Zac Brown Band Reveals Star-Studded Nashville Lineup

Southern Ground Music & Food Festival 2013: Zac Brown Band Reveals Star-Studded Nashville Lineup

The Southern Ground Music & Food Festivalreturns to Nashville for a second year withZac Brown Band and a who's who of musical friends along for the ride. The festivities take place at the Lawn at Riverfront Park, Friday and Saturday, Sept. 27-28, with ZBB joined by Willie Nelson & Family, Eli Young Band, Kacey Musgraves, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, the Head and the Heart and Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue. Additional acts will be revealed soon.

The festival's hosts will be joined by celebrity friends for their "Super Sets."Kenny Chesney, John Fogerty and Jason Mraz will perform with Zac Brown Band at the close of both nights.

Ticket pre-sale for Zac Brown Band fan club members begins Wednesday, April 24, at 12:00 PM CT. Pre-sale opens to attendees of last year's festival Thursday, April 25, at 10:00 AM CT. General sale begins Saturday, April 27 at 10:00 AM CT. Last year's event drew more than 12,000 people to downtown Music City.

VIP ticket options are also available and include access to Zac Brown Band's customized Front Porch Stage Boxes, providing concertgoers with onstage seating and a gourmet meal prepared by a team of renowned chefs under the helm of Southern Ground Executive Chef Rusty Hamlin. Guests in the boxes are served complimentary beer, wine, liquor and non-alcoholic drinks, as well as gourmet cuisine from ZBB's mobile kitchen.

Two-day festival passes start at $99. Gates open at 2:00 PM CT on Friday and 12:00 PM CT on Saturday. For more details on the full music and food lineup, visit the official Southern Ground Music and Food Festival website.

Zac Brown Band Announces Lineup

Zac Brown Band Announces Lineup for Southern Ground Music & Food Festival in Nashville

Zac Brown Band photo by Cole Cassell, courtesy of Southern Ground Artists/Atlantic Records.

Zac Brown Band’s Southern Ground Music & Food Festival will return to Nashville’s Riverfront Park on September 27-28 with an all-star lineup. ZBB will perform along with special sit-in performances by Kenny Chesney, John Fogerty, Jason Mraz and more. Also on the lineup are Willie Nelson & The Family Band, Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Eli Young Band, Kacey Musgraves, The Head and The Heart and Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue with more artists to be announced.

In addition to two evenings of music, the festival will offer fans a selection of food from some of the world’s best chefs. Tickets for the festival go on sale Saturday, April 27 at 10 a.m. CST at www.southerngroundfestival.com. Fans will have the opportunity to purchase exclusive VIP Lounge Tickets and Front Porch Stage Tickets as well.

The VIP Lounge Tickets include complementary catered food and access to the VIP Bar with complementary beverages, a lounge area to watch football games on HD TV screens, air-conditioned, private restrooms, yard games and other activities, a private viewing deck of the Main Stage and access to cell phone charging stations.

The Front Porch Stage Tickets package allows fans to sit on the stage, enjoying dinner while the concert goes on feet away. Fans will be served gourmet meals custom designed and prepared by Zac Brown Band Executive Chef Rusty Hamlin and other award-winning chefs. Premium alcohol, wine and beer are included with access to private restrooms and the VIP Lounge Area.

Zac Brown Band to perform at SPAC Aug. 31

Zac Brown Band to perform at SPAC Aug. 31, Matchbox Twenty, Goo Goo Dolls to perform June 26

Two more summer shows were announced for Saratoga Performing Arts Center this week.

The popular country-folk group the Zac Brown Band will return to SPAC Aug. 31.

Matchbox Twenty and Goo Goo Dolls will perform at SPAC June 26.

Tickets for the 7 p.m. Zac Brown Band show will cost $64.50 and $39.50 for seats or $29.50 for the lawn. Limited quantities of lawn four-packs ($88 plus fees) will be sold in advance but will not be available on the concert date. A ticket sale date has not been announced. The band is probably best known for the single “Chicken Fried.” The band released its fifth album, “Uncaged,” in 2012. Last summer’s SPAC show by the band drew a capacity crowd of 25,000 concert-goers.

Tickets to the 7 p.m. Matchbox Twenty show go on sale at 10 a.m. Saturday, April 13. Amphitheater tickets are $30, $49, $69 and $95. Lawn tickets are $25.

Zac Brown Band keeps it real for fans

In 2004, Zac Brown saw guitarist Clay Cook wailing away at a gig with the Marshall Tucker Band. Brown turned to his bassist, John Hopkins, and said, “Clay is going to be in our band one day.”

Back then Brown’s group, scheduled to headline the Comcast Center on Sunday, was just another struggling act in the Atlanta scene. But Brown was true to his word after breaking big with the triple-platinum disc “The Foundation.”

“Two years to the day of him seeing me with my uncle’s group, the Marshall Tucker Band, we had our first conversation about me coming on board,” Cook said. “We’d been running into each other for years, and I had always been the guy people call when they needed a replacement guitarist or a fill-in bassist. That’s what I became for Zac, but it became permanent.”

Brown wasn’t the first rising star to notice Cook’s skills.
As freshmen at Berklee College of Music, Cook and John Mayer became friends and eventually band mates. In the late ’90s, the two dropped out and tried to make it as a duo in Atlanta but fizzled out.
“We lived together, worked together. He didn’t have a car, so I was his ride,” Cook said. “It was too much and we were too young to realize each other’s talent. But we taught each other how to write songs. We’re back in touch now and are buddies again.”
After Mayer took off for solo stardom, Cook kicked around Atlanta. He didn’t find success on his own but was always in demand. He played guitar with Marshall Tucker, handled bass duties in the first Sugarland lineup, toured with Shawn Mullins and produced other artists.
Brown’s band has finally allowed Cook to play the rock star stages Mayer enjoys — Zac Brown Band’s Saturday show at the 21,600-seat Darien Lake Performing Arts Center in New York will be the group’s largest headlining gig yet.
“I remember when we were struggling to fill these minor league hockey rinks,” Cook said. “Agents wanted to put us in smaller venues so we could have people wishing they could get in and drive up ticket prices. But that’s never been what we’re about. We’d rather have empty seats and make sure everyone who wanted to come got in.”
There’s a certain humility, a homeyness to the Zac Brown Band that is missing from slick rock acts and pre-fab country artists. The guys in the band aren’t pretty or glamorous. But they can play.
Cook attributes the band’s success to this humble, bar band aesthetic.
“The songs are real songs about real stuff,” he said. “And with Zac, you get what you see. There’s a couple of country artists who do a lot of posturing when they play. We go out there and we’re ourselves. It’s genuine.”

Zac Brown Band's Southern Ground Festivals

Zac Brown Band's Southern Ground Festivals include Avett Bros., Grace Potter and more 

The Avett Brothers, Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, Gregg Allman and The Lumineers are among the artists who will join Zac Brown Band for ZBB’s  two Southern Ground Music & Food Festivals this fall.

After bowing last year in Charleston, the Southern Ground Music & Food Festival will expand to Nashville this year. ZBB headlines each night at the events.

The line-up for the Sept. 21-22 Nashville fest, which will be held at Riverfront Park, is Amos Lee, David Gray, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, The Lumineers and Los Lonely Boys, among others.

Top names for the Charleston fest, which will be held Oct. 20-21 at Blackbaud Stadium, include The Avett Bros., Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, The Charlie Daniels Band and The Wailers.

In addition to ZBB, both festivals will feature Michael Franti & Spearhead, Jerry Douglas, and Southern Ground artists Sonia Leigh, Nic Cowan and Blackberry Smoke. Southern Ground is ZBB’s label.

As the name connotes, the emphasis is also on the food, with chefs from around the globe working with Southern Ground executive chef Rusty Hamlin. Among the ticketing options are Front Porch Stage Boxes, which allows patrons to sit on stage, enjoying a four-course gourmet meal, just feet away from the performers. Prices start at $325/seat.

Non-VIP tickets are priced for as little as $89 for a two-day early bird ticket.  For more information, go to www.southerngroundfestival.com

In an interview I did earlier with Brown for the Los Angeles Times, he told me the guiding principal behind planning the line-up and festivities: “What would I want to have if I was at a festival?’,” Brown said. “I’d want to have amazing food and drink and see an eclectic group of artists play. Too much of any one kind of music for six hours in a row is going to wear people out.” Brown added that ultimately, he'd like to expand the festivals to 10 cities.

Zac Brown Band Stretches Country's Limits 

 

Country music has never had a simple relationship with Mexico. While outlaws like Waylon Jennings once warned that there "ain't no God" on the other side of the border, Tim McGraw more recently took the opposing position, suggesting that God in fact created the country, but only as a place for trapped American adults to go when they needed a vacation.

No matter one's position in this rather limited point-counterpoint, the "Mexico song" has become a staple of nearly all mainstream country albums. Kip Moore, for instance, recently gave the genre a nostalgic turn on Up All Night's emotional center, "Everything but You"; Brad Paisley, never one to pass up a chuckle, rounded out last year's This Is Country Music with the Blake Shelton-featuring "Don't Drink the Water" ("No one I know / goes to Mexico / to drink the water anyways" rolls the punchline). Shelton, meanwhile, once pushed the senorita-chasing, Van Morrison-quoting "Playboys of the Southwestern" up into the country top 40, though the tune never caught on as successfully as Kenny Chesney's chart-topping "Beer and Mexico," Toby Keith's "Stays in Mexico," or Zac Brown's platinum-selling "Toes," the opener on the band's 2007 major-label debut, The Foundation.
"Toes" begins like all the rest: The narrator, exhausted by the "concrete and cars" that "are their own prison bars," hops a plane heading south and spends four days emptying his pockets living the life he's always wanted. But where the majority of these songs must eventually return back to the everyday grind of life in the U.S. of A., "Toes" turns the vacation into a way of life and concludes with its singer posting up on a Georgia lake just as he once posted up on a Caribbean beach.
Combining this attitude toward the world—so Buffett-influenced that their eventual collaboration felt almost superfluous—with subtle, harmony-filled arrangements and the repetition of a few gloriously empty clichés, the song couldn't have been clearer statement of purpose. Five years later, it instantly comes to mind upon hearing the "island lullabye" opener to Uncaged, the band's third major studio album and the country crossover hit of the summer—it sold some 234,000 copies in its first week.
Still, when breaking down those sales figures, it's the crossover that's key: Although country radio has yet to fully embrace any of Uncaged's eleven tracks, still preferring 2010's "No Hurry," to any of the newer material, the traditionalist band has cultivated audiences via non-traditional routes, developing a jam-ready sound that's best heard live and which coincided perfectly with the recent festival boom. Just as Eric Church recently reached a new market by shedding some twang and delivering a hard rock set at the Metallica-curated Orion Festival, Brown was taking the I-24 from Nashville to Bonnaroo way back in 2009. Lately, that sound has found a more comfortable fit at New Orleans's more roots-driven Jazzfest, and Uncaged's Trombone Shorty guest spot "Overnight" finds the singer embracing this collision.
As I was organizing this blog post, I was surprised to walk into a D.C. Starbucks and find the record sitting directly in front of the register, ready to be purchased by an audience about as far from "Stays in Mexico" as you can get. In turn, this new audience moved from purchasing Uncaged to exploring previous efforts like the aforementioned The Foundation, pushing that record to the top of Billboard Catalog Albums chart and the live Pass the Jar.
At the same time, beyond the bluegrass fiddles that endear the band to Jazzfest or the overpriced coffee crowds and the extended jams that fit right in at the Phish-headlined Bonnaroo, it doesn't seem far-fetched to suggest that this record has reached so many people in part because, to paraphase that "Knee Deep," pop has its mind on a permanent vacation more now than at any point in recent memory. After all, what group of artists, DJs, and producers have turned the getaway into a way of life more successfully than those who brought four-on-the-floor Eurohouse off of the island resort and onto everyday radio? If the EDM-inclusive playlist that warmed the crowd for Lady Antebellum's recent Radio City Musical performance is any indication, audiences have no problem listening to both.

 

Zac Brown Criticized by Little People of America

Zac Brown Criticized by Little People of America for ‘Midget Bowling’

 

From here forward, Zac Brown should probably stay away from controversial forms of recreation. The singer made headlines earlier this week when he went ‘midget bowling’ — which literally involves throwing a willing little person down a slip-and-slide lane into some pins — but now, he’s facing backlash from the Little People of America.
When the non-profit organization, which provides support and information to people with dwarfism, caught wind of the Zac Brown Band singer’s antics at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota last weekend, they were upset. ‘The Wind’ hitmaker teamed up with a little person named Short Sleeve Sampson, and together, the pair earned a strike when Brown slid Sampson down a greasy bowling lane toward 10 pins, which was caught on camera.
While Sampson was an eager participant in the ‘sport,’ Little People of America still gave Zac Brown a virtual slap on the hand for taking part in ‘midget bowling.’
“Little People of America does not endorse any activity in which a person of short stature is used as an object rather than regarded as a competitor, in a ‘sporting event’” a rep from the organization told TMZ. “We believe that such practices are a direct insult to the equality of people with dwarfism, grounded in a respect for basic human dignity.”
After the fact, Sampson spoke up in the singer’s defense, calling in to TMZ Live to insist that the game wasn’t such a big deal — and he wasn’t the only little person to show support of Brown.
“There’s no reason to give Zac Brown a hard time,” said James, a little person who called in from New York. “If it’s Sampson’s prerogative is to be hired as a human bowling ball, then that’s his prerogative. There aren’t many job opportunities out there for people of our stature, and I think that’s Sampson’s prerogative.”
Somehow, we think next time Zac Brown is invited to play midget bowling, he will probably decline.