Dwight Yoakam in Two Acts

This is a long overdue post I have had sitting at the bottom of my email inbox for months. Thought it was time to brush it off, make some edits, and tell you a little bit about a guy named Dwight.

Act I: Saturday, February 23, 2019. Capitol Theater. Wheeling, WV

DiCarlo’s Pizza on Main Street is a cross-section of Wheeling society. With both a toughman competition and Dwight Yoakam lined up for nearby venues, it was an easy game to guess which event each group of customers would attend. I decided that all-male and groups with children were probably headed to Wesbanco Arena for the toughman. Groups with women and couples were headed my way to the Capitol after getting a few slices of the Wheeling delicacy.

The Capitol Theater was the swan song of its architect, George Bates. The only other building he finished before his death was a high school in Ohio. It is a vision of what Wheeling was in the 1920s and 1930s, when it was an important, relevant metropolis. It was the most well-known city in West Virginia. In fact, even now, if you are in Oregon or California and say you are from West Virginia, Wheeling is the most likely city folks will name if they know the difference between Virginia and West Virginia. (Spoiler: I get asked about Richmond, Norfolk, and Alexandria all of the time when out west). Wheeling was important. If you are not sure, you are definitely sure once you set foot in the Capitol. Important cities get theaters like the Capitol. Of course, there are no promises in life, whether you are a person or a grand old theater.

Opening for Yoakam was Dillon Carmichael. When he walked out I was shocked to see a young Bob Seger. When he started a rendition of Turn the Page I realized it was exactly what he was going for. Though as I get older and older, I have a harder and harder time listening to 20-somethings talk about the good old days they were not around for (…sometimes even their parents were not around for) and hardships of life they cannot yet imagine.

However, I drove out to Wheeling to see in person a performer that seems to have lived in my periphery for a very, very long time. I recall the video for Pocket of a Clown (YouTube video here) vividly as it was in heavy rotation on CMT in Canada in the early 1990s (when they still aired videos 90% of the time). Yoakam’s rendition of Suspicious Minds is, frankly, the standard for  every Elvis imitator to emulate (YouTube video here, but it gets off to a weird start). Fast as You is a classic to tear up the freeways of Los Angeles or the desolation of the Mojave (YouTube video here). Shortly after moving to West Virginia, near Yoakam’s hometown of Pikeville, Kentucky, I became acquainted with Readin’, Ritin’, and Route 23, which manages to explain what’s happened over the past six decades along the Big Sandy in a way that made sense to a recently-transplanted West Coaster. I suppose it was fate, I migrated to West Virginia from California, with a few intermediate stops, and turned into math. Yoakam made the opposite migration and turned it into art.

So here we are, breathing life into Wheeling’s ghost on a Saturday night.

Yoakam’s band, the Bakersfield Beat, numbered fewer than Carmichael’s had but produced a wall of sound that I could best liken to a slightly dustier rendition of Phil Specter’s—certainly reminiscent of Buck Owens’ “freight train through your front door” concept. The crash between nostalgia the present, pleasures and pains, yielded an energetic force that I would not even expect out of a college kid. No wonder all of the women old enough to be my mother were still teeming with lust for the guy—and he played into their hands by reciprocating with his trademark …dance moves?

But for as much as the show was performance, I was impressed with his depth. I have seen many shows where the act has no idea where they are. In fact, when I saw Bob Seger in State College, PA he kept calling it College Station. He even talked about Texas (Dillon Carmichael did not have this problem). I cannot possibly describe how different State College and College Station are, but they are about as geographically different as they could possibly be and still fulfill similar purposes.

Yoakam knew he was in Wheeling and he had reverence for the venue and the important history of Wheeling in the mainstreaming of country music via WWVA, a 50,000 watt clear channel radio station. This means that the music they played could be heard almost coast to coast—the nearest station on the same frequency was out of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Wheeling Jamboree was second only to the Grand Ol’ Opry (broadcast on WSM 650 from Nashville, another clear channel, with nearest competition for the frequency in British Columbia, Canada) in terms of longevity and importance in country, western, bluegrass, and Americana genres. As I said, Wheeling was an important, significant city. Wheeling mattered!

I am sure this was not terribly interesting to the undulating sexagenarians in the orchestra pit, but it won me over. At this point I realized this guy’s the real deal. After this, it came as no surprise when he pulled not only from every era in his own career, but made some choice selections from Waylon’s and Buck’s repertoires. It is a special feeling when the person you’ve come to see is as much of a fan of the music as the folks you’re sharing the audience with, though my trance was momentarily threatened when a half-empty bottle of Bud Light hit my shoulder and bounced onto my husband and when the couple in front of me had a spat worthy of a Yoakam song.

While it was an obstacle course of bodies in various states of intoxication to get to the roof of the parking garage across the street, I left the show with a renewed interest in Yoakam’s catalog and started to dig past the big hits to discover and rediscover a catalog of heartbreak. I do not know who hurt the guy so badly, but he spins the hurt into such masterful work and I can’t seem to get enough of it.

Act II: Thursday, March 21, 2019. Palace Theater. Greensburg, PA

He said that tonight Pittsburgh just happened to be in greater-Greensburg. I could not stop laughing.

I had spent the day visiting my undergraduate alma mater, a task both nostalgic and disorienting. Returning to your undergraduate campus as a successful, even honored guest yields an indescribable feeling. You both feel like a kid out of your depth and feel an enormous sense of pride knowing that you owe at least a sliver of your success to the foundation set on the campus. (A note to my current employer: please recall, I did not go to Pitt). However, there is nothing like feeling like you’re in college again to do something impulsive.

After dinner at a delicious and delightfully low-key Italian restaurant in Shadyside, I traded my California Navy Tieks for my pair of Justin’s and went on a high-speed burn to Greensburg, feeling like I was not only traveling through space, but time. Backward through time.

I arrived late. I really was not interested in the opener (ironically, when talking about the concert to my students the next day, they all knew Midland, who do a banging rendition of Tougher than the Rest, but had never heard of Dwight Yoakam). The street outside the Palace Theater was deserted. The only sound was the thrum of the tour buses parked around the corner. I was briefly concerned I was in the wrong place on the wrong day—perhaps I had literally traveled through time? I pulled open the door and found more of what I had expected.

Breathing a sigh of relief after the self-inflicted harrowing drive, I sought out a drink. I turned around a corner and cased the beer line. Turns out just about every male in the theater was in the beer line. Turns out the women of Greensburg were just as excited the women of Wheeling were. I pray that when I am 62 I am this sexually relevant to anyone (well, besides students feigning to flirt for mercy at the gradebook—which doesn’t even work now). I digress, I settled for a Diet Coke. I learned a long time ago that scene safety is the first task of any EMT arriving on-scene. I was suspicious of the gender balance, booze, and sheer quantity of denim. Again. Time travel.

As Midland wrapped up I found my seats and the more punctual friends of mine. Smaller, or at least more compact, than the Capitol Theater in Wheeling and somewhat less ornate, I was glad I waited for the break to find my seat because even in the very back row you feel very conspicuous when you walk in. Though being on the floor rather than the balcony I was satisfied that I was less likely to be struck by an errant bottle of Bud Light here than in Wheeling. By the time I finished these contemplations, Yoakam and his band hit the stage.

Musically, the depth of Yoakam’s performance in Wheeling was not a fluke. He is actually that good.

Dwight Yoakam and his Bakersfield Beat

Also surprising were the deviations in the set list and the stories. There was some overlap, but it was not the exact same show. Though I have to imagine that when you are playing these small clubs as a gang of five, you have a lot more flexibility to play what you are feeling versus the large, carefully produced arena shows. Perhaps that is a benefit of reaching this point in your career. You can play what you want for an audience of fans that has found some element of your aesthetic to hold onto—at this point, the folks turning out would turn out for a recitation of the phone book.

The women of Greensburg were quicker to their feet than in Wheeling, and it really made me wish I were in some smoky venue with a dance floor. I would be nursing something fruity at a high top in such a circumstance, but the music was bringing a sustained and unhindered joy and energy, I think just everyone would have been dancing if the space allowed.

While it had not even been a month since the show in Wheeling, I had almost forgotten the depth of Yoakam’s catalog. By the end, I was still counting off the songs I would have loved to hear… but delivering a sustained, high-energy show for two hours takes everything you have. I’d have loved to hear If There Was a Way, Second Hand Heart, Things Change, The Back of Your Hand, and Take Hold of My Hand. However, I was equally grateful to hear Turn it On, Turn it Up, Turn Me Loose, Buenas Noches from a Lonely Room (She Wore Red Dresses), The Heart That You Own, My Heart Skips a Beat, and Liar.

A week before the show I had told someone I regretted not staying up on a Sunday night to see Steely Dan in 2017—mere months before Walter Becker passed away. Now I would never get a chance to see Steely Dan. While I certainly hope Dwight has another decade, maybe two, left in him, life is fleeting. Go see the damn show.

But don’t go to the bathroom after the show. I am not sure what it is about a few hundred women that can turn the nicest bathroom into a nightmare, but here we were! Toilets flooding and women explaining what they’d love to do to the evening’s protagonist—as a certified EMT I wanted to point out to a few of them that such acts would spell the end to their hips or knees. I held my tongue and focused on the playlist I would need while peeling out of the municipal parking garage (that was free to park in!).

The 90-minute drive home on the dark, deserted U.S. Route 119 was the encore of my dreams. Thanks, Dwight.