Kenny Chesney rules the road
The most prominent member of an endangered species, Kenny Chesney is nonetheless feeling OK.
American stadium tour headliners are all but extinct these days, yet Chesney's Poets Pirates show is playing coast to coast this summer. Chesney has sold more concert tickets in the new millennium than has any act in any genre, and, while Bruce Springsteen plays basketball arenas and the Dave Matthews Band works amphitheaters, Chesney will step on stage Saturday night at LP Field in front of more than 40,000 fans.
"Across America, he's the guy," said Ray Waddell, Billboard magazine's editor of touring. "In the last five or six years, nobody has put up the kind of numbers he has. These kinds of tours are hugely expensive to mount, relative to how much you can charge for tickets. Production has to be big, and you have to draw a whole lot of people. And then it doesn't grow unless you're delivering, and unless you get to a stature where fans believe this is the party of the summer."
Chesney achieves this even at a time when a faltering economy, skyrocketing fuel prices and declining CD sales have left many in the music industry on shaky ground. Hit songs are a prerequisite for the kind of summertime juggernaut Chesney and his team have built, but other performers score big hits and play to smaller crowds.
Chesney's appeal involves a complicated, perfect storm of charisma, planning (high production value, comparably reasonable ticket prices, star level support acts, etc.) and branding. It's not enough to play to Longchamp Leather Bags Australia the back of the room. He plays all the way back to the parking lot. "I think the people coming to our show want an outlet from everyday life. Sometimes I ride around the lot in a golf cart around noon, talking to people and reminding them to take it easy 'cause it's going to be more than nine hours before I even get on stage."
Top row considered
Two weeks ago, Chesney sat in a chair on his massive stage at an empty Soldier Field in Chicago and talked about his life on the road. It was late Friday afternoon, and he had just finished a sound check for his Saturday night show.
"Tomorrow morning, at 10:30, I'll go up there to the top row of the stadium and just sit by myself," he said. "I do that every place we play. I look around the stadium, take in the environment and think about how far I have to go to make someone sitting up there feel like they're in the front row."
As Chesney spoke, ESPN football analyst Kirk Herbstreit walked up to shake his hand and say, "Man, that was fun today." The singer and the broadcaster had met up earlier that day at a Chicago Cubs game, where Chesney sang "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" during the seventh inning stretch. Chesney then wound up celebrating a Cubs win with Herbstreit and a group of revelers. The whole crew then headed to Soldier Field, popping cold ones and standing on stage while Chesney led his band through "Bartender's Blues," "Almost Like A Song" and "Sweet Home Chicago."
"We have a real good time out here," Chesney said after his buddies left. "I'm a carefree spirit, and everybody out here lives by the 'work hard and play harder' rule. But it's not always like this. You have to be able to take some punches, and Tiffany Necklace Wholesale there are things that go along with this that sometimes make you question whether it's worth it. I'm more in the moment this year than I have been the last couple of years, and I notice more of the good things."
Turns out there is a grind amid the glory, and Chesney's eyes are the only feature of his athlete's body that looks older than his 40 years.
"I feel like I've got my edge back," Ghd Hair Straightener Cheap he said. "I've been playing guitar a lot lately. There was a period at the end of 2005 and really all of 2006 where I never took the guitar case out of the closet when I was at home. I was in such a personal funk after the Renee thing that I could have played Soldier Field every day of the week and wouldn't have felt much joy from it."
The "Renee thing" was his brief 2005 marriage to and annulment from actress Renee Zellweger. That one took him from country star to tabloid guy, and he has never left the grocery store checkout lane displays. This year, articles one week had him getting set to marry an old flame. The next week, he was supposedly romancing a different woman.
"I don't like being in certain magazines," he said. "And who would? But that's part of what comes with this. And 'this' is going out and playing these shows, and I love that. It's so addictive I can't even begin to tell you."
Promoter Louis Messina of TMG/AEG Live first saw Chesney's appeal when the singer was touring as part of a package show headlined by George Strait.
"I could see it growing," Messina said. "The first tour with Strait, he was doing about 50 cents a head (meaning per fan) in merchandise: T shirts and CDs at the show. The next year, it was $1.50 a head and there were people standing up the whole time he was playing. Then he went out opening for Tim McGraw and he was doing $4 a head, which was about 35 percent of the total merchandise sales. With a normal opener, they'd do about 10 percent. On that second Strait tour, Kenny looked at me and said, 'One day we'll be able to do this.' Two years later, he sold out Neyland Stadium in Knoxville."
'I tried too hard'
Playing a stadium isn't merely a matter of drawing enough fans to fill the place, and working a stadium stage after playing arenas can be like jumping from a sports Buy Ghd Online car into a Formula One racer.
"It's not like playing an arena, where it's 15,000 people right on top of you," Chesney said. "Not that 15,000 is a quaint atmosphere, but compared to this it kind of is. And I knew I wasn't connecting with everybody when I first started doing stadiums.
"It's like my friend Peyton Nike Free Womens Manning: His rookie year in the NFL, he said everything was so fast for him that he wasn't picking up on everything the way he should. It's the same way out here.
"At first, I think, I tried too hard. I had to find my sweet spot, and that took about a year. Since then, I've had certain acts Nike Free 4 V3 opening for me that haven't really been themselves because they were in this environment. I understand that, because I did that, too."
Chesney said more time is spent planning the first 10 seconds of the show and Ghd Straighteners Sydney the video screen introduction than any other single element. Many fans sit in the parking lot and play Chesney's albums for hours before the show, so the set list won't provide much in the way of surprise, but the opening the "reveal" is a way of heightening excitement at the outset of the show.
"We spend months on the intro," he said. "I mean, the music is going to be the music, but the stuff around it can change and create an environment, and that gets me excited and the crowd excited. Right before the show, just before I take that elevator up to the stage, I can hear the crowd and know that Ghd Hair Straightener Australia Sale the energy went from the parking lot into the stadium, and from the stadium to the stage."
The evening before his Soldier Field show, Chesney looked up at the seats and rows and sections that surrounded his stage.
"Tomorrow night, it'll be full and loud and rocking," he said. "But in the morning, I'll sit up there when it's completely empty, and I'll just listen."
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