Dwight Yoakam Read online

  So, just as a biography of Elvis Presley must encompass Colonel Tom and a book about John Lennon needs to include Paul McCartney (talk about your bitter splits!), this is a book about Dwight Yoakam—how his music originated, how it has progressed, what it has accomplished. And it’s about a legacy that doesn’t stop here, for the artist has too many ideas and too much ambition to rest on his laurels for long. Like a lot of those who follow Yoakam—critics and fans alike—I eagerly await the next chapter.

  1

  How Far Is Heaven?

  IT ISN’T UNTIL AN HOUR into what was promised to be an interview but instead became a monologue—wide-ranging, stream of consciousness, fascinating and frustrating in equal measure—that Dwight Yoakam leaves the conference room of his business office and returns with an acoustic guitar. One that badly needs tuning. And at this point our interchange morphs into something like one of those Behind the Music specials.

  The setting: the headquarters of Etc., Etc., the nerve center of Dwight’s career, located on the fourth floor of the Sunset Boulevard building of the Directors Guild of America. The rectangular table with the marble top flanked by office chairs could pass as the meeting place of any board of directors. Yet the gold and platinum records and the movie posters covering the walls attest to the nature of this particular business—and suggest that, for Dwight Yoakam, business has been good.

  The panoramic views of Sunset Boulevard below and the Hollywood Hills above reflect the sense of privilege that success bestows. The vista from a different angle extends all the way downtown, when you can see through the smog. By the window is a telescope through which perhaps Yoakam can view Venus or Mars on a clear night. Nearby are a globe and the National Geographic Atlas of the World.

  No, from here you can’t see Pike County, Kentucky, the mining region that the Yoakam family continued to call home even after moving north to Columbus, Ohio, when Dwight was two. But the real question is whether Dwight could somehow have foreseen all this back then. Could he have envisioned his career in West Hollywood, even some approximation of this office, when he decided to make music his life while still living in Columbus?

  Attesting to an artistic vision that extends beyond country traditionalism, or even music, a number of coffee-table-sized art books are stacked in the conference room: Dalí, da Vinci, Warhol. And beneath one of the two speakers, a skull. Alas, poor Yorick! Amid the immortality of art and the infinity of the universe, here’s a reminder of the end that awaits us all.

  The “Etc., Etc.” on the outside door of these offices provides an oblique reminder of Yoakam’s early recording days, when he released an indie EP in 1985 titled Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. He quickly became a national country chart topper after Warner Bros./Reprise signed the roadhouse renegade and had him expand the disc into an album with the same title and added a colorized version of the original black-and-white cover. His first full-length release with national distribution turned Yoakam into an overnight sensation, and it had only taken him a decade or so.

  The funny thing about the EP and the title is that it wasn’t until the expansion into the LP that Yoakam was inspired to write a song called “Guitars, Cadillacs,” with “and hillbilly music” replacing the etceteras. (In other words, the EP’s title preceded the LP’s title song.) His record company initially balked, fearing that the Kentucky-born artist’s evocation of what the label considered trailer trash was like waving a rebel flag at the possibility of crossover mainstream success.

  But Yoakam stood his ground and “hillbilly music” remained his categorical description of choice (and “crossover” an epithet). Yet the “Etc., Etc.” was more than a placeholder in the EP’s title. It suggests the inner workings of a mind that sees connections everywhere, generating possibilities without boundaries, where “and so on, and so on” is the sort of transition that can leap chronology and linear logic as well as subject matter.

  Start talking with Yoakam about seminal inspirations and you’re as likely to hear him wax rhapsodic about the Monkees and the continental shift of television from New York to Los Angeles, thus blazing the trail for his eventual pilgrimage, as you are about the Stonewall Jackson and Johnny Horton influences that made their way from his parents’ albums from the Columbia Record Club into his own music.

  Hours later, ask him about the breakthrough stage of his musical development in Los Angeles, when he was embraced by the roots-punk crowd before establishing a fan base in contemporary country. Then sit back and roll tape:

  “Oh, yeah, that was our crowd. We’d moved out of the brilliance of the ’60s, and by then we were into the Tusk world of Fleetwood Mac, and nobody knew where it was going. It was over under sideways down.

  “We were too country for rock and roll and too rock for Nashville. Pete [Anderson, Yoakam’s longtime producer, guitarist, and bandleader] and I had gotten fired from a lot of places, because we wouldn’t play that Urban Cowboy cover stuff. I used to be on the phone seven hours a day. I booked us. And I had records in my El Camino—the EP—and I’d be driving ’em all over town.

  “I was the generation that had given us punk. If I’d gone to New York in ’75, ’76, it would have been CBGB. What we had was the emotion. When we’d do “Please, Please Baby,” the affinity they felt for us at the Whisky a Go Go was like, holy shit. They had a lot of rockabilly out here. When I first got here I saw Robert Gordon at the Whisky a Go Go, and he had Link Wray with him. 1978. And Billy Zoom’s rockabilly band opened for him. And the Blasters were really rockabilly in a sense. We had the greatest affinity with the Blasters and Los Lobos. Again, guys who were more professional in their execution than Rank and File or Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

  “But then Del Fuegos was an interesting band. The Plugz became Del Fuegos when the cowpunk thing started happening. Southern California has always been more of a free-association environment. The Byrds happening alongside Arthur Lee and Love. Go from Paladin and Westerns on television.

  “So, we were certainly distinct, but the access point was the emotional reckless abandon. We were as rabid as anyone, it’s just that we stayed in tune. And it was shocking to see bodies slamming. It was crazy. We were slammin’, but we were in tune! Watch the Beatles on bootleg video, and, man, they were good! Listen to them sing ‘Nowhere Man’ live, and it was raw, but man, they were the Beatles for a reason! [Dwight starts singing ‘Nowhere Man.’] ‘Paperback Writer,’ wow. What they’re doing, they’re doing. Those four had depth.

  “And when you listen to the Roxy Theatre [recording], that bonus disc with the deluxe edition of ‘Guitars, Cadillacs,’ that is the moment! We knew! We didn’t know what we knew, but we knew . . . And maybe we knew that before I realized we knew it.”

  Not to get all Watergate about this, but what did Dwight know? And when did he know it? Before I began working on this book, one journalist described him as “one of the smartest people in the business,” while another warned that he is “too smart for his own good.” How come? “He can talk himself in and out of things like five times in one conversation,” came the reply. “He’s an enigma, man. And God can that guy talk!” That journalist told me about having his own broken jaw wired shut when he first interviewed Yoakam, and how it hadn’t made any difference. He wouldn’t have gotten a word in edgewise anyway.

  One of the many contradictions that makes Yoakam such a provocative artist is that his loquacious reality is so at odds with the brooding image of the noir cowboy who keeps his visage hidden beneath his cowboy hat and his thoughts to himself, preserving that lip curl for his singing. He’s a flamboyant, even electrifying, performer, but one never gets the sense that he’s revealing much of himself beneath those flashy outfits, with jeans so tight they seem painted on his swiveling hips.

  Away from the stage, Dwight has no such flash or airs. And he has no qualms about revealing himself as a balding guy with a few wrinkles and a bit of a paunch—more the character actor that he has become (memorably and menacingly in Sling Blade, Panic Room,
and other roles) than a leading man. Hiding nothing, he holds nothing back. Of all the artists I’ve interviewed, only the late Doug Sahm (Sir Douglas Quintet, the Texas Tornados) ranks with Yoakam as a world-class talker. The difference is that Doug was more of a memoirist, a one-man oral history project whose sudden shifts had their own logic (sometimes only a logic discernible by Doug, but still). Dwight’s mind is more analytical, even philosophical, as he frequently seems to be heading down five different speculative highways at ninety miles per hour, divergent directions on different bridges, all at once.

  When preparing for our interview (I’d last talked with him decades before, for a newspaper story), I had dozens of questions covering his formative years in Kentucky and Ohio, his early attempt to launch a career in Nashville, his subsequent struggles and triumph on the West Coast, the progression of his music, and the development of his film sidelight . . .

  After an hour, when Dwight leaves to get his guitar, we are on question two. He wasn’t out of grade school, let alone high school. But he had written his first song, at the age of eight, and he wanted to play it for me. And this performance provided the key to everything, unlocking the contradictions between sincerity and sham, authenticity and contrivance that lie at the heart of not only Yoakam’s music, but of country music in general.

  Because when the fifty-four-year-old Yoakam starts singing the first song he had written, he isn’t pretending to be eight years old. But his voice has as much sincere innocence in its conviction as a child’s. For the minute or so that it takes him to sing that first verse, he is living that song, just as he had when he wrote it.

  The song sounds like it should be titled “How Far Is Heaven?,” and it’s about a little boy who was Dwight’s age when he wrote it. The boy’s dad was a soldier, killed in Vietnam, and now his father was in heaven, or so the boy has been told. And since the boy, more than anything, wants to see his daddy, he asks the question that obsesses him.

  While tuning for maybe ten or fifteen minutes—the guitar itself has become an obsession, and a distraction, as we try to sustain a train of thought in the interview that now threatens to jump the rails—he jokes about his instrumental range: “I haven’t gotten that much more sophisticated, for better or worse, but I knew enough to tell that was Johnny Cash,” he says of the melodic model for his song.

  Finally the strings are close enough to tuned for him to tolerate, and he starts singing with the purity and passion that might have marked his performance if we were in a concert hall holding a few thousand. Or if he were in that boyhood bedroom, alone.

  “There’s a few things that I don’t understand,” he sings, his voice plaintive and on the verge of heartbreak. “How far is heaven? When can I go? I miss my dad. Oh, I loved him so.”

  His voice has the ring of truth, for these are the questions an eight-year-old would ask, maybe even one who hadn’t been raised in a fundamentalist church that preached that every word in the Bible is literally true and that heaven is a place far more real than West Hollywood could ever be. A kid that age could only be consoled by the possibility that his dad wasn’t gone for good, that the two of them could still reconnect. If only someone would show him the way.

  I later read in an early newspaper profile that Dwight had given the song a more prosaic title, befitting a kid his age when he wrote it: “My Daddy Got Killed Over in Vietnam.” By whatever title, the song is an invention, a creative fabrication. While the emotional investment of Dwight’s performance of the material made it ring true, his own dad wasn’t dead, hadn’t even served in Vietnam, though he had been a soldier. Dwight had learned about the war the same way he’d discovered practically everything else that would have such a significant impact on his musical persona—from television. And TV was real, a heightened reality.

  “I was watching the news all the time, and this is what was on,” explains Yoakam, who continues with a critique of his first songwriting effort. “It’s not that complex, but how many eight-year-olds would write that? Is heaven a place? From a kid’s eye view, it is.”

  “It’s an awfully sad song,” replies his lone listener.

  “It is sad,” he agrees. “I walked downstairs and my parents said, ‘What are you playing up there?’ And I played it for them, and they went, ‘What the hell!’ They were freaked out. ‘There’s something wrong with the kid,’ ” he laughs heartily. “Yes, I was given to invention. But only loosely. ’Cause my dad had been a soldier for awhile.

  “I hadn’t been seriously writing, but now I knew I could do that. That was a song! At eight years old. My parents looked at me a little weird. Bizarre. Not sure what you do with that or what that means. And they had me play it for some friends. And they thought it was weird.”

  The experience left Dwight sure of two things. That he was gifted enough to write songs of his own, songs that would give him control of his artistic destiny. And that he was weird. Maybe those are the same thing, or at least they were to a kid who continued to feel a little bit different all the way through high school in Columbus, Ohio, into his brief stint at his hometown’s Ohio State University, then to Nashville, where he didn’t fit at all. And finally, maybe inevitably (or so it seems in retrospect), he headed west, to a dream factory where a lot of creative misfits come to reinvent themselves, or to invent themselves in the first place.

  Over the course of the rest of our interview, Dwight continues to strum the guitar, letting his thoughts trail into riffs, documenting the chronology of his career through a series of acoustic performances—sometimes an intro and a line or two, sometimes even a whole verse and chorus. But the more that he lets his music speak for him, the less he amplifies upon it. After extending an excursion through the memories of his first eight, largely pre-musical, years into more than an hour, he compresses a summary of his last two decades into little more than thirty minutes, complete with impromptu soundtrack. He can talk expansively, as if he has all the time in the world, but he’s also a restless man with a short attention span.

  As the following chapters will show, when he analyzes his songs with specificity, as he did above, the underlying theme of his musical creativity relies more on the abstract. Truth or concoction? Purist or poseur? A throwback to an earlier era or a visionary offering of Tomorrow’s Sounds Today?

  “You don’t have to live it to write it,” he explains about the writing of “It Won’t Hurt,” one of his classic honky-tonk ballads about drowning your sorrows in alcohol, which Dwight had never drunk. But he’d played enough bars to internalize what he’d seen. “You write from what you know. And then you write beyond what you know, from what you know, vis-à-vis what you know . . . It’s the tool that allows the writer to move beyond yourself to something larger than yourself. That’s the task at hand. And that’s what the best writing can be—using what you know to think beyond yourself.”

  Are you sure Hank done it this a-way? (I’m pretty positive Hank never said “vis-à-vis.” Though, as Chuck Berry might have put it, “ ‘Vis-à-vis’ say the old folks. It goes to show you never can tell.”)

  The “real” Dwight Yoakam may forever remain an enigma, as complicated as any of us, more complicated than most. But his music is as real as it gets. It delivers a truth that takes something from the facts of his life but uses that literal factuality as a seed, a springboard, a launching pad. So let’s call this a musical biography of Dwight Yoakam, a book about the life of the music, for the creative truth of the art is almost always more significant than the factual truth of the artist who made it.

  2

  Readin’, Rightin’, Rt. 23

  IN THE EARLY SONG that best reflects Yoakam’s creative authenticity, his ability to render the details of a life that seemed so different, so exotic, so real, to fans and fellow musicians in Los Angeles—yet were more a projection from his life than a reflection of it—he sings, “They learned readin’, rightin’, Route 23 to the jobs that lay waiting in those cities’ factories. They didn’t know that old highway could
lead them to a world of misery.”

  The “they” in the song are those schooled in the coal mining country of rural Kentucky, just south of the Ohio border, where the third of the three Rs was the road out of town. The most important lesson kids learned in the schools of Pike County was that they needed to leave it far behind if they hoped for something better from life than a coal coffin.

  Though that version of the three Rs was a familiar joke in Pike County, Dwight was never one of those kids. His perspective on Route 23 ran north to south, rather than vice versa. Kentucky wasn’t the place he’d hoped to escape, it was the home to which his family returned, pretty much every weekend.

  The “world of misery”? That would be Columbus, Ohio, a hundred miles or so to the north on the twisting, two-lane Route 23. Not that far, but a whole different world: a big city rather than a rural county, where emancipation from the mines meant the blue-collar drudgery of the assembly-line factory. In other words, pick your poison.

  Yet by Dwight’s own account, the life that he lived with his parents in Columbus, Ohio, where the family moved before he was two, was far from miserable. He was a reasonably happy kid in a reasonably happy household. But the family missed Kentucky and had close ties to relatives there, so practically every Friday they’d pack up the car, hit the road, and travel south to Pikeville. Whenever they talked about “goin’ home,” it was understood that “home” meant Pike County.

  That route would provide the lifeline for Yoakam’s music, the return to Pike County giving his artistry the sort of richness that those heading the other way hoped to find in the material world. Long before he had settled on a career ambition as a country musician, he knew that “in some way, this part of the country would be at the heart of whatever I would do,” he says. He lived in both worlds, never completely leaving one for the other.