by Don McLeese
So you might say that this album found Dwight behaving and sounding more like a conventional country artist than he had in the past. Yet the album also showed him expanding his aural vistas, with the Hammond B-3 organ on the title track sounding a whole lot more like Muscle Shoals or Memphis than Nashville.
“That title track is Percy Sledge!” agrees Yoakam. “It’s really an R&B groove, where we introduced the Hammond B-3 for the first time. That’s soul, that’s Stax. And I that’s where I said, ‘Here we go . . .’ ”
Prominently featured on background vocals throughout were Emily Saliers and Amy Ray, better known as the Indigo Girls, alt-folk lesbians whose status as Lilith Fair darlings made for an unlikely but inspired match with Dwight’s brand of honky-tonk. David Leonard, who mixed the album (and would often work on subsequent Yoakam albums), had previously been celebrated for his credits with Prince.
As for the closing, workmanlike cover of “Let’s Work Together,” written by Wilbert (“Kansas City”) Harrison—a 1970 hit for Canned Heat, subsequently reworked by Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry—it mainly served to show that there were interpretive limits to what Dwight could do. He was far more convincing when brooding about dark nights of the soul than celebrating the brotherhood of man.
Whatever the musical direction, Dwight’s material rarely veered from the thematic road on which true love never runs smooth. His hit co-write of “It Only Hurts When I Cry” with the legendary Roger Miller holds its own with the best songs of either, and in it Dwight adapts the phrasing of an Elvis impersonator to a lyric steeped in reversal and denial: “The only time I feel the pain is in the sunshine or the rain. And I don’t feel no hurt at all, unless you count when teardrops fall.”
He tries a similar strategy with a more contemporary co-writer, the Nashville hitmaker Kostas, with “Nothing’s Changed Here,” which mainly details how everything changes after a lover’s departure. Kostas also contributes the signature “Well, I’m back again . . .” on “Turn It On, Turn It Up, Turn Me Loose,” making this the first album in which Dwight sang new songs that he didn’t write, but sound like he could or should have.
Yoakam recalls that producer Pete Anderson brought the tune to him, saying, “People don’t realize that your writing is your strength, and so they throw covers for you to do. But this is one song I’ve come across that sounds like something you would have written for yourself.”
And then Dwight starts strumming and singing a snippet: “ ‘Well I’m back again . . .’—with that Johnny Cash melodic moment, but then it gets a little more lilting. Like me.”
Beyond collaborating with and covering songwriters from Nashville, Dwight seemed to make another concession to commercial country convention with his duet with country songstress Patty Loveless on “Send a Message to My Heart,” the third song on the album that bore the Kostas imprint. Though released as a single, it barely cracked the Top 40, and in retrospect seems more like a move by Loveless toward Yoakam’s brand of creative independence rather than a commercial ploy by Dwight.
Throughout the rest, Yoakam showed he could make the heartbreak of love lost sound existential (the album-opening “The Distance Between You and Me”), metaphoric (“The Heart That You Own”), drunk and defiant (“Since I Started Drinking Again”), haunted (the soulful title track), and absolutely gorgeous, with the string-laden balladry of “You’re the One.” That song demonstrated that Yoakam hadn’t exhausted his storehouse of early material, since it predates the 1981 demo (with an inspiration that reaches back to high school) but was inexplicably not recorded during those sessions.
It proved to be the album’s highest charting country hit, though “Turn It On, Turn It Up, Turn Me Loose,” “It Only Hurts When I Cry,” and “The Heart That You Own” all joined it in the top ten (the last just barely and briefly). For all its variety, the album ranks with Yoakam’s most consistent in terms of the inspired quality of his material.
In a cover story for Country Music (July–August 1991), Patrick Carr praises the album thusly: “as wonderfully non-countrypolitan, kick-ass classic as ever, and even more intelligent, vivid, and precise than his previous work. It sounds as if he’s really powering up, really finding his groove and focusing his vision.”
Says Pete Anderson, “Dwight wrote a plethora of new songs, mining new ground with all the things he had learned. Because up through Buenas Noches, like I’ve said, we’d had twenty-one of his songs to record, and he wrote some new songs along the way. But not a whole album of new songs. And Kostas had come into the picture. We were painting with a broader brush and more colors on our palette. We could be a little bolder in what we did and how we did it. We had the Hammond organ, and it was like, Whaaat?”
Yoakam had now released four albums (not including the hits compilation), each sharing a common ethos but all distinctly different. And none offered more than a taste of what would come next, when Yoakam would release the biggest and arguably the most ambitious album of his career two and a half years later.
THOUGH IF THERE WAS A WAY wasn’t a game-changer in the way that 1993’s This Time would prove to be, it did arrive during the year that would transform the world of country music. For 1990 was the Year of Garth, in what would prove to be the Decade of Garth. While Garth Brooks had emerged the previous year with his self-titled debut, which included four hits, including two chart toppers, that album gave little hint of what a behemoth he was destined to become.
With the one-two punch of 1990’s No Fences and 1991’s Ropin’ the Wind, Brooks recast country music in his image with the same sort of impact that the Beatles had on rock and roll in 1964. In both cases, the popular triumph of such dominating artistry (and/or marketing) provided a line of demarcation between before and after.
Before Garth (and after Urban Cowboy), country music had experienced a creative renaissance, as progressive acts with some appeal to rock fans enjoyed considerable success in Nashville. The king and queen of that brief era were Rodney Crowell (whose 1988 Diamonds and Dust contained an unprecedented five number-one country hits) and Rosanne Cash (Johnny’s daughter and Rodney’s wife at the time), with Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett, Foster and Lloyd, the O’Kanes, Nanci Griffith, and others combining country airplay with a popular base that included fans of folk and rock and music that transcended category.
Thus, Before Garth (or B.G.), many artists found the door open, at least a sliver, between the smaller country community and the larger world of rock. After Garth (or A.G.) that door slammed shut again, while the comparative sizes of the musical communities shifted significantly. It no longer seemed to make much sense for Nashville to aspire for crossover success, as country itself became the most popular music on the airwaves and at the cash register. It attracted converts with the popular craze of line dancing (suburban disco with a twang) and the “Achy Breaky Heart” of Billy Ray Cyrus and the new generation of country hunks.
Credit changing demographics, credit changing musical trends (as pop stations began to feature more hip-hop, much to the disdain of listeners raised on classic rock), or credit Garth alone. Whatever the cause, the sales figures that were considered a success in ’80s Nashville were dismissed as pocket change in the 1990s. According to the bible of country music history, Country Music, U.S.A. (third revised edition, by Jocelyn R. Neal and original author Bill C. Malone), “By 1996, Brooks’s accomplishment of over sixty million album sales had been surpassed only by the Beatles and Billy Joel, but he had achieved this spectacular figure more rapidly than any other artist in any field of music.”
After Garth, Nashville had little interest in trying to sell a few hundred thousand albums by Steve Earle or Lyle Lovett, both of whom were subsequently shifted from their label’s Nashville base to its Los Angeles pop/rock division. Country radio was far more receptive to a new generation of artists who would dominate the charts A.G.—Tim McGraw, Alan Jackson, Brooks & Dunn (assembled with as much calculation as Dwight’s beloved Monkees), Faith Hill (who later married McGraw), Shan
ia Twain—than to the more independent, creative types who had somehow found country favor during those days when there didn’t seem to be as much at stake.
Perhaps the only act that enjoyed commercial country favor A.G. with a rebellious attitude comparable to Dwight’s was the Dixie Chicks. And we all know what happened to them, and how quickly country music would turn on them. With the exception of Toby Keith (who didn’t exactly share Yoakam’s demographic), the prototype for the emerging generation of country artists who appealed to the growing legions of self-styled suburban cowboys was the nice guy, the next-door neighbor, the type you’d invite over for beer and a backyard barbecue.
A comparative punk like Dwight had no interest in coming to your barbecue. And he wouldn’t drink your beer. He would never be one of the guys, in the way that Garth or Tim would, and not just because he was a teetotaling vegetarian. Garth was a marketing revolutionary who worked within the system as a recording artist, releasing the requisite album a year, glad-handing radio, press, and fans alike, while bringing a level of spectacle to the performing stage that had long been common in rock but provided a jolt to the country circuit. Dwight was one of the few holdover artists whose live performance was already electrifying enough to hold its own in the new era.
Another distinguishing difference between the rock and country worlds, where Dwight was the rare artist who sustained commercial and critical impact in each, is that rock had long ago splintered into a variety of different formats, from alt to classic and a number of niches in between, where country remained in the stranglehold of its equivalent of Top 40.
Both Before and After Garth, if you were on country radio, you were country. If you weren’t, you weren’t. Despite attempts to develop more progressive formats—with “adult alternative” and “Americana” initially sharing some of the same artists—the results were commercially marginal, even negligible. Former country hitmakers of the ’80s and emerging artists classified as “alt-country” (which was really more of a rock category than one that the country industry acknowledged) often found their most influential airplay support from NPR stations, where listeners who might never have listened to country radio responded to the literacy of the songwriting and the “authenticity” of the musical roots.
Many of the artists cast adrift by country radio found creative emancipation and new audiences, even new artistic identities, now that they no longer had to feed the Nashville radio beast with singles that weren’t likely to get played anyway. Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, and Rodney Crowell were among those who responded with their most inspired work in years. If they’d still been aiming for country radio, Cash wouldn’t have covered Nine Inch Nails, nor would Harris have worked with alchemist producer Daniel Lanois (U2, Peter Gabriel), nor would Crowell have developed such a devastatingly confessional voice.
Yet Yoakam wasn’t about to give up on country radio, nor was country radio going to give up on him. His ambitions, both creative and commercial, were too big for Americana or NPR. Since the era when he might have been a country-rock artist was ancient history, he would need to be a country star. Or a rock star. Or both.
“The Americana world is great, but you’re not gonna put your kids through college and retire by selling Americana records,” says Dusty Wakeman. “Our joke was that in Americana, five thousand is gold and ten thousand is platinum.” (Within the commercial music industry, a sale of half a million units is gold, and a million is platinum.)
With If There Was a Way, Yoakam had planned to sustain his mainstream country success and he had succeeded. But he had also provided hints of plenty of possibilities beyond commercial country. And he subsequently positioned himself for a very different market with the 1992, Europe-only release of La Croix D’Amour.
“The Cross of Love” (a thematically appropriate evocation of Yoakam’s music to date) is one of the more curious albums of Yoakam’s career, though it doesn’t even exist as far as his American recording career is concerned. Mainstream country success meant little in Europe, which responded to roots-oriented, rough-hewn, anti-hero American mavericks and considered Nashville polish a mark of artistic corruption.
According to Pete Anderson, the album was a result of the success Warner Bros. UK had enjoyed with time-warped rocker Chris Isaak, who had previously attracted only a cult following in the States. Yoakam and Isaak recognized each other as kindred spirits, though the former was categorized as country and the latter as rock. They were two California-based artists with a flair for retro (fashion, music, and otherwise), an affinity for twang, and a vision for an artistry that sounded timeless rather than anachronistic.
“This was the only time we ever took a curve ball from the record industry,” says Anderson. “Chris Isaak had been having trouble breaking through in the States, but somebody at Warner Bros. in England had done something that really lit a fire for him over there. So then the suits in power thought, ‘Wow, maybe we can do this with Dwight.’ So we said, ‘Okay, we’ll play along, we’ll be knuckleheads with you.’ And that’s what we did. It became knucklehead time.
“They asked everybody in the office to come up with a list of songs that they thought Dwight Yoakam should sing,” he continued. “And they’re in England, for Christ’s sake. Some nineteen-year-old secretary is picking songs for the next album. And Dwight said, ‘If they’re gonna pay for it, let’s give it a shot.’ And it was completely goofy. Some of the stuff is pretty cool, but it’s just a sidebar.”
Though the inclusion of some previously released material tagged it as a compilation, it has few hits, and none that would be a sales hook for the anti-Nashville European maverick music crowd. But it’s more cohesive than If There Was a Way, combining four of the songs from that album that strayed furthest from country formula, with a selection of covers that suggested an appreciation for radio rock that extended well beyond honky-tonk traditionalism.
Beginning with “Things We Said Today,” one of the more underappreciated minor-key masterpieces in the Beatles’ canon, the album continues with the Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’,” “Here Comes the Night” by Van Morrison’s Them, and another Elvis Presley classic—“Suspicious Minds”—that would soon be bringing Dwight’s live performances to an extended, show-stopping climax.
But the real sleeper here is “Hey Little Girl,” a 1966 garage-band nugget by the Syndicate of Sound, representing yet another slice of California’s musical legacy. Yoakam’s spoken-word sneer absolutely nails the song’s pitiless putdown of a girl who played around and paid the price. The glory years of one-hit-wonder AM radio had shaped Yoakam’s sensibility, as a performance like this clearly attests. The collection once again gives a prized spot to “Long White Cadillac,” making it the emphatic closer to an album that refused to submit to the yardstick of honky-tonk authenticity. And yet remained quint-essentially Dwight Yoakam.
13
Wild Ride
ALONG THE WALL OF the conference room of Yoakam’s business office on West Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard, punctuating that panoramic view that underscores success, is a series of framed commemorative albums, gold and platinum, the kind so prized throughout the recording industry. They proceed chronologically, from left to right, serving as signposts to Yoakam’s commercial trajectory. (As stated before, gold indicates sales of half a million units; platinum is sales of a million.) Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.: double platinum. Hillbilly Deluxe: platinum. Buenas Noches from a Lonely Room: gold. If There Was a Way: gold.
And then, This Time: triple platinum.
Released in March 1993, two and a half years after Yoakam’s previous recording of new material, the album found the artist and producer Pete Anderson shooting for the moon. And hitting it. Even though, by Yoakam’s categorization, this would be the second album in his second trilogy, it seems more like a brand new chapter, a major leap. It was not only an album where the material was all recently composed—rather than drawn from the backlog, re-recorded from the demo, powered by the muscle memory of
years of live performance—but it was the first of Yoakam’s albums to employ the recording studio as a creative instrument, even a magician’s lab, to extend his artistic vistas much farther than he had ever done on the bandstand.
According to Pete Anderson, the album fulfilled an artistic mission that had begun with If There Was a Way, to take Dwight’s music to a category beyond country, where his artistry would be recognized as sui generis.
“I wanted to get to a point where we made Dwight Yoakam music,” he explains. “First off, we made country music. We were bound by the constraints of making a good country record, so you have a fiddle, you have a mandolin, you had certain stuff to choose from. But whatever Johnny Cash was, Johnny Cash made Johnny Cash music. Was it country, was it folk, was it Americana, was it rockabilly? It was Johnny Cash music.
“And Kenny Rogers, for better or worse, made Kenny Rogers music. I wanted Dwight to be in that stratosphere. Ray Charles, all these guys that just made their own kind of music. They did what they wanted, and, eventually, ‘Ah, this is Ray Charles.’ And we wanted it to be, ‘Ah, that’s Dwight Yoakam.’ ”
Whatever chances Dwight had previously taken, his artistry had generally been anchored in a specific place and time—the classic honky-tonk of the mid-twentieth century. Here, in the hit that would become one of Dwight’s redefining signature tunes, he was floating above the earth, unmoored, as if in the suspended animation of a dream: “I’m a thousand miles from nowhere,” he croons languidly. “Time don’t matter to me.” With a soaring double-tracked guitar coda (as if Anderson were channeling both Eric Clapton and Duane Allman), the song rocketed toward the top of the country charts despite sounding nothing like country music and nothing like anything Yoakam had previously recorded. Instead, it evoked a surrealistic twist on Ricky Nelson’s “Travelin’ Man,” filtered through Chris Isaak, exploding into Derek and the Dominos, for a film by David Lynch. As Dwight put it in his memorable chorus hook, “Oh I . . . Oh, I . . . Oh, I . . . Oh, aye-aye-aye-aye-aye-aye-aye-uh-aye.”
