Charley Crockett, Midland, Tanya Tucker Had My Focus on Day 1 of Stagecoach

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by Julian Spivey
For the first time in the history of the Stagecoach Festival in Indio, Calif., a country music festival held the weekend after the two-weekend Coachella Festival at the same site, the event was live-streamed for fans across the country.
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While I have little-to-no-interest in the headliners of Stagecoach: Thomas Rhett on Friday, April 29, Carrie Underwood on Saturday, April 30 and Luke Combs on Sunday, May 1 I was interested in a lot of the other acts on the festival schedule and made sure to catch the sets of Charley Crockett, Midland and Tanya Tucker on the first night of the festival on Friday.

Charley Crockett, a throwback to a different era singer-songwriter, was one of the first artists on the Stagecoach stage around 4 p.m. (Pacific Standard Time) and it was a fantastic way to get a country music festival started, but also sort of shows the imbalance within the country music genre today as the day started off with a hardcore country troubadour and ended with a tight jeans pop singer in Rhett prancing around the stage to a much greater crowd.

Crockett began his set with “Jukebox Charley,” a re-spelled cover of Johnny Paycheck’s lost classic “Jukebox Charlie” which appears on his latest album Lil’ G.L. Presents: Jukebox Charley, which pays tribute to many unheralded old country songs from stars of the past.  
 
He then performed the tongue-in-cheek “Music City USA” off his 2021 album of the same name before launching into terrific performances of “Don’t Cry” and “Run Horse Run,” off 2020’s Welcome to Hard Times (wish he had fit the title track into his set).

My favorite performance of Crockett’s set, which we may not have gotten the full performance of on the stream, was the soulful “I Need Your Love,” off Music City USA, which I feel draws potentially more on old soul records than country music. 

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Later in the evening I tuned in for Midland’s set, which began at dusk in California and finished under the stars. I honestly don’t know what Midland was performing half the time because honestly they’re not as good of a live band as they are on record, which I’ve known for a while now having seen them a few times perform on late night TV talk shows like “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” The biggest problem with this is vocalist Mark Wystrach is a mumbler when performing live (makes me wonder how make takes it takes to cut a record for this group). Much of the time the group was on stage the lyrics were unintelligible for me listening from home.

​However, there were still some highlights from Midland’s set like early on when they broke into “Mr. Lonely,” from their 2019 album Let It Roll, which is one of my favorite tracks in their repertoire. Another highlight was the dancing tune “Two to Two Step,” off the group’s latest EP The Last Resort, which they performed the title track of late in their set.

Also, late in the set the group was joined on stage by country hitmaker Jon Pardi for a performance of the group’s latest single “Longneck Way to Go,” for which I don’t really have much use. Midland’s live vibe is all fun, which worked well for the Stagecoach audience at the “mane” stage.

The penultimate performance of Midland’s set was my favorite of the evening taking things all the way back to where they began in 2017 with “Drinkin’ Problem,” which almost instantly became a modern country music classic.

The band finished their set with a rocking cover of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” in which they were joined on stage by Marcus King who played terrific guitar on song. All three members of Midland – Wystrach, Cameron Duddy and Jess Carson – took turns on the verses of the song with Duddy starting off and, like he’d done earlier on a cover of Eddie Rabbitt’s “Drivin’ My Life Away” sounded like something dying on the mic. 

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The last set of the evening I watched was the legendary Tanya Tucker’s, which was pretty much a “greatest hits” set and the audience at the Palomino Stage really enjoyed it.
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Tucker opened her set with a rip-roaring performance of 1992’s top-five hit “Some Kind of Trouble.”

The hits would keep coming for the next hour during Tucker’s performance, including “Walking Shoes,” “Two Sparrows in a Hurricane” and “Love Me Like You Used To,” all top-five hits from the late ‘80s into the early ‘90s. She also performed some older stuff like 1975’s No. 1 “San Antonio Stroll” and 1978’s top-five “Texas (When I Die).”

At one point during her set Tucker asked for her phone and FaceTimed with Grammy-award winning singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile, who was supposed to perform that same night at Stagecoach but tested positive to Covid-19 and had to back out, just to tell her she and the crowd loved her, missed her and wished her well. This was a segue into “Hard Luck,” which is off Tucker’s most recent studio album While I’m Livin’, which was co-written and co-produced by Carlile.

A unique highlight of Tucker’s performance was her combination cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire” with Johnny Cash’s classic “Ring of Fire,” but while this was happening the camera focused on the crowd swigging from a shared bottle of her new tequila Cosa Salvaje, which she’d pimped very early on during her show, liked Covid wasn’t still a goddamn thing, and she hadn’t just spoken with the Covid-stricken Carlile less than 15 minutes prior. Some of those Stagecoach concertgoers are going to regret that within the week.

Tucker, of course, finished her set with what’s most likely her greatest and most recognized hit “Delta Dawn,” which put her on the map 50 years ago (almost to the date) when she released it as a 13-year old as her debut single. Orville Peck, fresh off performing at Coachella both weekends (I believe the only country act at that festival), joined Tucker on stage for the final verse of “Delta Dawn.”

Be sure to check out the schedule for the remainder of Stagecoach livestreams over the next two days. I know I’m hoping to catch the sets for Zach Bryan, Brothers Osborne and Peck on Saturday and Hailey Whitters, The Mavericks and Cody Johnson on Sunday. 

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