Review: Dwight Yoakam at the Lexington Opera House

Just after the scheduled showtime passed last night at the Opera House, and with it the stage announcement that headliner Dwight Yoakam was delayed in air travel somewhere between Lexington and Atlanta, a decidedly non-country tune shot through the venue. It was a recording of the 1964 Beatles hit I Feel Fine – two-and-a-half minutes of jubilant Brit pop perfection.

Shoot ahead nearly three hours and the modestly delayed Yoakam was in the thick of the first of two encores, plowing through I Feel Fine in the flesh. It sounded perfectly natural in the hands of the Pikeville-born country music veteran, too. The performance was both a celebration of the song’s overseas origins (the guitar-happy hooks, the jangly harmonies) as well as Yoakam’s continued ingenuity in adding colors and inspirations from generations past into his own California country punch bowl. It was a blast of roots music that was hip, clever, fun and more than a little emotional – much like the other 30 or songs the singer stuffed into his sold out, two hour program.

The hip aspect has long been played up in Yoakam’s music, and was so again last night. Before kicking into a show-opening cover of the honky tonk staple Dim Lights, Thick Smoke and Loud, Loud Music that was revved up into a steamrolling Americana anthem, he was introduced as being “from Hollywood, California” (his long adopted home) instead of Kentucky. Certainly the T. Rex flavored reading of Ring of Fire and the sleek doo-wah vocal line of Pocket of a Clown that came later in the set underscored that sense of West Coast roots rock revisionism. But pre-pop country fare from Yoakam’s 1986 debut album Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc. Etc. – specifically the Big Sandy tribute Bury Me and the self-explanatory Miner’s Prayer (“Please take my soul from ‘neath that cold dark ground”) vividly upheld his Eastern Kentucky heritage.

Perhaps understandably, the show focused heavily the first decade of Yoakam’s career – the era that scored him the most plentiful number of hits. Yoakam was in strong though heavily stoic form for most of them, from the galvanizing heartbreak tale that served as the title tune to 1990’s If There Was a Way album to his backbeat heavy hit version of Little Sister. By the end of the show, though, the hit parade had essentially dissolved into an extended medley with slightly truncated versions of This Time, Honky Tonk Man, A Thousand Miles from Nowhere and more being raced through as though Yoakam was running late for another show. They were serviceable performances, but given how sterling the material was and how inventive the singer has always been, the flow sounded like curiously perfunctory and, at times, tired.

In contrast, newer works from 2012’s 3 Pears and 2015’s Second Hand Heart – easily Yoakam’s finest recordings since his split with producer and longtime band co-hort Pete Anderson in 2003 – were full of fire, especially the title tune to Second Hand Heart (invigorated with another shot of Brit pop) and the guitar riff-laden Liar. Neither earned crowd reactions as hearty as the ones that greeted the hits, but the songs clearly showed how involving Yoakam can still be when he isn’t continually traveling the roads linking Hollywood to Kentucky that he has come to know perhaps too well.

This story was originally published March 4, 2016 at 7:24 AM with the headline "Review: Dwight Yoakam at the Lexington Opera House."