‘Heavy Traffic:’ Morgan Wallen has a big night in Mobile - AL.com

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“So, listen. I ain’t never sold this many tickets before,” Morgan Wallen said near the end of his sold-out show Friday night at Mobile’s fairgrounds. “I sold, we sold, 31,000 tickets tonight in Mobile, Alabama.”

He wasn’t just saying it to brag. Wallen, who had worked the stage all night with the barrel-chested, blue-collar strut and swagger of a Delbert McClinton, seemed a little shaken. “My hometown’s got about 1,500 people in it,” he said. “And I never thought I’d be doing something like this, man. So I just want to say thank you to each and every one of you who showed up tonight … There’s a lot of different people from a lot of different places here tonight, and I just wanted to say I see you, and it means a lot to me, man. It means a lot to my band. Thank you. That’s all I can say. Thank you.”

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With that, it was time for another song about people being just the right amount of bad for each other. “If you ever feel like you’ve wasted some time on somebody, sing this one as loud as you can,” he said. A few seconds later, most of those 31,000 people were belting out the first verse of “Wasted on You.”

The days leading up to the show had been marked by a vaporous, low-key mini panic inspired partly by the recent disaster at the Astroworld fest in Houston. How many people were going to this thing? Were parking and traffic going to be merely bad, or impossible? How much of a ‘show was this show going to turn out to be?

The event itself was a rebuke to all that: It was an orderly, smooth-running, amply staffed happening with an extremely relaxed vibe. The biggest problem most people had was getting their Ticketmaster app to bring up ticket codes as demand overloaded the bandwidth available at The Grounds.

A stage had been set up on the expanse occupied a week earlier by the Greater Gulf State Fair’s midway. It faced a gentle rise that became sort of a natural amphitheater for a crowd on par with what you’d see in front of a main stage at the Hangout Fest. In fact, this standalone concert felt like a festival in some ways: Big screens flanked the stage and another one was positioned deeper in the crowd, improving the visuals for folks way in the back. Even further back, there was plenty of open space for anyone who wanted elbow room. It had carnival vendors selling corn dogs, funnel cakes, burgers and more. It had more portable toilets than Mardi Gras.

The downside was that it also felt kind of like half a festival. There were three support acts -- Ashland Craft, Ernest and Hardy -- whose sets ranged from 20 to 40 minutes. Each was followed by a 30-minute break as things were set up for the next artist. So if you were on the scene when the music started at 6 p.m., you’d been there nearly three hours when Wallen finally stepped onstage -- and half those three hours had been idle waiting between sets. At a fest there would have been another stage you could have wandered off to, to offset the pokey pacing.

Morgan Wallen's concert at The Grounds in Mobile drew a reported crowd of 31,000 on Nov. 12, 2021.Lawrence Specker | LSpecker@AL.com

Unfortunately, this creates a certain dynamic: By the time the headliner comes on, a lot of people are ready to hear a couple of songs and head for home. That phenomenon was very much in evidence by 9:30 p.m., a third of the way into Wallen’s 90-minute set.

The weird thing was that in many cases, as people made their way for the exits, they were still singing along. They crooned along to “Chasin’ You.” They called out the digits to “865,” Wallen’s addition to the canon of phone-number songs. Normally if people are cutting out, they aren’t singing along. Normally, if they’re singing along, they’re facing the stage. This was a little different. The mood wasn’t, “we’re not enjoying this,” it was more like, “we love this but our feet hurt and the kids are getting fussy.”

Wallen’s set featured a lot of rock guitar crunch but lacked the rise and release that a good rock show generates. Instead of building to a climax, it chugged along alternating between midtempo and downtempo songs. (In the latter category: Wallen brought out Ernest for the bender-breakup-weeper “Flower Shops,” which Ernest had already performed during his set. The guys clearly have high hopes for the tune, but hearing it twice in the same show was a major momentum killer.)

With all that said: If you work your way through the lyrics of Wallen’s blockbuster “Dangerous” double album, what you find is a guy with a knack for writing about people who are just the right kind of wrong for each other. The minute the guy lays eyes on the girl, he knows that somebody else’s problems are about to be his. Or he’s the good bad guy, about to disrupt someone’s plans for her life. Or, a little later in the process, he’s savoring some hard-earned scars. They’re tunes custom-made for young men and women to swap meaningful glances to: This is a bad idea, let’s do it.

Based on Friday night’s vibe, that’s a rich vein of highly resonant material, and Wallen mines it very well.

There may be other lessons to be found in the event. Wallen has had a spectacularly dramatic year, including a scandal in which he was caught on video flinging a racial slur at a buddy. That made him persona non grata with an image-conscious Nashville establishment. When sales of “Dangerous” just kept climbing, it raised the unsettling concern that fans were actually supporting Wallen because of what he’d done, not in spite of it.

The mood on Friday night suggested it was time to let go of that worry. Folks were there for the songs and for the relatable appeal of outsider country stars who don’t look like they have personal trainers, makeup artists or wardrobe managers.

“It’s been a year of extreme highs and extreme lows,” said Wallen. “But we’re going to stay on an extreme high tonight.”

The industry ostracism probably led directly to his current tour, featuring the unconventional setup at The Grounds. But the turnout, and the smooth run, shows that Wallen has the gravitational pull to make it on the outside. If he can’t get a booking at the usual places, he’ll just draw a bigger crowd at an unusual place. And if that works, heck, why not make it a traveling festival?

On Friday night, Wallen could see it working. His fans could see it working. The industry could see it working. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next.

“I was sittin’ on my bus earlier, and I kept getting a bunch of alerts on my phone,” Wallen said early in the show. “It said, be prepared for heavy traffic because of the concert on The Grounds. I guess that’s what they call us, heavy traffic, baby. Let’s go! I’ve been doing this for a while and I’ve never ever gotten alerts on my phone about changing the landscape of a city, so that’s what you’ve got here tonight.”

Heavy traffic. It won’t be lost on Wallen and his songwriting cronies that they’ve stumbled across a really nice title for a song, an album or a tour. You can almost hear the wheels turning.

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‘Heavy Traffic:’ Morgan Wallen has a big night in Mobile - AL.com
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