How this Kentucky distillery brought in some big concert names to its small venue

Dwight Yoakam was winding up one of his earliest and most career-defining hits last weekend at The Amp at Dant Crossing when he decided to take a trip. The tune was “Streets of Bakersfield,” a 1988 reworking of a 1963 Buck Owens single that embraced the West Coast country accents living on in the Pikeville native’s music.

The liberties came late in the song. “How about the streets of New Haven?” he asked the sold-out crowd of 2,000 that had gathered at one of Kentucky’s newest and most distinctive outdoor concert venues. It sits not on the outskirts of a major metropolis, but deep in the core of bourbon country. Located a few miles down the road from the Abbey of Gethsemani, where very different spirits are honored, The Amp is not a stand-alone facility. Rather, it is part of a massive distillery property dubbed Dant Crossing that houses its own fishing lake, bed-and-breakfast facilities and a tasting room for its preferred spirits.

On this balmy July evening, though, live music rules the grounds. Sitting on the downward incline of a hilly area where livestock graze far to your left, trees abound behind the stage and the sun makes a slow exit to the right, music abounds. Country music. Kentucky bred country music, at that.

On this night, Bakersfield reached New Haven.

Within the concert’s opening moments, everything that established Yoakam as a country traditionalist torchbearer over three decades ago was reawakened. There was a show-opening version of the Carter Family staple “Keep on the Sunny Side” rewired with an electric honky-tonk drive, a rootsy transformation of the 1961 Elvis Presley staple “Little Sister” and the Yoakam original “Please, Please Baby,” which was part of a hit express that established his stardom in the late 1980s.

But here Yoakam was, bringing all this to the streets of New Haven and the heart of the bourbon world.

‘Help me design this amphitheater’

“As we began constructing our first building and looking out over the old distillery ruins which sit below here, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could marry music and entertainment in with the traditional distillery experience?’,” said Wally Dant, president and distiller of Dant Crossing. “Given the natural lay of the land we have here and the surrounding settings, I felt this would be a perfect place for an amphitheater.”

Dant is the first to admit, though, that building and then operating a sizable music venue was not exactly a project he was versed in.

Having worked in Nashville as a health care CEO for over two decades, he returned to the Nelson County distillery property that had been in his family for generations. Bourbon and health care — so where does live music fit in?

“I reached out to some friends of mine in Nashville that had been in the music industry for years,” Dant said. “I asked them, ‘If we want to do this the right way, what do I need to do to get big acts like Cheap Trick or Little Big Town (acts that played The Amp last summer) to come and feel comfortable about playing here? Help me design this amphitheater to where we can attract these large acts.’ So we began working with those consultants to design an amphitheater from a sound, lighting and stage perspective.

“We’ve wanted to give people a different experience that essentially looks and feels like the rest of our campus here. When you create a great memory, people tend to want to come back and experience it again. That was really how we envisioned this whole campus. How do you create those great memories for folks to go, ‘Hey, I had a great time there. I want to go back.”

The Amp: Atypically intimate outdoor concert venue

One of the distinguishing factors of The Amp is its size. With a 2,000-patron capacity, it is atypically intimate for a major outdoor concert venue. It is roughly half the size of Cincinnati’s PNC Pavilion, which, in turn, is dwarfed by the 20,000-strong Riverbend Music Center, its parent outdoor facility.

“Typically, a lot of these acts are playing in either bigger arenas or bigger places, Dant said. “This has been one of the refreshing things for them, to be able to play in front of an audience where almost no one is less than 50 yards from the stage. So they feel this connection to that audience that a lot of times they don’t always feel.

“For us, it’s a manageable size. For the folks that come here, they feel a connection to artists they can’t necessarily get sometimes at Rupp Arena, for instance. Not to say that Rupp or anybody else, doesn’t provide great opportunities from an entertainment perspective.”

Challenges opening during COVID

When The Amp opened in August 2021, there was another factor to consider that wasn’t part of the original plan for Dant Crossing — the COVID-19 pandemic. As the country quartet Little Big Town inaugurated the venue, the concert industry was still in an awakening period from when business completely shut down the previous summer. For any live music venue, COVID was a consideration. For a facility overseen for a former health care executive, the issue was vital.

“Fortunately/unfortunately due to COVID, we found all these artists were starving for a place to come and play safely,” Dant said. “They were clamoring to get out.

“You try to balance safety for everybody who comes here,” Dant said. “While we didn’t require masks at the time (in 2021), we encouraged all of our patrons to be vaccinated. I felt strongly about that as a health care guy. That’s where I spent a lot of my career. Vaccinations make a difference. We actually ran free vaccination clinics here because we just felt it was important to show our support around that program.

“Quite frankly, I think the governor of Kentucky did a fantastic job in saving lives and shutting down early with what he put in place. It certainly impacted our ability to construct and do things here that maybe we wouldn’t have been able to do in some other states. Then we maneuvered through that with the artists and their management teams around whatever requirements that they had around safety for themselves.”

As Yoakam tore through his own hits at The Amp (“A Thousand Miles from Nowhere”) and a few choice covers (“Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down,” a staple by another West Coast country classicist, Merle Haggard), the combination of space, safety and live music brought a full after-hours atmosphere to the bourbon-based experience Dant envisioned for his guests.

“I came into the distilling business not knowing a lick about how to put on a concert. But we hired the right people, provided them with the right resources to do the right thing and now we’re beginning to see the fruits of our success around that. While the first year we stumbled our way through, every act felt good about what happened here and their experience. And that plays into our season two.

“I used to hear, ‘Okay, where’s Dant Crossing again and who are you?’ Now, it’s more like, ‘Oh, I’ve heard of you guys.’ Those are the ‘ah ha” moments for me where you go, ‘Well, we’re getting somewhere.’”

The Amp at Dant Crossing

Where: 225 Dee Head Rd., Gethsemane, Ky.

Upcoming concerts

▪ July 15: Tommy DeCarlo

▪ July 22: Mary Chapin Carpenter

▪ July 29: Marty Stuart and his Fabulous Superlatives

▪ Aug. 12: The Frontmen

▪ Aug. 26: Justin Moore

▪ Sept. 2: Diamond Rio

▪ Sept. 5: Collective Soul/Switchfoot

▪ Sept. 8: Ashley McBryde

▪ Sept. 16: Clay Walker

▪ Sept. 23: Billy Ray Cyrus

▪ Sept. 30: Jake Owen

▪ Oct. 7: Josh Turner

▪ Oct. 14: Sister Hazel

▪ Oct. 28: Tracy Lawrence

Tickets: dantcrossing.com/amp or ticketmaster.com