Van Morrison Willie Nelson Concert Report

This is the Willie Nelson Outlaws tour.
Van Morrison's only appearance on the East Coast this year.

First an outline of the concert as a whole.
The gates opened at 1:30 and parking was free, so that was cool, our tickets were only $89 bucks sans all the fees which jacked them up over $100.

There were sort of seven bands plus Van.
Outside stadium, good view, sound was okay.
It was an eclectic crowd comprised of lots of boots. Brown boots, black boots, red boots, cowboy boots; and a good number of those country and western cowboy hats.
Also a few hippies scattered about. One looked like he escaped from Woodstock as he had on a tie dyed bib overhaul, etc. There was a guy in yellow dress pants and a dark blue sports jacket that looked like he parked his yacht in the lot and another wearing a Pac Man sports jacket with matching pants.
And the mandatory sugar daddy was dancing with some young cowgirl down front.

Also there was a dude in the neatest wheelchair I ever saw. It had four wheels and a set of caster wheels up front. He drove it around on all four wheels and the front casters, then pressed a button and it launched upward to ride on only two wheels like a Segway. Really cool.
Also there was a small section for deaf people and a chick signing the whole concert to them. Kinda strange as the music wasn't really chest thumping, so I don't know how much they got out of the concert. But it was really neat watching the chick as she was fascinating.

It was hot. We sweated it out in the bleachers for hours then took a walk down on the infield and found a pallet of ice bags about four feet high. So we leaned against it for about an hour to cool down. As we melted the ice people would stroll by on their way to buy beer (half hour waiting time in line, $9.00 a can was the cheapest brew). We got lots of comments about how "cool" we were and how we were just "Chilling". We made lots of friends. One chick had lost her husband who had gotten a call to deploy to the Mid East and she was afraid he'd miss Van's set.

I saw this dude walking around with a Dylan hair cut, Dylan sunglasses and a Dylan T shirt and said to my wife, as a joke, "Hey, there's Bob Dylan!" Ha Ha. Turns out he was Willie's harmonica player.

So the first act was some guy that sounded just like.....Bob Dylan. He did a really nice acoustical Dylan type song that I really liked. But I don't know who he was as no one ever told us.

Then "The Particle Kid's" band came out. That's Willie's youngest son. Eh, I could'a skipped him. He's called "The Particle Kid" because he and his brother used to play Mario something and Willie called them the "particle kids".

Then I think it was Lukas Nelson and The Promise of the Real, number one son. He was better, good musician but not my cup of tea.

Next was Margo Price. Some country chick that sounded like Dolly Parton.
Then the Avett Brothers, which the crowd seemed to have heard of.
And then Sheryl Crow. She sounded like Dolly Parton to me.

So by now it's like 8:00 or something, and we're thinking we could have just shown up at 7:30 and have been happy.
It was finally time for Van.

He came out in a pin strip suit, matching hat, sunglasses and played an instrumental on the sax.
Then he went right into an extended jazzy version of Moondance, followed by Warm Love, Sometimes We Cry, Roll with the Punches, Baby Please Don't Go/ Don't Start Crying Now/ Here Comes the Night, Cleaning Windows, In the Afternoon/Ancient Highway/Raincheck, Wild Night, I Can't Stop Loving You, Whenever God Shines His Light, and Night Time is the Right Time. During the last song he disappeared from the stage and continued singing from somewhere in the back.
Then he came back out and did Gloria as an encore.
Then he snuck away again.

He was excellent.

Then Willie came out and did Willie stuff. Willie is good but I noticed the crowd began to thin out.
It seems many people were there to see Van the Man, not Willie.
I would say when he was about halfway through his set about a quarter of the arena was gone.
We hung around for awhile hoping Morrison would come back out but then we also left.

So we finally got to see Van Morrison, which I never thought would happen, so it was good.
The end.