George Strait Led Country’s Graduation to Stadiums
I’ve been reading Three Dog Nightmare: The Continuing Chuck Negron Story, a book about the tragic fall and personal resurrection of one of the lead voices from the pop band Three Dog Night. In it, Negron makes a claim that the band was one of the first to pack stadiums with a rock show.
The Beatles had done it before, at New York’s Shea Stadium, and there were other bands that played stadiums, though many of them fell far short of filling them out. But I’ll bet no one in the Fab Four’s mid-‘60s era — or in Three Dog Night’s early-‘70s prime — ever thought country music would be capable of that.
So this week’s anniversary of the first George Strait stadium tour is one worth celebrating. Strait brought in 56,000 fans on March 14, 1998, to Sun Devil Stadium in Arizona for a lineup that featured Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, John Michael Montgomery, Lee Ann Womack and others. And Strait continued doing stadium tours with massive talent rosters for several more years before pulling back to his traditional in-the-round arena format.
What’s now amazing is that while the stadium date is still a country rarity, it happens much more frequently than anyone could have predicted in the past. Kenny Chesney is playing 14 of those dates this summer, supported by a rotating list of acts that includes Keith Urban, LeAnn Rimes, Big & Rich, Gary Allan and Luke Bryan, among others. Toby Keith has offered a handful of stadium shows as well.
Strait could likely pick up and fill out stadiums again, if he chose, and you can imagine Keith Urban, Tim McGraw, Brooks & Dunn and Shania Twain (remember her?) doing the same thing. In fact, when the Gridiron Bash — a strange, college-football-related fan competition — lined up stadiums across the U.S. for April, a surprising number of country lineups were employed: Alan Jackson in Alabama, Dwight Yoakam in West Virginia, Dierks Bentley and Wynonna in Kentucky, Montgomery Gentry and Taylor Swift in Tennessee.
At last week’s Country Radio Seminar, one booking agent noted that outside of such longstanding classic-rock icons as the Rolling Stones and U2, there’s no stronger genre for live shows these days than country music.
Considering that a lot of country artists were happy to play high-school gymnasiums and small county fairs at the time Three Dog Night was playing those stadium dates, it’s tough to find stronger support for the upward transformation that’s taken place in country music.
©2008 Country Music Television, Inc., a Viacom company. A division of
Deb says:
Its great that George Strait can fill the stadiums. I as well as some other people that I know all had tickets (with good seats) to the original concert at the Home Depot Center in Carson Ca. As it happened, the night before I was to go to the concert I was looking online for directions to the venue and found out that it had been cancelled and moved to the Honda Center in Anaheim. Our tickets were no longer any good. I contacted ticktemaster where I purchased them (online) and they said since I didn’t respond to the email about this they would be refunding my money. I informed them that I received no such email and that they should have made more of an effort to notify ticket holders of the change of venue and that we should be able to get tickets that are comparable between the two venues. When I talked to some friends the night of the concert, they also told me the same thing happened to them, but they did recive the email when they called to exchange their tickets, they were given a choice of tickets in the nose bleed sectiton. I was also told that it was George Strait who requested that the concert be moved. If he’s as respectable as I think he is, I don’t think he would appreciate finding out how ticketmaster handled this situation. Situations like this can put a bad tasted in fans mouths and eventually the performer can lose his/her following. George Strait may not be aware that this type of bait and switch practice is occuring.
rodney smith says:
george is the king plain and simple no one better. and it makes me mad when alot of people don’t think of him like they do the hag and the possum now don’t get me wrong i love them both but the numbers don’t lie strait has done more in 27 than the both of them have done in 50.
michelle says:
give all the awards you want, he has them all wrapped up if you ask me. he is the only true country artist we have left. i was watching cmt this morning and saw kid rocks video, and i realized that a murder had not been committed on music row, but a massacre. we need to get back to good country music, that george strait has not forgotten about