Posted on 12/11/2009 2:23:33 PM PST by Star Traveler
Garth Brooks officially emerges from retirement Friday night.
LAS VEGAS (December 11, 2009)--Garth Brooks' retirement ends when he sings his first note Friday night at the Encore Theater at Wynn Las Vegas.
It’s the first of a handful of weekends that he'll be performing each year for as many as five years.
The weekends are selected based on his three daughters' school and sports schedules.
Brooks says these acoustic shows will be different each night.
Sometimes he'll have guest performers with him, including his wife, Trisha Yearwood and sometimes it will be all Garth and no one else.
By the time these five years are up, his kids will have moved on and he says he might resume touring.
That house just looks idiotic.
updated 6:34 p.m. EDT, Thu October 15, 2009
By Todd Leopold
(CNN) -- Garth Brooks, one of the biggest country stars of all time, said Thursday he is coming out of retirement after nine years away from the music business, and will start a concert engagement in Las Vegas.
Brooks made the announcement at a press conference at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee, followed later in the day by a second press conference at the Wynn Las Vegas hotel after flying an entourage of media from Nashville.
...
Brooks has three daughters -- 17, 15 and 13 -- to whom he's devoted, and he told Wynn he wanted to make sure he was home in Oklahoma to be with his children until the last one graduates from high school. So Wynn got Brooks a plane; the singer will work one show Fridays, two shows on Saturdays and one Sundays, and be back home for Monday morning.
...
"If he tours again, it still won't be until his youngest goes to college," Seltzer told CNN via text message.
Well..., it’s a picture taken when it wasn’t even near finished yet. It looks a lot different now... :-)
Who?
Ahhh...., you don’t live in Oklahoma... :-)
I'm guessing he's put some additions on since then, to make it a respectable size!
You must be one of the three people living there...
First Shows Begin This Weekend
POSTED: 7:53 am PST December 11, 2009
UPDATED: 8:04 am PST December 11, 2009
LAS VEGAS -- The Garth Brooks era officially begins tonight, when the best-selling solo artist of the 20th century takes the stage at Encore Las Vegas.
Although tickets have been sold out for weeks, fans were given a chance to purchase other customer's canceled tickets for this weekend’s shows.
The catch: tickets are first-come, first-serve and hotel guests get the first crack at them.
A resort spokesperson said two lines would begin to form at noon, one for guests and one for the general public. She could not confirm whether the small crowds loitering around the Wynn Ticket Office were fans hoping to be first in line.
Back in October, the 47-year-old Brooks was lured out of retirement by resort mogul Steve Wynn, who was searching for a superstar to fill the Encore Theater following the May 1 death of longtime Las Vegas headliner Danny Gans.
Brooks agreed to perform four shows for 15 weekends annually, with the first round of concerts beginning tonight.
While the two initially disagreed on ticket prices, they eventually settled on $125 per seat. This led to a controversial resort policy of checking the names of ticketholders to prevent scalping.
Wynn is convinced the policy works and making canceled tickets available for resale is likely to calm the nerves of any jilted fans.
The resort will sell the canceled tickets only for the day that Brooks is performing, starting with this weekend’s shows. The concert schedule allows for one show Friday, two on Saturday and a fourth on Sunday.
I'm guessing he's put some additions on since then, to make it a respectable size!
Well, he's got lots of room to expand, considering it's over 1,300 acres (it may even be more ... )
You must be one of the three people living there...
Now you don't want to get the other Okies upset, making them think they don't exist... LOL...
I mean, ole Oklahoma got the highest percentage of vote for the GOP ticket this last Presidential election of any state in the United States. And, in addition, they had every last single county go for the GOP, including the two largest metro areas in the state (which is very unusual for any metro area in the country).
On top of that, they were trying to get legislation through to help get rid of Obama...
And why would you want to get all those othe Okies mad at you... :-)
I will not spend a dime on him...divorced his wife and married another women a minute later...nope. No way, no how.
Entertainer says he hopes audience members can keep surprises to themselves
Garth Brooks is a soccer dad -- a soccer dad with a private jet.
"The plane was the whole thing," the country superstar said of Steve Wynn's deal-making perk, which solved the logistics of a groundbreaking arrangement for Brooks to headline Wynn Las Vegas.
If you expect to see Brooks around town during this National Finals Rodeo weekend, when he settles into his first regular commitment since 2001, you'll be looking in the wrong place.
The country superstar will be putting that plane through its paces instead: finishing his first show at Wynn today, then flying past his Oklahoma home to get to his daughter's out-of-state soccer game, hoping to "get there about 30 minutes before the game starts in the morning Eastern time, watch the game and another that afternoon, then get back about 30 minutes before (the show) starts Saturday night."
Brooks' fans know the 47-year-old put his superstardom on the sidelines after his divorce from his first wife, Sandy, in 2001. He and his second wife, fellow '90s star Trisha Yearwood, now live in Owasso, Okla., and share custody of Brooks' three daughters.
They also know Brooks has vowed not to tour again until the youngest of the three girls -- now ages 13, 15 and 17 -- graduates from high school. "We have walked the walk these first 10 years. I really didn't want to blow it the last five years," he says.
Wynn, he adds, was the one person to pay attention when Brooks explained his domestic situation. Then he offered the plane, along with a handshake deal that either of them could walk away from at any time and, yes, a whole lot of money.
"I told him he couldn't afford me. I was wrong," Brooks joked to reporters at an October news conference to announce he would play the Encore Theater about 15 weekends each year for five years.
The private jet was "what no one else had thought of, what I hadn't even thought of," Brooks said in a phone conversation earlier this week. "You could say he was business-savvy enough. I'd say he gave a damn enough to think that way. That's kind of what melted my heart."
Now that Brooks will be doing as many as 300 shows at Wynn, fans can expect a solo-acoustic career retrospective that takes him full circle. The singer's repeated point of reference lies on a different strip.
It's Willies Saloon in Stillwater, Okla., one of the bars nudging up to the Oklahoma State University campus, on the drag students know as "the Strip." It was there, during his senior year of college in 1984, that Brooks first found ears for his singing and songwriting.
"Instead of looking back, it's like looking forward and starting the Willies thing again," he says of his new venture.
When Wynn invited Brooks to test out the theater with a private show in June, the singer delivered what Wynn would describe as "his journey through his career. ... It's a story, a personal story with his guitar and his music," he noted. "An incredible range of musical history and how it affects a young man."
Brooks says he will ask these first-weekend audiences, "Please, no YouTube."
"Surprise is a big part of entertainment," he explains, and he wants the set list to catch people off-guard.
"It can't change. It's my life is what it is, historical influences on me. My dad's music, my brothers' music, my sisters' and my friends'. How I get to my own stuff.
"When they hear the song that influenced me, They'll go, 'Of course, I hear it now.' "
He hopes fans will keep the secret, but he still can vary the set list if they don't: "I know 20 things from each one of these artists."
Each night will include a question-and-answer session. "You're going to get a chance to ask the questions that I want to ask James Taylor. The questions I want to ask George Strait.
"That's the whole plan: a wonderful, intimate evening where you laugh your ass off, you cry, you relate and you learn."
But the show looks forward as well as back. Brooks is already in touch with promoters and his former backing band about a comeback tour in 2015.
"If people will work with me and not YouTube this stuff, where I know it's safe and secret? Then I can have the confidence to start breaking out new stuff on these people, trying it out," he says.
"What a wonderful gift that would be for me as an artist, to get that audience and see their reaction and get their thoughts back on it as I create and mold and shape. ... That's Willies to a T, right there."
Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.
Garth Brooks opens as a headliner this weekend at the Encore Theater at Wynn Las Vegas.
8 p.m. today and Sunday, 8 and 10:30 p.m. Saturday
Encore Theater at Wynn Las Vegas, 3131 Las Vegas Blvd. South
$143 (770-7469)
I see you’ve eliminated a good chunk of our society... LOL...
And he’s a modest-to-poor vocalist, too.
But at least his house project employed a lot of Oklahoma construction workers.
And... ummm..., considering the way the ex-wife was carrying on with some black guy around here (I think her “handyman” or something...), I’m actually amazed that Garth Brooks still let her live next door...
But, I guess after the “handyman” decided to make off with the ex-wife’s money, that kinda put the “kibosh” on that relationship... :-)
Who knows (and I don’t, that’s for sure...) she could have been carrying on with the “handyman” for a while, if you know what I mean...
And he’s a modest-to-poor vocalist, too.
Ummm..., have you heard of Dylan... :-) I was thinking about a Christmas album from him, but he sure is gruff...
And, of course, there's that famous Okie... Woody Guthrie...
True...I won’t go to her show either.../sarc...just having a bit of fun.
Heck! I'm cheap enough to go to "free nights" at some place like "Cain's Ballroom"... not pay for $100+ tickets... LOL...
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