Dwight Yoakam by Don McLeese Page A

frame for Dwight’s high, lonesome vocals on “Can’t You Hear Me Calling,” the Bill Monroe classic that serves as his set opener.
    The shift sets the parameters, establishing the common denominator for the music. For the band to be capable of rocking so hard, with the singer fronting it sounding so country, suggests a refusal to compromise in the manner of so much country rock, which had pulled its punches in a way that sounded hippie-dippy rather than authentically shit kicking or slam dancing. There was something dangerous in the music’s synergy, as if its ability to inject punk-rock energy into honky-tonk tradition—to find common spirit in categories more often considered opposite polarities—was the aural equivalent of splitting the atom.
    â€œWe hadn’t been concerned with contemporary country at all, because it was in a pretty ugly state,” says Anderson. “Which seems funny to say now, because I’m not even sure that country exists any more. But we were just concerned with playing the way we played. We’d take off the radio what we liked, but there were enough honky-tonks out here to play what you wanted. And people dug it. So you could spend the whole night playing really good, hard-core stuff.”
    Though Pete had never considered himself a country player, Dwight was presenting himself as nothing but—an embodiment of country music returned to its pure, unvarnished state. With the contrast between the two powering the musical synergy, the Roxy set would underscore the crucial contradiction of Yoakam’s career: the music could be so obviously real—undeniably so, in the power that surged back and forth between artist and audience, obliterating the wall between the two—while the performance was so obviously artifice.
    Such an (obvious) observation isn’t intended as criticism, though Yoakam’s detractors would level it as such. For what is show business—if not all of popular culture—but artifice that is essential to the art? Some artists gleefully rub the consumer’s nose in the contrivance—David Bowie, Madonna, Lady Gaga, even Bob Dylan—as if the manipulation of identity is the popular artist’s real art.
    Others invite the audience to engage in what noted rock critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge once termed “the willing suspension of disbelief.” Whether it’s Hank Williams donning the cowboy hat that was never in fashion in his native Alabama, or Bruce Springsteen celebrating his working-class authenticity long after he became a bicoastal millionaire, or the lionization of the Clash playing revolutionary guerrillas (backed by the promotional muscle of a mighty international media conglomerate), we believe what we want to believe, what the art convinces us to believe. And our beliefs are as fluid as the identities of the artists we come to embrace, for how else could an artist reviled as the ultimate sham (Johnny Cougar) reclaim himself as the embodiment of small-town, pink-houses authenticity (John Mellencamp)?
    Whatever everyone involved believed on the night Yoakam gave his triumphant 1986 performance, it’s hard to hear it now without recognizing that Dwight was putting on an act—that this intelligent, articulate man who had been raised in Columbus, Ohio, and attended his hometown Ohio State University was impersonating, a rube, a hayseed. And not just impersonating but exaggerating: “Wuhl,
thank
you. We’re just
tickled
you came out tonight. Listen to yuhs carry on.” And, later: “Now they’re getting ugly, yelling stuff . . . acting like you’re at a honky-tonk. On the
Sunset Strip
!”
    So the audience was acting as well? Maybe they were all in on the act. Yoakam was acting as if he was a guy who had somehow fallen off the back of a turnip truck instead of an artist capable of conjuring a musical ethos that had been popular around the time he was born,