Dwight Yoakam has made a career of pissing people off, from his overt dissing of the Nashville establishment to his often brittle and unsympathetic interviews. Last Friday at the Aragon he tried it with his own fans, but they couldn’t stay mad at him long. The crowd was largely country, but there were also signs of Yoakam’s wider appeal. The guys in Stetsons and women in fringed jackets brushed elbows with punkish hipsters in vintage-wear. There were even a few little kids. Yoakam kept them all waiting for more than an hour after opening acts Kelly Willis and Jimmie Dale Gilmore finished their sets. The crowd drank and smoked and waited. The smell of leather mixed with beer, and from the balcony you could see a haze of cigarette smoke drifting across the wide expanse of the main floor up into the Aragon’s blinking-star ceiling. Eventually spontaneous applause and chants rippling through the crowd gave way to boos, and Yoakam’s band took some abuse when they finally assembled onstage.
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But all anger evaporated when the man himself emerged and without apology or explanation kicked off a blistering two-hour set. By the time he tore into the goosed-up “Guitars, Cadillacs,” the crowd was roaring. They came to see a star, and they got what they paid for.
He applies the same aesthetic to his original material. As a songwriter Yoakam stays true to his honky-tonk roots and cuts to the bone of contemporary life. Over a series of well-crafted albums, he has written about the misunderstandings that banish people to both rural and urban isolation (“South of Cincinnati,” “Throughout All Time”), heartbroken ghosts doomed to wander for eternity (“Johnson’s Love”), and the murderous possibilities within a jealous heart (“Buenas Noches From a Lonely Room”).
Yoakam needs a tough band to match his enormous stage presence. He turned the epic insouciance of “Honky-Tonk Man” into his personal theme. Alone on acoustic guitar, he slyly plucked out the intro, then refashioned several verses with a picking style reminiscent of Johnny Cash’s old sideman Luther Perkins. When the band finally exploded into the rocking version, men and women alike shouted out the immortal cad’s refrain: “And when my money’s all gone / I’m on the telephone / Singing hey, hey mama / Can your daddy come home.”
