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For decades -- a good half a century's worth, at least -- untold thousands of aspiring country singers and songwriters have pulled into Nashville from all over the United States, just looking for a hit or at the very least, a fair shake. A few strike it rich and feed the machine that is the country music industry, but most fall through the cracks and are never heard from again.
And then there are the ones that got away, finding their fortune elsewhere and leaving the sharks on Music Row kicking themselves for missed opportunities. Nashville, it must be said, had first dibs on a young Kentucky-born, Ohio-raised hillbilly savior named Dwight Yoakam, but before anyone even knew he was a prize worth fighting over, the West won his heart hard and fast. In 1977, Yoakam high-tailed it out of Nashville and drove to Los Angeles, never once looking back. It was Warner Nashville that eventually ended up signing Yoakam some nine years later, but by then he was too fully formed and too far gone in his Bakersfield Sound-inspired ways to ever fit the mold of the standard modern pop country hat act.
Yoakam wasn't the first country boy to find his place in the world playing California honky-tonks; that trail had long before him been blazed by the likes of Buck Owens, Merle Haggard and Gram Parsons. But with all due respect to Texan Joe Ely and his brief flirtation with the Clash, Yoakam was surely the first hardcore honky-tonk troubadour to fight his way to the top of the country charts by storming through the back door of the L.A. punk scene. When the trendy upscale urban cowboy establishments turned a deaf ear to Yoakam's retro-rockin' hillbilly originals, he stormed Hollywood's punk dens and found his place amongst the likes of X and the Blasters. Together with kindred spirit/producer/guitarist Pete Anderson, he cut an EP on an independent punk label and soon after landed his major label deal, debuting nationally with an expanded version of that same EP, Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.
Sixteen years, seventeen Top Ten country hits, two Grammys and some ten and a half million album sales later, Dwight Yoakam is so overdue for the box set treatment, they went and gave him two. Reprise Please Baby: The Warner Years, released by Reprise/Rhino on November 19th, neatly condenses the last two decades of Yoakam's career onto four discs -- one comprised entirely of previously unreleased material, including ten tracks from the 1981 demo that prove he was hitting the mark long before anyone paid attention. Then there's the big box, green-lit but still being fine-tuned by Rhino's collector-baiting Handmade specialty label. This limited edition collection, scheduled for release next year, will likely pack at least ten discs, drawing together every studio track he's recorded to date, including the unreleased stuff, the requisite Christmas album and Under the Covers, his bold but misunderstood, hit-and-miss 1997 pop, R&B and rock covers album.
The whole enchilada, as it were, but not the last word by a thousand miles. At forty-six, Yoakam is still a baby by country legends status, and despite his rising stock as a bona fide Hollywood actor (Sling Blade, Panic Room and an upcoming thriller with Harrison Ford), he's not about to give up his day job.
As great as it must feel to have a body of work worthy of a box set, by nature such things seem so final. When the project first came up, were you like, "Wait! I'm not done yet!"? An element of ...
Trepidation? Well, this is actually titled the way it is as an indication of what it's about. It's about that period of my life and career. And there have been examples of artists who've had multiple incarnations on different labels. I'm now starting the next stage -- we're going to start recording a brand new studio album in December and January, and that will probably come out late in the second quarter. And it'll be interesting to me, because I think it's incumbent upon the individual artist to maintain pertinence to themselves and their work with an audience, and I think we're still able to do that, I hope. This will be the first studio album in almost two years when it comes out. I'm excited about it, but we'll see how things transpire. But it's on my own label in a co-release distribution marketing deal with a major distributor, which I'm not mentioning yet. My label is Electrodisc Records.
When did you leave Reprise?
Our commitment was formally finished with the South of Heaven LP [the soundtrack to the Yoakam-directed film South of Heaven, West of Hell]. And then there's a compilation coming out in the fall called In Other's Words, which is outside tracks I've done over the years. But that was at end of 2001 -- which was sixteen years and fifteen albums. Seventeen years now as this box set comes out.
What made you decide to leave?
Not to sound trite or use a term that's almost clichéd, but the dynamics of the record business are changing. And it just felt right. I'm in a position where I have an audience base that allows me to make a record and ship a record that makes financial sense on my own, and I'm able to maintain a greater degree of artistic control over the master recordings.
Did you play an active role in selecting the songs for the box set? Seems like a good excuse to sit down and pull all your albums off the shelf and reminisce.
I tried to stay out of that. I let [box set producer] James Austin and the staff at Rhino come to us and say, "What do you think about this?" I felt it was something that needed the objective vision of a third party, so I let them select the cuts. Of course the Handmade set, there wasn't much choosing involved in that. That's really the total retrospective. You can always go back and look at the individual albums, but it's interesting to see it all in one place. Pete and I were like, "Wow, we did a lot of stuff in sixteen years."
Do you ever listen to your old records?
I usually burn myself out during the mixing process, because I really police what we do during tracking and mixing and the EQ stage. I mean, Pete is a very collaborative producer, especially with me -- he and I do these records elbow to elbow -- and during that process I'm listening to it constantly in the car. But a week after mastering, I shelve it, and then I don't usually listen to it again until I have to go on some television show and play it, when I have to fumble around and find it so I can listen to it on the way over there.
Looking over the tracks this box set, can you at least single out a favorite album you've made to date?
A couple of things stand out for different reasons. I've felt that each album that I've done in the studio is my favorite album that I've done up to that point. But having said that, Guitars Cadillacs will obviously always be prominent in my heart and my mind, because it was the first. It was literally off the street, that album. It was independent, and now I've come full circle to that place with my new label. This Time was a huge commercial success for us. I love If There Was a Way, and Gone is also an album that will always be something I'm very proud of, because it was in the shadow of This Time, and in some ways was overlooked. And A Long Way Home is the one that I feel the strongest as a writer and lyricist, especially the title track.
Let's talk about those early years in California leading up to Guitars, Cadillacs. Is it true that you once lived in Pete Anderson's closet?
Yep. Well, it was a laundry room. It went out to a back door. It was a little shotgun single he had, and I think for about three months, I shared his little hovel in between my own hovels. <<p> Was that the lowest point for you?
Well, you know -- you're twenty-five years old. That's kind of the adventure in life. Looking back, I knew it was temporary -- it was a transitional thing. And he and I were really thickly collaborating at that point. Those three months really shaped us.
When you first left Ohio, you briefly went to Nashville before winding up in Los Angeles.
Yeah, very briefly.
Was Los Angeles not just as discouraging as Music Row?
Well, no. There were things going on here that allowed you to have access to environments that encouraged development through performing live. That was what was missing for me in Nashville -- there wasn't really a great live performing environment at the time, in 1977. And Emmylou Harris was still on the West Coast here -- there was a great beacon there for inspiring country rock and alternative country, if you will, before it was called that. Ricky Skaggs was out here with Emmylou's Hot Band, and so was Rodney Crowell. The Palamino Club was here and rocking every night with a headliner act.
But you still had to deal with club owners wanting you to do Alabama covers.
Well to some degree, in the outlying areas. That was if you were going to play and make money doing it every night. And what I ended up doing was going to the other side of the hill to the rock clubs, Pete and I about 1982 took it over there, and found our audience doing original stuff. It was more starvation diet, but part of the adventure along the way.
Did you feel rebellious at the time? Like you were doing something against the status quo?
At that point, I think Emmylou had moved back to Nashville, and yeah, we knew we were bucking the odds, but I knew there was a great legacy of country acts being signed on the West Coast. Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, going back to Tommy Collins. The whole California country sound, which is what the Bakersfield Sound was. Ironically, all of the hits from the Bakersfield Sound were cut in L.A. at Capitol Records on Vine Street, Hollywood.
Living in L.A. has also conveniently allowed you to pursue an acting career. But you always seem to wind up playing scummy characters, like in Sling Blade and Panic Room. Is that really why you made your own movie, so you could play a sheriff instead of a creepy bad guy?
Exactly. [Laughs]. At least for once, I wanted to play the protagonist instead of the antagonist.
"South of Heaven" was recently released on DVD and home video. You spent years working on that movie -- were you happy with the end result?
Well I'm very proud of the fact that it survived at all, because it had a really arduous journey. Everything that could go wrong in an independent film went wrong, and then it lost its funding about a week and a half into the movie. But on a creative level, it was one of the most exhilarating things I've ever done, directing those actors. I was blessed with an ensemble cast of really gifted, talented people, and I'll be forever grateful to them for staying the course with me and allowing it to come to fruition. And it was something that I hope to be able to do again as a director, having become that much wiser from the experience. I learned an enormous about the execution of film directing, and I learned truckloads about the business side of it and what I'll never do again.
What can you say about your current film project?
I'm working with Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett on a film called Hollywood Homicide. It's co-written and directed by Ron Shelton. It's a principal role.
And what was the last great movie you saw yourself?
At the Silver Lake Film Festival, I saw a great documentary called Tribute, which is about tribute bands. It was pretty fascinating, hysterically funny at points, endearing at points, and sadly delusional at points. In the end credits, they give epilogues of the various performers in these tribute bands -- there was like a KISS tribute band, a Monkees tribute band, a Queen tribute band, and a superfan of this tribute band that would follow a tribute band almost as if they were the real thing. And there was one character in the story that the audience had followed, and a cheer when up when they found out that he had left this particular environment to explore creative avenues somewhere else. And that was a tribute to the filmmaker that they were able to connect that audience with those human beings in that way.
Do you know of any full-blown Dwight Yoakam tribute acts?
No, I don't know that there is. And I don't know that I want to know if there is one.
RICHARD SKANSE
(December 20, 2002)