- April 23, 2024
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I walk into my living room and find my wife, Hailey, singing along to a song on her phone.
“Is this Garth?” I ask.
Rather than say, “Yes, I love this song,” or simply nod, she rolls her eyes and says, “We are totally wasting a ticket on you.”
That afternoon, March 26, we drive from Palm Coast to Orlando, to see Garth Brooks on the second stop of his 2022 Stadium Tour. I’m a casual fan, wearing jeans and a Buzz Lightyear T-shirt, filing past devotees in cowboy hats and Garth gear. I seem to be the only one to notice that the parking cost $48.50.
I’m intent on measuring the scale of this sold-out event, with nearly as many people attending as live in the whole of Palm Coast. We pass congregations of portable toilets, and I asking Hailey to help me.
“I’m not counting them,” she says, but she patiently waits while I add up to 18 — just within eyesight on one corner of one floor!
Later, I buy a bottle of water for $5, after passing half a dozen refrigerator doors stocked with beer cans for $15 or $17. I ask a Camping World employee how many cans of beer will be sold tonight, and she does some quick math: 30 beer stations, 2,000 cans each, so let’s say 60,000? Plus what the concession stands are selling? They’ll restock as needed.
Far less than my initial estimate of 1 billion cans, but still impressive. I don’t drink, but I almost feel bad for not doing my part: These concertgoers have a lot of work to do.
Hailey is afraid of heights even more than I am, so her observation as we ascended to our seats was, “Seriously long escalators.”
I’m not saying we had bad seats, but I thought my nose was about to bleed halfway up.
I look up the prices for a front row ticket to the Paul McCartney show advertised in May: about $6,000.
Almost an hour later than scheduled, Garth himself takes the stage, which is billed as a 360-degree experience, with four jumbo screens clustered in a cube, 30 feet in the air, near the center of the stadium. Eight banana-shaped stacks of more than a dozen speakers each promise to blow our eardrums.
Garth’s about half the size of my thumbnail from up here (I measured).
As he starts to sing, the wind continues to whip around the upper deck, and it’s almost impossible to understand the lyrics — at least for anyone wearing a Buzz Lightyear T-shirt. Hailey sings along to every verse. No matter how much you love the music, though, no one can understand the most enthusiastic of his crowd-pumping interludes in between songs; there are words in there somewhere, but to me they sound like the crazed, echoing laughter that begins Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train.” I point out this clever comparison to Hailey, but she doesn’t seem to recall “Crazy Train.”
As I listen to Garth’s band, I decide that if I wanted the music to sound like the albums instead of all muddy up here in the wind, I could listen to Hailey’s double-live CDs in our minivan. I’m willing to see what Garth has in store; it seems to me that for him, this seems to be about something more than just the songs. But what?
One of the first on the set list gets the crowd singing the phrase, “Workin’ on a full house,” an apparent nod to the state of Camping World. Another song later, 70,000 people are joining together to sing, “Troubles, I’ve forgot ’em.”
Then Garth, wearing a cream colored cowboy hat and blue jeans, sporting a beard that may or may not be dyed brown (he’s 60 now), tells us the odd journey of many performers. When you’re a new artist, he says, you only play “other people’s stuff,” meaning you cover other famous songs instead of your own, since no one knows your songs yet. Then you get a record deal, and you “never play other people’s stuff.” But, he confides to us, “I love other people’s stuff.”
In an act of generosity and inclusivity, he then dives into the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s “stuff,” namely, “Fishin’ in the Dark,” one of Hailey’s favorites from her high school years. She sings every word; I sing whenever Garth sings “Baby, get ready,” because those are the only lyrics I know.
The songs are coming at us fast, and the crowd is thrilled. When the jumbo screens show closeups of people in the crowd, a pattern emerges across all age groups: First, the child or young woman or middle-aged couple or old man is shown singing along. Then, they look up and see themselves on the big screen. Third, they lose their minds: pure ecstasy.
Garth, who got his start in the 1980s and became one of the biggest entertainers worldwide in the 1990s, takes time to introduce the band members on the stage, many of whom have been playing with him since his early days: Bobby Terry, Jimmy Mattingly, Gordon Kennedy, Blair Masters, Steve McClure, Dave Gant, Vicki Hampton, Robert Bailey, Chris Luezinger, Mark Greenwood and Mike Palmer. Garth seems genuinely grateful for their work, their friendship, and especially for the adoration of the fans.
“I came out for you,” he tells us, “but the truth is, you do it all for me,” he gushes, making his hands into a heart shape ala Taylor Swift.
He puts down his guitar at one point to give a hug to child in the front row. He takes a phone from another woman and takes a selfie on the stage. He takes request after request, evoking tears from the happy fans who will never forget the night. He plays Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” and Don McLean’s “American Pie,” apparently satisfied to sing anything, as long as the crowd is happy and singing along.
Then he goes back to his early days and tells us of his dream when he was a young singer, trying to make it. He would ask himself, “Could I ever be part of a song that everybody knows the words to?”
Of course, the answer was evident already, but he hammers it home: “I think it actually happened!”
Lights and fog machines are choreographed to his next song, the most singable of all. You don’t have to be a country music fan to know the playful octave leaps of the chorus: “I got friends in low places.” Garth, and his adoring fans, proudly proclaim that they aren’t “big on social graces.” The concert becomes its own “oasis.”
Garth has already climbed the mountain of fame and fortune. He can’t be surprised by how well the fans know his songs, but the way he jumps around on the stage like a kid, with a big smile on his face, and the way he’s devoting so much time to “other people’s stuff” — including a not-so-surprising duet with his wife, Trisha Yearwood, who wore an awesome Animal the Muppet T-shirt — you know he’s trying to make something happen that’s beyond building his brand.
His voice, as clear and true as ever (and thankfully much less twangy than his original sound), is his instrument for holding a type of communion. A singalong in a crowd this size is a show of tremendous power, and he is using it to preach a message of dreams coming true, of relief from sorrows.
With flames on the digital displays throughout the stadium, he concludes the concert with a sermon-like slant rhyme: “Life is not tried, it is merely survived / If you're standing outside the fire.”
We make the long drive home still feeling that Garth afterglow.
