Dwight Yoakam (8 page)

The focus provided by bandleader Anderson took Dwight's career path on the most unlikely detour in the annals of mainstream country. Or punk rock, for that matter. A few years before Nashville would hear any commercial potential in Yoakam's music, the streamlined urgency of the Babylonian Cowboys would receive a boisterously receptive embrace from a club scene that had forged a common bond between roots rock and punk rock, and was ready to welcome hardcore country into that circle as well. Other Los Angeles acts were flirting with incorporating country elements into a sound aimed at rock fans (with Lone Justice featuring Maria McKee the most highly touted at the time), but Yoakam was country incarnate.

He was the real deal.

6

Who You Callin' Cowpunk?

DAVE ALVIN HAS TOLD THIS STORY many times before, and it seems to get better every time. Dave's a natural storyteller. It's a talent he first flashed when he was lead guitarist and songwriter for the Blasters, the kings of the Los Angeles roots-rock scene of the 1980s, and has continued to demonstrate through his solo career as a troubadour, one whose finely detailed narratives draw from country, blues, folk, and rock alike.

After Gordon Schyrock and Pete Anderson, Alvin was the third major figure in short succession that would have a profound impact on Yoakam's career trajectory. And, in some ways, he was the least likely, for the Blasters, with the raw intensity their bluesy revivalism, drew mainly a punk rock crowd. And the only hint of country this crowd seemed to embrace was an emerging L.A. hybrid called “cowpunk,” which was frequently as sloppy, anti-slick, and anti-commercial as the punk rock from which it had morphed. (Most of the early cowpunks had been in blitzkrieg bands before embracing the twang.)

Dwight wasn't sloppy. Dwight wasn't cowpunk. And Dwight wasn't in league with any subculture that had a profound disdain for selling records and having radio hits. Yet Alvin heard something
real
in Dwight, something undeniable, and the Blasters adopted Dwight as their opening act, giving him the opportunity to make their crowd his crowd. Since Yoakam had no other crowd, beyond the fellow musicians who recognized his talent, some of whom had been involved with the failed bid to win Nashville's ear, he wasn't about to be picky.

So let's listen to Dave tell the story of how he met Dwight Yoakam (again): “The first night I ever saw Dwight perform, my fiancée at the time and I had broken up, so I went into the Palomino to get drunk. There were maybe thirty people there, including the band, and I just sat at the bar and watched this guy deliver a totally complete, professional show, as if there were a thousand people. And it was
the band
—Brantley, Pete Anderson, J.D. Foster, Jeff Donavan—and they sounded like they would three years later when he was a star. Exactly the same show, pretty much.

“And I was floored. After their first set, I went backstage. I'd wallowed in my misery enough, [and] I'm normally pretty shy, but I didn't feel any qualms. I just walked up to Dwight and said, ‘Order the limousine now! You're gonna be a star.' And so that kind of kicked off our friendship.”

What's most significant about the story is that Alvin didn't simply believe that Yoakam was destined to become a star, but that he would become a
big country star
. When rock and country elements had previously commingled, the music had mainly won more favor with rock audiences than with the country crowd. Country was like a whole other country—with its own radio stations, dance halls, fan press, and audience base. You practically needed a passport to go there.

And Alvin didn't have one, though he plainly loved the country music from a decade or two earlier and found a common spirit between that and the blues base of the Blasters. For him to think an artist the Blasters would soon adopt as their opening act—introducing him to roots and punk audiences, where his music was embraced more enthusiastically than it might have been without the band's seal of approval—would be able to make the leap from the L.A. rock scene to the top of the national country charts was a remarkable act of prophecy.

“It seemed obvious,” he says. “Yeah, totally. I was actually more of a fan of mainstream country then than I am now, or at least an observer. And country music, like pop music or anything else, has periods where they don't know what's going on. They figure it out, and then they don't know what's going on again. And then they figure it out, and then they don't know . . . You know what I mean? So when Dwight came along, the
Urban Cowboy
thing was dying, and it was being replaced by some pretty limp-wristed, lackluster stuff. The powers that be in Nashville just did not know what the next thing was: ‘What's the next hat style?'

“I don't know if Dwight sat down and did demographic research, but I know that he was smart in that he knew that presentation was half of the ball game—the presentation of his image and to some extent that of the band,” he continues. “And harkening back to the early-to-mid 1960s, visually. It wasn't like, ‘Oh, I just found this shirt, and I think I'm gonna wear it tonight.' It was calculated. And that's not a bad thing. So, yeah, I knew he was gonna become a mainstream star.”

And Alvin wasn't the only one. Bill Bentley, who would become a senior publicist at Warner Bros. while Dwight was at the label, was then working at the indie label Slash, home to the Blasters and X. He was also occasionally booking shows at the trendy Club Lingerie and writing about music for
L.A. Weekly
and other publications. He had been a writer, editor, and drummer in his native Texas, and the first time he heard Dwight at the Palomino, he was floored.

“Dwight was living in a garage, seriously, in the Hollywood Hills,” remembers Bentley. “I think it had a bathroom and a door. And Bill Campbell, this great Texas guitar player that lived in L.A., said, ‘There's a guy that you should meet who lives by you. His name's Dwight Yoakam, and he's really good.' And Campbell never says that about anybody.

“So one day Dwight just appears, and he gave me these two tickets and said, ‘Bill Campbell said you might like to come and see me.' He'd been playing way out in the valley, and he was opening a show at the Palomino. The Palomino was
the
country club in L.A. going back to the 1950s, and I'd seen a lot of people there. And this guy gets up there, and I swear to God—I didn't get to see Elvis when he was young, obviously—but it was like, holy shit, how can this person be so good?

“Because at that time country music at its best was maybe John Anderson,” he continues. “I think Kenny Rogers had taken over. It just really sucked. The Outlaws [Waylon, Willie, et al.] had kinda worn out their welcome, and they had never meant that much in L.A, anyway. In the four years that I'd been out there, I hadn't seen much country music that I'd liked.

“And then this guy—
goddamn
. Not only did he sound good, and the band sounded good, but he
looked
good. Dwight always looked impeccable, dressed to the nines in those short jackets and just the right cowboy hat. It was just the total package, and I knew this guy was gonna be huge. He had everything—the songs, the voice, the band, the look. And that was at the Palomino! Maybe about ten times in my life I've seen a band where I thought there's no way for this to miss.”

You knew he would make it as a big country star? “Yeah, I did,” he replies. “Remember, I was around for Rank and File and all the cowpunk movement. And from a million miles away you could tell that Dwight wasn't part of that. He played those shows with them and the Blasters and got in with that crowd pretty good. But it was apples and oranges.”

Yet, somehow, an artist playing a traditional style of music that is commonly considered culturally conservative forged a bond with fans at the radical fringe of L.A. rock. And since he'd migrated to Los Angeles with country rock as his aspiration and made music steeped in country tradition for the rock crowd—just like Gram Parsons and John Fogerty had—he didn't consider his earliest embrace by rock fans to be all that unusual.

If there was a problem with this roots-punk genre, it was that it wasn't considered commercial. The fans loved the music
because
it wasn't commercial, seeing its lack of airplay and sales as a sign of artistic integrity. The music Yoakam had loved—country and rock alike—had always been popular, and the musicians that created it had always aspired to be commercially successful. So did Dwight, though it might have been hard to determine at that time how an artist could use Club Lingerie in Los Angeles as a launching pad to soar to the top of the Nashville music stratosphere.

Of the qualities his music shared with punk, Dwight remembers, “The spirit of what we were doing, the energy, the intent, was where the affinity was. That's what they got at Club Lingerie. The intention of our delivery, how profoundly we were connected to what punk had been. By that time, it had become cowpunk. The Dils had become Rank and File. But they weren't as proficient as the band that we had put together. And there was Sid Griffin's band, the Long Ryders. Our strengths and weaknesses were individual, but our intent was in common.”

There was also a political dimension to what Dwight was doing, a reclamation of traditional country as the populist voice of the working class, the sound of a hardscrabble South (and of those who had moved north from there to urban factories) rather than the smoother sound of the suburbia that turned “hat acts” into chart toppers. (“All hat, no cattle,” as they'd say in Texas.)

Dwight knew that country music had developed a bad reputation among the rock generation—
his
generation—and that even the '70s surge of country rock hadn't redeemed the genre. That music had been aimed primarily, if not exclusively, at rock fans, at those who weren't otherwise likely to turn the radio dial from FM album rock to the AM country station. Among rock fans, mainstream country had an image problem, one rooted in the politics of geography and class. In what would soon become known as “culture wars,” country was on the wrong side.

“Country music in the sixties developed such a negative connotation with the youth of this country, and it was associated in kind of a cultural sense with the extreme right,” Yoakam told Paul Kingsbury in 1985 (in an interview that has since been archived in the Country Music Foundation Oral History Project).

“I think there was such a stratification of the youth and the older generation that there was a period, a whole generation, where we did not pass the baton, so to speak, from one to the next, in terms of honky-tonk music, especially. It's extremely important that honky-tonk music have youth involved in it, because you remember that Hank Williams Sr. was a young man. I mean, he died at twenty-nine. So when he was twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight is when he was making the big waves that he was making. I think that's critically important.”

Yoakam conducted that interview the week before his twenty-ninth birthday, so he knew of what he spoke. Between conservative politics and commercial polish, country music had lost its connection to the hillbilly exuberance of its youth, a spirit that Yoakam found more prevalent in the rock clubs of Los Angeles than the recording studios of Nashville.

Hank Williams was no cowpunk. But in his reckless abandon—the way he lived, the way he died, the music he made, the compromises he refused to make—he became the exemplar for every former punk rocker who began traveling that lost highway.

7

Honky-Tonk Man

LET'S RETURN TO THAT deluxe edition of
Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.
to explain why we've dubbed it the Rosetta stone of Yoakam's musical development and subsequent career. The first disc opens with those 1981 demos produced by Gordon Schyrock, the ten Yoakam originals from his first recording session. The disc concludes with the ten cuts that constituted his major label debut, not issued until March 1986, the album that turned Yoakam into an overnight success and built a bridge between alternative rock and mainstream country that no other artist has crossed so successfully. Though many fall into the “too rock for country, too country for rock” chasm, none have enjoyed a fraction of Yoakam's commercial success, which he achieved without compromising his critical credibility.

Only four of those ten songs from the 1981 demo made the cut for the debut album, though others were plainly just as good and would see release and find great commercial success on Yoakam's follow-up albums. (And there's still that one song from those early demos, a divorce weeper titled “Please Daddy,” that's as memorable as anything from Yoakam's early songbook.)

For better and worse, things had not proceeded according to plan after that 1981 demo. The plan had been to take the tapes to Nashville, where Yoakam's songs, singing, and seductive stage presence could be polished into a commercially successful product.

Though Nashville had proved barely interested in the songs, let alone the artist, the sessions nonetheless changed the trajectory of Yoakam's music and career. By catching the attention of Pete Anderson, Yoakam found the sonic architect who could frame his voice, provide an instrumental foil with a stinging guitar, and streamline his arrangements to best advantage. It's mainly hindsight that makes those 1981 arrangements sound busy, as if the guitars and fiddles were chasing each other's tails, but what Anderson added was clearly crucial, making the sound as important as the songs.

“Dwight's a brilliant lyricist, with a great voice as a gift from God,” says Anderson. “And a gift for composition. He didn't struggle to write. He played me stuff he had written when he was very young, ten or eleven years old, and it was very poetic. So those two things were a powerful combination for him. It was just a question of what kind of music he was going to do. And he was learning to entertain and be comfortable onstage, but he had the confidence of knowing he had a really good voice from an early age.