Dwight Yoakam Rips Through the Classics in Fantastic Little Rock Show

by Julian Spivey
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I don’t know how a 62-year old, balding man by way of Bakersfield and Kentucky became the biggest badass in this entire world, but Dwight Yoakam sure as hell has.

Yoakam ripped through a set of more than 20 songs, many of which are classics and some excellent new releases, in just under two hours on Sunday, February 17 at Verizon Arena in North Little Rock, Ark. in a smaller, theater type setup for the arena.
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It was an excellent display of Yoakam’s musicianship and showmanship with his “Dwight Dances” thrilling the audience throughout his entire set on Sunday evening.
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Yoakam began the night with a rip-roaring cover of Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie,” no doubt a tribute to the legendary guitar God who passed away in 2017, replacing “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke & Loud Music,” which had been his opener the two previous times I’ve seen him perform.

After this opener it was one Yoakam hit after another for much of the remainder of the show with Yoakam and his incredibly talented band going into rocking versions of “Please, Please Baby” and his excellent Elvis Presley cover “Little Sister,” which he truly makes his own (as he does with most of his excellent cover songs).

One of the real highlights of this show for me was Yoakam’s performances of a couple of new songs that he released last year, the absolutely beautiful “Pretty Horses” and the creative “Then Here Came Monday,” which was co-written with the great Chris Stapleton.

Pretty much every Yoakam show is a tribute to his heroes and Bakersfield brethren Buck Owens and Merle Haggard as he fell in love with and adopted their specific sound of country music known as “The Bakersfield Sound.” Yoakam has now incorporated some of his heroes songs into his set as tribute to the late, great artists doing “The Bottle Let Me Down” and “The Fugitive” in honor of Haggard and incorporating Owens’ “My Heart Skips a Beat” and “Act Naturally” brilliantly into the middle of “Turn It On, Turn it Up, Turn Me Loose” after the line about dancing with a woman to “an old Buck Owens song.” Yoakam would also do fantastic covers of Lefty Frizzell’s “Always Late (With Your Kisses)” and Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” which truly sounds like a new song the way Yoakam does it.

The crowd really loved Yoakam’s musical tributes to heroes, but it’s his own classics they mostly packed the smaller venue within a larger one to see. Yoakam just absolutely tore through hit after hit toward the end of his set giving the fans terrific performances of “Pocket of a Clown,” “Ain’t That Lonely Yet,” the Buck Owens-esque “Little Ways,” “It Only Hurts When I Cry” (which he did briefly mangle some of his lyrics to) and “Honky Tonk Man.”

Yoakam finished his excellent set with the fantastic one-two punch of two of his most energetic performances of his career “Guitars, Cadillacs” and “Fast as You,” which had many within the crowd on their feet doing their best “Dwight Dances” of their own in the aisles.

Yoakam left to uproarious applause before returning a couple of minutes later for the excellent one-song encore of Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds,” which has been a frequent encore closer for Yoakam for years.

Yoakam wasn’t the only highlight of the night as newcomer Dillon Carmichael, out of Kentucky and a part of a musical family (his uncles are John Michael Montgomery and Eddie Montgomery of Montgomery Gentry), showed off his terrific voice (reminiscent of Jamey Johnson) on excellent songs from his 2018 debut album Hell on an Angel like the album’s title track, “It’s Simple” (my favorite off the album) and “Dancing Away with My Heart” (which sounds like it could’ve been a John Michael Montgomery hit in the ‘90s). Carmichael also treated the crowd to absolutely fantastic covers of Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page” and Waylon Jennings’ “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line.”

It was certainly one amazing night of true country music at Verizon Arena on Sunday night.