Review: Dierks Bentley brings decades of country music history to Vibrant Arena
Dierks Bentley has had the same tour bus since 2003.
Its couches smell of worn-down leather. Their cushions sink like a sofa collecting dust in a Midwest garage, right next to the beer fridge. A bag of pickleball gear was propped against the arm rest.
This bus has seen a lot. Bentley has shared the road over the last two decades with acts like Carrie Underwood and George Strait. He's been nominated for dozens of awards and played The Mark five times before, most recently in 2019.
But when the 48-year-old parked the bus there on Friday night, the tour vehicle might as well have been a country music DeLorean, complete with "Back To The Future" style time travel abilities.
That's because, alongside opening acts Ella Langley and Chase Rice, Bentley's "Gravel and Gold Tour" stop managed to bring the genre's commercial past, present and future together in one all-encompassing show.
Rice brought 'bro country' back
The night opened with the future: Ella Langley.
The 25-year-old Alabaman is a meteor on country radio right now. Her breakout hit, the partially spoken-word Riley Green collaboration "you look like you love me," is just a few months old and already has more than 80 million streams.
On Friday, Rice played the part of Green, fumbling and apologizing through the words on his verse but nailing the hook.
In a just 25-minute set, Langley's vocal talent was apparent and her sense of humor was endearing — she took the stage to Rihanna's hit "Umbrella" (ella, ella, hey, hey, hey).
She juggled braggadocio and break-up sentimentality with ease, willing to paint herself "pretty as a picture" on "Country Boy's Dream Girl" but "paint the town blue" with sadness on her killer opening song, too.
Once Langley left the stage, the tour bus (The DierksLorean?) turned the clock back ten years to the early-2010's bro country boom.
That's the era when Rice rose to fame, something the former college football player and "Survivor" contestant seemed have a sort of guilty conscience about.
"I started out with this thing called bro country," he said, before playing an acoustic version of the Florida Georgia Line hit, "Cruise," which Rice co-wrote. "I didn't mean to do it."
And that's the thing with a country music history-encompassing tour: this genre is not without a few flaws.
Rice's songs like "Eyes on You," "Ready to Roll," "Lonely If You Are" and "Drinking Beer. Talking God. Amen." sounded noticeably more sanitized. The lead guitar melodies were looped like an EDM remix lurked threateningly around the corner.
Rice did deliver hard on his covers. A pair of ubiquitous singalongs — Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Simple Man" and John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" — brought the place to an explosion. He dedicated the former to his old tourmate Jelly Roll and the latter to his father, who gifted Rice his first guitar in 2008 shortly before passing away.
"I get to honor my dad every night by playing this," he said.
Rice's more subdued originals, like "Oklahoma," sounded like his best work. On "Way Down Yonder," he brought up a 12-year-old in the audience who was celebrating his birthday, signing the boy's hat as the kid stood wide-eyed. If that wasn't enough to sway your heart, he brought up his sweet, black dog for "Bench Seat," a sentimental track about a dog saving a friend of Rice's from considering suicide.
The dog wore a backpack. The backpack had beer in it. And somewhere in Nashville, a country music executive smiled.
Rice did, too. The night was young.
Bentley covered Petty, Brooks and more
Dressed in plain blue jeans, boots, a black collared shirt and later a backward camouflage hat, Bentley opened his set with "Gold." By the song's second hook, he stood with his arms wide like a touchdown celebration.
Bentley's 28-song "Gravel and Gold Tour" setlist was full of catchy country tunes about rural roots that begged to be on gravel, dusty enough to leave some amber on your jeans.
But more often, they felt like gold. Shiny, sharp, polished.
Bentley danced around the stage like a mascot and joked like a politician. He gave a shoutout to school teachers, held a sign from a 9-year-old fan and played a montage of his crew members to thank the tour's unsung heroes. Bentley shotgunned a beer with two noticeably in-over-their-head drinkers, and threw out three dozen more cans to the too-sober fans in the front row.
It's easy to like the guy. But it's also easy to tell he's done this before. The bits felt rehearsed. Though I'll cut Bentley some slack, considering this tour is close to wrapping up its second year. He knows what works.
"I think she's a Quad-Cities girl," Bentley said with a smirk after covering Tom Petty's "American Girl."
His eyes narrowed cheerfully like he could tell that he'd won your vote. And he did. The electoral college of The Mark was unanimous, based off the ear-busting ovation at the show's conclusion or the call-and-response participation on the addictive hit "Somewhere on A Beach."
The music itself was sound, too. Guitarists Ben Helson and Charlie Worsham proved why Bentley calls his band Nashville's best. Gentle doses of pedal steel and fiddle were a nice touch. Mostly, the band was impressive in the way a clock is. Consistent, reliable, necessary.
That includes Bentley's vocals, which were so punctual and on-key that you could've convinced me they were plucked straight from the studio demos.
Throughout the two-hour performance, the singer managed to park his time-travelin' tour bus all across the American south.
He covered Alabama's "Mountain Man" and Garth Brooks' "Callin Baton Rouge" (with Worsham on vocals). He also blended "Am I The Only One" with the late Toby Keith's classic "Red Solo Cup," a pair of crowd-pleasers that played even better as a duo.
Bentley also brought up Rice for "Gone" and Langley for "Different for Girls." Despite Langley's solid performance, the latter was a lowlight, a break-up ballad full of patronizing platitudes and country cliches.
On encore song "Drunk On A Plane," Bentley dressed like a hammered pilot with Mardi Gras beads falling out of his pockets. It was funny in the way a punny captain on Southwest Airlines might be.
Sometimes the low-hanging fruit tastes good. But the best moments of the set were those when Bentley's theatrics were scaled back completely.
Like on "Black," when he sang through a transparent video board of fluttering white lights, or on the saccharine "Say You Do," where constellations cascaded on the massive jumbotron behind him.
The brief peeks behind Bentley's 20-year armor felt meaningful.
On "I Hold On," a tribute to Bentley's late father, the singer pointed to the sky with a "What's up, dad?" at the end of the first verse. Ahead of "Living," he talked about the fact that almost every memory he's made this year has been on the same short stretch of stage carpet. He contrasted that with the days spent in tour buses. He didn't sleep much last night on the drive from Grand Rapids.
"I spend my days barely living," he said.
But you could see Bentley come to life on stage. Especially on the second encore, as the night ended with the razzle-dazzle dial turned up to a million.
The DierksLorean's final parking job was in the '90s, with Bentley's satirical country band Hot Country Knights playing a medley of the decade's hits.
Electric keyboards were balanced on upturned feet. There were synchronized kick dances, leopard-print vests, Squirt soda stickers and mullet wigs.
Backstage, these outfits hung on a rack next to a Quad City Storm jersey. There, Bentley talked about the Knights in the third person, as if they're just another band on this tour.
The whole encore was a skipping CD of the era's greatest hits: "Heads Carolina, Tails California," "Achy Breaky Heart," "Man! I Feel Like a Woman," "I Like It, I Love It," and more.
It was a blast that ended with the best cover of all, Brooks' singalong "Friends in Low Places," a track that's just about a decade older than Bentley's bus.
That bus, by the way, turned out to be a solid metaphor for this Bentley tour.
After all, a vehicle doesn't stay on the road for 20 years unless its signature trait is consistency. And while the DierksLorean stopped at a few low places in the country music canon Friday night, it never broke down.
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