by Don McLeese
In addition to these recording projects that didn’t make major demands on his songwriting services, Yoakam was filling his time making The Newton Boys with Austin director Richard Linklater. The film generated mixed reviews and mainly seemed to give the director a chance to work with his buddies Matthew McConaughey and Ethan Hawke, who overshadowed Yoakam.
Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times, “Dwight Yoakam is their explosives expert, who pours nitro as if intensely curious about what it would feel like to be vaporized in the next nanosecond.” Janet Maslin’s review in the New York Times offers, “The film is often straightforward bordering on sedate. (Dwight Yoakam and Chloe Webb, as the group’s nitroglycerine expert and his insinuating wife, seem to have wandered in from a kinkier, possibly more interesting movie.)”
Both Linklater and Yoakam would recover. And if the movie didn’t do much to raise Yoakam’s thespian profile, the down time that making a movie involves made him more prolific than ever as a songwriter. A Long Way Home was the first (and rare) Yoakam album to credit all material solely to the artist. And the consistently high level of the writing suggests that, if anything, making movies was having a beneficial effect on Yoakam’s music.
Yoakam agrees. “Yeah. Absolutely. I wrote some of the best material I’ve ever written while shooting in Austin, Texas. Just waiting around a lot, you’d have days when you’re just staring out at the Colorado River. [He starts playing the intro to the album opening “Same Fool”]. So, I think I wrote more. Because touring interrupts writing. Writing is stationary; it allows me to ponder and think outside myself. And I’d hope I was getting better at it. A Long Way Home had thirteen songs on it, and they were all mine. First one where I had no covers.”
If we reconsider Dwight’s journey a metaphor for his music, the full-circle implications of this title are plain, suggesting how far he’d strayed from the straight and narrow on previous releases. “And with A Long Way Home, we knew we’d probably taken it as far as it could go,” he agrees. “I’m proud of the other things, but . . . you could feel that the journey was completed.”
While in no way a repudiation of the detours, side trips, and creative skyrocketing that had come before, A Long Way Home suggests a return to traditional country classicism, reinforcing that Dwight was the same guy (or the “Same Fool,” as he sings in his most Buck Owens–esque phrasing) who made Guitars, Cadillacs and Hillbilly Deluxe. It could have passed as a natural progression from those.
It’s also far lighter (not lightweight, but buoyant) than the noirish streak that ran from Buenas Noches through This Time and Gone. Even the design of the packaging is whiter and brighter, recalling the early days, while the (airbrushed?) photos of Dwight appear to have turned back the hands of time. In his early forties when making the album, Yoakam could have passed in these photos for mid-twenties.
Though the road of love remains rocky in Yoakam’s material, the arrangements reinforce the lighter touch. The lyric to the title track is one of Yoakam’s best in haiku mystic mode (“Hate is deep, and its pull is strong. But the passion’s short, then it’s a long way home.”), but the melody suggests something out of the Lovin’ Spoonful. And the Chet Atkins–style picking of “These Arms” recalls that goodtime band’s “Nashville Cats,” which of course was homage to an era of country classicism.
The opening steel run of “Same Fool” evokes the “Rainy Day Woman” of Waylon Jennings, the following “The Curse” proceeds at a Johnny Cash lope, and the majestic “Things Change” and the string-laden “Yet to Succeed” rank with definitive Dwight. Everything he’d ever done well before, he did as well or better here—even out-punking the adrenalin fury of “Please, Please Baby” with “Only Want You More,” which is reprised as the final “Maybe You Like It, Maybe You Don’t” as an unmistakable Elvis Presley impersonation.
“A Long Way Home was one of my favorites, the last full album I worked on with them,” says Dusty Wakeman. “There’s a real introspective, retrospective quality to that album. As soon as I heard the title cut, I knew what that album was about. And Dwight was really involved in the production of that record. It was a great last record for me to be involved with, because it kind of summed up those nine records.”
Listen to his albums out of sequence, and you’d be hard pressed to determine exactly where A Long Way Home fits chronologically or how well it fared commercially. If it had come a decade earlier, “Things Change” and the Buck Owens–style roadhouse shuffle, “These Arms,” might have ranked with the biggest hits of Yoakam’s career. Instead, the former barely crept into the country top twenty while the latter hardly registered a blip with country radio.
Where Dwight says that, with this album “the journey was completed,” it’s also plain in retrospect that the game was over. And, as he acknowledged in the hit that should have been, “Things Change”—record companies, producers, management, airplay (or lack thereof), tours. Maybe Dwight himself didn’t change much, except for the inevitability of aging amid a country market skewing increasingly younger, but everything around him did. And would, even more, in the years to come.
17
Playing Out the String
ONCE DWIGHT YOAKAM was no longer a hit-generating recording artist for Nashville’s Warner Bros./Reprise, it was inevitable that he would no longer be a recording artist with that major label. A rock act or an indie act can sustain a recording career through touring and a loyal fan base, but the country music industry in particular needs hits to feed the beast. And it needs radio to generate hits. No radio, no hits, no major-label recording contract.
Perhaps just as inevitably, once the partnership between Yoakam and his label dissolved, so would the one between the artist and his producer. And in both cases, it’s a question of whether there is blame to place or this is just the natural arc of a career. Dwight, Pete, and Warner Bros. had a good run together—a history-making run. But all good things must come to an end.
“Maybe we went about four albums too long,” says Dwight of his collaboration with Anderson. “But that happens, and I’m proud of everything we did together. Things just ran their course.”
And without allowing this book to degenerate into the sort of “he said/he said” dispute that Yoakam and his management might have feared, we have to at least acknowledge a different perspective on the part of the producer: “I personally don’t think so,” says Anderson of any suggestion that he was no longer the right producer for Dwight. “But I can only grow as much as the artist grows . . . Maybe Dwight stopped bringing his ‘A’ game. And maybe I’m not the easiest guy to be around. But what producer is gonna come in and make Dwight better than Gone or This Time? Guess what? It ain’t gonna happen! T Bone Burnett, Don Was, any of my contemporaries? Ain’t gonna happen. What are they gonna know about Dwight and bring to the table that I didn’t?”
Dusty Wakeman remains friends with both, and can see both sides, yet finds it hard to agree with Dwight if that four albums of counting backwards includes the last one Wakeman worked on.
“You know, careers have an arc,” he says. “That’s the way it works. They later made some albums I wasn’t involved in and perhaps they’d worn each other out by then. But I thought A Long Way Home was as good a record as Gone was. They may not have been as warm and fuzzy as they once were, but I think the team was still working well together.”
Whatever the verdict, the hits had come to an end before the contract would, which meant there were still four more releases by Dwight on Warner Bros./Reprise, and Pete would produce all of them. But only one could be considered a real album of new material—2000’s millennially titled Tomorrow’s Sounds Today. And, to my ears, this was the first (and last) album by Dwight that would simply sound like product, as if he had gone to this particular well a little too often.
Preceding that was a(nother) greatest hits album, with too few hits. Following Tomorrow’s Sounds Today was an unplugged (and generally if unfairly ignored) solo album, dwightyoakamacoustic.net.
Capping his Warner Bros. decades was a soundtrack that nobody heard to a film nobody saw. And then, again inevitably, there was the four-disc box set, the tombstone to Dwight’s days (till then) as a major-label recording artist, documenting just how high he had skyrocketed and how fast he had fallen. It also demonstrated how tough it was to encapsulate his musical progression as a collection of hits, highlights, and outtakes, because Dwight’s best albums demand and deserve to be heard as albums.
But since Dwight had pretty much written himself out with A Long Way Home, and was finding his focus on film sharpening as his country career was faltering, there would be another gap of more than two years before Tomorrow’s Sounds Today. And since country music, like nature, abhors a vacuum, that gap would need to be filled, and was, with the May 1999 release of the expansively titled Last Chance for a Thousand Years: Dwight Yoakam’s Greatest Hits from the ’90s.
The generous selection of fourteen cuts was designed to appeal to two very different groups. First, those who were a little curious about Dwight and had heard him on the radio, but hadn’t been among the three million–plus that popped for This Time, the album where four of these hits had previously appeared. At the other extreme were the Dwight fanatics, the completists, the true believers, the ones who would need the compilation for the three previously unreleased tracks, even though they already owned the rest.
In comparison with Yoakam’s previous hits collection released ten years earlier, Last Chance boasted some of his biggest hits, ones that had extended his musical reach well beyond the confines of country. Yet there weren’t as many of them, and all of the eight that could remotely qualify as country radio hits were from just two albums (with four from If There Was a Way as well).
Curiously, the three new tracks from very different sources all supplied what Yoakam’s own material lacked: a positive perspective on love. “Thinking About Leaving” would never be a single, let alone a hit, but the ballad possessed an impressive pedigree, as the only released co-write between Yoakam and Rodney Crowell, the renowned singer-songwriter who had also enjoyed a string of chart-topping country hits pre-Garth. You can hear the distinctive styles of both of them in the song (which, despite its title, is more about staying), with Crowell in particular on the bridge.
The second of the unreleased studio tracks is “I’ll Go Back to Her,” a Waylon Jennings obscurity that barely registered any impact through Yoakam’s rendition. Yet the third and most surprising selection would spur sales of the compilation and give Yoakam new commercial life as both a country and crossover artist. “Yoakam sings Queen” wouldn’t seem like a surefire gambit for a career resurgence, but the rockabilly spirit of “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” suited Yoakam even better than it had Freddie Mercury.
So the good news was that Dwight was back on the radio, back on the charts, back in the public eye as a recording artist (and pitchman, with the song commissioned for a Gap commercial). The bad news, for a visionary artist who considered songwriting one of his main strengths, was that the public responded more strongly to taking a Queen tune for a retro spin than it had to any of his original material for a long five years.
Few artists paid closer attention to image than Yoakam, who generally took or shared credit for art direction on his albums, so the western motif of the hits package reflected a significant shift and offered a hint of the film project that would soon consume him. Stetson aside, Yoakam had never been known as much of a cowboy (since ranches were in short supply in both the Hollywood Hills where he lived and rust-belt Ohio where he was raised), but the CD booklet showed a soft focus Dwight on horseback, gazing wistfully into the distance. The black-and-white CD cover features a close-up of galloping hooves.
Wherever Dwight’s career was galloping, the release of Tomorrow’s Sounds Today in October 2000 found Dwight and Pete limping toward the finish line of Yoakam’s recording contract with Warner Bros. Nashville. Though a film soundtrack would follow, this would be the last album on a major label by Dwight Yoakam to be targeted at country radio. And radio would turn a deaf ear, with only the Buddy Hollyesque “What Do You Know About Love” making a minor ripple (without cracking the top twenty).
It isn’t a bad album by the standards of that era’s country music, but it was a decidedly desultory affair by Dwight’s and Pete’s. Where his creative peak of the mid-1990s had found Yoakam in expansive mode, pushing limits and transcending boundaries, Tomorrow’s Sounds Today, like the superior A Long Way Home before it, is an album of retrenchment, one that reinforces Yoakam’s persona as a country artist rather than extending it, with too many of the cuts sounding like retreads.
“At this stage, Dwight definitely had his identity set in stone and he had his two or three or four directions he could go in as a singer/artist/writer,” says Anderson. “Then it was up to me not to repeat the same tricks again as an arranger.”
The major trick on this album is the elevation of pedal steel guitarist Gary Morse into a spotlight position as a foil for Anderson’s electric guitar. It was like a third element, turning the call-and-response relationship between Yoakam’s voice and Anderson’s guitar, long the focus of the musical dynamic, into something closer to tripart. Anderson and Morse, who had begun recording with Yoakam during the sessions for the new tracks on the last hits package, found a fresh interplay as they framed the vocal.
More steel meant more country, as attested by titles such as “A Place to Cry” and “The Heartaches Are Free” (the latter the closest that Yoakam would ever come to channeling Hank Williams, though he sounded more like an actor in a role). Yet the steel would also play a prominent role in the album’s major curve ball, a version of Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me” that is as inspired as it is unlikely, making the band’s own breakout hit seem lightweight by comparison. Here and elsewhere on the album, Yoakam showed that he still had what it took to connect with a song and a mainstream audience. Yet, again, there had to be some concern that the material bringing out the best in him came from the likes of Queen and Cheap Trick.
Reinforcing the album’s thrown-together, tossed-off feel are the two concluding “Bonus Bucks,” reuniting the artist with mentor Owens. Since the musical quality couldn’t qualify as highlights, and didn’t really fit with the rest, they were simply tacked onto the end. “Alright, I’m Wrong” got Anderson his first writing credit on a Yoakam album, with an accordion-driven cantina number that sounds like the Texas Tornados (with Buck’s vocal sounding like it was phoned in), though the closing revival of Buck’s “I Was There” makes more of an impact.
The album didn’t, except for the Cheap Trick cover as a curiosity among rock fans. If Yoakam and Warner Bros. hadn’t previously given up on each other, they plainly did in the aftermath of his last full-fledged, full-band studio album. Big deal. Dwight had a movie to do, one into which he had been pouring all of his creative energies, placing his entire bankroll on a long shot. Boom or bust.
18
South of Heaven, West of Hell (and Off the Charts)
PLEASE FORGIVE THE chronological hiccup. Preceding Tomorrow’s Sounds Today was the stealth release of the solo dwightyoakamacoustic.net just five months earlier, but it made more thematic sense for us to jump from the Last Chance for a Thousand Years hits package directly into Tomorrow’s Sounds and save the unplugged album for this chapter with the soundtrack on Dwight’s end of the line with Warner Bros. Because unless you’re a Dwight diehard, these are the two albums you never even knew existed.
The hits package and Tomorrow’s Sounds Today were both reflective of Dwight’s association with a major label, and both were intended to generate power-rotation airplay and to achieve massive mainstream sales. That neither did turned the strains in Yoakam’s relationship with his label into a rupture beyond healing, but at least those releases gave the impression, or sustained the illusion, of business as usual.
By contrast, dwightyoakamacoustic.net and the South of Heaven, West of Hell soundtrack were more like boutiq
ue projects or vanity recordings, released without any marketing muscle whatsoever, little known among country fans who might have still considered themselves among Yoakam’s core constituency. Thus, they went barely heard, though among the few who heard them, they rank with Dwight’s most inspired efforts.
An attempt to both jump on the “unplugged” bandwagon and to connect with the early (by country standards) Internet adopters, the solo album stands as a crucial cornerstone in an appreciation of Yoakam’s talent, as indispensable as the early Roxy live set belatedly released with the deluxe edition of Guitars, Cadillacs.
Because in an era that had become dominated by pretty young faces, lyrical clichés, and assembly-line production, Yoakam still had to face accusations that he was something other than the real deal, that he was a phony playing the role of a country purist (while twitching his butt to elicit female squeals).
With a full complement of twenty-five numbers of solo acoustic performance (producer Anderson provides electric guitar accompaniment only on a reshuffled “Little Sister”), the album is a tour de force of vocal virtuosity, a revelation in terms of the power of Yoakam’s rhythm guitar, and a testament to a talent that not only drew from the icons of country’s classic past, but could hold its own with them.
As Anderson would later insist, years after a lawsuit would end any relationship or even conversation between the two of them, “I don’t care, you take anybody. Take Lefty, take Hank, take Merle. And you set them in a room and put Yoakam in there, and give him an acoustic guitar. And you’re gonna go, ‘Whoa, this guy’s right up there!’ ”
Though Pete produced it, the album serves as a response to those who might think that Yoakam’s success was primarily a result of Anderson’s production. Strip everything away and you’ve got those songs, that voice, the qualities that convinced crucial supporters at an early stage that Yoakam had what it took to be a big country star. And though the solo acoustic arrangements here ensured that country radio would never touch this, it provides evidence of the enduring power of those songs and that voice, all the way to the a cappella finale of “Guitars, Cadillacs.”
