Fun-loving Brad Paisley gets in some serious riffs

PHOTOGRAPHER: Erica Miller

On Sunday evening, July 26th 2015, at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) country star Brad Paisley performed on stage with headliners Justin Moore and Mickey Guyton.

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Brad Paisley is one of country music’s biggest stars. He’s also its biggest jokester, known for campy videos and a mischievous nature.

When Paisley, on his Crushin’ It tour, opened his headlining set at Saratoga Performing Arts Center on Sunday night with “River Bank,” a song about simple summer pleasures, the 60-foot television screen behind him played a video featuring not just scantily clad people partying in a muddy river but also a trained squirrel on water skis being towed behind a miniature motorboat.

Paisley obviously doesn’t take himself very seriously, which is a significant part of his appeal. By the second song, “Water,” a full-service bar on stage filled up with people – lucky contest winners and VIPs who got to imbibe and watch the show from an unbeatable vantage point.

Aside from humor, one of the other features setting Paisley apart from the pop-country pack is his ferocious guitar playing. On “Moonshine in the Trunk,” he and fiddler Justin Williamson traded off on blazing-fast riffs, with a hillbilly hoedown feel, while standing on a walkway that extended from the stage into the crowd.

Plowing from one song to the next, Paisley turned the humor on himself during “Celebrity,” a satirical song about the trappings of fame. On the stage’s giant video screen, a bigheaded puppet modeled after Paisley got caught in various compromising situations.

“This Is Country Music” took a more serious approach, paying tribute to old-school country music.

For all his cleverness, Paisley’s music doesn’t escape some of the retrograde clichés that infect modern country music. “I’m Still a Guy,” which featured an appearance by opener Justin Moore, trafficked in tired gender stereotypes about the difference between metrosexuals and macho men.

But for every song that revisited good ol’ country boy tropes about pickup trucks and weekend fun, Paisley offered a song that stretched the boundaries a bit. “Ticks” was a memorable, jokey song about wanting to get close enough to someone to check them for the Lyme-plagued bugs, while “Another Saturday Night” made the sly point that so much of what we celebrate about America originated somewhere else.

Paisley sang a duet with country star Carrie Underwood via FaceTime on “Waitin’ on a Woman,” brought a little girl onstage to compete in a Mario Kart video game projected on the screen as he and Williamson traded wicked riffs on the instrumental “The Nervous Breakdown,” and sent the crowd home happy with an encore including his latest single “Crushin’ It.”

The white-cowboy-hat-wearing Justin Moore got the crowd whipped into patriotic fervor during his opening set featuring well-received songs like “Point at You” and “Small Town USA.” After he dedicated “Heaven Wasn’t So Far Away” to members of the American military, repeated chants of “USA, USA” broke out on the lawn.

Singer-songwriter Mickey Guyton kicked off the show with confessional songs like the self-empowering “Better Than You Left Me.”