Concert review: Seeing Garth Brooks once is absolutely worth it. But what about twice?
If you’re going to see Garth Brooks’ concert at Bank of America Stadium on Saturday night, there are some very specific questions you probably have regarding the show he did here Friday night.
I’ll answer those for you straight away.
- Yes, he had an opening act: Mitch Rossell, a country (of course) singer-songwriter who played for 20 minutes but only needed five to win the crowd over with his startlingly clever writing and surprisingly easy wit.
- Brooks came on stage at 8:16 p.m., and — following a single encore that spanned eight songs — left it at exactly 10:31.
- Trisha “The Queen” Yearwood did show up, for two songs, including a duet with her hubby as well as a solo performance of one of her oldest and biggest hits.
All that said, I can also tell you this: Who the heck knows if he’ll follow the same playbook on Saturday? Because these things are true, too.
- Just over six hours before showtime Friday, a rep for the tour told me she still was waiting for word on whether there’d be an opener at all. Few knew to expect Rossell until he stepped onto the stage.
- On Friday afternoon, Brooks told journalists that Yearwood was with him in Charlotte but a solid maybe for a drop-in. The surprise was not that she ultimately did appear, since she’s made a habit of cameos lately; but I was caught off-guard by the fact that they didn’t team up for their beloved cover of “Shallow,” which has been a quasi-staple in recent shows.
- At 10:32 p.m. on Friday, scores of fans continued loitering by their seats, still seeming to half-expect the headliner to come back one more time (even though the house lights were up) — after all, Brooks has routinely returned for multiple encores on this tour.
In other words, if you’re going to see Brooks’ concert at BofA Stadium on Saturday night, do not assume you’ll see what we fans who attended Friday’s show saw.
He indeed seems to revel in being a man of at least a little bit of mystery.
‘Thank you, thank you, thank you’
What you can assume, though, is that the person who will seem most excited on Saturday about Garth Brooks finally — finally — FINALLY — getting the chance to perform here, after five postponements, will be ... Garth Brooks. And given how much pent-up fan demand there’s been for this event, that’s really saying something.
“HELLLLLLLOOOO, CHARLOOOTTTTTE!!!!!” the singer growl-bellowed, just two songs in on Friday, after belting out 1991 honky-tonker “Rodeo.”
“People, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, a million times, for not just a second chance, (but a) third, fourth and fifth chance. ... I have been waiting for this way too long to talk about it. I say LET’S TURN THIS SUCKER UP AND LET’S —” — and I had to assume that the end of the sentence was “RAISE SOME HELL!!”; whatever the words were, they got drowned out by the roar of 40,000-plus fans as Brooks launched into another oldie-but-greatie — “Two of a Kind, Workin’ on a Full House.”
There weren’t supposed to be 40,000-plus fans in Bank of America Stadium for Brooks’ first Charlotte show in more than 24 years, by the way. There were supposed to be more than 70,000.
You can blame Brooks for that. Or, perhaps more appropriately, you can thank him.
As he explained during a press conference earlier in the day — and I’m paraphrasing here, but — after the Charlotte tour date was canceled and then re-booked, his team got a lot of social-media feedback from fans complaining about how they’d scored good seats the first time but wound up with not-so-good ones on their second try.
So Brooks’ folks struck a unique deal with the venue: to do two shows instead of one and to close the upper bowl for both, saving it the cost of staffing a vast portion of the stadium while at the same time sparing fans from having to settle for nosebleed seats.
Plus, over two days, more fans in total would get to see Brooks in Charlotte than if he’d done just one concert: roughly 84,000, a bump up from the original 70,000-plus.
“The only thing better than one bowl of ice cream,” he quipped in the press conference about the arrangement, “is two.”
His hits, ‘The Queen’ and J.T.
Similarly, two sets of Garth Brooks music is better than one, and the first one alone — 23 songs in about an hour and 45 minutes — was packed with enough entertainment value to more than justify the cost of a ticket. (In case you didn’t know, every seat in the house was the same price: $95.)
Though he kicked off the evening by emerging from beneath the floor of the in-the-round stage to sing “All Day Long,” a cut from his 2020 album “Fun,” he then dove immediately into the classics and never came up for air again.
“Nothin’ll piss you off more,” he told the crowd early on, “than coming to a concert and a guy dumps a whole new album and doesn’t play any old stuff. We bring all of our old stuff with us.”
That meant everything from his 1998 toes-in-the-sand drinking anthem “Two Pina Coladas” to his foot-stomping cover of The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s 1987 hit “Fishin’ in the Dark” to stacking lovingly mounted solo acoustic renditions of “Unanswered Prayers” and “To Make You Feel My Love” (despite his assertion that one should “never do two ballads back-to-back”).
Brooks also crafted a crowd-pleasing four-song homage to a true North Carolina folk-music hero, teeing it up by noting that they were recording it for use on an upcoming live album, and by saying: “God is the reason why I get to play music, but ... if there’s a mortal person on this planet for the reason, for me, it’s James Taylor.”
He started with a spot-on cover of — what else? — “Carolina in My Mind,” followed by a honey-dipped rendition of “Shower the People” and a cheery bit of “How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved By You).“
The clear highlight of this series, though, was “Mockingbird,” which started with a wide-eyed Brooks opening with “Mock (yeah) / Ing (yeah) / Bird (yeah) / Yeah (yeah)“ ... before his wife Yearwood suddenly rose from beneath the stage to take on the Carly Simon part as the surprised and delighted crowd screamed its collective head off.
The couple belted out the final chorus while holding hands.
“You ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Brooks told Yearwood with a big ol’ grin after they finished their duet.
“I think these people would love to hear a Trisha Yearwood song. So I’m gonna make a request myself: ‘SHE’S IN LOVE WITH A BOYYYYYYYYY’!!!” For this he faded into the background, strumming his guitar while sitting among his backup singers, giving her a prime platform to use to slay her famous debut hit.
I hoped she’d stick around longer, but once Yearwood finished taking us back to 1991, she kissed her husband and disappeared.
‘This is hard on an old man’
Brooks then started firing his biggest guns one after another — “Callin’ Baton Rouge,” “Shameless,” “Friends in Low Places” and “The Dance” — and I managed to (temporarily) forget Yearwood was ever there.
The second set, meanwhile, would be better characterized as a traditional encore, although at eight songs and nearly 30 minutes long, I think it’s also just as acceptable to call it a second set.
And it was a considerable diversion from the first. Save for his implementation of “Standing Outside the Fire” as a rousing finale, this series was more understated, mostly used as an opportunity to field fan requests for deeper cuts. Or, in a couple of cases, for photo opps.
At one point, Brooks turned his attention to a female fan in the front row who earlier in the evening had helped him out by passing a guitar pick back to a fan in the sixth row who was holding a sign that said, straightforwardly: “I want a pick.” He wanted to pay this front-row fan back for her help, and did so with ... a guitar pick — but also by grabbing her phone and taking a selfie.
A couple songs later, he spotted another female fan holding a sign that read “Photo redo??? Me & You!” and had a picture of her as a young girl sitting next to a circa-1990s Garth.
“Is that really you? Really?” the singer asked her. “Can I tell you that time has been much more friendly to you than it has been for me?”
They did re-create the photo, but not before Brooks warned: “I am soaking wet.”
It was, in fact, something pretty much everyone in the building couldn’t help but notice and comment to their seatmates about: On a night that felt reasonably cool for mid-July in the South, he had completely sweated through his denim shirt, which started the night as a light-gray color, dampened quickly, and eventually turned black from all the perspiration.
The only other time he seemed to allude to his level of exertion was after racing around the stage during “Fishin’ in the Dark” early on.
“People, this is hard on an old man right here,” Brooks said, panting and chuckling, as he downed the better part of a small bottle of orange Gatorade Zero.
“Old man” is, of course, a relative term. There’s no question that he’s still at the very top of his game as an entertainer, as someone who can go hard for 135 minutes and fill pretty much all 135 of those minutes with magical music, fun fan interaction and savvy surprises.
But although he can sprint faster than you’d expect and seems to have the vocal stamina of a man half his age, he is 60 now, since February. And while he jokes about his extra weight, cracking in the afternoon press conference about carefully positioning his guitar (“I pretty much use it to hide my gut”), he probably knows he’ll have to get serious about shedding some of it in order to keep putting on high-energy shows in his 60s.
That’s just the reality: He won’t be able to run like he did on Friday forever, to sing like that forever.
So as I’ve sat here organizing my thoughts, I’ve grown increasingly grateful to have been able to watch Garth Brooks perform live while he’s still most definitely got it — but at the same time have found myself wondering if and when I’ll ever get to see him again in Charlotte.
Then I’m reminded that, duh, there is another opportunity. Like, soon. On Saturday night.
Hmmmmmmmmm...
Garth Brooks’ setlist
1. “All Day Long”
2. “Rodeo”
3. “Two of a Kind, Workin’ on a Full House”
4. “The Beaches of Cheyenne”
5. “Two Piña Coladas”
6. “The River”
7. “Papa Loved Mama”
8. “She’s Every Woman”
9. “Fishin’ in the Dark”
10. “The Thunder Rolls”
11. “Unanswered Prayers”
12. “To Make You Feel My Love”
13. “That Summer”
14. “Ain’t Goin’ Down (‘Til the Sun Comes Up)“
15. “Carolina in My Mind”
16. “Shower the People”
17. “How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved By You)“
18. “Mockingbird” (with Trisha Yearwood)
19. “She’s in Love With the Boy” (performed by Trisha Yearwood)
20. “Callin’ Baton Rouge”
21. “Shameless”
22. “Friends in Low Places”
23. “The Dance”
Encore:
24. “Every Now and Then”
25. “Wrapped Up in You”
26. “Ireland”
27. “Turn the Page”
28. “The Grand Tour”
29. “In Lonesome Dove”
30. “More Than a Memory”
31. “Standing Outside the Fire”
This story was originally published July 16, 2022 at 6:56 AM.
