LITTLE ROCK — Country singer Tim Mc-Graw had nearly 11,000 fans in the palm of his hand Friday night at Verizon Arena, but he almost lost them when he dared to bring up the touchy subject of football. He was trying to tell a story about going to college in northeastern Louisiana, and the mere mention of our neighboring state to the south elicited an instant chorus of “boos.”
And then, he made things worse by mentioning the Razorbacks’ traditional seasonending foe, LSU, which wasn’t even his college. He seemed stunned at the thundering chorus of “booing” that created, so he tried to calm the waters by mentioning how he’d heard the Razorbacks’ current quarterback, a guy named Mallett, was quite a player.
Not long after, he returned to the scene of the crime and tried to tell a story about his wife, Faith Hill, who is from Mississippi, and, well, you can imagine what happened.
At least he didn’t bring up Tennessee.
Other than those two incidents, the fans were on their feet for much of McGraw’s two-hour set, and they also seemed quite enamored of opening act Lady Antebellum, who are following the Sugarland road to success, with female and male harmonies. McGraw’s show was a rich visual treat, as well as musical. It was a mix of wondrous lights, colors, images, shadows, film and photographs, as the handsome singer cavorted on stage, dressed in his black hat and characteristic tight shirt and jeans. While he played guitar on a few songs, he primarily relied on his talented band,The Dancehall Doctors, a 10-piece that occupied the stage with impressive displays of virtuoso skills, especially on fiddle, pedal steel and harmonica.
The show began with Mc-Graw’s “Real Good Man,” and he followed that with “Last Dollar (Fly Away),” and 22 more songs, concluding with his thoughtful “Live Like You Were Dying,” then pouring it on in “The Cowboy in Me” to such a degree that there was no encore, rare at shows nowadays, but the crowd knew it had seen a spectacle that needed no formal encore.
In between, the set included his fine “Just to See You Smile,” the humorous “Everybody Hates Me,” crowd favorite, “I Like It, I Love It,” a pair of songs from his latest album, title cut (and tour title) “Southern Voice” and “Still.”
Lady Antebellum playedalmost an hour and will no doubt return again as a headliner some not-so-distant day. Singers Hillary Scott and Charles Kelley have that onstage charisma that has made them country/pop stars in a brief four years.
The new Lady Antebellum single, “American Honey,” was warmly received, but not as much as the hits “Lookin’ for a Good Time” and “Need You Now,” a dramatic ode to late-night desperation. It was followed by an odd choice of a cover song, John Mellencamp’s “Rockin’ in the U.S.A.” The Lady A. set ended with the group’s first No. 1 hit, “I Run to You.”
Another newish band, The Lost Trailers, got a brief 17-minute set as the opening act, and like their latest single, “Country Folks Living Loud,” the band was memorable for playing loud.
Arkansas, Pages 18 on 04/11/2010