Friday night and Heather and I headed out to the BOK Arena to attend the Garth Brooks concert in Tulsa. The first of seven. When he put the tickets on sale back in early Noveember he sold 105,000 tickets the first day. Just for Tulsa. You see he is a native Oklahoman and the people here love him. Besides his last concert here was 17 years ago and so we were feeling a little deprived.

Heather and I got there well before the schedule start time of 7 pm. We are such nerds. When we see a start time we assume that they are serious. Well we waited a while so we had some time kill. You can see the view we had. I’m surprised that we didn’t have Sherpas and oxygen bottles to get to our seats. Oh well, we were in the house and that is what counts.

What did we do with the time. Well of course we did a selfie!!! Lots of Selfies at the arena that night.

Especially down close to the stage. I brought my Canon PowerShot SX40 HS super zoom  camera to the concert. It is concert legal, anything that uses detachable lenses is forbidden, but the Canon has the super zoom feature and a low light mode that gives me a decent chance at photographs.

 

There were almost lined up. Who invented the term Selfie. You know I might have I am not sure. So anybody making or looking at Selfies you need to send me a dime every time you do do those things. Don’t worry though, it is in effect only today and I should have a billion dollars by this time tomorrow and then they will be free again. Unless I run out of money.

Then we got a little bit of a warm up act. Singer/Songwriter Karen Rochelle came out and sang and few songs for us. I thought she was really good. She writes songs for Garth’s wife Trisha Yearwood. She was going to be in the concourse after the show to meet people and even take Selfies. If you are going to tonight’s show I’d appreciate if you would stop by her booth afterward and remind about the dime fee that she owes me for each selfie. You know, in accordance with the new policy and all.

And the Garth came out. Actually he came storming out. I had forgotten how active he is on stage.  His fans love him.

When he got tired of running around the state, he started climbing stuff. I bet his insurance company has concerns about stuff like this. He was singing the whole time also.

I judge concerts by how much in tune the performer is with the audience. Nobody is in tune with Okies like Garth is. He blew by everybody else. His musicians are first rate and they have been with him a long time. The “new guy” has been with him only twenty years. Garth even introduced a couple of the road crew. I have never seen anybody do that before.

He was here, there, and everywhere. He even grabbed a video camera at one point and was running around the stage with it.

After a while his wife Trisha Yearwood came on stage and they sang a duet.

And then a little bit smash face and then she sent him off the stage. You know to go fetch something or check on the kids or something.

And then she sang some songs. She still has the voice as she played some of the favorites.

She is quite a performer in her own right.

They are pretty cute together. They have been retired for the last ten years while their daughters were growing up, in the Tulsa suburb of Owasso and they have been seen all over town. I have several friends who have ran into them in various stores and everybody is impressed with how friendly and approachable they are. I think they are two of the world’s really nice people. The kids are out of the house and now and so Garth and Trisha are resuming their careers.

So, Garth finished up his set, said his goodbyes to the crowd, several times as everybody was still screaming at him.

He had two encores and then that was that. He is doing two shows on Saturday. It must be grueling for him. He put everything he had into the performance Friday night. I can’t imagine him doing it twice.

If you are not familiar with Garth here is a song.

 

If you are familiar with him, here was his set list for the concert.

And I got a t shirt. The last concert t shirt I got for Janet Jackson way back when in the early 90’s or late 80’s in Oklahoma City. I still don’t know why I got one.

I just hope that Garth comes back sooner than seventeen years.