Tim McGraw & Faith Hill Live Review (2000)

(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )

“Seventeen more minutes,” sighed a young lady in the row behind me in the Cajundome Sunday night as she counted the minutes ’til the beginning of the Tim McGraw-Faith Hill concert

And it occurred to me that the number seventeen seems to follow Tim McGraw around. (It’s apparently occurred to McGraw too: He’s prefacing his performances of “Seventeen” with a recording of the “When I was seventeen” verse from Sinatra’s “It Was a Very Good Year” these days.) But the hottest number that followed McGraw around Sunday night was his wife and the mother of his children, Faith Hill, about whose remarkable voice and way with an outfit more in a moment.

First, about the opening act, Phil Vassar: He was ASCAP’s “Country Songwriter of the Year” in 1999, and his own album--simply called Phil Vassar [Arista], the one he exhorted everyone to “buy ten or fifteen copies of”--contains the hit “Carlene,” one of the four songs he performed. He went over well considering that he had nothing but his voice and an electric piano to get over with. He would elicit his biggest cheer, however, near the end of McGraw’s set by bounding on-stage during “I Like It, I Love It” with a Bud Light for the singer.

That Vassar did not deliver beer to Hill goes a long way toward explaining how she can fit into the clothes that she wore during her part of the concert.

For starts there was the tight white tank top (that for purposes of political correctness should probably be called a “husband beater”) emblazoned with a pink Rorschach design to which the men in the audience seemed to be struggling to formulate a psychologically healthy response. Encasing her lower half were a pair of even tighter fluorescent-green jeans. Breathe is the name of her latest album, but how she can in apparel like that is hard to fathom.

Still, as her voice made clear--both live and in the Alltel ads that ran between sets on the video screens--she not only breathes but breathes properly, even going so far, it would seem, as to sing from her diaphragm.

Before the scrim went up on Hill and her nine-piece band, the sound system blasted En Vogue’s anti-racism anthem “Free Your Mind” to the ninety-nine-percent-white audience. But, though it was the evening’s only funk, it was far from the evening’s only good music.

Leading off with “This Kiss” (red confetti! dry-ice geysers!), Hill followed with “The Way You Love Me,” “Wild One,” “I Got My Baby,” “Secret of Life,” and “Let Me Let Go” before pausing to relate, as an introduction to “It Matters to Me,” that she began singing as a four-year-old in a little Mississippi church. “I didn’t have an instrument,” she said, “and I didn’t need one. I just sang from my heart. I sang as loud and hard as I could, and I still do today.”

She does. “What’s in It for Me,” “If My Heart Had Wings,” “Let’s Go to Vegas,” “Piece of My Heart,” “There Will Come a Day,” “Breathe” (with sexy video! or was it a mattress ad?)--then she was gone. Yes, the woman was as much fun to listen to as to look at.

We as a nation should really appreciate little Mississippi churches much more than we do.

Tim McGraw went over even bigger. To a crowd primed by repeated showings of his three Budweiser ads (the one starring his butt got the loudest screams of delight) and a techno-rave mix of “Indian Outlaw” (which, you know, is pretty much “Free Your Mind” in war paint, right?), he and his eight-man Dancehall Doctors Band delivered thirteen of the Man in the Black Hat’s greatest hits and some that will be.

Among the former: “Something like That,” “Where the Green Grass Grows” (with Joe-El Sonnier!), “Refried Dreams,” “Everywhere,” “Just to See You Smile,” “For a Little While,” “Down on the Farm,” “Some Things Never Change,” “All I Want Is a Life,” and “Don’t Take the Girl.” Among the latter: Steve Miller’s “The Joker” (with peach-squeezing hand motions!). Sometimes it was hard to hear for all the screaming girls, but people made the same complaint about the Beatles.

In the last part of the show (for which the Misses reappeared in a hot-pink gown), McGraw and Hill performed five duets, including “It’s Your Love,” “Let’s Make Love,” and a version of “Go Your Own Way” that found the Dancehall Doctors evoking rock-and-roll dreams that were anything but refried. Fleetwood Mac, Steve Miller--heck, I was ready for “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

But then the lights came up, the pre-recorded music came on, and it was off to the tour bus for the First Couple of Contemporary Country Music, leaving the rest of us with just one more vintage rock band to recall: Traffic.


More McGraw-Hill:
http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2010/07/tim-mcgraw-faith-hill-concert-preview.html

Tim McGraw-Faith Hill Concert Preview (2000)

(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )

The Gig: Tim McGraw and Faith Hill
8:00 P.M. Sunday, July 23
The Cajundome, Lafayette
Tickets: $35-$59

Although the idea of getting Tim McGraw and Faith Hill together for a tour seems obvious now that someone’s thought of it, most previous husband-wife tours have portended divorces so messy or career downturns so drastic that even the most economically ambitious promoter might wonder whether marriage and music performed before huge crowds simply shouldn’t mix.

Sonny and Cher, Delaney and Bonnie, James and Carly, Ike and Tina, George and Tammy, Whitney and Bobby, Amy and Gary, both halves of Abba--the carnage of broken wedding vows polluting the pop-music waters is so great that not all the hits of Steve and Eydie could turn them blue again.

The good news for McGraw-Hill fans is that McGraw and Hill differ from most of the aforementioned acts in two important ways. First, by being individual superstars and not a superstar duo, they avoid putting both their egos in one basket. Second, unlike such previous superstar non-duos as James and Carly and George and Tammy, neither McGraw nor Hill is a spouse-battering, drug-abusing boozer with delusions about the greenness of the grass across the way.

Each is, in fact, nearly saintly: the Faith Hill Family Literacy Project, although probably longer on good intentions than measurable effects, is hardly a road to hell, and McGraw’s recent designation by the National Fatherhood Initiative as Father of the Year is a real cockles-warmer. “My daughters Gracie and Maggie are my North Star,” he said in accepting the award. “They, along with my wife Faith, give my life focus. Loving them, keeping them safe in my arms has made me rich in a way no sold-out tour or platinum album ever could.”

Both McGraw and Hill know a lot about platinum albums. Between them they have nine so far, and because there’s no reason to expect Nashville’s finest songwriters to quit supplying them with number-one singles, the total will almost certainly grow. Of the two, McGraw has the more countrified voice (and music), but each, by selecting material as carefully as such celebrated non-writers as Elvis Presley or Frank Sinatra used to, has established a certifiably countrified image.

In two songs on A Place in the Sun (Curb), for instance, the thirty-three-year-old, Louisiana-born McGraw extols the joys of being seventeen, and in another (“My Next Thirty Years”) he promises to watch what he eats and drinks now that his youthful metabolism has slowed to a canter. Rock-and-rollers hold on to sixteen (cf. John Cougar), not seventeen. And to vow to count one’s calories is to make that most un-rock-and-roll of admissions: that time is not on one’s side. For these and other reasons--not the least of which is that he wears a cowboy hat--McGraw is at least as country as his timmcgraw.com website is high-tech.

True, his recent victory in Quepasa.com’s “Who is the most desirable man in music?” on-line contest wasn’t very cowboy. (Could Waylon and Willie and the boys ever have convinced a majority of women that they were “more desirable” than Ricky Martin, Alejandro Fernandez, Carlos Ponce, or Rob Thomas--the losers whose relatively less-desirable butts McGraw whupped?)

But these are different times, and McGraw--well, let’s see what the voters themselves had to say: “I think it’s great that Tim won!” wrote one. “He is an all around sexy guy! Not only are his looks 100% perfect but his personality is great and he is a great husband and father! I think anyone putting Tim down is jealous! They wish they could be as great as him! He was the sexiest man nominated! Tim is a great role model to everyone! Even the Pope! That man is one FINE man!!” (She didn’t really write “even the Pope,” but I’m pretty sure she meant to.)

Of course, Faith Hill qualifies as pretty desirable herself. Earlier this year, Country Weekly placed her atop its “Top Twenty-Five Sexiest Stars” list, and teenage boys aren’t hiding the CD booklet of her latest album, Breathe (Warner Bros.), under their mattresses for nothing. Still, as those who witnessed her performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl know, her voice is the real reason that she’s reached the pinnacle of her profession.

She also must be a real God-bless-the-U.S.A. kind of patriot to have been able to sing the National Anthem with that much lung power, not to mention a real ACLU-baiting Believer to have included “There Will Come a Day” (which goes, “Every knee will bow / Sin will have no trace / In the glory of His amazing grace”) on an album that she knew darn well would be listened to by kids who attend public schools.

God, country, literacy, parenthood, desirability--and, oh yes, the chart-toppingest country music of the new millennium so far--the McGraw-Hill Tour has it all.

Ignore it at your own risk.