Hats off to Buck - Dwight Yoakam honors mentor Buck Owens and Fred Durst (what?!?) does his part too.
DWIGHT YOAKAM is not driving the tractor, he's just sitting on it, hunkered all alone under a bright blue sky tinged with a hint of encroaching twilight. Wearing faded overalls and a red Shell trucker cap, he gazes pensively at a sprawling modern ranch house off to his right. Beyond him are fields crosshatched by white picket fences, dotted with oak trees and ringed by shadowy mountains.
The scene is forlorn and a little unsettling -- just what the singer-songwriter wants for his video for "Close Up the Honky Tonks," a country classic recorded by Buck Owens in 1964. It's the first single from "Dwight Sings Buck," his tribute to the late singer, songwriter and business mogul, due Oct. 23. The romantic lament is slower and more doleful than Owens' spunky version; the effect Yoakam and director Fred Durst are after is what both call "minimalist loneliness."
--
So close up the honky tonks
Lock all the doors
Don't let the one I love go there any more
Close up the honky tonks
Throw away the key
Then maybe the one I love will come back to me.
--
"It's about the emptiness at the end of a relationship, in this case specifically the aloneness of living with someone you no longer really share a love with," Yoakam explains about the video's concept during a break in shooting at this rustic-yet-luxe wood-and-stone home in Westlake Village.
Obliging a photographer, he's now dressed in proper country-singer attire: near-fatally tight faded jeans, white shirt with sparkly cuff links, denim jacket, gorgeous tan cowboy boots embellished with the ace of spades. "It's just the ghost of a love."
As the farmer, whose name is Shell, in this "metaphorical story," Yoakam spends much of the day conjuring up the contemplative resignation of a man haunted by the absence of his once-happy marriage.
But the singer-songwriter himself is preoccupied by different memories -- reminded in his solitude on the tractor, in the bathroom, at the dinner table, of Owens, his close friend who at age 76 died in his sleep on March 25 last year after performing that night in his Bakersfield nightclub/museum, the Crystal Palace.
The tribute is "a way for me to say I loved him, and I loved his music," Yoakam, 50, says. Their relationship was "part friend, part sibling, and a whole lot surrogate parent." Their lives had intertwined since 1988, when Yoakam, then a newly minted hit-maker, talked his idol out of retirement to duet on Owens' signature "Streets of Bakersfield," which became Yoakam's first No. 1 country single.
