NashvilleGab - Country music news and Nashville gossip

Wynonna thinks she's crazy....but in a good way

Oh that Wynonna, she's like my carazzzy brother sister from another mother.  Wynonna tells the SunTimes.com that she's reached a point in her life where ''[I] maybe have finally found the kind of balance I sure could have used in my life back when I was a lot crazier.''

''Not to say I'm not still crazy -- but I'd like to think I'm now crazy in a good way ... plus a lot more at peace with myself.''

See, told you, Wynonna and I are like two peas in a very crazy pod. 

Billy Ray talks Christmas in Canaan and Christmas with the troops

Tonight is the premier of Billy Ray's Hallmark Channel movie "Christmas in Canaan."  You can catch it at 8/7 central. 

And here's a little video of Billy Ray talking about the movie, Christmas traditions, and the fact that he's leaving for Iraq December 13th to entertain the troops.

 

Just in case you were curious, it was a wig

Yep, Taylor had herself a Hannah Montana moment by actually wearing a wig rather than forcing her curls to go straight the other day. 

Bah humbug.

No one better in the world to perform a Michael Jackson tribute than Toby Keith, that's fer sure

I just about shot coffee out my nose when I spotted this video of all the performers at the Nobel Peace Prize concert performing together yesterday.  Why you ask?  Well because it's the group singing Michael Jackson's song Man In The Mirror.  And yes, Toby took part. 

After watching it it's actually cool, just unexpected to say the least.  Toby comes in at about the 1 minute mark.

And here's Toby singing American Ride during the concert.  Toby's performance starts at the 2 minute mark.

 

Guess the gams - X marks the spot edition

It's that time again Gabbers, time to try and figure out who the lovely country legs belong to.  This photo was taken December 6th at an event honoring some big names.  President Obama was even there. 

Answer after the jump....

Kenny Chesney is one of the top tourers of the decade

No surprise here, Kenny Chesney ranks pretty much near the top when it comes to top tours. 

Rolling Stone has come out with their Top Touring Acts of the decade (via Chesney World) and Kenny ranked 3rd on the Top North American Touring Acts of the Decade list with $434.4 million in ticket sales.  Over on Billboard.com, they've got Kenny listed at #8 with Kenny grossing nearly $478 million, having a little over 9 million concert attendees, 622 shows, and 409 concerts that were totally sold out.  

Way to go Kenny.  You can check out the full Billboard.com list here.

Remember back when I had said most of today's CD covers sucked? Yeah, I take that back

Back last year at some point I had a post about how so many of today's CD covers were so damn boring.  I also said that most of them seemed to lack creativity.  I looked back for the post but couldn't find it since it's old and apparently very well buried. Doesn't really matter anyway, I just wanted to make a retraction and say that after looking at these 25 worst album covers of the decade, I'll take boring any day. 

Steve Wynn and Garth were just joking about affordable tickets

Yesterday was the triumphant, highly anticipated return of Garth Brooks...Vegas style.

And to mark the occasion Steve Wynn and Garth held a press conference before the show which is pretty standard when you're talking about history in the making like Garth coming out of retirement.  Yes, this is country history in the making.  You have your history and I'll have mine.

But the press conference took a slight turn into the we-should-have-seen-this-coming when the question of ticket prices came up.  Remember all the hullabaloo about making sure the fans could afford the tickets and fighting all the scalpers to keep ticket prices down? 

Yeah, they were just kidding.

See it seems Steve Wynn was just giving into one of Garth's demands and never actually planned on keeping tickets affordable to all the fans and the $125 price tag was just temporary. 

I think it's becoming a lot more clear now how Steve plans on making a heck of a lot of money off this deal. 

From lasvegassun.com...

“We learned a lesson here about the tickets over the first 20 shows. I think that before this is over, we’re going to scale the tickets a little better,” Wynn said. “As for scalpers, I’m not going to be checking every receipt at the door and inconvenience fans, but I did send a message to scalpers. That I accomplished.”

Asked about what sort of scale he was thinking of and where the current $125 would land in that scale, Wynn said, “The midpoint.”

“It would have been wrong to try to change any of his preconceptions until he was in the room, in Las Vegas,” Wynn said, noting that the single-scale price was Brooks’ wish. “That’s why I shut up and let him have his way. He had a program that was easy to figure out, which he toured on, and it did the job.”

“I let him have his way with the ticket prices, but we might be going with scaled pricing before too long,” Wynn said. “We will have to talk about that.”

“Everything he did made perfect sense -- under the old model,” Wynn said. “But we’re looking at it differently here. I think he’ll have to learn for himself about how to scale shows in Las Vegas, to charge less for the balcony, that this approach does matter. Then we’ll have a different discussion, for sure.”

Oh sure, Steve says raising ticket prices is something that they're going to have to talk about later, but you know as well as I do that a savvy businessman like Steve Wynn wouldn't make a statement about raising ticket prices if it wasn't something he'd already thought through very carefully and more than likely already had in Garth's contract.  But at least if $125 is the midrange then that means that there will be tickets that are less expensive....if you can get them before the scalpers do that is.