‘Gone’ Won’t Be Forgotten Dwight Yoakam Blends His Myriad Musical Roots To Produce A Masterpiece

Too country for rock. Too rock for country. And so good as to render the argument moot. That’s Dwight Yoakam, the Kentucky-born, California-matured cow-punk singer who has played shows with Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, as well as with Husker Du and the Violent Femmes. No other artist in this or any other universe can claim that.

Eleven years after Yoakam set the honky-tonk world abuzz with his disc “Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc.,” he’s produced his best offering yet, “Gone.” It came out Tuesday and reflects a panoply of influences, from Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis to the Rolling Stones and Creedence Clearwater Revival. You can probably throw out many other names - and chances are that Yoakam, with his archival obsessiveness, will have known and distilled them in his music.

Call them “pluralistic references.” That’s how Yoakam describes them, as though he were a budding sociologist. “All my influences show up on the new album perhaps more clearly than on anything else we’ve done,” Yoakam says. “It’s just an evolution.”

Just an evolution? How about just a masterpiece? Because that’s what “Gone” is. It extends the mastery of the 2 million-selling “This Time” (1993), which featured the Top 5 country hits “Ain’t That Lonely Yet,” “A Thousand Miles from Nowhere,” “Try Not to Look So Pretty” and “Pocket of a Clown.” That disc helped earn him a Grammy for best male country vocal performance - and one can only imagine the laurels that “Gone” might achieve. It’s that good.

Highlights include the Jerry Lee-style hillbilly beat of “Baby Why Not,” the breakup song “Sorry You Asked” and the marauding, Stones-ish rocker “Never Hold You” with Yoakam wailing: “I’ve listened to them boast that I’ll just be a ghost once they start taking up your time/I could have told them that they’d never hold you if they tried.”

“The cornerstone of what we’re doing is what I heard as a child - mountain music, bluegrass, the Stanley Brothers. Echoes of that are to be heard in ‘Never Hold You,’ which is a rave-up on the record. But if I wanted to strip that down and start playing it as a hillbilly two-beat, it could be with mandolin, dobro, fiddle and upright bass, with Ralph Stanley playing banjo on it with me. It could be a bluegrass song. It’s all an abstraction from the foundation of what I heard and did musically as a child. And I heard all of these other things too, so it became this cross-pollinated kind of musical clutter.”

Such variety first drew Yoakam to Los Angeles in 1976.

“Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris - they were doing that. And prior to that, you had the Burrito Brothers and the Eagles. They were an outgrowth of that whole country-rock scene, which Gram was the godfather of via the Byrds and Clarence White. Even Mick Jagger once told me that he and Keith Richards wrote with Gram.”Also, back in the ‘60s, you could hear an enormous variety of popular music on the radio. On AM radio you could hear Buck (Owens), Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, followed by the Beatles, Them, the Supremes, the Statler Brothers and maybe Henson Cargill singing ‘Skip a Rope.’ All on the same radio station. When I was a kid, that’s how I listened to music.

“These days, I think we’ve actually moved backwards to a segregated formatting of music, which I think is tragic in that it doesn’t encourage exploration,” Yoakam adds.