Dwight Yoakam with Los Lobos at Rose Music Center

When Dwight Yoakam tapped Los Lobos to fill in for the Mavericks on his Cosmic Roundup & Rodeo tour, he not only replaced the Mavericks, whose Raul Malo is battling metastatic cancer, he provided Lobos with some much-needed work after their tour with X was abruptly canceled. 

As it happened, the tour that pulled into suburban Dayton, Ohio’s, Rose Music Center on Sept. 27 paired two eclectic music makers who share the distinction of having opened for the Grateful Dead in the stadium era and having covered the band, but little else. 

And it worked out quite nicely, thank you very much, indeed. 

Like Los Lobos, arguably America’s most-consistently excellent live band for the past 30-plus years, Yoakam, despite being a country-music artist through and through, blurred the lines between genres during his headline performance. 

Bedecked in denim and with his cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes, Yoakam and his choreographed, sparkling-in-sequins band of rhythm section; and multi-instrumentalists on electric guitar and mandolin; and keys, pedal-steel guitar and fiddle, nodded to his influences while making an amalgamated brand of music unique to him. 

He took the stage after an audio tribute to Malo was piped through the PA and proceeded to turn the Carter Family’s “Keep on the Sunny Side” into a country-rock assault; pump Elvis Presley’s “Little Sister” with electric energy; and nod to the Ohio locale with lyric changes to “Streets of Bakersfield.” 

Yoakam spoke reverently about the line that extends from the Byrds through Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Linda Ronstadt to the Eagles and repeatedly made the case that good music is good music. 

Full stop. 

To that end, Yoakam offered the bluegrass-leaning “I’ll be Gone;” nodded to Johnny Cash’s boom-chuck style on “Turn it On, Turn it Up, Turn Me Loose;” and covered Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” as he bundled Western sounds from the 1950s to the 1980s and served the resulting gumbo up fresh for 2025. 

Like Yoakam, Lobos epitomized eclecticism in their opening set, a real blessing to those who’d been holding tickets to the band’s scratched Sept. 21 concert at the same venue and were shocked by the band’s last-minute reappearance on the schedule for the Rose’s penultimate show of the outdoor-concert season. 

The Wolves thus had a good number of fans in the house and, as the audience reaction to their raucous performance suggested, earned some more during their hour-long set.  

With Louie Pérez, his jarana jarocha, third electric guitar and other contributions absent, guitarists Cesar Rosas and David Hidalgo, who also played accordion on “Kiko and the Lavender Moon” and other cuts; bassist Conrad Lozano; saxophonist, keyboardist and percussionist Steve Berlin; and drummer Alfredo Ortiz served up an uncharacteristically gritty performance. 

Lozano was particularly busy, filling some of the spaces typically reserved for Pérez. Similarly, “Chuco’s Cumbia” had room for a lengthy baritone sax solo on its sinewy outro as Rosas shook maracas; “Shakin’, Shakin’, Shakes” found Hidalgo offering a long, Hendrixian interlude; “Come on, Let’s Go” transformed the mostly sold-out Rose into a sock hop; “Evangeline” reminded fans where the Jerry Garcia Band found the song; and the rarely played “The Road to Gila Bend” seemed a gift to longtime fanatics. 

The band also nodded to its roots on the grimy Native Sons covers “Love Special Deliver” and “Flat Top Joint;” to its beginnings as a wedding band steeped in Mexican tradition on “Let’s Say Goodnight;” and tucked “Good Lovin’” inside the inevitable “La Bamba,” in a reversal of the Dead’s 1988 practice. 

Having opened with “Will the Wolf Survive?,” Los Lobos effectively spent the rest of their show answering in the affirmative.