Dwight Yoakam by Don McLeese

captures Yoakam and band as they prepare to widen their orbit, just weeks following the album’s release. The launching pad wasn’t a country club, and this wasn’t a country crowd. The Roxy was the epicenter of neon hip in the capital of the entertainment industry, though to Nashville this scene meant little or nothing.
    Thus, the performance found Dwight poised between two worlds—the roots-rock, cowpunk crowd of his recent past and the mainstream country audience of his immediate future. “Honky-Tonk Man” was already a debut hit single and power rotation video (featuring Dwight’s own power rotation, charged by the twang), converting listeners who wouldn’t have known the Blasters from the Beat Farmers into fans of the brash young artist whose old sound was the newest thing in country music.
    It would soon be branded “neo-traditionalism” and turned into something of a movement, linking Yoakam with the likes of Steve Earle and Marty Stuart, who also brandished the “hillbilly” tag as a badge of honor. But Earle, despite his base in Nashville, was too ornery to find much favor with mainstream country after his
Guitar Town
album (released at the same time as Yoakam’s debut), while Stuart never meant anything to rock fans. Only Yoakam made significant impact in both musical worlds.
    After the Roxy show, recorded for broadcast on the
Live at Gilley’s
program (an irony, for Gilley’s was the Texas mega-tonk that had inspired the
Urban Cowboy
phenomenon to which Yoakam’s music provided an antidote), Dwight Yoakam and the Babylonian Cowboys would hit the road for their debut headlining tour: crossing the country twice, then traversing the Atlantic to introduce themselves to Europe.
    All but unknown on the Los Angeles club circuit just a few years earlier while juggling an assortment of odd jobs, Yoakam would be a conquering hero upon his return from this blitzkrieg ten-month tour, with a debut album that had topped the country charts and a live show that gave both country and rock fans something to rave about. He would be leaving clubs the size of the Roxy behind, playing for thousands rather than hundreds.
    The Roxy set anticipated this phenomenon, combining the bravura of a band that knew it had captured lightning in a bottle with the excitement of a crowd that recognized it was on the ground floor of something big. Not to make too much of such comparisons, but think of the Beatles in Hamburg. The Ramones at CBGB. Elvis on
Louisiana Hayride
. Hank Williams . . . wherever Hank Williams flashed the raw intensity of the music that millions would soon come to know through more polished recordings.
    In the words of Buck Owens, to whom Dwight would pay homage in his introduction to “Guitars, Cadillacs,” Yoakam and his band had a tiger by the tail.
    Almost twenty-five years later, his enthusiasm about that night remains undiminished, as we sit in his offices on Sunset Boulevard, just a short stretch down the hill from the club where he’d recorded his performance, the prime location of his business office and down-home opulence evidence of the success he’d enjoyed over the decades since. And this is when Dwight exclaimed, “When you listen to the Roxy Theatre, that bonus disc with the deluxe edition of
Guitars, Cadillacs
, that is the moment! We knew! We didn’t know what we knew, but we knew. We knew we were headed somewhere.”
    The set starts with Pete’s coiled riffing, generating tension through repetition, sustaining a dynamic that evokes rock’s primal energy. Perhaps, in country ritual, Dwight isn’t even onstage yet, letting the band warm the crowd’s enthusiasm before the headliner’s triumphant entrance. Or maybe he is, for there is no applause signifying an entrance. Instead, the fiddle of Brantley Kearns makes its presence known, marking a dramatic shift from rock club to hoedown, providing the