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Massive crowd showed up in the rain Saturday night at Parc Jean-Drapeau to watch Chris Stapleton close out a fantastic two-day festival.
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It was in the 1950s when American songwriter Harlan Howard used the phrase “three chords and the truth” to describe country music.
That was also the title of a 1997 book by Laurence Leamer on the business and lifestyle of country music and its stars.
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Three chords and the truth remains a big part of country music, but the genre has changed a lot since the 1990s, when artists like Garth Brooks and Shania Twain helped bring in “new country” and started filling arenas and stadiums for their concerts.
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I didn’t grow up as a country fan and was well into my adult years in the 1990s when I started to get interested in the music. I still remember former Montreal Gazette entertainment editor Jim Baine telling me: “Listen to the words. Every song tells a story.”
Baine was a huge country-music fan and even started up his own magazine called Country, which he ran from 1989-98. The late, great Red Fisher, was also a huge country fan. One of the first things Red did when he’d check into a hotel room on the road while covering the Canadiens for the Gazette was scan the radio dial to find the local country station. Red loved to talk about country music almost as much as hockey.
I went to see Brooks and Twain perform at the Bell Centre in the 1990s and became hooked on country — especially “new country.” But being a country fan back then in Montreal wasn’t easy. Montreal remains the only big city in North America without a major country music radio station, so I had to buy a satellite radio.
While Brooks and Twain were able to fill the Bell Centre in the 1990s, country acts coming to Montreal after that remained few and far between. In 2014, I went to see Brad Paisley — who was packing arenas in the U.S. as the reigning Country Music Association Entertainer of the Year — and there were only 7,200 people in attendance.
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During a pause between songs early in his show, Paisley said when he was told he was going to be playing in Montreal he didn’t know if he could sell out the first two rows. Paisley put on a fantastic show and afterward said he was surprised and pleased to hear “my songs sung back to me with a French-Canadian accent.”
Paisley really would have been surprised and pleased if he was part of the second annual Lasso country-music festival that was held Friday and Saturday at Parc Jean-Drapeau. After selling 35,000 tickets last year, Lasso attracted 50,000 fans this year, according to promotor Evenko.
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“It has been an unproven city (for country music),” Pat Guay, a senior manager at Evenko in charge of booking talent for Lasso, said during an interview Friday at Parc Jean-Drapeau. “We’d get Garth shows and Shania shows, but no one (else) ever really wanted to come in and try. With this festival and Luke Bryan playing here last year the word is spreading and we’re kind of being trusted as a country market now — slowly, but surely.”
Year 2 of Lasso was a fantastic event and a huge success. Saturday’s rain didn’t put a damper on things as a massive crowd showed up to see Chris Stapleton as the headliner, along with Brothers Osborne. On Friday, Kane Brown was the headliner, along with Jake Owen.
One of the highlights of the event was Brown bringing his wife, Katelyn, up on stage to sing their hit duet Thank God with fans singing along to the words. Stapleton showed why he was named CMA Entertainer of the Year this year with a fantastic 90-minute performance and said “that’s what I call magic” after fans turned on their phone flashlights and sang along to his song Broken Halos.
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There were more than 30 performers over the two days on three stages with 18 hours of music. A two-day, general-admission ticket cost $230 — a good deal in today’s concert market (just ask Taylor Swift fans).
“The main goal is to build this festival and make it the premiere country event in Canada in the summer,” Guay said. “But it’s country music in general we’re trying to build here.”
Not having a major county-music station in Montreal doesn’t help.
“The younger fans are using all the streaming services and whatnot,” Guay said. “It’s not like we’re going to start a country station, so this is what we have to deal with.”
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The fact there were so many fans at Lasso in the 20-30 age bracket — many wearing cowboy hats — bodes very well for the future of the event.
“Now we’re still in sell mode, like: ‘Here’s the reason why you should come here,’” Guay said about attracting performers. “But we’ve been lucky that this year we have a ton of agents from the States who have come in and once they see it for themselves they’re like: ‘I’m reporting back to my people and saying this is something we have to be all in on.’ ”
I’m already looking forward to Year 3 of Lasso.
scowan@postmedia.com
twitter.com/StuCowan1
Evenko to launch country-music festival Lasso in Montreal
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