by Don McLeese
Reinforcing the melting-pot motif, “One More Night” is a soul-shuddering ballad that features both a Stax/Volt horn chart and a lead sitar from Anderson. Which might seem all the more peculiar until you recall Joe South’s use of the instrument on “Games People Play,” a recording that we’d now call country but then knew as a ’60s AM smash. (South would also make crucial contributions to Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, recorded in Nashville, at a time in the mid-1960s when so much seemed up for grabs.)
As the country music critic for Nashville’s Tennessean (the journalistic equivalent of covering the automobile industry for a Detroit paper, or the film industry as a Hollywood journalist), Robert K. Oermann put Yoakam’s achievement into country-music perspective:
“Yoakam’s new Gone CD comes in the wake of 1993’s This Time, the biggest-selling album of his career. Instead of duplicating the earlier effort, the California maverick has smashed all musical borders and concocted a brew of startling diversity and originality.
“Tom-toms pulse beneath his voice, strings sigh, an organ hums darkly, horns punctuate the mix. Is that an Indian sitar we hear? Bongos, Mexicali trumpets, and electric guitars swirl through the album, creating hypnotic sonic textures. Riding above it all is the unmistakable hillbilly drawl of a man who has made a career of defying expectations.”
In retrospect, Gone represents the point where his career went south—in terms of commercial country hits, that is. His music would never again scale the heights of country success that it previously had done routinely. Gone found Yoakam generating more publicity than ever, but This Time remains celebrated as his creative and commercial peak, the album where he put it all together. Which makes Gone, in comparison, the album where he threw it all away.
“I was truly disappointed in the lack of success of Gone,” says Anderson. “And it wasn’t a slow decline. We went from a triple platinum record to a record that sold three hundred and fifty thousand copies. And then sold more through record clubs than it did at retail. What does that tell you? It tells me people didn’t even know the record was out.”
Even if it reached more people through record clubs—those “buy ten records for a penny” deals that once stocked the music library of the Yoakam household—the daring brilliance of Gone remains its own reward. None of the principals who worked on it consider it anything like a mistake or a failure; all are proud of its achievement more than fifteen years later. No one was suffering from the delusion that “startling originality” was a sure bet for country acceptance.
Whatever the album’s commercial fate, Yoakam had other fish to fry. He’d been interested in acting even longer than he’d been performing music, and he’d been amusing himself with bit parts in interesting flicks such as Red Rock West. Yet he was making a greater commitment to this sidelight with a key role in a film by his buddy (and sometimes fellow musician) Billy Bob Thornton, a forthcoming movie that every profile timed to the release of Gone referenced as Some Folks Call It a Slingblade.
Released the following year as Sling Blade, the film would establish Yoakam’s credibility as an actor (one who was willing to play a really bad guy and even take off his hat!) and would profoundly affect his career trajectory. It also earned Billy Bob Thornton a screenplay Oscar and a best actor nomination, with the whole cast recognized with a Screen Actors Guild nomination for best ensemble acting.
Yoakam insists that making movies never compromised his focus on music or provided a distraction. But it did give him other options beyond touring and making albums. And there’s no question that it would ultimately put a strain on his working relationship with Pete Anderson.
15
Act Naturally
THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT Dwight Yoakam’s music. It is tangentially about the music business. It is barely about his private life: his loves, his friends, his outside interests. But it necessarily must touch upon his movie career, for a couple of different reasons. One is that the more serious Dwight became about acting in particular and making movies in general, the less he focused his artistry exclusively on music. He remained a musical artist with an acting alternative, but there were times when he seemed more intrigued by the alternative than by his bread-and-butter career.
The second reason is that some—particularly some who are critical of Dwight—insist that these aren’t two separate creative outlets at all. They are the ones who dismiss Dwight as a poseur who had been acting the part of a honky-tonk traditionalist from the start of his career.
When I was talking to one veteran musician who had been part of the same SoCal roots-country scene as Dwight, and asked in passing if he had anything to say about Yoakam, he said he didn’t. This was a surprisingly common response from those who hadn’t worked directly with Dwight, and even from some who had worked closely with him decades ago, and seemed to reflect the advice I’d heard long ago from my mother: “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”
But then the musician offered, deadpan, “He’s a pretty good actor.” And I don’t think he was referring to the movies. Or at least not exclusively.
Let’s remember that it was acting that led Yoakam into performing music in the first place, that it was his high school theater background that gave him the confidence to assume the role of lead singer in a Sha Na Na–type band for his school’s talent show. And that the reaction he generated changed the course of his life. But even after he arrived in Southern California, he took a role in a community stage production before he formed a band and began playing the honky-tonks.
In one of the first “local boy makes good” profiles back home, in the Sunday magazine for Louisville’s Courier-Journal (“Hot Honky-Tonk,” August 3, 1986), Dwight’s younger brother David told reporter Ronni Lundy, “Drama was a big thing for him. He’s been a ham all his life. When he was little, about in second grade, we’d come home from church, and the other kids would change into play clothes. Here would come Dwight with his little bow tie on, just like he was onstage.”
And whether others meant it as dismissal, a sign of his lack of authenticity, Dwight showed early on that he is a good actor, and an ambitious one, for all the right reasons. His acting ambitions and range extend well beyond playing a version of his musical persona in order to cross-promote his celebrity. He’s had twenty-five roles since his 1993 debut in Red Rock West, but the one that really opened eyes was the redneck loudmouth Doyle Hargraves in 1996’s Sling Blade, the breakthrough for Dwight’s buddy, fellow actor-musician Billy Bob Thornton.
Balding, evil, and decidedly unromantic, Doyle showcased a whole different side of Dwight than the honky-tonk heartthrob his fans had embraced. And critics and movie fans who might only have been dimly aware of Yoakam’s brand of country music took favorable notice of his performance. One critic who had plainly been aware of Dwight was Janet Maslin, who had written mainly about rock before becoming a film critic (and now a book critic) for the New York Times, and whose Sling Blade review praised Dwight’s “strong, solid” acting as “the teasingly malevolent Doyle.”
For purely commercial reasons, Pete Anderson didn’t see much benefit in Dwight’s choice of roles. “If that was his sidebar, what he wanted to do, fine,” he says. “I was initially hoping, just from the perspective of a producer who had points [a percentage of profits] on the record, that it could really help record sales. But he was pretty bent on not being himself in a movie or taking advantage of that. He wanted to truly be an actor and disguise himself in a part, as opposed to, ‘Why don’t you do a singing cowboy movie? And we’ll do a soundtrack and sell more records!’ ”
So Dwight’s acting career became a whole separate thing, one in which he eagerly submitted to character parts that forced him to stretch rather than higher profile productions in which he could play a version of the guy fans knew from his music videos. And he resisted any suggestion that his work on the film soundstage and on the concert stage had much in common, that each found him playing a role.
“No, I’m
not different,” says Yoakam, responding to a question about any difference between Dwight off stage and his persona (the role he plays?) on the concert stage. “The context is different. It’s like the difference between sitting down and playing the acoustic guitar in concert and then standing up and performing is like the difference between throwing the long pass and when you bootleg or hand off. If it’s a short route, I’m already looking to throw it by the second step. But if it’s a post route, I don’t look for it until I’m four steps back. To use the analogy of sports, because it’s a physical thing that we’re talking about. It’s a physical performance.
“And like you, you have to be different when you lecture,” he continues (since we’ve discussed how my main job these days is teaching journalism). “You’re not different; your approach to delivering information is different, based on the necessity of context, environment. I have to capture your attention from the stage. It’s not like a record where you open it, take it out, put it on, and play. You’re intent on listening. If the kids pick up a book you wrote on a subject, you don’t have to contextualize it the same way you would in a lecture. You’re imparting information in a different context. So no—I’m not different, context is different.”
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 tw
o-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.”
