“It’s my show and I can do whatever the hell I want!” a smiling Chris Stapleton said midway through his Saturday night concert at Petco Park. The capacity audience in the sprawling stadium — the 20-year-old home of the San Diego Padres — cheered in response.
On paper, this might read like a standard moment from almost any live-music event, whether in a stadium or arena, theater or bar. But there was almost nothing standard about what Stapleton did following the sound-marred opening sets by Elle King and the rootsy Oklahoma country band Turnpike Troubadours.
The concert, which kicked off Stapleton’s 2024 All-American Road Show tour, was happily free of pomp and circumstance. But his two-hour set was a celebratory musical event that at times almost qualified as subversive, at least by the usual stadium concert standards.
Stapleton’s “I can do whatever the hell I want!” declaration came prior to his soul-baring ballad “Whiskey and You,” the 12th of the 26 songs he performed. It was also his third consecutive solo acoustic number, following “Who Are You Listening To?” and “Mountains of My Mind,” the tender, whisper-soft closing number from his superb 2023 album, “Higher.”
With his band temporarily offstage — “Don’t worry, I’ll hire them back” he quipped — Stapleton accomplished a daunting feat. He transformed his stadium concert at the enormous ballpark into a campfire singalong for the sold-out crowd of more than 40,000.
It was, of course, minus the campfire — and, thankfully, also minus Saturday’s rains, which subsided over Petco Park barely half an hour before King’s 48-minute opening set kicked off at 6:31 p.m. But Stapleton’s ability to make a giant concrete edifice seem like an intimate hootenanny with just an acoustic guitar and his deeply expressive voice was a rare accomplishment.
So, too, was the no-nonsense manner in which he and his ace band — featuring longtime Willie Nelson harmonica great Mickey Raphael — delivered their impeccably paced performance. Stapleton’s blues-rocking country songs are expertly constructed to achieve maximum emotional impact without a single extraneous lyric or gesture.
Or, as Stapleton put it a 2018 San Diego Union-Tribune interview: “I don’t like to waste words in songs is the best way I can put it. If you can say something with three words that puts the point across — and leaves room for the listener to put themselves into the song — there’s no need to use 10 words.”
That same sense of purpose and concision applied to the fuss-free performance Stapleton delivered Saturday. His unwavering, music-first focus was clear from the surging opening salvo of “White Horse,” “Parachute” and “Second One To Know” to the two tender reveries that closed the show, the intensely melancholic “Where Rainbows Never Die” and the quietly defiant “Outlaw State of Mind.”
Stapleton’s vocals were tender one moment, gritty and blues-drenched the next, rising from a deep growl to a falsetto swoop without a hint of affectation.
His singing is expertly calibrated to achieve maximum impact, without a hint of the overwrought delivery that can make too many stadium concerts exercises in empty histrionics. While his vocal influences are easy to discern — from Otis Redding, Bob Seger and the Marshal Tucker Band’s Toy Caldwell to Marvin Gaye, John Fogerty and (if my ears don’t deceive me) Terry Reid — when Stapleton sings, he sounds wonderfully distinctive and completely natural.
“We’re going to play as much music as we can in the time we have. So, I’m not going to do much talking,” he said, shortly after taking the stage.
But Stapleton didn’t hesitate to stop his band four minutes into the rollicking “Might As Well Get Stoned” when he spotted an audience member near the front of the stage in apparent need of immediate medical attention.
“Somebody needs some help down there,” Stapleton said. “We want to make sure everybody’s taken care of. Make room for him, make a path everybody. Let him out. The sooner you do, the sooner we can get back to the show.”
Once the person was attended to, “Might As Well Stoned” resumed with note-perfect precision — at the exact point in which pedal-steel guitar master Paul Franklin was completing a brief but exemplary solo.
Throughout, Stapleton and his band consistently played to serve the songs at hand, not to show off. He, Raphael, Franklin and second guitarist Mike Eli LoPinto could easily hold an audience’s attention with extended instrumental forays, but their solos were unfailing crisp and to the point.
The stadium setting proved daunting to opening acts King and Turnpike Troubadours, whose music seemed ill-suited to such a large location. But Stapleton seemed right at home, even if he himself marveled at the size of Petco Park.
“Amazing!” he said after romping through the Guy Clark-penned 12-bar blues, “Worry Be Gone.”
“I do that (song) every night, but not in a baseball stadium in San Diego!”
Stapleton’s set list Saturday included such gems as “Nobody to Blame,” “Broken Halos,” “Think I’m in Love With You” and his 2015 breakthrough hit, “Traveler,” the title song from his album of the same name.
With that album, Stapleton unexpectedly created a tectonic shift in contemporary country music, before going on to win 10 Grammys and enough other awards to fill a room. He did so by offering wonderfully soulful new songs that sounded like weathered classics, not the slick, instantly forgettable assembly-line knockoffs the Nashville music machine too often spews out like an aural form of cotton candy.
Stapleton’s San Diego concert was a winning testament to the craft and durability of his work — and his work ethic — and he clearly savored and appreciated the moment for all it was worth.
Alas, the audio quality for the opening sets by King and Turnpike Troubadours was somehow both muddled and not nearly loud enough, in contrast with the much higher volume but perfectly balanced sound mix Stapleton and his band received.
Coming on the heels of King’s drunken, profanity-fueled performance at a Dolly Parton tribute in Nashville in January — after which King canceled her January and February concerts — she conspicuously took sips from a plastic water bottle during her by-the-numbers Petco Park performance. But the large illuminated letters “F” and “K” that bedecked the stage behind her suggested King may not be ready to make nice just yet.