He wears the hat low. So low that you never see his eyes, the whole top half of his face masked in shadow. A guitar invariably shields his torso. That leaves only the mouth, which produces one of the richest drawls in the world today, and a pair of long, skinny denimed legs, which shake, shimmy and slide like an Elvis animatron jacked up to a dangerous hyper gear. Any rockabilly-hat-act with a penchant for exaggerated caricature could pull of this schtick, but only Dwight Yoakam could write songs good enough to override -- and complement -- it all.

"Baby, things change," he sang halfway through his Saturday night set at New York's Hammerstein Ballroom, but count him as one notable exception. In the fifteen years since Yoakam's lean, mean debut, Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc., no man has done country better or more consistently. While his maverick contemporaries like Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett have long since spun off the road into adventurous -- and artistically bountiful -- new territories, Yoakam has never really strayed a two-step from the Buck Owens/Merle Haggard-penned book of the Bakersfield Sound.

To wit, that band he leads. They're crisp and clean, tight as hell and fully capable at any moment to follow guitarist Pete Anderson's smoking lead into the raging, rock-fueled fire of "Little Sister," "Train I Ride" or the set-closing "Fast as You," yet never muscling over that perfect voice up front. And those songs: be they Yoakam originals ("Yet to Succeed," "Turn It On, Turn It Up, Turn Me Loose") or covers cherry-picked so carefully as to render the distinction moot ("Ain't That Lonely Yet," "Streets of Bakersfield"), every damn one recalls a bygone age of country when even a grand weeper could still be delivered with balls (and stinging steel guitar) intact. "It's not that cuddly kind of honk-tonk," Yoakam cryptically warned before one song. "This is circa 1977, back when Conway [Twitty] was still king."

Yoakam's allegiance to that bygone age could easily be misinterpreted as lack of vision if he hadn't singularly enriched the tradition so much as an artist. It would be lamentable if Yoakam's originals merely sounded like Haggard's; closer to the mark, he matches them. There's a mark of classic greatness in the triumphant, wicked turnaround at the end of "Things Change," ("She said, 'You once cried my name' / I said, 'Well baby, things change,'") and even more in the volumes of heartache packed between the two simple lines, "I didn't plan to see you / And then I saw him first" (from "Yet To Succeed.")

Neither of those songs from 1998's woefully under-appreciated A Long Way Home was ever a significant hit, but the fact that they stood out as the very best in an evening heavy on genuine chart-busters from the new greatest hits collection, Last Chance for a Thousand Years, is testament to the fact that, not unlike his closest rock equivalent, Tom Petty, Yoakam's only getting better with mileage. And with that kind of promise, who's to deny him a genuine country radio hit with a straight-rockabilly cover of a Queen song?

If there's room to quibble at all, it was with the omission of any material from Yoakam's killer '95 set, Gone, coupled with his astounding lack of raw stage charisma. No matter how engaging a performer, Yoakam was a rambling, befuddled deer in the headlights on the rare occasions when he stepped out from behind a song to try and address the audience. He connected a little better during the encore, which found him performing solo acoustic versions of four songs. But even that intimacy was hit and miss: "I Sang Dixie" was stark and riveting, but "Suspicious Minds" begged for a little more verve and a lot more of those swinging hips so abundant throughout the rest of the evening. But then the band returned to lead Yoakam roaring out with "Long White Cadillac," and all was well again.

RICHARD SKANSE
(August 30, 1999)