Anyone watching Sunday’s Academy of Country Music Awards 50th anniversary show from AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, might experience a bit of déja vu if they were among the 100,000-plus attending last weekend’s Country Thunder festival in Florence.
Hosts Blake Shelton and Luke Bryan were among the dozens of country artists performing during the four-day festival here. We were their warm-up to what is likely to be the biggest performance of either of their careers; 80,000 people in the stadium and tens of millions more watching when the show is broadcast on CBS Sunday night.
The pair set a record last weekend in Florence, with back-to-back soldout nights — Shelton on April 11, Bryan on April 12 — bringing in more than half of the overall audience that attended the festival. Organizers did not have an official count this week.
We hung out at the festival throughout the four days, checking out the action behind the scenes and on the stage. Here’s a few observations: (For videos, photos and more backstage action, see @Starburch Twitter feed.)
Seen and heard
• Luke Bryan’s assistant rushed into the media/artists relations trailer a few minutes before the superstar was set to take the stage Sunday night. “You have a printer?” Seems Bryan made a little set change so they needed to print out a revised set list and lyrics to one of his newer songs.
• Dustin Lynch and members of his band boarded a trio of golf carts Sunday afternoon and headed out for Coyote Crazy campgrounds, tucked into the backside of the sprawling festival grounds. Coyote Crazy is where the partiers set up camp, including a group we found way in the back that had set up a giant teeter-totter with seats fashioned out of old pony kegs. Lynch was a good sport. He posed for selfies, hopped on that teeter-totter and took it for a ride and even played a drinking game with a half dozen guys and gals who looked like they had been drinking since the sun came up. Lynch drew the line at drinking beer from a hose attached to a contraption shaped like breasts that a guy had fastened onto his chest. “I don’t know where those people’s lips have been,” Lynch said afterward.
• Fender Guitars set up a display backstage near the Boom Boom Tent — a hospitality area for the artists where you can find the festival’s owner Troy Volhoffer on most nights throughout the weekend performing with his band and any of the festival artists who have a mind to join in. Among the celebrities playing the dozen or so Fender guitars, banjos and dobros displaedy outside a vintage Airstream trailer was Love and Theft’s Stephen Barker Liles and Eric Gunderson, and Big & Rich’s Big Kenny Alphin.
• Blake Shelton flew into the festival grounds aboard a private helicopter that picked him up at a small nearby municipal airport. Before posing for pictures with the lucky handful of fans who scored meet-and-greet passes, Shelton ducked into the artists relations/media trailer and plopped down on a plastic chair to check his Twitter feed. Shelton, who has 11.8 million followers, is a voracious tweeter.
• Traffic getting into the festival grounds all four days was a cakewalk. Getting out Sunday night, however, was a nightmare. The line of cars snaked through a maze that twisted from the lots closest to the stage around the Pinal County Sheriff’s outpost, along a rutted dirt road that ran alongside the overnight parking lot then down the half-mile-long dirt road leading to East Price Station Road. Frankly, we all should have left our vehicles on that dirt road or in the parking lot and joined Tucson’s own DJ Du in the Electric Thunder tent Sunday night. Surprise guests included Love and Theft and Dustin Lynch, who joined Du for EDM remixes of their songs.
Delivering on the big names
Both Blake Shelton and Luke Bryan are up for Entertainer of the Year, and they showed us why: They know how to work an audience.
Shelton blasted that made-for-TV smile and aw-shucks nod when he looked out in the audience and seemed genuinely surprised by the crowd filling the festival grounds last Saturday night.
“Where did y’all come from?” he mused aloud, before ripping into 90 minutes of pure B.S. (Blake Shelton, that is — "Boys Round Here," "Neon Light," "The More I Drink," "Ol' Red," "Austin," "She Wouldn't Be Gone," "Hillbilly Bone," "Footloose"). "Son of a (expletive) there are a lot of people out there. This calls for a drink!"
It’s a safe bet that his blue Solo cup wasn’t filled with water.
Bryan on Sunday took a while longer to warm up. He was three songs in before he acknowledged the audience. But where Shelton was like the tipsy uncle you wanted to hang with, Bryan was the sexy cousin you couldn’t help but swoon over. When he shimmied and grooved to “Country Girl (Shake It For Me),” the crowd of women crushing against the catwalk looked ready to pull him from the stage and swallow him up in a tangle of fans. Almost every song he performed warranted that sexy little dance, from the midtempo ballad “Drunk on You” to the rocking “That’s My Kind of Night.”
Big surprises, little packages
• Didn’t expect Nickelodeon star and Britney’s little sis Jamie Lynn Spears would have such commendable country chops and a lovely twangy soprano. Her hourlong set was filled with memorable moments including her debut single “How Could I Want More” and an acoustic cover of “I Got the Boy,” a song she cowrote that is being taken on a chart ride with country singer Jana Kramer. Backstage before her show, Spears said she was always surprised that Britney chose pop music over country. “We’re from Louisiana and Mississippi; it’s who we are.”
• I have a new favorite band: Old Dominion, the country rock quintet (“Break Up With Him”). They were the first act to play at the 2015 festival, burning up the stage with only a few hundred people looking on. But that didn’t bother them; frontman Matthew Ramsey had the energy and confidence of a headliner, which I’m confident they will one day become. The band gave the festival a two-fer; as headliner Brett Eldredge was about to take the stage last Thursday night, Old Dominion was wrapping up a show on the Jack Daniels Stage at the back end of the festival grounds.
Young guns
• Among the fresh new country faces making Country Thunder debuts: the pop-country duo Maddie & Tae (Maddie Marlow and Taylor Dye); indie artist Clare Dunn, who showed off some monster guitar skills; rap-rockers The Lacs; and Canadian country rocker Dallas Smith.
Old friends
• It was great seeing Phil Vassar, Diamond Rio and John Michael Montgomery back at the festival. Vassar is on the lineup every other year or so, but it’s been a few years since we’ve seen Diamond Rio or Montgomery.
