Stagecoach Day 3 Recap: RaeLynn Salutes Gwen, While Luke Bryan Is Working for the Weeknd

Luke Bryan performs at Stagecoach (Photo: Mark Davis/Getty Images)

“Team Blake!” yelled RaeLynn, getting her Stagecoach set into gear Sunday with one of the songs associated with her ascendancy on The Voice. And she appears to still be on that team to the extent it seems clear that, in the Blake/Miranda split, it was Shelton who got custody of RaeLynn in the divorce, as it were.

She didn’t bring any special guests on for her afternoon Main Stage set, to the disappointment of fans who’d been hoping that RaeLynn hanging out with Shelton and Gwen Stefani the previous night at the Radio Disney Awards might have augured for a Stagecoach hookup. But the young singer made it obvious how much she’s in thrall to her Auntie (or should it be Stepmama?) Gwen. Saying she was “gonna do a little Throwback Thursday,” RaeLynn — who turns 22 on Wednesday — launched into Stefani’s golden oldie “Hella Good.”

They say that what makes a song country is the person singing it, and if there’s any truth to that, “Hella Good” became very much a country song in RaeLynn’s hands, despite the band’s fealty to the original pop arrangement. As you can see from the excerpt from Yahoo’s live stream here, every syllable that comes out of RaeLynn’s mouth is so hilariously, exceptionally Southern that she makes “Hella” sound like something that emerged from deep in the holler.

At Stagecoach, performers don’t have to worry about showing up wearing the same outfit. (That’s kind of a given, with so many ballcaps in play.) They have to worry about showing up with the same cover songs in their set. That happened when RaeLynn did Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” as part of her afternoon set, only to find Little Big Town doing an a cappella arrangement of the same song in the evening. That’s not quite as coincidental as the hour the previous day that found both Chris Stapleton and Rodney Crowell doing the latter’s “I Ain’t Living Long Like This” in overlapping sets, but close.

The weirdest trend that emerged over the course of Stagecoach 2016’s final day? The oddity of country artists doing covers of actual country songs. Beyond the multiple Dolly homages, there was that moment toward the end of the night when headliner Luke Bryan brought Dustin Lynch out onstage and they collaborated on Brooks & Dunn’s “Play Something Country,” followed by the seemingly spontaneous addition of Jason Aldean’s “Play Something Country.”

But, with apologies to B&D, “play(ing) something country” is way more the exception than the rule when it comes to festival covers. After all, when Bryan brought Little Big Town out to share his stage just prior to Lynch, the fivesome did Ed Sheeran’s “We Found Love,” along with a bit of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” And during LBT’s own set, they found room for an off-the-chain redo of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” and a chorale of Prince’s “When Doves Cry.”

Following the Friday spotlight moment that had Sam Hunt ceding his stage to Snoop Dogg and G-Eazy for a spell, Sunday’s lineup had one more instance of a guest from outside the genre joining the proceedings. Jay Popoff and Jeremy Popoff of the band Lit put in a surprise appearance toward the close of Lynch’s set to join him on their 1999 alt-rock hit “My Own Worst Enemy.” With his pleasingly anachronistic Stetson, Lynch may be the last of the so-called hat acts in country, but he can put on a ballcap, too, in spirit if not reality.

Aside from Bryan’s ecstatically received, festival-closing performance, the most crowd-pleasing sets of the day might have been over in the Mustang tent, by a pair of bands who haven’t changed their sets up too much for 40 years for anything, least of all any contemporary covers. Those would be the Doobie Brothers and the Marshall Tucker Band, both of whom achieved the rare feat of filling the massive, hangar-like structure (albeit with not quite the overflow crowd outside it that John Fogerty drew the previous night).

It was recently announced that the promoters behind Stagecoach and Coachella are looking to add a third festival to their spring lineup next year, the new one comprised entirely of classic rock artists like Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and Neil Young. It’s as if they’re already having a smaller scale dry run for that, though, in the Mustang tent, where Stagecoach bookers have been having a lot of success putting in mid-level veterans like the Doobies and Fogerty (and, in recent years past, ZZ Top and Gregg Allman) whose connection to country is more implied than overt.

Ponytailed Marshall Tucker Band singer Doug Gray (the only holdover from the 1970s lineup) addressed the genre question during their set, telling the crowd his group had long played at rock, jazz, and country festivals and “we still don’t know what kind of band we are.” But with a plurality of today’s country acts claiming vintage Southern rock as a primary touchstone, the MTB has as much right to the country mantle as anyone who never got airplay in the format. The Doobies didn’t waste any time philosophizing over genre distinctions between their hits, but co-founder Tom Johnston did accurately describe one deep cut as “hoedown music,” before also correctly assessing that the following number was essentially R&B.

The Tucker Band’s Gray seemed to be having as good a time as anybody onstage all day. He interrupted the trademark song “Can’t You See” to conduct an audience sing-along of “Why Can’t We Be Friends,” which he claimed was a first for one of their sets, inspired by the Stagecoach love he was feeling. At another point, picking out for attention one young lady behind one of the walls of hay bales serving as a buffer between the audience and stage. “I ain’t had but one girl hide behind the hay bale in a long time,” he said. “She knew who was coming out the other side.” With the audience whooping it up over his rascally remarks, Gray added, “At 68 years old, you supposed to have a damn good time, baby. You ain’t supposed to sit around!”

At 68 years old, Gray is also 40 years (if not more) above the median age of Stagecoach attendees. There is still service paid to the concept of this as a family-friendly festival, with a petting zoo, stage, and crafts area aimed exclusively at kids. (Well, almost exclusively. What drunk girl doesn’t want to pet a goat?) But it’s clear that Stagecoach has skewed younger than any other country festival, resembling a typical spring break in its demographics than, say, an average CMA Festival audience. The transformation could hardly be more complete for a format that once worried that its audience was aging up and out, a fear that seems like very ancient history amid all the bare male chests and ubiquitous Daisy Dukes.

The party aesthetic was certainly visible onstage as well as off. Dustin Lynch took the occasion to premiere a new song from the sophomore album he’s working on. Its title: “Party Song,” with the promise to “get you up in my truck/Tearin’ it up… Can I get a whoo-whoo?” If a computer assimilated everything about bro-country into one tune, it might have resulted in this, coming to a radio near you in the summer of 2017, most probably.

When Blake Shelton drinks onstage, you get the feeling that he might be downing colored water, the way Dean Martin used to while playing drunk. But there was definitely no pretending going on in the imbibing Bryan did during his climactic set. When he brought Little Big Town out, they did shots of Patron, with Kimberly Schlapman literally pouring it into his mouth out of a miniaturized Red Solo cup. “The best thing about singing with Little Big Town is that everything you sing sounds good as s—,” Bryan noted… and then they proved it by improvising a group chorus of a soul refrain that went: “Philip’s gonna throw up.”

When Lynch came out to join him, they switched to chugging Lite beers drawn out of a cooler at center stage. And more than one. When Bryan hollered “Who likes to hunt?,” you might have feared that a tragic shooting-while-plastered accident was about to occur, but fortunately, he was only leading into “Huntin’, Fishin’, and Lovin’ Every Day.” If that described a lifestyle that not everyone in southern California is personally familiar with, his set-ending cover of the Weeknd’s “I Can’t Feel My Face” captured a part of the lifestyle that knows no state boundaries.

Not all the performers on the bill were indulging. At least, we’re pretty sure that 11-year-old show opener EmiSunshine was maintaining her abstinence, which served her well when the power went out in the Palomino tent and she showed off her sharp show-business chops by going down into the audience to play acoustically.