Country music star Keith Urban and other performers are trying to fill the void created by the lack of live concerts in recent months. That’s a worthy cause but an unattainable goal.
Urban should be applauded for doing a show live at a drive-in movie theater in Nashville for health care providers. Those in the audience showed their appreciation by honking car horns.
A few nights later, Urban and singer-songwriter Kelsea Ballerini did a nationally televised livestream show from the Grand Ole Opry as other artists have been doing on Saturday nights.
The silence that follows each song at those concerts and images of the dark Opry House auditorium with all 4,300 seats empty is sad and eerie.
Regina and I love live music performances. We have been to shows by a wide range of artists like Michael Bolton, Aaron Neville, Harry Connick, Jr., Celtic Woman and a lot of my favorite old country music stars.
Good friend Ted Jones, an attorney for Merle Haggard, got us front row seats to some of Merle’s concerts. We sat in on rehearsals and joined Haggard and his band for a buffet of Louisiana seafood before one of his shows.
We have been to concerts by other country stars like Vince Gill, Willie Nelson, Jamey Johnson, Kris Kristofferson, Alison Krauss, the Statler Brothers, Joe Stampley, Mel Tillis, Mickey Gilley, the Oak Ridge Boys and others.
I asked Regina to get us tickets to a David Allan Coe concert in Shreveport, and she hesitated. She said he was a washed-up outlaw singer, and that was reflected in the dirt cheap admission price.
When band members had to help him up to the stage and strap him to a seat, she wanted to leave. But we stayed and he dazzled the crowd with Mona Lisa Lost Her Smile, You Never Even Called Me By My Name and other hits.
We have been to several Willie Nelson concerts. My sons are both musicians, and I took them to see Willie years ago at Hirsch Coliseum in Shreveport. People in the crowd were smoking joints, and we relayed them down the aisle for other folks to share.
That was the only time I knowingly touched pot. We had never seen it in my younger years. The guys in the athletic dorm tried Thunderbird wine, Schlitz beer, lethal sloe gin and cheap whiskey and would probably have tested pot if we had known about it.
My older son liked John Denver, and we saw him perform a number of times. My younger one liked the rock group KISS. I took him to a KISS show, left during the first song and waited for him outside. I still have my hearing, so it was a good decision.
I saw Elvis live a few times at the height of his career when he was electrifying and went to some of his shows at the end. He was bloated and forgot words to songs. Those concerts were painful, and I wish I didn’t remember them.
We are hoping the pandemic passes soon and there will be live concerts again. I went to drive-in movies during high school and college but would not want to sit in my car for a live music show.
The speakers screeched with static at the Rancho Drive-In in Springhill, and we smelled the paper mill when the windows were down. That killed the romance when we were able to get a date.
We sweated and swatted mosquitos in our college days at the Chief Drive-In in Natchitoches. We saw John Wayne in the Horse Soldiers movie there that was filmed down Cane River.
Drive-ins were popular back then. I got on one of those Easter egg-colored Braniff Airways planes going to a meeting in Kansas City. It was the first time I heard a humorous announcement by a flight attendant.
She said, “We won’t be showing any in-flight movies today, but we have asked the pilot to fly low over some drive-in theaters.”
As much as Regina and I like live concerts, we are not likely to attend any at a drive-in theater. We want to be shoulder to shoulder with fans who are cheering and applauding for performers, not blowing horns and flashing lights.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES