During a 1987 tour, Yoakam showed up in Buck Owens's Bakersfield offices unannounced. A grateful Owens returned the favor by coming to Yoakam's show -- and listening as the band performed a few Buck Owens classics; by the end of the night, Owens was on stage himself, born again in the adulation of acolytes.
"I think Dwight is an acquired taste," Owens says. "When people first hear him sing, if they don't know anything about him, they think, 'Hmmm.' But then they begin to find out this is who he is and this is what he does, being from Kentucky and from that area. Hell, he was a rock-and-roller in high school. He's got a picture where he's lying across a floor and got on some real green green pants and a shirt, and I said, 'You oughta burn that thing.' Dwight's a pretty damned good little performer. He knows a lot more about music and how to get things in that record than most anybody."
Owens says he gives Yoakam a hard time -- and not always to have fun -- about fooling around in the movies. To Owens, Yoakam is too talented a musician to waste his time acting; he needs to be writing, paying more attention to the business of music. Says Owens, "I used to tease him: 'We already had James Dean.' "
But Yoakam has not abandoned his craft -- far from it. Later this month, he'll release his first Christmas album -- So Come on, Christmas, which features a couple of new songs and some fascinating reworkings of old standards -- and he has already begun working on an album of all-new material. Indeed, he spent the months while shooting The Newton Boys writing his next record as well, on dozens of note pad sheets he kept stuck in a hotel-room drawer.
Yoakam hadn't even brought his guitar and amp with him to Austin when filming began in April. He had planned to keep his head in the script, but found rather quickly that the isolation of being away from home was too much to bear, so he started writing -- and within weeks, dozens of pages had poured out. He pulls the sheets from the drawer as though they were thousand-dollar bills, marvels at the volume, then shakes his head and grins.
"Being here, it's almost as if I'm a prisoner to circumstance, and my mind instinctively starts dealing with an alternative form of expression: music," he says. "And I tend to personally express myself through music in my own way. It's almost as if it's sort of a digression to being a kid at home, waiting to grow up. It's almost as if I'm waiting to graduate high school, to finally leave home, but now, at this point in my life, I'm a little more focused on what it is that I'm able to do as a means of expression. I wasn't writing heavily then, but I was certainly exploring music as a means of eclipsing my surroundings."
Yoakam likely will begin recording his next album in the fall, with a release date some time next spring. And when he and Pete Anderson go in to make the album, they will do so in the place where they have been recording almost since the very beginning -- at Studio B in the Capitol Records building at Hollywood and Vine. It was there that Owens and Haggard recorded many of their hits -- where Haggard laid down "Okie from Muskogee" and became an outlaw hero, much to his surprise, where Owens cut "Act Naturally" in 1963 and shot to the top of the charts. And it's there that Yoakam found his place in the history he so desperately chased when he went west 20 years ago.
