Have you ever gone to a concert where you completely enjoyed the live performances but left the venue at the end feeling a bit off-put by the whole experience? Maybe I pay a little too much attention to my surroundings at concerts, but this was how I felt when I was walking back to the parking lot at the end of Eric Church’s The Outsiders Revival Tour show at the Walmart Arkansas Music Pavilion in Rogers, Ark. on Thursday, July 27.

Church and his openers – Midland and Ray Wylie Hubbard – all put on terrific sets that I enjoyed quite a bit, but in general I was upset by the audience at the venue from the very beginning of the evening for the sheer reason that they were largely disrespectful as hell toward the openers.

Now, normally I’d start my concert review with the headliner of the show and work my way down to the openers, but because my experience on Thursday was so affected by the openers and the audience’s reaction toward them and the fact that I truly bought my ticket for the openers, maybe even more so than Church (I’ve seen him at least four previous times, whereas I’ve never seen Midland and only saw Hubbard for a 25-minute set at Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July festival in Austin, Texas in 2015) that it’s best to start at the beginning of the night.

Ray Wylie Hubbard is a Texas songwriting legend and he can do it all. His music knows no bounds and genres. He’s country. He’s folk. He’s rock. He’s blues. He’s Americana. He’s Folkarolla, as he recently said on Twitter (or whatever that twat Elon Musk is calling his social media deal these days).

And it seemed the smallest of percentages of the audience, who bothered showing up for the first opener of the Church show in Rogers, knew who the hell Hubbard was. And that immediately pissed me off. Legends not only should be known but they should be treated with at least a modicum of respect. And this crowd has not an ounce of respect for Hubbard, his band, his music and his performance the entire set from the first lick of the opening “Rabbit” to the last echo of the finishing “Desperate Man,” which Hubbard freakin’ co-wrote with Church and Church named an entire goddamn album after. And later in the evening, these same concertgoers would prove they know the song when Church performed it in his own set.

Not only that, but Hubbard is one of Church’s songwriting heroes and is even name-dropped in one of his best songs “Mr. Misunderstood.” You would think something like that would lead to fans of Church knowing something about Hubbard!

You can’t judge a musician’s set based on the reaction of an audience because Hubbard performed a six-song set of really good songs, including my favorite Hubbard song “Snake Farm,” off his 2006 album of the same name. It’s a song that if he were performing in his home state of Texas would probably be belted by a crowd at the top of their lungs, but in Rogers, it was pretty much me and a few others – I assume one of them the gentleman I saw walk by earlier in a Snake Farm T-shirt. I wonder how he felt about the crowd’s reaction to this all-timer.

Next was Midland, from Dripping Springs, Texas, which is essentially three friends from out west who liked to perform country songs together and despite successful careers in other fields decided to make a go of it and have succeeded.

I figured the crowd’s reaction would turn around once Midland took the stage. After all, Midland has been played on mainstream country radio – something that would be too afraid to play Hubbard – and has had a couple of top-five songs on country radio.

But the crowd still did its own thing. Held conversations with each other. Got up every two minutes for another beer or bathroom trip. Twiddled their fingers while by-God actual country music was being performed right in front of their faces. It was clear this audience just wanted to tailgate essentially. They wanted to party inside the venue while waiting for Church and it didn’t matter if their partying came off as rude to those around them wanting to enjoy the sets of the openers or if it came off to the performers themselves as if they didn’t care.

Much like Hubbard had done, Midland gave their best on the stage. They performed some of the best tracks of their most recent album 2022’s The Last Resort: Greetings From, including “If I Lived Here,” “Sunrise Tells the Story” and “Paycheck to Paycheck.” They played stuff from previous albums like a couple of my favorites in “Mr. Lonely” and “Cheatin’ Songs” off 2019’s Let It Roll, and “Burn Out,” off their 2017 debut On The Rocks.

Lead vocalist Mark Wystrach shared the mic with his cohorts for a couple of songs letting guitarist Jess Carson perform a nice cover of my favorite Garth Brooks song “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)” and bassist Cameron Duddy rocked the crowd a bit with the Thin Lizzy classic “The Boys Are Back in Town.”

It wasn’t until the opening notes of the band’s final song, “Drinkin’ Problem,” their biggest hit from 2017 that the audience’s attention seemed to perk up as if to say, “Hey, I know this one.” “Drinkin’ Problem,” is by far the group’s most played song on the radio and I think the attention given to it by the crowd just goes to show the insidiousness of country radio – after all remember what former C.E.O. of Sony Nashville said back in 2015: “if you’re not on country radio, you don’t exist.” As so to the majority of those attending the Church stop in Rogers, Ark. on Thursday, Ray Wylie Hubbard did not exist and only one song from Midland did.

When the sun was completely gone from the sky and the lights on the stage went dark and smoke started billowing out from the set of doors at the back of the stage and Eric Church came out to the first notes of “Chattanooga Lucy,” from 2015’s Mr. Misunderstood, you would’ve thought the second coming of Christ was appearing right there in Rogers, Ark. by the reaction of the crowd.

Don’t get me wrong, I was pumped too. I hadn’t seen Church since 2017 in Little Rock, Ark. and he’s always been one of the few mainstream country acts I’ve enjoyed since Nashville went and became a wasteland sometime in the late aughts. But the juxtaposition between the crowd’s response to Church and the artists who preceded him – though unsurprising – added to the rawness I’d felt during the evening.

Anyway, you know by now that the crowd totally sucked, so how about a review of Church’s set?

I wasn’t sure what I was going to get from Church’s set this time around because he’s changed things up a bit for his first-ever amphitheater tour and it’s rankled some of his fans. Gone from the set are some classic fan favorites he’s always done faithfully like “These Boots” and he’s added a horn section for the tour that doesn’t really seem to fit in with his style, as it has with other artists.

But what Church did have and always has had were good songs and those were aplenty on Thursday night. He played many hits. He played some deep cuts. And I enjoyed nearly every one of them. His most recent release, the 2021’s triple-album Heart & Soul (& is its own album if you’re confused) has been my least favorite of his to date, but the songs he performed on Thursday night from it mostly had me singing along like “Heart on Fire” and “Bad Mother Trucker.” “Hell of a View” is a bit simplistic, but it seemed to be loved by the crowd.

I know the deep-cut performance of “Livin’ Part of Life,” from his 2006 debut Sinners Like Me, really made my wife Aprille’s night. It’s one of her favorites. There were chest-banging hits throughout the show like “Creepin’,” “Smoke a Little Smoke,” “Drink in My Hand” and “Cold One” that energized the venue. There were also beautiful performances of non-singles like “Mistress Named Music” for a nice change of pace.

He played some of my top-five favorites of his in “Give Me Back My Hometown” and “Mr. Misunderstood,” which were capable of making me compartmentalize some of my irritability from the night as a whole, and just shout the lyrics with thousands of others into the sticky night sky of Northwest Arkansas.

And then came the encore, where he performed my all-time favorite song of his (which will likely always be my favorite of his) “Springsteen,” which included a new opening verse that honestly isn’t really that necessary (and somehow many within the crowd didn’t even realize was about to lead into “Springsteen” – I really have my doubts about the I.Q. of that particular audience). As I mentioned earlier, the horn section for this tour doesn’t do a whole lot for Church’s music and at times on Thursday night was even hard to hear over the mixture of sounds but having a saxophone on a song called “Springsteen” is perfect and does add to that particular performance. It just felt right.

Church finished the show with what he told the audience was his favorite song – the touching “Holding My Own,” a tribute to his wife and sons from Mr. Misunderstood. It was a nice way to end the show.  

Seeing American Aquarium in concert in Little Rock has become something of an annual tradition for me and my wife, Aprille. We first saw them at The Revolution Room (affectionately known as The Rev Room) in Little Rock, Ark. in late May of 2018 and I believe we’ve seen them every year since with the exception of the pandemic year of 2020.

So, there we were again at The Rev Room on Sunday night (July 23) for our annual night of fantastic, heart-pumping, sweat-pouring, rock music with a country tinge from one of the hardest-working bands in America.

American Aquarium frontman and songwriter B.J. Barham told the enthusiastic crowd at The Rev Room on Sunday night that Little Rock is like a home away from home because it was the very first city outside of the band’s home state of North Carolina (home base being Raleigh) that really accepted and took in the band and its music. You can tell what the city and the fans in the city mean to the band, and Barham in particular as the only original member of the band by the way he glowingly talks about it and its impact on the band’s career.

When I first saw the band in 2018 I did so because I had instantly loved the songs “The World’s on Fire” and “Tough Folks” off its, at that time, upcoming album Things Change and had remembered hearing “Losing Side of Twenty-Five” a few years before and enjoying it. They were also performing that night with another recent, at the time, favorite singer-songwriter of mine, Cory Branan.

Through that performance that night, subsequent performances, and excellent subsequent albums (2020’s Lamentations and 2022’s Chicamacomico) I’ve gone on to love the band’s entire repertoire – I posted on Twitter the other night after the show that all of their songs are terrific, which doesn’t even make sense to me. You can tell by the band’s sweat-stained shirts and energetic movements on stage throughout their two-hour shows that they’re one of the hardest-working bands you’ll ever see, but the music is so good it also seems effortless.

American Aquarium opened the Sunday night show with “Casualties,” from the 2012 album Burn.Flicker.Die., a perfect song to begin a night of raucous heartland rock with and somewhat of a theme for Barham and the boys.

It was a non-stop performance of fantastic song after fantastic song for the next two hours with much of the crowd singing along to every last word. The band went through older classics like “St. Mary’s,” “Lonely Ain’t Easy” and the beautiful “Hurricane,” which damn near drops me every time I see Barham perform it live.

They played plenty of the new stuff, the stuff that hooked me as a fan starting in 2018, with “The Long Haul,” “Tough Folks,” “Crooked + Straight,” “All I Needed” and “The Luckier You Get.”

They played both songs inspired by another Little Rock music and drinking establishment, the White Water Tavern (another of my favorite Little Rock concert haunts) with “Bigger in Texas” and “Rattlesnake” with Barham heaping glowing praise upon that venue, which I’ve seen him do before at The Rev Room and it’s always slightly awkward thinking of what the folks who run this place must be thinking, but having been to the White Water Tavern many times there is something special about “those old hardwood floors.”

The band had the crowd in the palm of its hand the entire night from the very first note struck, but both the band and the crowd were kicked into overdrive with the ending of the show culminating in fan favorites like “Wichita Falls,” especially “I Hope He Breaks Your Heart” (the go-to sing-along for all A.A. fans) and “Burn.Flicker.Die,” which works as another theme song of sorts for the band with its chorus of “We’re no different than the neon lights/When you turn us on we stay up all night/We do what we can, we put up a fight/Then we burn too long, we flicker and die.”

Being a Sunday night and most of those in attendance likely having to get up and go to work the next morning the band didn’t want to do one of those cliché encores where they leave the stage and feed their egos by hearing the crowd clamor for their return, so they went straight into the encore with Barham taking center stage alone and the rest of the band taking a bit of a break. This is when one of the most riveting moments of the entire show took place – and frankly one of the most beautiful concert moments I’ve ever witnessed – and this was without Barham even strumming a chord on his guitar or singing a note. Barham told us a story about his mom. How much he loved her and everything she meant to him. Then he told us about the tragedy of her dying due to opioid addiction and how addiction runs in his family – I believe Barham said he was now seven years sober. He told us about how her death truly broke him when he didn’t receive his annual phone call from her at the exact moment on his birthday when he was born. Then he told us about his father and how his parents were married on the Fourth of July and how he made sure to be home for his dad on that day, and his dad one of the old-school tough Southern men broke down when he woke up on the first anniversary without his wife. He then performed “The First Year,” which was written about the entire thing he’d just told us. This was probably a 10-plus minute monologue from Barham to us in the audience just baring his entire heart and soul. It was truly special for everyone involved. Nobody interrupted with chatter. Nobody took the moment to get another beer or go to the restroom. He entranced us with one of the saddest stories any of us had probably ever heard – a story that I know personally affected some in the audience to tears because they had similar things happen to people they loved and adored. This moment in the show truly shown a light on the kind of storyteller Barham is – whether on an album or in conversation.

Following “The First Year,” the band returned to the stage, including the night’s opener Kate Rhudy, who had performed a lovely set before American Aquarium’s, for “Just Close Enough.” Rhudy, also a native of Raleigh, N.C., performed the song and other backing vocals on the group’s most recent album Chicamacomico.

The band ended the show, which is probably now my favorite of all of the ones I’ve seen them perform – they somehow keep getting better – with a raucous performance of “Katherine Belle,” which sent the entire crowd home with smiles on their faces.