More Rock Than Country, Mcgraw Wows The Fans

Tim McGraw and Faith Hill Friday, May 3, at The Arena

When the history of country music is written, Tim McGraw’s name won’t be found in the chapter titled “Great Singers, George Jones and Beyond.” More likely, he’ll be there in the one called “Great Showmen, The Loud Spawn of Bacchus.”

With McGraw, country music has fully appropriated the trappings of arena rock. McGraw’s show doesn’t nod toward rock’s excesses - it plants both feet in the fog machine.

McGraw is an engaging entertainer with an athlete’s barrel-chested strut, and his between-song patter came across as unrehearsed and genuine. And though he doesn’t have much of a voice - his reedy tenor pales in comparison to even such unremarkable vocalists as Colin Raye - he knows how to connect with a song’s emotions and conveys them with an Everyman vulnerability.

The show opened with a band video set to Van Halen’s “Running With The Devil.” Onscreen volcanos rumbled as McGraw dropped to the set on a hydraulic lift and cracked into “Renegade,” a tribute to his own rebel image.

McGraw’s young fans have taken his music to heart - they can sing whole songs back to him, especially “Don’t Take The Girl,” which turned into a mass sing-along while the video played on screens flanking the stage - and he brought them to their feet over and over again with such tunes as “Down On the Farm,” “Refried Dreams,” “Can’t Really Be Gone” and “When She Wakes Up (I’ll Be Gone).”

Much of McGraw’s material has its roots in the era when the bulk of his fans were being conceived: A giant mirror ball spun behind the set during “All I Want Is A Life” with its Allman Brothers twin lead guitars and psychedelic Country Joe & the Fish organ. “That’s Just Me” got a funky Rare Earth beat and a wah-wah lead guitar solo that belonged at the Fillmore.

McGraw showed how he felt about such nitpicking when he sang Steve Miller’s “The Joker.”

“People come up to me and say, ‘But Tim, that’s not country music,”’ he said. Then, to show how much he cared, he shrugged and grinned at the cheering crowd.

Opener Faith Hill has a beautiful, gospel-inflected voice but her set, too, was afflicted with a ‘70s arena-rock sheen. She covered Janis Joplin (“Piece of My Heart”) and Journey (“Open Arms”) and turned her hit “Someone Else’s Dream” into a flat-out rocker. She let her guitar player loose for a screaming solo on a blues piece that would have fit right into any big rock show of the ‘70s.

, DataTimes