Stagecoach Day 2: Carrie Gets Shoeless, Chris Stapleton Gets Hairy, Fogerty Gets Busy

(Carrie Underwood performs at Stagecoach 2016. Photo: Rich Fury/Invision/AP)

The desert has a funny way of getting people to do things they normally wouldn’t. Even the people in the spotlight at the 10th annual Stagecoach country music festival, which had its hump day Saturday in Indio, California. The winds kicked up in a big way, and suddenly some of the performers were throwing caution to them.

“I’m gonna do something I said I’d never do onstage,” declared Carrie Underwood, the second day’s late-night headliner. Probably the entire sold-out audience of 75,000 had been obsessed with how she managed to frenetically pace around on those spike heels of hers without doing some serious damage to herself. Turns out she’d become obsessed, too, as the set wore on. “I feel like these shoes are keeping me from getting down, and I want to get down,” she announced, getting barefoot, to huge cheers. “My feet are gonna be nasty after this!”

At Stagecoach, a little nastiness among friends is highly acceptable, given the wear and tear of three days of serious tromping. Unlike most of the audience, Underwood was probably not medicating her blisters with alcohol.

Earlier on the Mane Stage, it was the weather compelling Chris Stapleton to adopt a new look. Since the release of his freshman Traveller album, Stapleton hasn’t really been seen without his trademark straw hat. But as “Nobody to Blame” kicked in at the beginning of his early evening set, his backup singer and wife, Morgane, gently placed her hand on his chest as she seemed to offer him some counsel. All of a sudden, she was removing his hat and handing it to a roadie, obviously convinced it would blow off. And for the next 50 minutes the crowd got to see the longhaired Stapleton like most had never seen him before. Morgane occasionally came over to brush her husband’s flowing locks out of his face, but gave up during the intense jamming that ended “Outlaw State of Mind,” as Stapleton came to look like the Addams Family’s Cousin Itt turned guitar hero.

Over on the Mustang stage, there were fewer physical transformations… unless you want to count the makeup of the tent itself, which had never been fuller in Stagecoach’s 10 years of existence than it was for John Fogerty, who had hundreds of people listening from outside the confines of hangar in addition to the thousands packed inside. Preceding him, Lee Ann Womack also managed to fill the massive tent, which typically sits three-quarters empty for most of the day as attendees are reluctant to leave the lawn chairs parked in front of the Mane Stage.

Fogerty is in a happy tradition of classic rock bookings that had the similarly not-entirely-country ZZ Top headlining the tent last year, with nearly the same draw. The ex-Creedence frontman was returning to Stagecoach for the first time since 2008 and seems to have a liking for the desert, as the tent’s big screens preceded his appearance with an advertisement for a Vegas residency he has coming up. If you were a betting person, you might gamble on whether Fogerty will be able to project as much pure glee at those shows as he did at Stagecoach, with some of his joy surely coming from the opportunity to trade guitar licks with his highly capable son, Shane Fogerty.

Womack’s set emphasized material from her recent turn toward the even rootsier sounds of Americana, including the title track of her 2014 release, The Way I’m Livin’, with its memorable refrain, “If I ever get to heaven, it’s a doggone shame.” But the set inevitably ended with the country/AC crossover hit to end all AC/crossover hits, “I Hope You Dance.” They did… as space allowed.

Back on the Mane Stage, the Band Perry was back at it after having played Stagecoach a mere two years ago. Their third album has been delayed while they negotiate for a new label after parting ways with Big Machine following the release of a teaser single last year, “Live Forever.” The crossover direction of that tune proved slightly controversial – “If I Die Pop,” anyone? – but the trio were hardly backing off it, proudly declaring that the song had just been selected as the official number of Team USA at the 2016 summer Olympics. They played two other songs from the unreleased third album, as well, including one that had unusually sultry lyrics — “Let’s turn off all these lights… I just want to stay in the dark” — yet sounded even more pop-anthemic in style than “Live Forever,” if that’s possible.

And now, a day 2 covers roundup:

* An old soul at age 23, Mo Pitney covered recent Big Machine signing and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees Cheap Trick’s "I Want You to Want Me,” giving the Empire Polo Field its Budokan moment. Pitney, one of country’s most promising freshman artists, was not the first artist of the day to cover Merle Haggard. He was beat to it in the afternoon by Jamestown Revival, who put their luscious harmonies to work on “Silver Wings.” However, Pitney became the first and presumably only artist of the festival to precede his Hag cover — “Big City,” in this instance — with a song about the late legend: “I Met Merle Haggard Today.” It immortalizes in song the sole unforgettable line that Haggard ever spoke to the up-and-comer two years ago: “Pleasure to meet you, Mo.”

* Two acts performed Waylon Jennings’s 1979 hit “I Ain’t Living Long Like This”: Chris Stapleton, who includes it as a staple of his nightly set… and Rodney Crowell, who wrote and was first to record it in the late ‘70s. You were left wishing one artist might have joined the other’s stage to sing it as a duet, but even if that had occurred to anyone involved, that would have been difficult, seeing how Crowell’s and Stapleton’s sets were overlapping.

* Crowell drove his set into the home plate with an epic version of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” successfully prompting the enthusiastic crowd to sing many of the song’s approximately 6,178 lines.

* An unlikely cover Fogerty somehow worked into his set amid the nonstop array of CCR hits: Van Halen’s instrumental “Eruption.”

* Newcomer Caitlyn Smith might have seemed to have been covering Meghan Trainor’s top 10 pop hit “Like I’m Gonna Lose You,” but she had a pretty solid right to it — she co-wrote it.

* As always, the Band Perry did Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls,” with Kimberly Perry changing the “they” to “we” — a disingenuous line at this point, given how the audience marveled at how her outfit flattered the most toned bare country midriff this side of Shania Twain.

* Underwood is one of the few people in the world who could cover “I Will Always Love You” at this late date and get away with it. And now, foot fetishists will always love her back.

Yahoo’s live stream of the Stagecoach country music festival concludes Sunday here.