Dwight Yoakam by Don McLeese Page B

a music that this audience had never experienced firsthand. And so the audience was acting as if Yoakam was a real honky-tonker—whatever that might mean amid the Hollywood glitz of the mid-1980s—and that the Roxy had transformed itself into a real honky-tonk. For one night at least.
    Was there anything real in this? Of course, indisputably, as stated before, the galvanizing power of the music was real, particularly in comparison with the safe, sanitized version of contemporary country that had smothered that original hillbilly spirit. Or the rootless, multi-tracked arena rock that had no more spontaneity than the computers linking the keyboards to the lights. And the connection that Yoakam and band forged with the audience that night was as real as the musical muscle that had forged it. This was hardscrabble, angular artistry, music without fat or filler, music that felt like the real thing to an audience too late to have experienced the real thing. In an era of commercial calculation, there was nothing safe about it.
    There’s an apocryphal quote often (if ironically) attributed to Hank Williams: “The key to country music is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
    As Richard A. Peterson describes the phenomenon in his brilliant
Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity
(University of Chicago Press, 1997), “Authenticity is not inherent in the object or event that is designated authentic but is a socially agreed-upon construct in which the past is to a degree misremembered.” Which is exactly what Hank Williams would have meant, if he had ever said what he never said.
    Within this “socially agreed-upon construct,” we collectively ignore the obvious—that faking it, or putting on an act, is just another term for putting on a show. However authentic (or not) Dwight may have been, he was undeniably sincere. He sincerely wanted to be a star—a country rock star when that had seemed to be a possibility, a country star now that it wasn’t, at least according to the formatted dictates of commercial radio. He sincerely refused to compromise his principles in order to achieve that goal of stardom. He sincerely fronted a smoking-hot band. And he sincerely thought that country music had strayed from its rightful path, that it had betrayed its better self politically, geographically, generationally, artistically.
    And he sincerely believed, deep down in his bones, that his music represented a corrective—a power that could not be denied, a charisma that could not be ignored, a flash that obliterated any distinction between the real and the surreal. For what Dwight was conjuring was a parallel dimension, one where country music hadn’t decamped to the suburbs, where rock and roll shared a common spirit with it, and where punk energy could be harnessed to restore something rather than destroy it. And where retro honky-tonk was the hippest new trend in Hollywood.
    Throughout the performance, Dwight invoked the inspirations that his singular musical dynamic was channeling. There was Kentucky homeboy Bill Monroe, of course, who shared Dwight’s audacity and had all but invented the music known as bluegrass, but whose stiff, autocratic demeanor was at odds with Yoakam’s. There were Buck and Merle and the rest of the Bakersfield crowd, whose California legacy would come to provide such a strong imprint for Dwight’s own, so much so that Buck would subsequently be perceived as Yoakam’s main musical mentor, and Dwight would be known as the guy who had rescued Buck’s reputation from
Hee Haw
corn.
    And there were the two artists whom he’d acknowledged as the twin beacons of musical inspiration that had drawn him to California, both in attendance that night at the Roxy, as if passing the generational torch. Dwight toned down the hokum as he acknowledged their presence: “There’s a couple of folks here tonight that were a big