“I’m just a face out in the crowd that looks like trouble. . .”
-Dwight Yoakam in “Lonesome Road”.
America’s hillbilly deluxe was driving around Los Angeles playing his new album on the car stereo when the last song ended and he looked at himself in the rearview mirror.
Dwight Yoakam “almost laughed,” he remembers, as he discerned that the album’s final selection, an alienation anthem titled “Lonesome Road,” wasn’t really prompted by the two people he thought he had written it about.
“I said, `You were only fooling yourself,’ ” recalls Yoakam. “I realized I had written it about myself.”
Indeed. In fact, the song’s theme-of stoic but anguished loneliness-seems to characterize all six albums Yoakam has produced thus far: five that have sold a total of 6 million copies and a new one, “This Time,” that is scheduled to hit sales counters this week.
The nasal, traditional-country sound that graces these collections is probably one of the two most important cornerstones on which country music’s current national boom has been built.
While Nashville mainstreamer Randy Travis revitalized traditional-country fans young and old with album sales of three and four million in the mid-1980s, the “alternative country” Yoakam sold a harder, more rock-edged neo-traditionalism to lesser but also-important numbers of more rebellious country adherents. Together, he and Travis forced Nashville executives out of watered-down pop-country crossover music and onto the traditionalist track they have ridden to unprecedented prominence.
Today Yoakam’s seeming spiritual spawn-from Miami’s Mavericks to the Midwest/urban-influenced Gibson/Miller Band to honkytonking western-style two-steppers Brooks & Dunn-dot the country landscape. At a mention of this, Yoakam-whose engaging interview manner mellows an egotistical, difficult-to-deal-with image-pronounces himself “flattered.”
“Living on the West Coast, sometimes I feel like I’m on another planet with regard to country music,” he adds.
“But our last album, `If There Was a Way,’ was the most successful record we’ve had so far-it sold 1.1 million without a major tour-and `This Time’ will be our first one to be released under Soundscan (a computerized method of measuring record sales). I’m excited about that.
“If in 1986 and ’87 country albums had had the benefit of Soundscan, Randy Travis would have had a No. 1 pop album for at least two or three weeks, I’m sure. And we would’ve probably at least made the pop Top 20.”
Although “This Time” is no carbon copy of Yoakam material that has come before-it sounds a little prettier, more melodious and less abrasive in vocal style, and a little less straightforwardly derived from vintage country masters-it’s still Yoakam: hard-hitting and defiantly ruralesque.
His antagonistic artistic persona, which “stunned” members of his family back in Ohio and Kentucky (“I was the least likely candidate to be called this rebellious so-and-so, this black sheep”), was a product of a creative “journey” on which he went to California at age 20, he says.
He headed west, he recalls, seeking “an environment in which to play country-rock and things that transcended the boundaries that were parametering country music,” but a simultaneous personal odyssey into his own roots led him into traditional-styled country music-played “with a sense of urgency and emotion” that stemmed from his country-rock orientation.
Yoakam’s creative attitude also owed much to the Urban Cowboy craze circa 1980-in the sense that he detested the fad popularity in which Urban Cowboy music was basking while rootsier country music languished in obscurity and seemed headed toward oblivion.
“When I was getting fired from more L.A. clubs than I was allowed to work in-by people who in my view knew nothing about country music or where it came from-I wrote a song,” he recalls. “It was a hillbilly waltz called `New Boots,’ about people dancing the Texas Two Step while knowing nothing about Ernest Tubb, about people who claimed to be country while their new boots said it wasn’t so.
“In L.A. they looked at me like I was a Martian, man, when I’d play something like `Down the Road’ by Flatt & Scruggs. I realized that real country music had been not only abandoned but shunned as something less than respectable. At some point I think I turned around and said: `Hey, that’s not right. These people have been treated wrong. I’ve been treated wrong.’
“Some things that happened to me made me mad. The West Coast is a tough place to go as a 20-year-old and just plop down and say, `I’m gonna make it here.’ It’s a tough place to survive without some scar tissue.”
With a distinctive fire, Yoakam-descendant of a Kentucky coal miner-set out to show audiences an earlier kind of country music created to chronicle the mistakes, regrets, heartaches and (to a lesser extent) joys of America’s anonymous rural-rooted poor, before Nashville music became demographically upscale. His sound bristled with lower-class contempt for what was perceived as upper-class indolence and irreverence toward traditional values.
In Los Angeles, of all places, Yoakam finally managed to sell his combative rural music. It took him almost nine years, though, and in the meantime, he recalls, he lived in “a room without a bed.” When he did break through to wide notice, he was an appropriately angry young man.
Thirty-six now, he isn’t so angry anymore, he says. His artistic journey having proceeded far beyond its initial goals, he says he is “not certain what the destination is anymore, other than exploration of myself musically.
“I don’t have the sense of urgency I had in 1984,” he confesses. “But perhaps I have a greater sense of contemplation about what I want to do.”
What he wants to do besides make good records is becoming clearer: He would like to take his photogenically resentful glare to movie screens.
Presently in rehearsals for “Southern Rapture”-a play in which he will have the male lead during its April 2-25 run at the MET Theatre in Los Angeles-Yoakam already has seen that take him into the major male role in an upcoming movie titled “Ginger Snaps,” which he says is scheduled for filming this fall.
Asked if the play is a tuneup for movies in general, he replies:
“I think it’s a tuneup for acting, period. I think it’s a great opportunity for me, and I’m seizing it at this point.”
However, his primary stocks in trade remain a sexy concert performance style (which will be on display at the Star Plaza in Merrillville, Ind., May 14 and 15 and on The Nashville Network in the special “Warner Brothers Records Salutes TNN’s 10th Anniversary” April 12) and visceral music largely written or co-written by himself.
The new album contains such memorable material as “Two Doors Down,” a defiant drinking song (“Two doors down there’s a barmaid/ Who serves ’em real strong. . .”); “Try Not to Look So Pretty,” a strikingly vulnerable lost-love song; and the title tune, a shaky musical vow not to be hurt by the same lover anymore.
Describing himself as “a radically private individual,” Yoakam says he mixes incidents in other people’s lives with ones from his own, and even melds feelings he has had in different romantic relationships into single songs, as part of an elaborate “defense mechanism so I don’t feel so blatantly vulnerable to having exposed” his innermost feelings.
The loneliness of such a self-described private man is implicit, but the reason Yoakam’s message has found such a prominent place on today’s scene is probably that even its air of desperate abrasiveness strikes a chord of kinship with a lot of harassed Americans who feel their own sense of apartness continually growing even as their lives become more and more crowded with other people, obligations and disquieting world news.
“I think this journey we’re all on is a solitary one,” Yoakam says, “even though it is only realized to be that when we arrive and when we leave.”
