Warmth flows from Reba, Brooks & Dunn, even in chilly setting

Reba McEntire, Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn submitted to a news conference before their Friday show at Caesars Palace, and we asked them:

“When you listen to today’s country radio, does it sound different than the ’90s sound? Or are the people just younger?”

“Sure, it’s different,” McEntire said, “But when when Loretta (Lynn) and Tammy (Wynette) were listening to my songs in the ’90s, it was different than what they did in their decade.”

Well, yeah. But that was the ’70s versus the rockin’ “new country” explosion. We asked again: Doesn’t today’s country seem like less of a quantum leap and more of a continuation?

Brooks agreed he and Dunn “turned up our guitars pretty loud,” noted that “Garth (Brooks) was catching the same hell back then that acts are catching now” and pointed out that Jason Aldean has been covering Brooks & Dunn’s 2005 stomper “Hillbilly Deluxe.”

“I think we might have started some bad trouble, but I feel like we had a few records out there that might have been on the front of that wave,” Brooks concluded.

A couple of hours later, the three were on the Colosseum stage, trying to sing above loud guitars and framed in dozens of moving lights on a stark, metallic set.

Maybe no one made it a spoken mission statement, but this arena-style show sure did seem like it aimed to step in right next to Aldean, and not be some Grand Ole Opry-style tutorial about where his sound came from.

Two guitarists indulged in some down ‘n’ dirty dueling, before Brooks jumped in on his harmonica to build it into “Rock My World (Little Country Girl).”

McEntire thanked fans for hanging in there “the last 107 years,” but then introduced her anthemic new single “Going Out Like That” like a record-label guy would to radio programmers: “A toe-tapper with a sassy attitude.”

She joined right in with her reunited buddies on their hits, such as the opening “Play Something Country.” But she later told the crowd that Brooks & Dunn had all the “kick-ass” hits, while her catalog is full of “these sad, slow, kick-ass songs.”

The answer was to combine the ballads into a medley. But even here, ’90s hit “You Lie” got juiced up with some electric guitar blues.

For a while it even seemed like they were trying too hard. The booming 10-piece band muddied the vocals, not at all characteristic of the usually pristine Colosseum.

The chilly stage design dangled metal coils over the trio like a giant Slinky, and the moving lights probed the crowd like the “Close Encounters” spaceship, usually leaving the backing band in silhouette.

But you put these three on a stage together, and you’re gonna have a hard time draining it of warmth.

You might have heard, this isn’t their first rodeo. There’s something very genuine in the little stories that popped up between songs about their past tours, or about the time McEntire guilted Dunn into buying a horse for his daughter.

It’s become a concert cliche to come down front and pull up stools for an acoustic segment. But this time, about an hour in, you really felt like the three had come down out of the light to talk to us.

Suddenly we could hear their voices in startling clarity, too. Brooks took the lead for “You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone,” after an amusing setup when he explained his fears of McEntire and Dunn grabbing all the “songs that matter” and turning it into “the Ronnie and Ma-Reba show.”

They followed this up with a great version of “If You See Him/If You See Her,” their gimmicky “threesome” hit of 1998, now stripped of melodrama and the rare moment when we wanted to listen instead of sing along.

There were a few more of those listening times, such as Dunn’s soulful lead on “Believe,” when the horseshoe framing of the stage took on stained-glass hues.

But it’s not like the sing-along was something to fight. Not in a show that had to leave some hits out of about 100 minutes.

It had been a long time since people got to hear McEntire’s “Turn On the Radio” or Brooks & Dunn’s breakout hit “Boot Scootin’ Boogie,” here punctuated on the giant rear screen with photos of neon signs from fabled honky tonks around the country. (Balcony sitters had to settle for conceptual video throughout; not one close-up of the stars.)

And it was pretty amazing to see a circular curtain drop to reveal the 60-year-old McEntire in her red dress, singing “Fancy” (Bobbie Gentry’s rewrite of her own “Ode to Billie Joe”) just as she did in the bygone original showroom on the other side of Caesars. But it only seemed like a throwback to those fans who remember it as one.

Back to the news conference. Dunn said his youngest daughter — an “avid, avid” fan of today’s country and “probably my biggest critic” — declared after the trio’s first show, “I enjoy hearing those songs as much now as I ever did.”

Yes, country radio has changed, he agreed. “But there’s always going to be that dynamic in music, art, whatever you do; if it’s classic its going to stick and will stand the test of time.”

Read more from Mike Weatherford at bestoflasvegas.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com.