Big country
Brandy McDonnell caught up with Blake Shelton and we visited the Little Big Town concert. Read the reviews inside.
Blake Shelton was looking to knock off a little rust and polish up a few new songs with h is band before launching his “Country Music Freaks” arena tour.
“I figured, ‘Hell, we’ve got this really cool bar in Tishomingo, so might as well practice in front of some people,” the country music superstar declared to the eager crowd of about 200 people who packed into his Ole Red Tishomingo restaurant, music venue and watering hole Feb. 9 for a casual pre-tour gig.
It was the first of backto-back nights of soldout warm-up shows in Shelton’s new hotspot in his adopted hometown. Although the Ada native was to launch his “Country Music Freaks” arena trek with all the requisite flash Thursday night at Tulsa’s BOK Center, he kept the Tishomingo shows loose and laidback.
“I realized I can’t remember any of my songs,” he joked from the compact Ole Red stage. “Don’t expect anything crazy up here. We’re just gonna go through some songs, and y’all drink and have a good time.”
With friends, relatives and neighbors mingling with out-of-state fans from Kansas and Colorado, the chart-topping headliner and his band — Rob Byus (bass), Beau Tackett (guitar), Philip DeSteiguer (piano), Tracy Broussard (drums), Kevin Post (steel guitar), Jenee Fleenor (fiddle) and Kara Britz (background vocals) — opened with the easy-breezy ballad “Gonna.” Perched on tall stools, bellied up to the bar or standing tall with their cellphone cameras filming, the audience belted along with “Neon Light,” while clusters of fans outside on the sidewalk peered in the windows.
“I don’t think I screwed up any words on that — I don’t think,” he said as he finished up the sultry “Sangria.”
“We’re getting through a few of these we need to go through, and then you can start shouting some out.”
When he did start taking requests, though, he quickly had to dissuade the crowd from delving too deeply into his album cuts.
“I can’t even remember singles,” he playfully protested, although he and his band delivered rock-solid renditions of his latest chart-topper “I’ll Name the Dogs,” his early hits “Austin” and “Some Beach” and, naturally, his Michael Buble cover “Home.”
“I guess we have to do this song: We can’t be in Ole Red and not sing ‘Ol’ Red,’” he said, unleashing the fan favorite.
Although he botched a few lyrics of the fastpaced heartbreaker “She Wouldn’t Be Gone,” his sheepish smile and selfdeprecating humor made it practically impossible to fault him for it.
The two-hour and 20-minute set boasted plenty of highlights: Shelton shared the story of filming the video for “She’s Got a Way with Words” in the venue’s basement before playing the cleverly worded kissoff. He introduced his down-home new single “I Lived It” by confessing he wasn’t sure how it was going to do on the charts — “it’s so different from what’s on radio these days, for better or worse” — but that he was proud of it anyway.
And he gave a shoutout to his “meanest, grumpiest, rowdiest” tour mate Trace Adkins before performing their hit duet “Hillbilly Bone,” giving his fiddler a special showcase since her mother was in attendance.
“Will you come to every show so she can do that?” Shelton asked Fleenor’s mom after the scorching solo got the crowd riled up.
After beautifully dusting off his cover of Conway Twitty’s “Goodbye Time” at his stepdad’s request, Shelton made good on plans he revealed when Ole Red opened last fall to use the Tishomingo stage to share his love for 1980s and 1990s country music.
“I’m gonna play a couple of songs I wanna play, damn it,” he said, before tunefully tearing through covers of Doug Stone’s “I’d Be Better Off (In a Pine Box),” Dwight Yoakam’s “Little Sister,” Mark Chesnutt’s “Too Cold at Home,” Alan Jackson’s “Dallas” and Hal Ketchum’s “Small Town Saturday Night” (even though it was Friday).
Shelton even paid tribute to fellow Oklahoman Garth Brooks with a fine drawling rendition of “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old).”
“Let’s do something stupid,” Shelton said, taking a deep drink before serving up the familiar pop hit “Escape (The Piña Colada Song),” to the delight of the audience.
Shelton also indulged in another preferred pastime: making fun of the tabloid reports about his personal life, especially his romance with pop star Gwen Stefani, who was in the audience at the Feb. 9 show. When the crowd chanted for Stefani to join him on stage, he excused her by joking, “She says she just had a baby for God’s sake.”
When the Tishomingo tickets went on sale, Shelton promised to give the proceeds to charity. On Saturday, he and Ryman Hospitality Properties announced they would donate $50,000 from the weekend’s ticket sales to the City of Tishomingo for improvements at Pennington Park, including updates to the splash pad and the additional of more water features.
Although he skipped the usual encore, Shelton polished off the practice show with his charttoppers “God Gave Me You,” “Honey Bee” and “Boys ‘Round Here” and a hearty thank-you to the crowd.
“This was so good for me,” he said.