If you happened to not be one of the thousands of people at Charlotte’s Speed Street, well that sucks for you — that means you missed a complete cluster fuck of people that made driving through uptown like cruising the strip at the beach. OK, so the traffic sucked, but the entertainment on the other hand did not.
Compliments of Speed Street, the concert we got included Loverboy, Puddle of Mudd, Joe Nichols, Better than Ezra, Cheap Trick, Danielle Peck, Diamond Rio, The Wreckers, and this country girl’s favorite, Sara Evans.
I hit up 3rd and People, I mean Poplar, on Thursday to see Evans with promises of getting backstage at the Miller Lite stage and the possibility to meet the Dancing With the Stars country star from Carolina Nightlife. I was more excited than a little kid getting to see Mickey Mouse; Evans is like my country music Oprah. But when we got to the stage, no passes! Dude from Carolina Nightlife told us that we were on the list at the entrance on the other side of the stage, so we fought our way through the jungle of cowboy boots and in turn missed two songs, one of which was my favorite of Evans: “Looking for Something More.” Yeah, looking for my damn passes. When we got to the other side of the stage, there wasn’t another entrance. I refused to give up, so I texted my cohort Jeff (hold the ‘rey) and he sprinkled his media magic dust on me and my homegirl.
From my front row view from stage left, I noticed a scripted-sounding Evans looking down in front of the stage and realized she was checking her agenda to see what to do next. Evan’s agenda was a 13-song show, with allocated breaks after three songs to talk to the crowd and introduce her band, comprised mostly of her family members. Funny … her agenda was the exactly the same when I saw her in Nashville and at Ovens Auditorium.
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