Photo courtesy Essential Broadcast Media
Starting a concert for which a local country station was present with a song called "That's Damn Rock & Roll" and following it not long after with a snippet of a Hank Williams classic may say some about commercial radio country nowadays. But it definitely says even more about Eric Church.
As country threatens to become subsumed by Music Row's infatuation with subpar R&B, hip-hop, pop and stadium rock mimicry, Church runs with that last influence as an organic part of his own musical makeup. Being marketed as a country act while exuding rock-star cool has worked well enough for him to be the first music act to be booked two consecutive nights at Fiserv Forum. And since he calls hardcore fans his Choir, it would be fair to say that on the first night of his Fiserv tenure last Friday, he held... church.
His is a gospel of booze, marijuana bud, patriotism, general bad-assery and, most importantly, the unifying, transformative power of music. The last of those is the humanizing, humbling element to Church's otherwise edgy persona. In giving the nearly packed auditorium audience a roughly three-hour show, he seemed to genuinely want to reward his faithful with as cathartic, transcendent experience as his style can summon. In so far as his mythic belief in his artistry's power to change lives, however momentarily, one could call him a South Carolina Bruce Springsteen with occasional banjo and Dobro in his band.
Funny, then, that Church’s song "Springsteen," one of his biggest hits which he saved for the first of his solo acoustic encores, perhaps best capsulizes Church's ability to conjure a specific time and place with just enough blurriness for listeners to fill in details to make it their own. Within that same concluding set he used one of his many songs that acts as a statement of purpose, "Mistress Named Music," to bookend excerpts of accomplices to that mistress who have inspired him, such as AC/DC, Eagles, Travis Tritt, Bryan Adams and someone who gave Church his first arena gig in Milwaukee as an opening act, Bob Seger.
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Before that, however, he balanced harder-driving material with revelations of his sensitivity. His first, slightly shorter set was arguably stronger in the balance of elements that make Church such a genre-crossing uniter. He can evoke the "doot doot doot"'s of The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy For The Devil" and declare himself a grown-ass man on the relatively sonically spartan "Desperate Man,” speak reflectively of near-regrets in "What I Almost Was," and both advocate for and warn against the rejection of small town, blue-collar values on "How 'Bout You" and "Homeboy" with an internal logical that would escape less resolute artists.
If his second set's energy flagged some, pacing was a key contributor. Ending with the subdued "Holdin' My Own" and placing similarly slower, if astute, numbers such as "Monsters" (inspired by his child's active imagination and the depths of human fallenness) throughout a 17-song list weighted Church's attack a mite. Conversely, he was also more interactive with Church Choir adherents toward the front, autographing their LPs during the vinyl-as-romantic solace salute "Record Year" and doling out little cups of whiskey amid "Jack Daniels" and "I Pledge Allegiance To The Hag," the latter another show of his country bona fides in its nods to Merle Haggard. His effort to press the flesh by climbing into an upper tier of the Forum surprised the Forum's security detail some, too. Less surprising and more ridiculous were the cascade of ganja leaves animating the screens around the stage during "Smoke a Little Smoke." Surely there's a less silly way to support cannabis than making oneself look like Swamp Thing employing Instagram filters? A spirited take on Steve Miller Band's "Rock N' Me," part of Church's effort to play something by an act with local ties at every date of his current tour, was a more satisfying way to curry audience bonding. Bits of goofiness and slightly uneven flow aside, Church can be rightly credited with unironically embracing a swath of music encompassing hard country to hard rock in a charismatically winning manner. He promised his flock a memorable, lengthy night not soon to be forgotten. And he certainly delivered.
