Dwight Yoakam by Don McLeese

Author:Don McLeese
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2012-10-31T04:00:00+00:00

11

Bonus Cut

NOTHING DISTINGUISHED the difference between rock and country recording artists more than the greatest hits album. Since the late 1960s and early ’70s, rock had primarily been an album-driven music, while hit singles remained the currency of country. Since other tracks that hadn’t been designed for single release were plainly filler, country fans who wanted the most for their dollar often waited until the artist had enough hits to warrant a compilation of those singles.

Such collections in rock circles were (like live albums) seen as signs that the artist needed a creative breather, was switching labels, or was nearing the end of a commercially successful string. Thus, they typically came later in a rock artist’s career, though, even in country, it was uncommonly early for an artist to package his greatest hits after only three releases.

Then again, Dwight had already had a lot of chart success, enough to warrant the release of Just Lookin’ for a Hit in September 1989. And perhaps he needed a creative breather as well, a chance to replenish the stockpile of original material now that the 1981 demo had finally been exhausted (except for “Please Daddy”).

For all of his radio success, Dwight was among a “raised on rock” generation of emerging country artists, ones who paid attention to albums as coherent wholes rather than hit-and-miss selections of singles and filler. Steve Earle, Rosanne Cash, (her then husband/producer) Rodney Crowell, Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith, and others who were enjoying success or were attempting to establish themselves as country artists in the pre-Garth period all carefully conceived of albums as albums. Not necessarily concept albums, with which Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and Willie Nelson had previously built artistic parameters beyond country convention, but albums that held together as albums.

To trace the careers of such artists through a succession of singles would be sketchy, incomplete. And so it was with Yoakam, who had been conceiving of each album as an album, paying particular attention to the sequencing of material as well as the selection of it. But the market must be served, and the country market dictated that an artist with enough hits must package them into a greatest-hits compilation, bringing potential fans to the cash register that had previously restricted their consumption of the artist’s music to the radio.

Another convention of the greatest-hits album is that it should have at least one track available for the first time—a hoped-for hit-to-be, or something to make the diehard who already had all of this music on album buy the hits package as well. And here’s where Yoakam threw his fans and the Nashville music establishment another curve ball, kicking off the collection of otherwise familiar material with “Long White Cadillac.”

It was an inspired choice on multiple levels. As an account of the last night in the life of Hank Williams, it reinforced Dwight’s connection to another outsider Nashville had never embraced and to musical values to which contemporary country barely paid lip service. As a number well known

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