does it…But Kenny Chesney?
Almost two decades on the road, the 4-time
Country Music Entertainer of the Year and 4 consecutive Academy of
Country Music Entertainer of the Year has never done a costume change…
Until Bangor, Maine.
Spurred on by a group of particularly boisterous members
of the No Shoes Nation, who kept telling the high impact songwriter he
was overdressed, Chesney asked the sold out crowd if they all thought he
was over-dressed. The screams suggested that his normal uniform of
jeans, boots and t-shirt might be a bit much for the summer night;
Chesney issued them a challenge.
“I said to them, ‘Will you give me three minutes then to
get to the bus and change?’ And they cheered even louder,” recounted the
singer after. “So the band vamped for a good three minutes on the intro
to ‘Everybody Wants To Go To Heaven,’ and I ran… ran… to the bus, so I
could get into the vibe of the crowd.”
Emerging in a pair of swim trunks, a t-shirt and a Boston
Red Sox baseball cap, Chesney returned to the stage and played the rest
of the show barefoot – taking the No Shoes Nation moniker literal. For
the performer who packed’em in at Darling’s Waterfront Pavilion, the
laidback look fit the night.
“I may be the only person in history to come back dressed
down,” Chesney said with a laugh. “But that crowd was so alive and so
ready to hang out. That was literally, that and Fort Lauderdale, the
most freewheeling shows of the tour! If they didn’t have a curfew,
we’d’ve probably start pounding covers and been up there ‘til 1 o’clock
in the morning.”
Always one to strap on a guitar and play all night, there
are few things Chesney enjoys as much as his pop-up Keg In The Closet
shows. Having sold 49,302 tickets at Georgia Dome stadium Saturday
night, Chesney is riding that energy straight into New Jersey’s Met Life
Stadium as the No Shoes Nation 2013 tour heads into its final stretch.
With an early wake-up call Friday, for “Good Morning
America”’s Summer Concert Series in Central Park, the Luttrell,
Tennessean is packing in the memories to hold him over until he hits the
road again in 2015. Called “The King of the Road” by The Wall Street
Journal in a 2-page cover piece, the man who’s sold over a million
tickets each of his past 10 tours, hit that mark in early June by virtue
of playing 19 NFL stadiums across the nation this summer.
“When you have the kind of nights we’ve been having, you
don’t want to see the summer end. The crowds the last few weeks have
been incredible, and to look out in the crowd and realize these people
have come out to party with us again this year, it just makes you want
to work that much harder… I mean, how do you not give it up for a crowd
shouting to take your shoes off?!”
“When I See This Bar,” the anthemic song Chesney wrote
with Keith Gattis about celebrating the places and moments that mark us,
is climbing the charts. The earthy, acoustic guitar-driven song is from
Chesney’s seventh #1 Top 200 Albums debut Life On A Rock, Chesney will
perform it on ABC this Friday, along with “Pirate Flag” and a couple
classics.