by Don McLeese
It’s fitting that the relationship would rupture over touring rather than recording. Neither Dwight nor Pete (nor those who worked with them) recalled serious disagreements in the studio. The division of labor remained clear: Dwight wrote and sang the songs; Pete arranged and produced the music. As long as those lines weren’t crossed, there was no need to argue, and as long as the records kept selling more and more each time, there was no need to cross those lines.
Yet Pete insists that his first love all along was playing the guitar, preferably in front of an audience. And that even though his work with Dwight established him foremost as a producer, his aim from the time he started working with Dwight was to ensure himself plenty of opportunity to pursue that first love.
“To be truthfully honest, everything I ever did was to play guitar,” he says. “That’s all I ever wanted to do. Producing came easy for me. Guitar playing was difficult; I practiced really hard. Because I loved it. I’d been in bands way before Dwight, but you can’t speak up when there’s five supposed equals in a room. You’re just the guitar player, you can’t tell the drummer what to do. And once I got the clipboard that had my notes on it, I called that the mantle of authority. Once Dwight gave me the mantle of authority—‘Pete’s producing this’—I had no problem telling people what to do or what to play.”
Pete’s success with Dwight led to other offers to provide similar direction for other artists, leading to a career he’d had no intention to pursue: “After Dwight’s first record, Warner Bros. asked if I’d do a record with Rosie Flores,” he continues. “And I knew Rosie, we were pals, but I really didn’t want to do it. Even after Dwight’s record was successful, I think I was still sorting out what a producer was, to be honest with you. I hadn’t figured out how this was a job and you made money.
“So once I made the record with Dwight, it was like, let’s go out and tour the world. I want everybody to hear me play guitar. And then they came to me and said, ‘We’ll give you $25,000 to produce Rosie,’ which at that time could have been a million dollars. So I said, ‘Sure, I’ll take it.’ Then I started to formulate what a producer was. But, yeah, Dwight’s success meant everything for my world as a producer. It was a rocket launch.”
The rocket launch subsequently led Rolling Stone to dub Anderson its “hot producer” in an annual “Hot” issue, for his work with Michelle Shocked as well as the Dwight hits, and he eventually amassed production credits that extended from Steve Forbert to the Meat Puppets. He also became a mini-mogul, signing artists and producing them for his Little Dog Records. Yet he never felt he spread himself so thin that his work with Dwight suffered. (And when his studio commitments kept him from the road, the late Eddy Shaver provided an electrifying replacement, and many Dwight fans might not have even known the difference.)
“I kinda wanted to have my cake and eat it too,” admits Pete. “Producing records was cool, but I really didn’t look on it as much of a job. And then eventually it became a job. And it’s odd that I probably made a name more for myself as a producer than a guitarist. But Dwight’s records were always the high-water mark, because I was so involved with them.
“The good thing for Dwight’s career was that everything I learned on someone else’s sessions I would bring to his next record. I started to understand all the things that would make the records better, production-wise, and more competitive. I learned how competitive sonics were in record making. And we made our records definitely from a rock, West Coast perspective, not from a Nashville perspective. We made them like we were rock and roll guys.”
How involved was Dwight in the sound of Dwight Yoakam’s music? The artist and the producer started out with a single vision, using Buck Owens and Don Rich as the model. Success encouraged them to extend their aural horizons, and such progression brought more success. Pete always knew that they were Dwight’s songs, his voice, his album, his baby—and that one of the producer’s main mandates is to please the artist. And the busier that Dwight got with acting, the more responsibility Pete assumed for thinking for both of them.
“As much as Dwight was paying attention, he trusted Pete to do what Pete was going to do,” recalls Dusty Wakeman. “It wasn’t like Dwight was sitting there all the time. He was pretty much not there except for vocal time or when we had a guest star come in to play. With the building and framing the house, he just trusted us. And he’d come in when the decorator was there, you know what I mean?
“And Dwight’s a guy who on any given day can come in and do an amazing vocal on a couple of passes,” continues Wakeman. “By the second batch of records, he’d gotten into the acting thing, plus these guys were touring like crazy. So he had a lot on his plate besides just making the records. The big picture focus was there, but day to day—when he’d been on the phone with managers and agents all morning—it was hard for him to shut that down and say, ‘Okay, I’m gonna sing now.’
“It would take more time to get his vocals done, because he might have been talking for three hours, and his voice was tired. And with his voice, it’s like there’s 90 percent and there’s 100 percent. And everybody else might be perfectly happy with his 90 percent, but he wouldn’t be.”
So, the pair of ambitious, hard-working perfectionists made a perfect team, as long as the records were selling and radio was playing them and Dwight was receiving positive response for his film endeavors. When the major-label recording career tanked and Dwight lost his shirt on his film, it was time to question a relationship that had been impervious to challenge from the start. Even Pete knew that things had to change. He just figured he’d still be an integral part of that change. And he proposed a big idea about how to keep the show rolling while circumventing the normal channels of record labels and radio play.
“I had this idea for this thing with the working title The Death of Country Music,” says Pete. “I wanted to do a stage play. What you needed was something he didn’t have to write any new material for but would be great in and attract a lot of attention. Something a little different from the usual record-tour routine. So, you have this stage play, and you start it with Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman, and you end it with Merle Haggard. And go through five guys, loosely, from Jimmie to Hank to Lefty to Buck to Merle, something like that. Because after Merle, it was over.
“So you’d have a stage play, a DVD, a soundtrack record, then wrap that up and go play casinos. We’d do a set of each guy and end with Dwight Yoakam music. And that could be a two or three year turnaround, and you could go back to it whenever you wanted to. And he could act in it, being Hank in the back of a Cadillac. But he wasn’t interested.”
Despite Pete’s attempt to suggest a vehicle in which Dwight could combine music and acting, such a project would seem to be a creative dead end. And if Dwight didn’t have any more country hits in him—due to changing demographics, record company politics, promotional budgets, and a variety of different factors that have little to do with the quality of music—he felt that he still had plenty of songs to write. And a loyal audience that would continue to support him. And a musical future without Pete Anderson. (Though increasingly it has been in casinos, which pay well for established country names.)
Pete sued, Dwight settled, and that was that. They don’t talk, though others who knew them together remain friends with both. Neither sees much possibility of ever working together again.
And the music they made together?
“It’s timeless,” says Dusty Wakeman, who had the closest view of the collaboration at its peak. “Those guys made history.”
20
Produced by Dwight Yoakam
IF POPULATION: ME REPRESENTED something of a fresh start for Dwight, Blame the Vain was an even fresher one. After a couple of decades of continuity with a major, he’d jumped from one indie deal to another, this time with New West, an artist-friendly label with offices in both Los Angeles and Austin. The latter city had long positioned itself as the anti-Nashville, the place where rougher-hewn creativi
ty resisted the assembly-line polishing of the mainstream country machine.
New West would establish itself as the premier indie label for the emerging “Americana” movement after the turn of the millennium, cornering the market on this artistry much as Rounder had with folk in earlier decades. It provided refuge for artists who had once enjoyed Nashville country success (Kris Kristofferson, Steve Earle), for artists who resisted categorical niches (John Hiatt, Delbert McClinton, the reunion of the Flatlanders with Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore), and for artists who came to twang with a younger perspective (Drive-By Truckers, the Old 97’s).
The label also launched a series in association with the Austin City Limits program, releasing classic performances (including an early one of Yoakam’s) on CD and DVD. And it would subsequently enjoy great success with the Oscar-winning music from the Crazy Heart soundtrack, a film steeped in the honky-tonks.
Label head Cameron Strang didn’t need to think twice when the opportunity to work with Yoakam presented itself. “For me, this was a total no-brainer,” he says. “I’m just a huge fan. When I was running the label there were a few artists who I felt that if I could just sign that person, how fantastic would that be.”
Yoakam could have been the biggest commercial catch for the label, but it was never a natural fit. Yes, New West could offer him complete creative freedom, but so had Warner Bros. New West had no connection to country radio and the country music industry at large, and that’s still where Dwight’s commercial significance lay. What had made him singular was his ability to straddle mainstream country and progressive Americana.
Now he fell into the gulf in between, no longer a major-label hitmaker, but also lacking the stature in Americana circles accorded not only some of his New West label mates—Buddy Miller, in particular—but also creatively rejuvenated artists such as Rodney Crowell, Rosanne Cash, Emmylou Harris, and others who had given up on making music for country radio and were making some of the most inspired music of their careers—for themselves. Even the venerable Johnny Cash had been taking radical chances with his music, recording with cutting-edge producer Rick Rubin, covering material from the likes of Nine Inch Nails.
By contrast, Yoakam still had his ear toward country radio—a commercial ambition that made Americana suspicious. But trying to invade that mainstream music monolith from an indie outpost was like attacking a fortress with a slingshot. New West had no connection to country radio, and fans of Americana were but a fraction of Yoakam’s former constituency.
He certainly hadn’t broadened that constituency with the 2004 release of Dwight’s Used Records, his contract-fulfilling departure from Audium. Its fourteen tracks were all covers and mostly previously issued, on non–Warner Bros. tribute albums (to Webb Pierce, Johnny Cash, Bob Wills, ZZ Top) and one-off projects. Only Dwight’s biggest fans would ever know it existed.
As Dwight would later acknowledge, “I tend to have a broader commercial appeal than an Americana label like New West might have realized.” Or at least he previously had, when he had the promotional muscle of a major behind him, and he was making music that the major felt it could sell to country radio.
Since the dual trajectory of creativity and commerce had once given Yoakam his stratospheric ascent, it’s easy to confuse one with the other after the two veered in different directions. Yoakam’s career continued its nosedive in terms of commercial success, one that had begun with the comparative failure in the marketplace of Gone, and that Yoakam wouldn’t be likely to reverse by going the indie route.
Yet the music itself retained its consistency, its commitment to quality, its adventurous spirit. If anything, Dwight’s indie albums were more inspired than his last few albums on a major. And his first album ever to carry the credit “produced by Dwight Yoakam,” and first under his deal with New West, is work of which he remains justifiably proud.
At the time, guitarist Keith Gattis had replaced Anderson in Yoakam’s band, and Dwight says it was Gattis’s suggestion that the artist produce himself rather than inviting someone else. One senses that Yoakam didn’t need a whole lot of persuasion.
Whether it was because he was free of Pete or because he had learned so much by working with Anderson, 2005’s Blame the Vain was both recognizably a Dwight Yoakam album, an extension and continuation of the music he had made for two decades with Pete Anderson, and a liberating experience for its artist-producer. Just as there are cuts here that would have been highlights on any Yoakam album, there are others that reflect the idiosyncrasies of Dwight’s personality, independent of Pete, and that would never have appeared on any other Yoakam album.
Fresh and familiar merge on the album-opening title track, where the first fuzz-toned guitar note seems to channel the Beatles tune “I Feel Fine,” and then proceeds into a song that Warner Bros. might have been able to promote into a radio hit. It remains a staple of his live performance. At least half of the cuts seem to retain the sound and style that were Yoakam’s signature, suggesting that even with a new label and without his producer of two decades, this was still the same artist. These were fastballs, right down the middle.
But what makes the album more interesting are the wicked curves. Just as the early demos demonstrated what Yoakam’s music was like before Pete, thus underscoring what sort of focus as a producer and arranger Anderson brought to the picture, Yoakam’s first self-produced album shows what his music would be like unyoked from Anderson.
There’s an unbridled lack of restraint on a couple of cuts that listeners could dismiss as self-indulgence but which plainly sound like freedom to the artist. The hard-rocking, harmony-laden “International Heartache” tells a tale of a woman scorned who pursues her vengeance with reckless abandon, climaxing with a spoken-word play-by play-that makes a pretty funny song even funnier. Likewise, “She’ll Remember” opens with a deadpan comic turn by Dwight in a quasi-British accent, before reverting to honky-tonk shuffle mode.
“We were just fooling around in the studio,” explains Yoakam. “And [keyboardist] Skip Edwards was doing this kind of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer synth thing, like ‘Lucky Man.’ Just to amuse myself, I started playing the clown, with an absurd, stream-of-consciousness in an over-the-top British accent, like Monty Python’s interpretation of the Moody Blues. And then drummer Mitch Marine began to play kind of a ‘Ticket to Ride’ pattern. And it just became part of the track.”
A playful, off-the-cuff, in-the-studio part of the track that likely wouldn’t have been included with a more regimented, disciplined producer like Pete Anderson. Likewise, the piano break on “Does It Show?” finds Edwards coming closer to evoking Errol Garner (or even Bill Evans) than Floyd Cramer, in an arrangement that exudes the atmospherics of a surreal supper club. The languid “Just Passin’ Time” captures a similar feeling, reinforcing the stylistic kinship between Yoakam and California retro-crooner Chris Isaak.
Sandwiched between those two cuts there’s “Three Good Reasons,” which extends the strategy of “Sorry You Asked” from Gone, taking country convention and pushing it to the limits of lyrical absurdity. “I’ll give you three good reasons for leavin’, and number one is that I’ve forgotten number two,” sings Yoakam. “Number three is in a place that’s been kept hidden for so long I can’t remember, but it’s true.”
So there: the Zen koan as country song craft. And a sign that Yoakam was a long way from settling into creative complacency. He never intended this to be the last album of original material he would release. And he still doesn’t. Yet, six years later, there has been no more new music from Yoakam. He insists that the problem isn’t lack of material or lack of label options, and that there will be newly recorded original material available in 2012.
In the mean time, let’s allow Yoakam to reflect, at length, on how it felt to serve as his own producer. In order to keep this manuscript as timely as possible, Yoakam and I had a long, late phone conversation the week before the book’s initial deadline. The experience was so charact
eristically Dwight—when the time that had been scheduled a full week earlier came for me to call, Dwight was on another line but was “just wrapping up.” Call back in fifteen minutes.
Which I did, and Dwight was still “just wrapping up,” according to his assistant, who suggested he would call me as soon as he was through. So forty-five minutes later, I received a call from Dwight, who explained that he was still on that conference call (that he’d put on hold), “just wrapping up,” but was wondering if it might be better for us to reschedule later in the week. No problem, though the time he spent explaining why we couldn’t talk right then and trying to figure out when it would be best for us to talk was longer than many full phone interviews I’ve conducted.
He finally decided it would be best if he just called me back in an hour. And so he did—two hours later, apologizing profusely for all the delays and complications. But Dwight’s mind is itself a complication of wonders. So, here’s how producing himself differed from recording with Pete Anderson as producer:
“I think I did some things with EQ differently,” he explains. “On Blame the Vain, I was doing things with the bass, specifically. The frequency of the bass response was more akin to something you might hear in 1968 than you would in the mid-1970s, when tape heads were wider and you went to twenty-four-track, so you were playing with sonics differently.
“I mean, Blame the Vain clearly sounds like one of my records. Pete was always good—the way that Pete and I had worked over the years was that Pete was specifically hired to produce, I didn’t demand any co-producing credit, but I signed off on every mix. I went specifically to the mastering lab for each of my albums, starting with Guitars, Cadillacs. So, it would have been more different moving from Pete Anderson to a different producer. And I’ll still probably co-produce with somebody some day.
