Review: Morgan Wallen packs PNC for fun, beer-soaked show. As for that controversy...
A friend texted me at 6:47 p.m. on Thursday to tell me he was leaving his house in Huntersville to make what’s normally a 15-minute drive to PNC Music Pavilion. An hour and 15 minutes later, he told me he was still stuck, and that traffic was being routed to the Walmart parking lot out on North Tryon Street — more than a mile away from the amphitheater — because all of the venue’s spaces were full.
At 8:42, another friend texted me from inside to say, “I don’t think I have ever seen so many people here.” She’s been to dozens of shows at PNC.
I concurred. Twenty-thousand people fill this place to capacity several times every summer, yet somehow, on Thursday, traffic felt worse than usual; parking was as scarce as ever; and the sense of bursting excitement among the gathered masses was palpable. You’d have thought the Pope was in town. Except the majority of the women were wearing cowgirl boots and the majority of the men were in blue jeans (on an 85-degree evening, no less) and trucker hats, so this feels more apt: You’d have thought Garth Brooks was here.
Nope. It was Morgan Wallen everyone had come to see.
The same Morgan Wallen who was a virtual unknown when he opened for Luke Bryan on the PNC stage four years ago this month. The same Morgan Wallen who was still trying to break big when he opened for Florida Georgia Line here in July 2019, and who then did break big — for the wrong reasons — in February 2021, when a video of him using the n-word surfaced on TMZ.
The same Morgan Wallen who now, against not all but certainly considerable odds, is one of the most successful touring artists in the world. Bigger, so far this year at least, than megastars like Billie Eilish, Ed Sheeran, John Mayer and Eric Church.
He’s clearly still wrapping his head around it.
“This is the first time we’ve ever headlined an amphitheater like this,” the 29-year-old country star told the Charlotte crowd three songs into his set, and it was a true statement — the previous 26 shows on his “Dangerous Tour” had been mostly inside arenas, and occasionally on outdoor festival stages. “So this is a big night for us, man.”
The crowd roared at him, screaming, shouting, hooting, hollering, whistling, for 25 long seconds.
“You’ll have to apologize if I stand here and take it in a little bit every so often, OK?” Wallen finally said, flubbing his line slightly but still earning another 15 seconds of thunderous applause. (And you’ll have to forgive him for not always articulating himself as well as he’d like, OK? This has still all got to be pretty overwhelming for the guy.)
“We’re gonna sing a bunch of songs tonight, man,” he continued. “We’re gonna sing some old ones, some new ones, little bit of everything in between.”
What’s a little bit funny about that is this: The oldest “old ones” he performed on Thursday night — 2016’s “The Way I Talk” and 2017’s “Up Down” — are barely old enough to attend first grade.
The new ones he performed, meanwhile, were brand-new songs, released not even three weeks ago. Those included the forlorn drown-your-sorrows anthem “You Proof”; and “Thought You Should Know,” the tribute to his mother he said he was singing live for the first time ever, done on a mini-stage in front of the lawn with just him, one of his band members, and two acoustic guitars.
As for the “everything in between”? Well, Wallen’s catalog features just three EPs, his 2018 album “If I Know Me,” and last year’s double album “Dangerous.”
So “everything in between” certainly means something different for someone like Morgan Wallen than it does for someone like, say, Garth Brooks.
Yet the spell he cast on his fans was an astonishing thing to behold.
Though he has opened many a show on the current tour with the nostalgic “Sand in My Boots,” in Charlotte he came out guns blazing, kicking things off by belting most of the chorus of his bro-country-rocker “Up Down” a cappella while standing next to the drum kit on the elevated section of the main stage:
We’re just holdin’ it dowwwwwn here in BFE
Still rolling arounnnd with a burnt CD
Free Bird, fiiiive minutes deep
Head boppin’ —
Then the crowd took the “UP, down, UP, down, UP, down” part, then Wallen pumped his fist with Mike Tyson-like intensity as the drums came in and pyro sparks and plumes of smoke erupted from the sides. The singer skipped down the ramp, stalked his way slowly onto the mini-stage that jutted out into the pit, and re-started the song from the beginning.
From there, it was ON.
For the duration — over the course of a 92-minute running time that flew by — he kept practically the entire crowd on its feet, with many (around me, at least) singing every. single. word. Twenty-two songs in all, none of which seemed to land with the type of thud that will typically send noticeable numbers of people breaking for the bar or the bathrooms.
Some of the more bro-ish moments, admittedly, were among the most fun. A prime example: When opening act HARDY returned to the stage to duet with Wallen on the former’s very-clever and super-fun hit “He Went to Jared.” As has become tradition, the pair closed their live collaboration by shotgunning cans of beer, with Wallen finishing first and HARDY appearing to get way more beer on his MLB jersey (#37 Stephen Strasburg, of the Washington Nationals, for those keeping score at home) than into his mouth.
HARDY crushed the can after “finishing” the drink, then Wallen took it and threw the hunk of aluminum high and deep into Section 1 as fans went delirious.
Another: Launching into “oldie” (but very goodie) “The Way I Talk” by re-casting the line:
It’s got a touch of the town where I grew up
Something in it, them California girls love...
...to make it Carolina girls, then revving up the crowd by punctuating the next line:
Some people like to make a little fun of...
...by shouting “WHAT??”
To which a sea of fans responded, correctly and loudly: “THE WAY I TALK!!” Lots of fist-pumping and chest-thumping and balls of fire and blasts of smoke came after that.
But Wallen is equally captivating when he both tones it and strips it down.
For “Sand in My Boots,” the ballad about a lost love that serves as the lead-off track on his “Dangerous” double album, it was just him and an upright piano, bathed in three spotlights, smoke billowing around him. He played it beautifully, and sang it with an affecting tenderness.
He then made his way back to the mini-stage in front of the lawn section and did an aching, emotional rendition of the Jason Isbell ballad “Cover Me Up.”
If Wallen struggled at all, it was — as I hinted earlier — with his communication between songs. At one point just under a half an hour in, he spent nearly three minutes meandering through a story about getting his first guitar and his first experiences with songwriting that really didn’t lead to anywhere interesting.
Later, he made quite possibly the vaguest reference he could to the infamous TMZ video and the “fallout” from it while setting up “Don’t Think Jesus,” a song he put out in April (but, it should be noted, he had apparently no hand at all in writing).
“Man, this song right here is about my life, really,” Wallen told the crowd. “Really especially over the last couple years. Sometimes life has a way of puttin’ you in a position where you can let it strengthen your faith, or you can let it kill your faith. And I’ve been tryin’ my best every day to let it strengthen my faith. And I hope you guys do the same, and I hope this song speaks to you the same way it does to me.”
I used fallout in quotes above because — I mean, there was some, sure. He had some opportunities that were taken away from him. Several big ones.
Yet the net result seems like it’s been a win for him. A huge one, in fact. Since the controversy, he’s enjoyed record-setting chart success, massive sales for his 2022 tour, and an Album of the Year award for “Dangerous” at the Academy of Country Music ceremony in March.
There are, of course, a million stories and articles and columns you can find online that explore the idea of whether Wallen has truly paid a price for getting caught using that racial slur; whether he learned anything from it; whether he actually understands what that word means to Black people when they hear a white person say it; whether the country-music fans who have turned him into a country-music mega-sensation are supporting him as a reaction to the backlash he got, or simply because he makes good music.
I’m not going to explore that here. No one’s mind is going to be changed about Morgan Wallen because of anything I say on the topic.
Instead, I’ll just say this: If he can continue to make good music, and if he can eventually graduate from 20,000-seat amphitheaters to football stadiums, and if he can permanently keep himself from saying or doing things that are stupid — or hurtful, or hateful — Wallen might truly have a Garth Brooks-like career ahead of him.
Morgan Wallen’s setlist
1. “Up Down”
2. “Dangerous”
3. “Still Goin Down”
4. “You Proof”
5. “7 Summers”
6. “Country A$ Shit”
7. “Somebody’s Problem”
8. “Chasin’ You”
9. “865”
10. “Sand in My Boots”
11. “Cover Me Up”
12. “Thought You Should Know”
13. “Flower Shops”
14. “He Went to Jared” (with HARDY)
15. “Warning”
16. “This Bar”
17. “Don’t Think Jesus”
18. “More Than My Hometown”
19. “The Way I Talk”
Encore:
20. “Heartless”
21. “Wasted on You”
22. “Whiskey Glasses”
This story was originally published June 3, 2022 at 11:54 AM.
