Tuscaloosa, AL/Athens, GA/Knoxville, TN (Kenny Chesney Fans Website) - The smoke has cleared… the floors have been swept… and only the memories of 3+ hours of hits, new songs and covers of everything
Kenny Chesney and his band have ever loved remain for the lucky college students who got to rock on the 3rd Keg In The Closet tour, which strips the 19 semi tour down to one truck, two buses and a whole lot of fun!
Once again focusing on the schools of the Southeastern Conference, the run hit the Jupiter Bar & Grille in Tuscaloosa, the legendary 40 Watt Club in Athens and the Amsterdam Cafe in Knoxville. With all the proceeds from this year's mini-tour going to Habitat for Humanity - Home Delivery, Habitat's designated Hurricane Katrina relief effort, the always sweat-soaked, truly spontaneous shows gave as good as they got this year, in addition to having a special sentimental hold of the reigning ACM Entertainer of the Year.
"We'd been wanting to bring this tour to UT for as long as we've been doing it, because it's mostly about getting back to our roots as musicians, remembering every gig we ever worked too hard for too little money at - yet had the absolute time of our lives,' says Chesney with a laugh. 'But it's always really hard to keep a secret in your hometown, especially when your hometown is so small and such a part of you. We pulled it off - and considering that the last time we played Knoxville, it was 67,000 people at Neyland Stadium, this was a whole other kind of rush. But it was cool… especially seeing how much and how hard everybody was into some of the songs from the album that haven't been singles yet, songs like, well, 'Smalltown'.'
While Chesney was busy rocking hundreds, 9 dates of his upcoming The Road & The Radio Tour went on sale - and were promptly gone! Well over 86,000 tickets were snapped up - including two shows in Grand Rapids, Michigan that were gone in 15 minutes, less than a 60 minute sell-out in Jacksonville, Austin and both Dayton and Pensacola blowing out one show and nearly going clean on a second. Though he still has one of the lowest ticket prices of ANY major headliner - 'because I wanna make sure the people who wanna come and party with us can… and it's not the price of the ticket that's keeping them away. I've been there as a kid, and I try to remember…' - his sales for Saturday topped $5.5 million, getting the man who joined U2 and the Rolling Stones as one of the three highest earning acts of last year off a pretty good start on 2006.
You always wonder about how you're gonna make it better this year… what else can you do,' admits the always-pushing singer/songwriter. 'We started working on this year's staging and lighting last August and we're getting to the place where we're gonna be able to actually start putting all this stuff into play. This is the part where it all comes together, you can feel how great it's gonna be… and Keg in the Closet really locks and loads us for the part where we wanna really hit that music hard.'
With 'Living In Fast Forward' blazing into the Top 10, from his already double-platinum-plus The Road & The Radio, rewinding real slow hardly seems an option.
