COVER STORY : The Solitary Outsider : A country rebel with a shadowy edge, Dwight Yoakam shuns conventional guidelines to preserve the isolation he values, making contact from the stage with his music, and now acting

The video camera sweeps past an old rotary-dial pay phone inside a downtown L.A. warehouse and settles on Dwight Yoakam, a study in country cool in his trademark duster and cowboy hat.

Slouching against the wall, he stares into a private distance and forms the words of his new single “Ain’t That Lonely Yet” as the melancholy statement of regret and resistance blasts from a speaker.

You keep leavin’ / Notes stuck on my door / Guess you ‘ re hungry for some more / Girl, that’s too bad . . . / After what you put me through / I ain’t that lonely yet.

Yoakam, who is co-directing the video, shakes his head as he studies the replay on a monitor. There’s something unnatural about the way he walks out of the frame after the verse. He tries it again, with a different move but the same results.

Finally, after more discussion with co-director Caroline Mayer, he decides to stay put and let the camera swing away from him.

It works. The result is a tight little vignette of moody country noir , another entry in the stream of musical and visual images that have enshrined Yoakam as country music’s enigmatic loner.

The image certainly has its elements of calculation, and it might not stand up to the reality of his success in the mainstream of country music.

But it has its core of truth.

“I’m real solitary as a personality,” says the singer, sitting in a mobile home outside the gutted produce warehouse that’s serving as the video location. “That’s probably why I embraced music so firmly and clung to it so intensely. I found out early that one of the ways I was able to make contact was through musical expression.”

In a country music world where an open, Everyman accessibility has been the surest way to the top of the charts, Yoakam stands dramatically apart: a brooding, intensely private figure driven by restless ambition and an edgy intellectuality more commonly found in rock stars.

His need for acceptance has fueled a 16-year odyssey from his Appalachian origins to the Hollywood Hills, where he plots his moves far from the conventional wisdom of Nashville.

Take his acting strategy: While most country stars who test those waters do so strictly as a profile-raising career move with a “Pure Country” or a TV movie with Kenny Rogers, Yoakam’s entry into the field is almost willfully contrary--an allegorical play directed by Peter Fonda that just opened at a little theater in Hollywood.

Yoakam, 36, doesn’t have the sales power of Garth Brooks or Billy Ray Cyrus, nor the down-the-line country credentials of an Alan Jackson or a Clint Black--it’s one thing to marry a Houston native like Lisa Hartman, as Black did, but dating Sharon Stone is a little rich for Nashville’s blood.

His potential impact on country might have more to do with stretching of the boundaries than ringing up numbers or exerting a powerful musical influence; his body of work has its strong moments, but he hasn’t yet shown the songwriting depth or the vocal character that would put him in the elite class of Merle Haggard and George Jones.

By extending the range of options open to country artists, Yoakam is setting himself up as a liberating force, a charismatic role model for artists drawn to country music but uncomfortable with the Nashville club and its implied restrictions.

Says Ronnie Mack, an L.A. musician who has known Yoakam since the late ‘70s: “What I like so much about him is that he has an attitude. It’s that edge. Almost the James Dean of country music kind of thing.”

“Attitude.” Yoakam considers the word and pauses. “I guess. I’ve certainly got a point of view, I know that. I think that country music has only recently had artists show up that manifest the kind of attitude found in rock ‘n’ roll. Whether it’s Garth or me or Steve Earle. There’s a lot of us that could be described as having attitude.”

Yoakam might like to present himself as an archetype of tightly wound introspection, but he is hardly laconic in conversation. A compulsive self-analyzer, he can spin from talk of Merle Haggard into realms of metaphysics into eager explanations of current events.

“This is an observation about myself,” he says. “I tend to be overly deliberate, in terms of trying to focus. I have a real need to focus. And simultaneously I’ve got this propensity to be very tangential. So that’s very distracting. It’s this contradiction of a personality.”

The distractions are mounting this afternoon. The daylight is fading and there’s still an exterior shot to be done at the nearby 3rd Street Bridge. Associates clamber in and out of the vehicle attending to business, and Yoakam has to be at a rehearsal in a few hours--not for a concert, but for “Southern Rapture,” the “Southern gothic” play by Joseph G. Tidwell III that Yoakam is co-producing.

The singer enticed Peter Fonda to direct it--his first such work in more than 20 years--and got Sally Kirkland to star. They, in turn, persuaded Yoakam to take a role in his own property. It just opened a four-week run at Hollywood’s Met Theatre, with Yoakam aboard for the first two weeks.

“When Dwight read for me first,” Fonda recalls in a separate interview, “he slouched in this chair in a very bizarre way, and I realized that was him being in a bunk. He had a bag of popcorn, and a bottle of water, because he had to also drink at a certain moment and he had to be able to eat food at a certain moment. He was just reading the play at an audition level, fully propped. This is unusual.

“I’m sure people will go to the theater figuring there’s a singer dabbling in something. . . . When you leave the theater you will have seen a really good actor who, by the way, knows how to sing.”

Yoakam, 36, approached country stardom from an oblique angle, but these days he’s pretty well embraced by the Establishment--even as he makes musical gestures toward a broader audience with his new album, “This Time” (see review, Page 68), and raises his non-country profile with the budding acting career.

“I’m an outsider because of the obvious,” he says. “I live outside the (Nashville) community and work outside the community. And I just do it that way because it has allowed me that sense of solitude that I so desperately need.

“It has its downside as well as its upside. . . . The downside’s a little more obvious: out of sight, out of mind. If you’re not there they don’t talk as much about you, you’re not maybe focused on by the community as much. Politically too, you’re a little more outside the inner workings of the community.

“On the upside, I think it allows a perspective that allows an individualized musical take on things.”

Lon Helton, Nashville bureau chief for the trade weekly Radio & Records, doesn’t think Yoakam’s distance from Nashville has done him any harm.

“I don’t think George Strait and Willie Nelson have been hurt by living in Texas, I don’t think that Dwight Yoakam has been hurt by living in L.A.,” Helton says.

Says another insider, more bluntly: “To hear Dwight position himself as an outsider and all that kind of stuff, I think it gives him that rebel image that from a fan standpoint is probably nice to have. But I just never hear anybody refer to it that way.”

Yoakam was born the oldest of three children in the isolation of rural southeast Kentucky, and even after his family moved 90 miles to Columbus, Ohio, he stayed in touch with his Appalachian heritage.

The a cappella “hillbilly hymns” sung in the Church of Christ formed one of the foundations of his musical vision. The others came in profusion: the traditional country of Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs favored by his grandfather, and especially the popular country and rockabilly of the ‘50s.

“Man, I just became completely infatuated with these cats with guitars slung around their necks,” says Yoakam. “These guys epitomized success for the culture that I was coming from.

“It was the music of the cats, you dig? I got the aesthetics probably more from my dad in terms of the visual aspects. I remember a shot of my dad leanin’ on an old Plymouth . . . in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s, with pleated black slacks, a little thin pink belt and a pink-and-black two-tone gabardine shirt, and he had a pompadour with the Vitalis curl. I’m a byproduct of that.”

Then, in his early teens, he heard Creedence Clearwater Revival.

“I embraced John Fogerty like a messiah. I became infatuated with that as a sub-genre of country music.

“I think probably where my infatuation began was with the freedom . . . the enormous freedom that was afforded by engaging this musical style that could be up and rockin’ and speak very directly on an emotional level to the contemporary issues and needs of a young audience. But when you simultaneously are able to turn around and do ‘Miner’s Prayer’ or write stuff that was totally bluegrass-based--like--we don’t have to be limited.”

That freedom triggered Yoakam’s vision of country rock, and was one of the attractions of the West Coast--home to Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons.

“I always felt that I had a unique set of circumstances surrounding me, in that I was born into rural Appalachia, a coal mining community, then moved with blue-collar working people up that highway into the city trying to find this great Shangri-La of a life that doesn’t exist but is still chased, and then experienced everything that we experienced in the ‘60s with the explosion of the media.

“At 20 I realized, ‘Hey, these experiences may lend themselves to you doing something different musically.’ ”

Yoakam made an uneventful visit to Nashville, then headed west with a buddy in 1977, naively hoping to get a record deal in a couple of years.

“Eight years, nine years later I was still here just existing on the fringe of society, really. I was living in L.A., drivin’ a truck, making a couple hundred dollars a week. You can just exist.”

His friend returned to Ohio, stranding Yoakam in Long Beach, where he rode the bus to work at the Bullock’s loading dock in Lakewood.

Yoakam eventually assembled a band and started playing country bars in the San Fernando Valley, but in those “Urban Cowboy” days of watered-down country, his hard-core sound was as welcome as punk rock at a polka party.

At this point, things had gone beyond career and become a crusade.

“I realized, hey, a lot of people in the business of country music don’t really care about the people that it came from, they don’t really care about paying respect to the foundation of the art form--they’re just here to rob and plunder. I felt a compulsion to stand up and get on a soapbox a bit and make a statement.”

A few things happened in the early ‘80s: Yoakam met a guitarist named Pete Anderson, who would become his right-hand man on stage and the producer of all his records. In Nashville, George Strait and Ricky Skaggs led a resurgence of traditional values in mainstream country music. And when Yoakam returned from a second trip to Nashville in 1983, L.A.’s grass-roots rock community had sprouted an intriguing mutation.

“It seemed like just in a couple months’ period this whole scene had sprung up, the cowpunk thing,” Yoakam recalls. “There were these clubs that were now booking this variation on the theme of country music. We started playing in those clubs and we were embraced, and that was a very gratifying thing to have happen after a long, long time.”

Forming a phalanx of roots-oriented acts, Yoakam, the Blasters, Los Lobos, Lone Justice and others carved a niche in the happily crossbreeding clubs of L.A.

The momentum eventually allowed Yoakam and Anderson to record an independent EP in 1984, “Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.,” and in 1986 they reached the promised land: a major-label record deal with Reprise. His debut album, with the same title and including the EP’s six songs, came out in 1986.

The album yielded two Top 5 country hits, and from there Yoakam didn’t do much looking back. His first No. 1 country single was 1988’s “Streets of Bakersfield,” a duet with Buck Owens--a California country pioneer whom Yoakam lured out of retirement. Five of the songs from his last album, 1990’s “If There Was a Way,” made the country Top 10. Overall, he’s sold 6 million albums with his first five records (“This Time” is his sixth).

If Yoakam has reached most of his original goals, he has been quick to pick up new ones. He still seems driven.

The day’s video work is done, but Yoakam still has plenty to do. Right now he’s preparing to head to Hollywood for a read-through of “Southern Rapture.”

“I tend to approach it with the same kind of focus and seriousness that I approach my music with,” he says as he packs his gear into a gym bag. “When it works, it’s working in a very profound way, and I’m very pleased. I’m really enjoying it, even though it’s an enormously draining experience, physically as well as emotionally.”

Yoakam did some acting in high school and community theater in Ohio, and gave it a brief shot shortly after moving to California, but he quickly set it aside to concentrate on music.

“I felt with my music I had a greater chance of self-determination,” he says.

Yoakam, who says that acting comes “pretty instinctively,” also has a small role in the upcoming, Dennis Hopper-directed movie “Red Rock West,” and is developing a film noir project called “Ginger Snaps.” He hopes to play the male lead, with Fonda directing.

How far would he like to take acting?

“As far as it’s willing to open up to me as a craft,” Yoakam says. “I think that I can do both--acting and music. I don’t foresee that I’ll quit doing music ever. But I’m not certain what will present itself.”

Music will definitely take over next month when Yoakam begins an 80-city concert tour in support of the new “This Time,” an album that sets free an eclectic set of dormant pop and rock influences. (He plays the Universal Amphitheatre on June 16.)

“I feel that I stated what I felt compelled to state within those former parameters, and now I choose to go outside them,” he says, cutting off the interview with an offer to meet again to wrap things up.

“I felt compelled to articulate and to define for myself what created me musically and culturally, and I had to do that before I felt comfortable going beyond it. It was like unfinished business in my life, emotionally as well as musically.

“This album has the sense of being a destination arrived at.”

The following week, Yoakam is sitting in the Hollywood offices of Dwight Yoakam Productions in the BMG Records building--the same building where Elvis cut some of his records.

American Indian artifacts and Western prints adorn the antique-furnished suite, and the walls of the reception area are dominated by huge blowups of Yoakam that reduce his trademarks--hat, tight jeans, downward glance--to the abstract elements of a logo.

Yoakam is just back from an intensive promotional trip to Nashville and points south. A few hours off the plane, he looks like a road-weary mini-mogul as he sits at a desk to conclude the interview. His face looks fuller and broader when his hat is off. His hair is wispy, and his delicate features and high cheekbones give him a faintly Asian appearance.

As the conversation picks up, Yoakam’s jet-lagged discourses tend to become complex and circuitous. At one point he lays his head on the desk and exclaims with a laugh, “God, I feel like I’m writing a thesis on something! I’m in here doing an oral entrance exam.”

The only time he’s less than expansive is when he’s asked about Sharon Stone, who was recently quoted making a rather caustic evaluation of the singer. Something about a dirt sandwich.

“Yeah, we dated,” he says with an abrupt lack of animation. “I was coming out of a five-year relationship and pretty clumsy about myself emotionally. . . . We dated.”

Yoakam is still single, and the brink of a five-month concert tour isn’t the time to do anything about it, he notes. But it would be a mistake to interpret his many lyrics of romantic conflict strictly as a document of failed relationships. He says there’s a bigger picture.

“I think that the issues are all the same, whether it’s being carried out on a collective scale, with a world leader, or it’s on a very personal scale with how somebody’s dealing with somebody as an individual,” he says.

“Manipulation and control. Betrayal of trust. Truth, self-worth. I think the issues in terms of emotion are very much parallel. I do deal with the emotion, I just don’t necessarily always embody that emotion in the context of political issues. For some reason I feel compelled to address those issues on a personal level.”

Yoakam looks out the window at the panoramic view of his adopted city. It’s a long way from Pikesville, Ky., but this son of Appalachia has bridged the gap.

“I like the energy that I get here in town,” he says. “There’s kind of a kinetic thing about a big metropolitan area like this. I like drivin’ around town.

“I grew up here.”