This Time Dwight Yoakam
Get comfortable everyone; we’re gonna be here a while. Yes, this is about a Dwight Yoakam album, but while I was thinking about what I was going to write my mind did its usual thing and went off on a few tangents. Normally, I edit those out before I start these things, but today we’re going to indulge. Get ready for a discussion of country music, baby boomers, rock n’ roll, gen-xers, and finally the album This Time.
When people ask me what I think about country music, I respond the way Taco Bell might if asked if they serve Mexican food: “It’s complicated”. I don’t necessarily like country music, but I don’t necessarily despise it, either. Growing up in the South (more specifically, the rural South) means it’s part of my history. The first non-Sunday School song I remember singing was Charlie Rich’s “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World” at three years old. We’ll get to why I learned country music in 1973 in a minute. I am also fascinated by country music’s history, evolution, struggles, survival, place in the fabric of American society, and its ability to readily absorb other forms of music. Like any other art form, country music has experienced busts and booms. I think some of those booms have to do with disaffected fans of rock n’ roll coming to – or back to – country music.
My father was born in 1943. While he is technically a member of the Silent Generation, his father served in WWII, so his parents are part of the Greatest Generation who are the parents of the Baby Boomers. My mother is technically a Baby Boomer. She was born in February, 1946 which is considered the first year for that generation. However, her parents were much older and members of the Lost Generation. Don’t worry, I’ve not slipped into Matthew’s gospel; I’m headed somewhere with this. My father’s parents grew up in southern farming communities and he was raised listening to country and gospel. My mother grew up in a very small town (in Europe it would have been a village), and grew up mostly listening to the swing that was dominant on the radio. Both were part of the first generation of kids to experience the birth of rock n’ roll. For perspective, when Elvis appeared on Ed Sullivan, Dad was 13 and Mom was 10. When The Beatles did the same, Dad was 20 and serving in the Navy, while Mom was 18 and getting ready to graduate high school. They were into it: Dad leaning to rockabilly and Mom loving Motown and the Beach Boys.
Here’s where my country music boom theory comes in. As rock progressed through the 60s, its first fans matured and sometimes didn’t go along. I think the first real split happened in the late-60s with the rise of psychedelia and harder rock. Mom and Dad were both ok until the music began to be dominated by folks like Jimi Hendrix, CS&N, and Sly and the Family Stone. By the time Woodstock happened, Dad was 26, married to his second wife, and had a third child on the way. Mom was 23 and pregnant for the first time. A bunch of young people getting stoned and rolling around in the mud for three days had no relevance for them. So, Dad went back to country music and took Mom with him. (A few years later, he would do so physically when they moved from Ohio back to Tennessee.) In reality, he had never really left as he listened to George Jones just as much as he did Elvis or The Beatles. In any case, it seems like a bunch of people my parents’ age turned to country music, especially as the 70s brought things like disco and punk rock.
This is why I was listening to Charlie Rich at three years old. The three forms of music that dominated my early childhood were Southern Gospel, Country, and the newly formatted “Oldies”. For many of my classmates the same was true until 1981 and MTV. MTV boosted the entire music industry (with the help of Michael Jackson) and we gen-xers became obsessed, but not everyone abandoned country music. When MTV debuted, I was 11 and my wife was 12. While I mostly ignored country music after that, my wife kept a foot in both worlds. Just like the 60s, music in the MTV era developed and evolved until its own explosion occurred in 1992 when “alternative” and hip-hop began to dominate. In 1994, Woodstock came back and this time people like my wife had no interest in a bunch of punks rolling around in the mud while Green Day and Nine Inch Nails played. She was 25, I was 24, and we had been married less than two weeks.
Country music had maybe its biggest boom in the 1990s. In 1989, sales in the genre were $460 million and rose to nearly $2 billion when Woodstock 94 happened. There is no way the growth of alternative and hip-hop didn’t contribute to the growth of Country. We want to see some version of ourselves in artists and there were plenty of people in their 20s and 30s who didn’t relate to Kurt Cobain or Snoop Dogg. Many of them looked around and saw a whole crop of new, young, country artists who sounded like their childhood. Like my father, my wife never really left country music. While she was fully in on pop music and even early alternative (She maintains that Fables of the Reconstruction is REM’s best album and The Unforgettable Fire is superior to The Joshua Tree), she still listened to 80s country radio. For her, and other gen-xers who weren’t interesting in smelling like teen spirit, Garth Brooks, Travis Tritt, Marty Stuart, and Patty Loveless felt familiar. For anecdotal evidence that she wasn’t alone, I was sitting in an anatomy class my senior year at UT and two girls walked in wearing Clint Black concert shirts. I remember thinking something was going on. To sum up, country music experiences booms when rock/pop music experiences significant shifts in style and sound.
That brings to one of the beneficiaries of this phenomena: Dwight Yoakam. Now Yoakam had been around since 1984, and I talked about his 1987 debut album a few years ago. While I did not follow my wife into the 90s country scene, I stuck with Dwight. Well, maybe not really. This Time was his fifth album and I had pretty much ignored the others since the first. I heard a few singles and liked them, but not enough to plunk down my cash for a whole record. However, as the kids say today, This Time hit different.
I have been working on a theory that any musical artist who is successful for more than 15 years follows a similar pattern. An early album hits big and they refine that formula for a few years until it doesn’t work anymore. They adjust and make another huge album and do the same thing. What you get are peaks and valleys. While Dwight certainly wasn’t in a slump, by the time 1993 rolled around, he wasn’t really stretching creatively. His previously three albums were variations of the first one, and while that wasn’t bad, it was predictable. Everyone knew exactly what to expect from the torchbearer for the Bakersfield Sound. So, he changed the narrative.
Remember earlier when I mentioned that country music has a special ability to absorb other forms of music? Here’s a fine example. It’s easy to say a country record adopts rock music, especially since it helped influence the creation of rock in the first place. Plus, every time Country music evolves, “purists” complain it’s becoming too rock n’ roll. That’s a pretty good commentary of many of the songs on This Time, such as the Orbison-like “Fast as You” and “Ain’t That Lonely Yet” and my favorites, the straight up rocker “Wild Ride” and the Yoakam described “psychobilly” title track. Those last two should have surprised no one who knew Yoakam’s history of spending the early 80s playing the same California clubs as The Blasters, Joe Ely, and early “cowpunk” acts. There are also touches of soul like the Hammond B-3 on “House for Sale” and a string arrangement by the guy who worked for Elton John. Perhaps the biggest departure was the song “A Thousand Miles from Nowhere”, which sounds like nothing Dwight had ever done as there is not a trace of the honky-tonk that was a foundation for his sound. Yet that song made it number 2 on the country charts, maybe signaling the new generation of fans were more open to new ideas. This is not to say that traditional country fans won’t find what they’re looking for as three of the other originals sit squarely in that pocket. There are two things missing here that were normally found on previous Dwight Yoakam records: a cover of a classic country song and a duet. The absence of those things makes it feel like Yoakam, producer/guitarist Peter Anderson, and recent co-songwriter Kostas accomplished their stated purpose of creating a specific “Dwight Yoakam” music.
This Time is the second of what I believe are the three best Dwight Yoakam albums. The first was his debut seven years earlier, and the third wouldn’t show up for more than a decade later. If you have any interest in Yoakam, country music, the early 90s, or you just want to hear some good music, check this record out. That being said, there is even a better way. Two years after this, Dwight released a live album of this tour. In addition to six songs from This Time, there are songs from earlier albums and a couple of great covers, all arranged to match the tone of this album. Dwight Live is absolutely fantastic and one of my favorite live recordings by any artist.
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