Get ready for a new kind of concert experience,
The next concert you attend just might be in a big parking lot
Honkin’ Tonk music, anyone?
Last weekend at an Edmonton casino parking lot, Canadian country star Brett Kissel was greeted with the blaring of car horns instead of the usual applause as he hosted two days of outdoor concerts, the first sanctioned live music events in Canada since the pandemic broke.
“It was so loud — and amazing!” Kissel told the Star the morning following his marathon concert weekend of eight shows, with proceeds from six of them going to a local food bank, and two of them performed gratis for front-line workers.
“My voice is a little sore, but I’m in really good spirits.”
As he should be: while it wasn’t exactly held at a drive in — the River and Cree Casino hosted the event in a parking lot, with a capacity of 200 carloads for four shows each on Saturday and Sunday — Kissel’s triumphant shows may give hope to a live music industry that was unceremoniously shut down when venues were closed across Canada on March 17.
Kissel and his band — socially distanced from each other on stage with the help of Plexiglas barriers — delivered performances just slightly over an hour in duration as the audience watched from the isolated safety of their vehicles.
With a regular concert lighting rig and a gigantic video screen borrowed from the CFL’s Edmonton Eskimos, Kissel even fit in an onscreen pre-show cameo from perennial tough guy actor Chuck Norris.
Although it may have seemed normal in some respects, Kissel said he and his team had to jump through several hoops in order to pull off the shows, which took 28 days to plan and execute.
“I knew that we couldn’t do this without approval from the government, and that was my No. 1 priority — making sure that they were involved,” Kissel explained.
“We put in a call to the premier’s office, as well as Alberta Health Services and then Health Canada, because our concert was held on Treaty Six Territory in Enoch Cree Nation, so the River Cree Casino and Resort parking lot falls under federal Health Canada jurisdiction. It took a week to get the approval.”
Kissel estimates that 1,000 people attended each show, which was broadcast over a narrow bandwidth of FM radio that was secured just for the occasion, so attendees could listen to the show through their car radio.
“The thing we didn’t have was a front-of-house sound board — our guys mixed from the side stage. They didn’t need to be out in the crowd because there were no speakers.
Even the audience were subject to strict constraints.
“Our licence through Alberta Health Services said that everyone had to stay in their vehicle,” says Kissel. “There were no rest rooms made available, since there was no way to escort anybody and no way to keep the restrooms clean after usage.
“We just asked that everybody roll their windows down and have a great time and honk their horns when they want to applaud.”
And honk they did: even a Sunday night thunderstorm couldn’t dampen Kissel or the crowd’s spirits.
“The storm came down for the seventh show, about threequarters-of-the-way through,” says Kissel. “I went into a production trailer, took one of our iMate cameras, and we patched through the board to go right to the FM transmitters to go through people’s radios.”
Another popular option that seems to be growing is via drivein movie theatres, especially ever since country music superstar Keith Urban debuted the concept at a Nashville location on May 15 as a thank you to Vanderbilt University Medical Center front-line medical workers.
Since then, artists ranging from Andrew McMahon and Los Lobos to Garth Brooks and Alan Jackson have announced drive-in dates in the U.S.
Gord Deppe, founder, singer and songwriter of the Spoons and a guitarist for new wave band A Flock of Seagulls, is one of a few Canadian bands hoping to convert a GTA Drive-In movie theatre just north of Toronto into a concert venue for a night.
Toronto’s July Talk, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has announced shows in partnership with Live Nation for Aug. 12 and 13, which a source has revealed will be at the Stardust in Newmarket.
But Deppe is hoping to beat them to the punch with a July performance by the Spoons.
And he says drive-ins are a perfect venue for a number of reasons.
“The drive-ins have everything built in — they have the radio station, the insurances for liabilities, and hopefully they have washroom situation sorted out.”
As for the production needs of the artist, Deppe says it can be less complicated than staging a regular venue concert.
“It’s a lot less complex than you think, because everybody has invested in wi-fi, so you can forget the giant PA system or just go very minimal,” he suggests. “Just make sure you have a pristine signal going to the cars.
Premier Theatres, which owns six drive-ins, including the 5Drive-In Oakville, the Sunset Barrie, the Stardust Newmarket and the Starlite Hamilton, has implemented COVID-19 safeguards since reopening to booming business on June 6.
As well as making tickets available for online purchase only, Premier is requesting patrons stay in their vehicles unless they need to use the restrooms, as well as strongly suggesting the use of masks and provided hand cleansers.
At the moment, concessions are not available, but Peter Boros, Premier’s director of marketing and communications and a minority partner, says an app is in the final stages of development that will allow concession workers to deliver app-ordered food directly to their vehicles.
“We’re just trying to be very careful of what kind of content we’re going to put in the drivein,” said Boros.
Regular drive-in capacity for vehicles can be as high as 1,200 cars depending on the drive-in location, but with current restrictions on social distancing, the number is less than that — and even more minimal for live concerts, he notes.