Jen and I decided to make it a full weekend, so after spending my birthday with Keith Urban on Friday night, we drove up to Detroit for the Kenny Chesney concert at Ford Field. I had not been to downtown Detroit in years and was favorably impressed with what they have done to make the downtown inviting. I had made a hotel reservation based on closeness to the venue and didn’t realize I had selected a huge skyscraper of a Marriott hotel at the Renaissance Center. We had to circle the block that the Center is on three times before we figured out where to park and enter. The hotel lobby was a couple floors up and OMG there was a line of over 100 people winding through this huge hotel, waiting to check in!!! The majority were probably there for the concert. I tried to use one of the automatic check-in kiosks but they had switched them off for some reason. I must admit the hotel was pretty efficient so moved the line along faster than I expected and moved in a $2 beer cart to help smooth the ruffled feathers of the guests.
But it still took about 30 minutes to work our way up to the front and get our room.
The Renaissance Center is one of the stops on the “People Mover” train that circles through the downtown area. We hopped on that train to get us closer to Ford Field. We arrived about 20-30 minutes before the starting time printed on our tickets but - oh no!! - faced another line hundreds of people long waiting to enter the stadium!! I have been to about a dozen of Kenny’s big summer concerts over the years and have never seen such a back-up! We had to wait over an hour to enter and totally missed Lady Antebellum’s performance as a result! I was p.o.ed that a venue that must routinely deal with large crowd’s could not better plan the staff and number of entrances to handle the arriving audience.
We had what would be considered “good seats” - 26th row of the floor just a few seats from the fence that surrounded the “Sandbar” area. So I’m sure we could see better than most. But I have been spoiled by Keith Urban’s arena shows and found even “good” seats in a stadium are so much more unsatisfying than even “bad” seats in an arena. We caught a few glimpses of Kenny on his catwalk but watched 90% of the show on the video screens. I don’t know how Kenny keeps winning ETOY when the majority of his audience don’t really EXPERIENCE the show. Maybe they are voting for the party of the year rather than the performer.
I was so sorry to have missed Lady Antebellum because I really enjoyed their set when they opened for Keith at some shows over the summer. I am not much of a Montgomery Gentry fan. We did like what we saw of Miranda Lambert’s performance (we missed a good part of her set too, because of the terrible lines to get in) - she is a real pistol of a performer!
While waiting for Kenny’s set to begin I told Jen I was suspect of the wires running above our heads. Knowing Kenny’s penchant for making a grand entrance at his concerts I said “I bet Kenny is going to “fly” in”. And that’s what he did! He sang a great collection of songs - although a somewhat shorter set than last summer’s Pirates and Poets show. His music certainly does have wide appeal. But it is sort of telling that, in that stadium setting, I was not inspired to capture hardly anything other than Kenny’s entrance on film. Even from row 26 I was not ‘involved’ in the show as I have become used to at Keith’s concerts. I hope and pray that Keith will never go the stadium route for his regular tours!!
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