Garth Brooks can now sing “Friends in Low Places” to friends in low places at Friends in Low Places Bar & Honky-Tonk. The living country music legend’s most iconic song has inspired the name of his latest business venture that opened in the heart of Nashville’s downtown entertainment district last month. He performed a soft-opening dive bar concert at the venue in November before it opened to the public for a fortunate audience, but since then the only place fans have been able to catch Brooks live in concert is at his Garth Brooks/Plus ONE residency in Las Vegas.
He did serenade Elton John and Bernie Taupin on March 20 with renditions of “Daniel” and “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word” when the songwriting collaborators received the Gershwin Prize at D.A.R. Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., but there are currently no other live performances on his schedule for this year besides his 36 Garth Brooks/Plus ONE dates.
There will be covers at those concerts. Audiences attending Brooks’ residency at the Colosseum last year witnessed him sing Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” and “Turn the Page,” “Shameless” and “Shout” by Billy Joel, and “Shallow” from the A Star Is Born soundtrack with wife Trisha Yearwood. Nashville’s royal couple also paid homage to predecessors George Jones and Tammy Wynette with a duet of their 1976 No. 1 country hit, “Golden Ring.”
Fortunately for Yearwood, the menu curator for Brooks’ bar, her husband leads a vastly different lifestyle and is more of a stand-by-your-woman type. Once suspected of having a superficially humble public persona, Brooks has proven himself to have genuine and authentic character after more than three decades of superstar status. He’s polite, doesn’t drink and his only vice is his love of eating, according to his late mother, Colleen Carroll Brooks.
As Colleen Carroll, she was a modestly successful singer who was featured on country star Red Foley’s Saturday night television series in the mid- to late-1950s. She may have naturally imbued Brooks’ personality with a gift for communicating to audiences, and for being the same person on- and offstage. He combined that with the business savvy to produce some of the most successful residencies on the Strip, and enough sense to keep things interesting by mixing them up.
He’s mostly solo at Garth Brooks/Plus ONE, shifting song orders for different dates and taking requests from fans. The hits are all there, though, from “Rodeo” and singalong favorite “Two Pina Coladas” to “The Thunder Rolls” and “The Dance.” Outside of a Friends in Low Places reality series on Amazon Prime, along with an Amazon Live presentation of his November show at Friends in Low Places Bar & Honky-Tonk, Brooks’ legions of friends can count on catching him on the Strip. It’s mostly because of them that he considers himself, possibly, to be the luckiest guy on the planet.
Caesars Palace. ticketmaster.com
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