Dwight Yoakam - Brief Article - Interview

Interview, June, 2001 by Henry Cabot Beck

A COUNTRY SINGER-TURNED-DIRECTOR SPURS WESTERNS FORWARD

Dwight Yoakam is known primarily to millions of fans as a smoky-voiced singer-songwriter who takes the bulk of his inspiration from the honky-tonk country music of the and '50s and '60s: Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, Buck Owens and Stonewall Jackson. Added to that recipe are traces of '60s pop, music that he grew up listening to as a child In Kentucky and, later, Ohio.

After testing the waters in Nashville, Yoakam settled into a punky L.A. scene in the mid 1980s. From there he raved about the bastardization of modern country music while he let his cowboy hat cast shadows across his eyes, becoming a masked avenger--the Lone Ranger of Twang.

In the early-'90s Yoakam launched an acting career, his most memorable performance coming in Billy Bob Thornton's Sling Blade (1996). Now, stepping behind the camera as a director for the first time with South of Heaven West of Hell (in which he also stars), Yoakam reveals yet another talent. The film, to be released this month, with a cast that includes Thornton, Bridget Fonda, Peter Fonda and Vince Vaughn, is as much a surreal step forward in the evolution of the cinematic Western as his music is a step back. It's a daunting movie, full of ghosts and half-ghosts--Yoakam himself plays a character who may or may not have died at least once--many of whom are the silent staring echoes of Western myths and Western movies.

HENRY CABOT BECK: I have to tell you, Dwight, your film really has a great look.

DWIGHT YOAKAM: Thanks, Henry. When we were discussing the theme and the feel of the film, I said to Jim, the director of photography, "My approach to this is shafts and shadows."

HCB: You've been making small adjustments to South of Heaven for a while--how do you feel about it now that it's done?

DY: I'm really proud of it. To me, it's a movie about character behavior and the pecking order of the pack, as well as the central character's massive survival guilt. And it's overtly or covertly influenced by movies I love, like A Face in the Crowd (1957), One-Eyed Jacks (1961)--in fact my character in the picture, Valentine, gets his name from The Fugitive Kind (1959). And I tried to pay some small tribute to A Man and a Woman (1966) with the recurring musical theme.

HCB: I'm not giving much away when I say the movie is about a kind of Western purgatory. Where did all that come from, the otherworldly aspect of the picture?

DY: I felt like in the West, especially the Southwest, a lot of places were left, mining towns and such, to be dwelled in by ghosts. When we found the set in Arizona, it hadn't been used for a couple of years, and I said, "Leave it alone--I want the broken windows to stay broken, I want it to look abandoned." It became a metaphor for the lives of the people in this film and for the Old West, for the abandonment that occurred in the early part of the 20th century.

HCB: So can your character, Valentine, and the others, ghosts or not, be redeemed?

DY: At the end of the film Val suggests there may be a way to rejoin the living, when he says, "Let's see if we're able to live among the living, walk among the living."

And earlier he says to Vince Vaughn's character, "I'm not sure of my existence, only my intentions." Which is just about all that any of us can say about anything: Do we exist beyond this place, or are we existing here only as some sort of weird hologram? Is reality real, or are we tricked by a facade of reality?

HCB: One thing that is real is the way in which your music defends, and is defined by, the past.

DY: Yes, but it's meant to reaffirm the validity of that music--clean, minimalist, honest, classic music. Quality is timeless: It will clearly define itself. And so I make reference to and acknowledge things that I feel have been dismissed, trying to restate those musical and cultural elements clearly and vehemently.

HCB: You grew up hearing the music of Buck Owens, Roger Miller and the Beatles when it was played for the first time. But many of those who are listening to the Beatles' hits, Ken Burns' Jazz or the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack nowadays are listening to an idea of the past, or an idealized past.

DY: But that is a valid, continuing service that that music--which is, in some cases, 80 or 90 years old--is rendering. And proving its own timelessness. A voice expressing emotion in a musical way moves on. It's like the finale of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)--the world turns in on itself, as a universe unto itself, in the shape of one human being. It starts to become almost Eastern in its take on the comingling of all matter and in fact nonmatter--all energy, even. The giant embryo represents a plethora of universes that exist inside any materialized form.

HCB: So do you think that like the cosmic embryo we're being set up for the next evolutionary leap? If so, what is the next step in human consciousness?

DY: I have no idea. I can't remember. [laughs] I forgot that part of the course.

Henry Cabot Beck is a frequent Interview contributor.