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.
Gary Allan’s father died Wednesday (Sept. 24). And since I recently lost my dad, I know how terribly hard this time will be for him. Especially because Allan’s dad, Harley Herzberg, played a big part in getting his music career off the ground. (The legend is that Allan played with his dad’s band in honky-tonks when he was just 13.) But I’m sure it means the world to Allan that his fans are doing more than just praying for him. Fans and friends are encouraged to make donations to the Harley Herzberg Memorial Fund at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in lieu of flowers. Allan’s music has been such a gift to country fans, so a contribution in his father’s name is, I think, the perfect way to give back.
Maybe I’m just too vain. But when I heard that country-folk rocker 
Good seats at a concert bring you much closer to the music. The pounding bass, the plucky mandolin and the cry of the steel guitar. But you know what else you get closer to? The details. And I’ve become obsessed with them lately. I spent seven hours watching 
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