King of Country holds court in Sin City
George Strait’s Las Vegas residency drawing fans from Texas and the world over to hear all the hits
LAS VEGAS — A pack of super fans and Vegas dignitaries congregates backstage, in the bowels of the T-Mobile Arena on a Saturday night in early April, just minutes from a meet-and-greet with George Strait.
The anxiety of anticipation is noticeable as they wait for the quasi-reclusive country-music icon to step into the room. They steady themselves by preparing for the encounter. “Is my makeup OK? Do I smell? What do I say to him? What if I cry?”
Then he enters from a side door, a member of his entourage leading the way. Strait has a Texas swagger that can’t be replicated. He’s calm, cool, collected; he can level the room with a smile — and bring women to tears with his presence.
Strait is wearing his superhero outfit: cowboy boots, pressed Wrangler jeans, a perfectly starched button-up shirt, cowboy hat and a tan straight from a Cabo fishing trip or a week on a ranch. He’s King George, the man who has shepherded country-music fans through heartache and happiness with songs as smooth as a glass of topshelf tequila.
“When the hat is on, he’s all business, and he belongs to the fans,” says Louis Messina Sr., Strait’s touring promoter since the ’90s. Messina is an industry icon in his own right as founder and CEO of Messina Touring Group and co-founder of PACE Concerts. “But when it’s off, he belongs to his family. He could be your neighbor.”
Tonight, Strait’s hat is on. He’s performing one of 10 planned concerts as part of his 2017 Las Vegas residency. For a musician who quit touring four years ago, these intermittent dates in Sin City are rare chances to witness him sing about how his exes populate the Lone Star State. Since his first hit in 1981, the Poteet native has toured the nation, bringing a catalog of neo-traditionalist country music to his fans. Now, they’re coming to him.
Before the first of his back-to-back April dates, Strait takes time for intimate moments with some of those traveling fans.
Chase Pair, a teen from North Little Rock, Ark., is backstage with his mother, Julie. Pair is slowly going deaf, and after a story about his Strait fandom went viral, he was granted this trip to see the country singer before the hearing in his young ears is completely lost.
It’s a tender moment with the teenager dressed to the nines in sharp cowboy boots and a shiny belt buckle, almost like Strait himself. He gets a photo with Strait, and the musician signs a clutch of items. If you didn’t know the story, you wouldn’t realize just how magical these few minutes are for the Pairs and Strait.
Strait listens intently to both mother and son. Strait’s comforting eyes put the pair at ease, and he offers them encouraging words.
“There are no gimmicks with George,” Messina says.
Well, that might not be quite true.
Just the hits
Though they’re giving fans what they want, Strait’s Vegas dates do feel a little gimmicky, especially the times when he’s spreading his 60 No. 1 songs over two nights in the T-Mobile Arena.
It’s a foolproof plan, lining up every charttopping track from the smiling fiddle at the start of 1982’s “Fool Hearted Memory” to the somber guitar lick that fades out of his 60th No. 1 song, 2012’s “Give it All We Gonot Tonight.” Doing both nights offers a better picture of Strait as an artist.
He’ll revisit that motif when he returns to Vegas on July 28-29. There are additional shows in September and December, though they’re not certain to be just the No. 1 hits.
If those concerts run like the April dates of his Vegas residency, Strait and the Ace in the Hole Band will fill the first evening by running through the first 30 No. 1 hits — a murderer’s row of country gold including “You Look So Good in Love,” “The Chair” and, of course, “All My Exes Live in Texas.”
These are songs etched into the DNA of the modern-day Texan. The melodies, the lyrics — they conjure memories of where you were when you first heard the songs, and who you were in love with when Strait’s vocals poured into your ears.
On stage, Strait is the velvety Texas Sinatra, firing on all cylinders and grinning at all the right moments, looking lovelorn when the song demands it. He and the band don’t miss a beat or delicate fiddle line, delivering song after song like a well-oiled hit machine.
If the first night is about finding and falling in love, ending with the upbeat shuffle of “The Big One,” the second night is the hangover, kicking off with 1994’s “You Can’t Make a Heart Love Somebody.” Strait has always had a way of transforming songwriters’ tunes and molding them into devastating portraits of romantic futility. He still does it well as his voice wraps around you like a warm blanket, even as the ink dries on the divorce papers.
In some ways, these Vegas dates are Strait’s career in microcosm: The two nights taken together tell the story of an artist who’s managed to become an icon without giving himself away, at least not completely.
Texas me
One of the more bizarre aspects of seeing Strait’s Vegas show is how the experience can make you feel like you’re still in Texas.
An hour or so before the concert starts, the crowd outside the T-Mobile Arena looks similar to what you’d see milling around at Rodeo-Houston, sans giant corn dogs and carnival rides. Western wear is the dress code, along with tall hair and cowboy hats, all energized by the cold desert air that’s never felt in humid Houston.
Several of them are lined up at a merch booth where fans are waiting to buy Strait shirts and trinkets. Inside the arena, there are a few scattered ads for Strait’s Codigo 1530 tequila splashed around, with him sitting relaxed on a porch with a glass of tequila, looking impeccably cool and collected.
Every Texan in attendance has a story about Strait, a memory. Some are about falling in love to his songs at a dancehall in the ’80s, others about falling out of love in the ’90s while listening to his music play in a truck sitting at a stoplight.
And these Vegas shows have been full of Texans — 48 percent of the tickets sold were in the Lone Star State. But, as you’d expect from a country star as high in the sky as Strait is, people are coming from all over the nation to see him shine.
“California, Tennessee, Massachusetts. 52 percent from all over the rest of the world,” Messina says. “He’s not just a Texas act, he’s an everywhere act.”
The night before Strait’s first April date, Britney Spears performed a night of her Vegas residency at The Axis Theater at Planet Hollywood. It’s a different scene, with different demographics but some crossover. The Spears crowd is heavily made up of boozy bachelorette parties — women letting loose while wearing slinky attire — and scattered groups of people for whom nothing about the night will make it back to Oklahoma City, or wherever they call home. In comparison, Strait’s crowd is just as boozy but a little more mature and wearing more clothes.
One of those Strait fans is Pearland resident Bonnie Butler, who ventured to Vegas with some friends specifically to see Strait.
“I grew up watching him play in the Houston Rodeo, and I had to rekindle my love for his music,” Butler says. “Everyone there had an immense energy.”
Now that energy is building in Sin City.
Room fit for a king
The T-Mobile Arena is a brand-new venue in the heart of the Las Vegas Strip, neighboring the towering, faux Big Apple skyline of New York, New York and sitting spitting distance from the Monte Carlo, where it appears most Strait fans have bunked for the weekend.
Messina says that the plan to get Strait to Vegas (his surname has always offered up great copy opportunities) was hatched when the arena was still being built.
“He was very clear he wasn’t retiring, and he said he wasn’t going to do structured tours anymore,” Messina says from his office in Austin. It’s a real concert in a major arena, his natural habitat now since the late ’80s. And if this engagement continues beyond 2017, who knows what kind of set lists fans will be treated to.
“When we announced that final tour, he had just signed a new record deal, so he has tons more music in him,” Messina says.
Plans for 2018 haven’t been quite locked down, Messina says. But unlike other Vegas music residents past or present — Spears, Celine Dion, Cher, etc. — Strait isn’t likely to make long-term commitments to the city.
One reason: Not too long ago, Strait and his wife, Norma,, welcomed their first grandchild into the family.
“He loves playing music, but like all Texans-he loves his life and his family. His life is grand. He ropes, he rides, and he babysits,” Messina says. “He likes to process everything and do what is right for him and his family and the fans.”
“I’m on Strait time,” Messina says with a laugh. “Who knows, he may take off next year.”
The cowboy hasn’t quite rode away, yet.
“When the hat is on, he’s all business, and he belongs to the fans. But when it’s off, he belongs to his family.”
Louis Messina Sr., promoter