Kenny Chesney squinted beneath his cowboy hat against the glare of the stage lights into the audience overflowing the AVA at Casino del Sol Thursday night.
“It’s been several years since we played this town,” he told the crowd. “I want to try to make it up to you for being gone so long.”
Boy, did he deliver.
We got the scaled-back version of Chesney’s “Big Revival Tour,” the one sans the emerging superstar opening acts (Jason Aldean, Jake Owen, Old Dominion) and the bigger-than-life stage setting. Instead, we got Chesney, country music’s buffed, suntanned beach bum, for nearly two hours, all to ourselves.
It almost felt like he had rolled back the calendar to the late 1990s, when he was a regular at Old Tucson’s Budweiser Arena, a dusty amphitheater that holds just over half of the AVA’s 5,000 capacity. For an event that will go down as one of Tucson’s biggest concerts of the year, Thursday’s nearly two-hour show felt more like a family reunion — if your family had 5,000 members and a country music superstar.
Chesney, showing off a muscle-ripped, deeply tanned physique in his sweat-drenched tank top and distressed light-blue jeans, embraced the outstretched hands and signed autographs for the hundred or more people packed into the VIP standing-room-only stage-front section. At the end of the concert, he signed a guitar and gave it to a young girl in that section.
Throughout the night, the crowd sang along to every song — from the opening party anthem “Beer in Mexico” to his newest single “American Kids” and every hit in between — “Summertime,” “Pirate Flag,” “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problem,” “You and Tequila,” “We Went Out Last Night,” “How Forever Feels,” “I Go Back” and “’Til It’s Gone” among them.
At times, the audience sang louder than Chesney and you could hardly hear him. It almost seemed as if his mic was turned down and you had to strain to hear him, especially when he spoke.
“I realize it’s a Thursday night, but the party is not going to stop when the music stops,” he said, a statement that a large group of people took to heart when they stayed behind to catch Tucson’s own Robert Moreno Band perform an after-show. “This is a weeknight, but we just turned this into a Saturday night. I love you for it.”
Thursday’s concert, the kickoff for Casino del Sol’s weekend-long 21st anniversary celebration, was missing the alcohol-fueled shenanigans that have plagued a few of Chesney’s bigger arena concerts on the “Big Revival Tour.” In recent shows in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, police arrested dozens of concert-goers for alcohol-related offenses.
There were no reports of arrests Thursday night, and all seemed fairly calm, with police officers quietly patrolling the amphitheater and enjoying the concert.
