Omaha, Nebraska (Kenny Chesney Official Website) - There may be a lot of country tours hitting the road this year, but you wouldn't know it by the hysteria being generated by the first on-sale date of Kenny Chesney's eagerly anticipated The Road & The
Radio Tour. Put on-sale at 10 a.m. at Omaha, Nebraska's Qwest Center on Saturday, even every "isolated single" ticket was gone in less than 4 minutes - and the hundreds of fans who'd been in line, many over night in sub-freezing temperatures, were faced with leaving the venue empty-handed.
Quick work between Kenny Chesney, his management and the tour promoter was able to produce an almost unheard pf response: a second concert - April 5th - being put up just a little more than 11 minutes later. When the news of the additional show began flashing on the venue's LED display screen, an audible cheer went up from the fans who otherwise would have gone home disappointed.
"You never want people who took the time to get there the day the tickets go on sale, who stood in the cold or the rain to go home without tickets," says the man with the slow smile and the 2nd most attended tour for the 1st half of last year. "You can't always accommodate the demand for seats... but I always feel like IF there's SOME way to make it work, if that many people wanna come out and party with us, I'd really like to try and make it happen."
With work heavily underway for the follow-up to last year's Somewhere In The Sun Tour - which saw Chesney play to well over a million fans, as well as headline 3 major NFL football stadiums in Washington, DC, Pittsburgh and Boston - the reigning Academy of Country Music Entertainer of the Year is committed to expanding the concert going experience for 2006. In addition to enlisting Dierks Bentley and Sugarland for the tour's first leg, Chesney is again using the standing room only sand bars between the stage and the stage extension and creating even more stage space for the band to move around.
"Here's what I know: me and my guys have a blast playing music any time, any place, any way we can....," Chesney explains. "But when you've got the kind of fans we've got... the kind of fans that the more you give 'em, the harder they throw it back at you, I don't think you can find that anywhere. So when it comes time for us to get out there and get it happening, I wanna make sure I give the people who love my music and who come to our shows as good a time as they give us - because those fans make it a whole other kind of experience for me and the band."
With "Living In Fast Forward" scorching the charts - moving from 22-15 in one week alone - the double platinum The Road & The Radio's second single moves Kenny Chesney's brand new studio project closer to being his fourth triple platinum release in as many years. His solely-penned, soul-searching Be As You Are: Songs From An Old Blue Chair is closing on double platinum status for 2,000,000 copies sold as well - and come March 23-24 in Dayton, Ohio, Chesney starts another major tour that's already got fans snapping up every ticket available, and then some!
