Dwight Yoakam

Coming out of Los Angeles by way of Pikeville, KY, Dwight Yoakam made a statement when he kicked off his first major-label release with a cover version of Johnny Horton's "Honky Tonk Man." (Yoakam had cut an EP in 1984 for the Oak label that features songs rerecorded for his Reprise debut.) Everything he's done in the intervening years has been a testament to his diligent pursuit of a roots sound and unsentimental point of view. Nominally a country artist, Yoakam has no truck with Nashville, nor it with him. Yoakam and his producer and guitarist, Pete Anderson, keep things lean and mean with a basic band supplemented by fiddles, mandolins, steel guitars, and dobros, with little regard for mainstream country niceties. Yoakam is pretty much an outcast as a country artist, never honored by the Country Music Association, and hardly a staple on country radio; even his videos are seldom seen on TNN or CMT.

Ultimately the path leads to California, where Yoakam resides, and specifically to Bakersfield, where in the '60s Buck Owens and Merle Haggard came on with a searing blast of rock- and blues-informed country that wilted the sanitized, string-laden efforts being packaged as the Nashville Sound. It was Yoakam, in fact, who lured Owens out of retirement and back into the recording studio for a rocking remake of Owens' paranoiac classic, "Streets of Bakersfield." Yoakam writes often of family, dislocation (both spiritual and physical), and love wars. Guitars, Cadillacs and Hillbilly Deluxe deal most directly with reminiscences of his early life ("South of Cincinnati," "Readin', Rightin', Rt. 23," "Johnson's Love") and his family ("Miner's Prayer"), but the overriding theme of his music is the difficulty of finding true love. This all comes to a head on Buenas Noches From a Lonely Room, which sounds torn from the deepest part of a man who's utterly bereft of friends and lovers. In the title song he tells of a woman who bore him a child, then ran off with the baby, and of how he hunted her down and blew out her brains. Even the cover choices are telling: "Streets of Bakersfield," Johnny Cash's "Home of the Blues," and Hank Locklin's "Send Me the Pillow."

After a respite for the best-of collection, Just Lookin' for a Hit, Yoakam returned with another first-rate effort, If There Was a Way. Less tortured than Buenas Noches, If There Was a Way is nonetheless almost totally about loss and self-recrimination. Yet there's tenderness in "If There Was a Way" and in "Send a Message to My Heart." Ending with a cover of Wilbert Harrison's "Let's Work Together" bespeaks an optimism foreign to Yoakam's bleak sensibility, but he makes it work. For good measure, throw in a touch of Duane Eddy twang at the end of "The Distance Between You and Me" and quotes from Link Wray's "Rumble" in "If There Was a Way," and you get a sense that this album represents a summing up of the past and present that finds light, albeit faint, illuminating a path once enveloped in darkness and pain.

It would be almost three years before Yoakam returned with This Time, and the wait was worthwhile, even if the hard edges seemed to have become harder -- in his on-record persona, that is. "Pocket of a Clown" finds him bemoaning being made a fool of again by a woman, and the final song, "Lonesome Road," finds him alone again, naturally. But in between are some of the finest recordings of his career: the sizzling "Thousand Miles From Nowhere," the brutal "Ain't That Lonely Yet," the spiteful, hard-rocking "Fast As You," and a heart-tugging missive, "Try Not to Look So Pretty." Anderson became bolder in his arrangements, incorporating pop influences as well as subtle nods to the Nashville mainstream of the '50s and '60s. By comparison, Gone and Long Way Home, despite amazing moments such as "Sorry You Asked?" (on Gone) and a tough-minded bit of country philosphizing in "Things Change" (on Long Way Home), are the least accessible of Yoakam's studio efforts. That sense of a holding pattern being in effect continued through Dwight Live and an album of interesting cover choices, Under the Covers; however, a solo acoustic set aired on Internet radio and released as dwightyoakam acoustic.net was a powerful statement by an artist at the peak of his powers. Produced by Anderson again, but featuring him on guitar only on "Little Sister," this one belongs solely to Yoakam, whose voice is in full, unadorned splendor and who reveals himself to be one heck of a guitar picker along the way.

The solo acoustic album set the stage for an artistic resurgence, starting with 2000's Tomorrow's Sounds Today. The approach here is at once familiar and fresh, as Yoakam weds his hard, Bakersfield-style country to rockabilly rhythms, rock & roll production touches, and honky-tonk heartache in sculpting captivating mise-en-scènes for his lurid tales of love gone frightfully wrong.

A year later came South of Heaven, West of Hell, the companion soundtrack to a movie cowritten and directed by Yoakam. Minus the nine snippets of film dialogue interspersed throughout, it ranks as one of the artist's deepest, most stirring albums. This being a Western movie, Yoakam's hard-country approach undergoes little in the way of alteration. But when Yoakam and Anderson push the envelope a bit, the results are uniformly compelling. The dense atmosphere, twangy guitar, ominous kettledrums, and soaring, Billy Rose–style strings of "Somewhere" come out of Bakersfield by way of Phil Spector -- an instant Yoakam classic.

For those who want the Yoakam story in succinct form, the four-CD box set, Reprise Please Baby: The Warner Bros. Years, is the place to go. All of the essential studio recordings are here, including the abovementioned demos cut before Pete Anderson's arrival on the scene, which comprise part of disc four's 21 previously unissued recordings. That disc's early take on "You're the One," done as a slow, tearjerking lament, stands in stark contrast to the ferocious, Anderson-assisted version (heard on disc one) that scalded both the country and pop charts a decade later. In addition, there are enough new recordings (three) and previously unissued live and studio tracks (including two stunning duets with Kelly Willis, on the George Jones–Tammy Wynette classic "Golden Ring" and on Jones' "Take Me") to compose an entire new Dwight Yoakam album in the midst of this breathtaking retrospective. Most recently Yoakam departed the Warner Bros. fold to start his own label venture. (DAVID MCGEE)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide