestern kid with family roots in rural Kentucky could fulfill his destiny. He only seemed like an “overnight sensation” to those who hadn't watched his artistry germinate in Los Angeles for almost a decade, until he was almost thirty. And, really, nobody had been monitoring Dwight that closely, until the demo he cut in 1981—his first recording session—paid such serendipitous dividends.

Even in the wake of Dwight's subsequent commercial success, when he opened the door for some artists (e.g., Marty Stuart) who proceeded to forge distinctive paths of their own, none of those others created the sort of bridge that Yoakam did. Nobody else who revived a retro sound on commercial country radio enjoyed anywhere near the critical respect and hip cachet that Yoakam would sustain among rock critics, roots rockers, alternative radicals, and audiences likely to embrace artists on the commercial fringes (perhaps
because
they were on the commercial fringes, wearing the lack of multiplatinum success as a merit badge of integrity).