Military Music - Military Times

Kenny Chesney rules the road

The most prominent member of an endangered species, Kenny Chesney is nonetheless feeling OK.

American stadium tour headliners are all but extinct these days, yet Chesney’s “Poets & Pirates” show is playing coast to coast this summer. Chesney has sold more concert tickets in the new millennium than any act in any genre.

“Across America, he’s the guy,” said Ray Waddell, Billboard magazine’s editor of touring. “In the last five or six years, nobody has put up the kind of numbers he has. These kinds of tours are hugely expensive to mount, relative to how much you can charge for tickets. Production has to be big, and you have to draw a whole lot of people. And then it doesn’t grow unless you’re delivering, and unless you get to a stature where fans believe this is the party of the summer.”

Chesney achieves this even at a time when a faltering economy, skyrocketing fuel prices and declining CD sales have left many in the music industry on shaky ground. Hit songs are a prerequisite for the kind of summertime juggernaut Chesney and his team have built, but other performers score big hits and play to smaller crowds.

Chesney’s appeal involves a complicated, perfect storm of charisma, planning (high production value, comparably reasonable ticket prices, star-level support acts, etc.) and branding. It’s not enough to play to the back of the room. He plays all the way back to the parking lot.

“What we’re trying to give them is an experience that starts when they arrive at the show and goes through the night,” said Chesney. “I think the people coming to our show want an outlet from everyday life. Sometimes I ride around the lot in a golf cart around noon, talking to people and reminding them to take it easy ’cause it’s going to be more than nine hours before I even get on stage.”

Two weeks ago, Chesney sat in a chair on his massive stage at an empty Soldier Field in Chicago and talked about his life on the road. It was late Friday afternoon, and he had just finished a sound check for his Saturday night show.

“Tomorrow morning at 10:30, I’ll go up there to the top row of the stadium and just sit by myself,” he said. “I do that every place we play. I look around the stadium, take in the environment and think about how far I have to go to make someone sitting up there feel like they’re in the front row.

“We have a real good time out here,” Chesney said after his buddies left. “I’m a carefree spirit, and everybody out here lives by the ‘work hard and play harder’ rule. But it’s not always like this. You have to be able to take some punches, and there are things that go along with this that sometimes make you question whether it’s worth it. I’m more in the moment this year than I have been the last couple of years, and I notice more of the good things.”

Turns out there is a grind amid the glory, and Chesney’s eyes are the only feature of his athlete’s body that look older than his 40 years.

“I feel like I’ve got my edge back,” he said. “I’ve been playing guitar a lot lately. There was a period at the end of 2005 and really all of 2006 where I never took the guitar case out of the closet when I was at home. I was in such a personal funk after the Renee thing that I could have played Soldier Field every day of the week and wouldn’t have felt much joy from it.”

The “Renee thing” was his brief 2005 marriage to and annulment from actress Renee Zellweger. That one took him from country star to tabloid guy, and he has never left the grocery store checkout-lane displays. This year, articles one week had him getting set to marry an old flame. The next week, he was supposedly romancing a different woman.

“I don’t like being in certain magazines,” he said. “And who would? But that’s part of what comes with this. And ‘this’ is going out and playing these shows, and I love that. It’s so addictive, I can’t even begin to tell you.”

Promoter Louis Messina of TMG/AEG Live first saw Chesney’s appeal when the singer was touring as part of a package show headlined by George Strait.

“I could see it growing,” Messina said. “The first tour with Strait, he was doing about 50 cents a head in merchandise: T-shirts and CDs at the show. The next year, it was $1.50 a head, and there were people standing up the whole time he was playing. Then he went out opening for Tim McGraw and he was doing $4 a head, which was about 35 percent of the total merchandise sales. With a normal opener, they’d do about 10 percent. On that second Strait tour, Kenny looked at me and said, ‘One day we’ll be able to do this.’ Two years later, he sold out Neyland Stadium in Knoxville.”

Playing a stadium isn’t merely a matter of drawing enough fans to fill the place. Working a stadium stage after playing arenas can be like jumping from a sports car into a Formula One racer.

“It’s not like playing an arena, where it’s 15,000 people right on top of you,” Chesney said. “Not that 15,000 is a quaint atmosphere, but compared to this it kind of is. And I knew I wasn’t connecting with everybody when I first started doing stadiums.

“At first, I think, I tried too hard. I had to find my sweet spot, and that took about a year. Since then, I’ve had certain acts opening for me that haven’t really been themselves because they were in this environment. I understand that, because I did that, too.”

Chesney said more time is spent planning the first 10 seconds of the show and the video screen introduction than any other single element. Many fans sit in the parking lot and play Chesney’s CDs for hours before the show, so the set list won’t provide much in the way of surprise, but the opening — the “reveal” — is a way of heightening excitement at the outset of the show.

“We spend months on the intro,” he said. “I mean, the music is going to be the music, but the stuff around it can change and create an environment, and that gets me excited and the crowd excited. Right before the show, just before I take that elevator up to the stage, I can hear the crowd and know that the energy went from the parking lot into the stadium, and from the stadium to the stage.”

The evening before his Soldier Field show, Chesney looked up at the seats and rows and sections that surrounded his stage.

“Tomorrow night, it’ll be full and loud and rocking,” he said. “But in the morning, I’ll sit up there when it’s completely empty, and I’ll just listen.”

Putting on one of Chesney’s “Poets & Pirates” show costs $1.4 million, promoter Louis Messina said.

“And that’s before the talent is paid or the buses are fueled, and diesel fuel is now more than $5 per gallon in most places,” he said.

Fuel prices also make fans less likely to travel for shows, and Chesney’s team has cut ticket prices for upper-deck sections on the tour. Chesney’s team sets aside what he calls “Shift Work” seats in each stadium: three or four sections where tickets are priced at $10-$30.

“I grew up in east Tennessee, lower middle class, and that’s the demographic of the country now that’s struggling the most,” he said. “That’s also my audience, and I don’t want anyone who wants to come to the show to be unable to afford it.”