LITTLE ROCK — It was well into Jason Aldean’s set on Saturday night in the Night Train Tour before the first country music instrument – a pedal steel guitar -- made a significant contribution to the tunes of one country music's most popular performers.
The adoring Verizon crowd – a whopping total of 13,139 souls lapping up Aldean’s kind of party – likely didn’t notice or care. While Aldean and his opening acts of Thomas Rhett and Jake Owen name-checked country vets George Jones, George Strait and incorporated 1990s country star Joe Diffie into one number, the volume, attitude and sound was pure arena rock with a modest amount of hip-hop tossed in the mix.
Speaking of mix, the Night Train Tour even came complete with a DJ, Deejay Silver, standing in front of a raised laptop and tossing out barely altered songs from Eric Church to Def Leppard while exhorting the crowd in between set shifts.
Deejay Silver was slightly unexpected but certainly an interesting and welcome diversion. Otherwise Aldean, dressed in a plaid short-sleeve shirt and worn jeans, left little to chance. Backed by a four member band, the Georgia-born singer never let up off the volume or the throttle, opening with “Crazytown” and then running through his numerous hits off of his first five albums. He didn’t pull out a cover tune or even change the tempo for a solo acoustic number. It was guitar, guitar and more louder guitar.
But that’s really how Aldean has changed country music or, well, maybe not changed it since it has long since turned from honky-tonk to hard-core rock. Aldean has just done away with any sort of pretense. As the Verizon concert aptly demonstrated, Aldean isn’t even trying to pretend he’s not singing anthems for big arenas. Sure enough, on Saturday he even turned his sweeping ballad “Amarillo Sky” into a showcase for a guitar riff.
If his sound isn’t country, his song topics certainly are. “Tattoos on This Town,” “Hicktown,’ and “She’s Country” reverberated around Verizon as Aldean’s fans identified and sang along with every word. The singer also wasn’t much for talking in between songs. He mentioned he was from Georgia and absorbed some boos from the Arkansas crowd. He got them back on his side by mentioning how both states had teams in the SEC, “the best football conference in America.” The crowd agreed wholeheartedly with that statement. From that point, Aldean was generally content just to sing and all of Verizon seemed more than content to let him.
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