The internet speed has not improved and I am still struggling to get photos and videos uploaded. It takes an hour to upload 12 photos. I am anxious to get to a hotel that has a better internet connection. The internet seems fast enough for everything except uploading photos.
At 4:00 pm we got on the C-Train for our last ride into the city of Calgary. We are going to another concert this evening, but we wanted to spend some time visiting Weadickville and do some last minute Stampede shopping.
Weadickville is a recreation of a frontier town in the wild West and is named such, as a tribute to Guy Weadick, the founder of the Calgary Stampede.
It is hard to move through the crowds so we headed up to the Skywalk for an overhead view of the goings on at the Stampede. It has been reported that the crowds are in excess of 100,000 people per day.
The zip line looks like a good way to avoid the crowds and get from one end of the grounds to the other.
The skywalk lead us right to the Saddledome where we have seats for tonights concert.
The opening band is “The Band Perry” followed by “Brad Paisley”. This is the view from our seats.
The Band Perry opened with a song titled “Sugar Sugar”, this is not at all the Archie’s version. The Band Perry are 3 siblings – Kimberly, Reid and Neil.
They continued to warm up the crowd with their other hits, If I Die Young, Postcards from Paris and several cover songs from other artists.
Brad Paisley followed onstage after all his equipment was set up. This stop in Calgary is part of Brad Paisley’s “Virtual Reality Tour” I am expecting this show to be visually stunning with stage lighting and electronic graphics on screens and I expect it to be exceptionally loud.
Country music of today is not what our parents listened to. It is more of a cross between a country song with lyrics that tell a story along with some steel guitars, fiddles and banjos added in to “countryfie” it and then mix in a southern rock band sound and combine it all into todays “New Country”
I wasn’t going to be disappointed judging by the opening graphics and the volume of the opening song “Camouflage”
There were 3 huge screens set up at the back of the stage.
He sang “The World” with a large laser globe floating high above the stage.
Another favourite was “Welcome to the Future”.
If you know the song, the lyrics are about comparing yesteryears to today, such as having to be driven to the arcade as a kid so he could play pacman and now he has it on his phone. A giant pacman was on the screen and then it broke to a shot of Brad showing his phone with the game loaded and ready.
Brad sang this song at the White House for the Obama’s a year or so ago. For those of you who are not familiar with this song, here is a link to the video so you can watch along as Brad performs Welcome to the Future for the Obama’s.
Brad’s library of songs is very deep and he just keeps singing hit after hit. “This is Country Music” is another favourite and during the song he signed his guitar and handed it to a little boy in the audience. That guitar is either going to wind up on eBay or the kid is going to be inspired and learn how to play it and always cherish it.
During the singing of “This is Country Music” images of past country superstars were shown on the large screen.
The music was loud and the crowd was even louder as Brad kept the hits coming. He was onstage continuously for 2 hours.
The duet song “Remind Me” that Brad sings with Carrie Underwood almost took the roof off the building when Carrie Underwood came out to sing with Brad and the crowd just went wild.
Unknown to about 90% of us, Carrie Underwood was a holograph… after all this is a virtual reality tour, but it sure was realistic and everyone was convinced that she actually was onstage.
Brad was joined in another duet song “Whiskey Lullaby” by Kimberly Perry, which he originally recorded with Allison Kraus. This is the real Kimberly Perry, not a hologram.
A new song that we had never heard till this evening and it was the only song we were not familiar with, was “Working on a Tan”. It has a “Beach Boy’s” feel to it and the backdrop videos were full of bikini clad girls, including scenes from Beach Party staring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon.
For the song “American Saturday Night” he changed into a Calgary Flames shirt and changed up the lyrics to sing Canadian Saturday Night (instead of American Saturday Night) and inserted several lyric changes such as “Live from Calgary (instead of live from New York) it’s Saturday Night” and indeed it is a Saturday night and we are in Calgary. The crowd did not appreciate the American Flag waving on the large screen though, perhaps he should have tweaked the video for this performance.
Over 13,000 fans filled the Stadium and a great time was had by everyone.
This was a great wrap up concert to our Calgary Stampede vacation. The stampede is over tomorrow and we will be moving onwards from Calgary in a few days.
We don’t have a clue where we are going next, but we will spend the next couple of days deciding where to go and working on our maps and routes and hotel reservations.
To see all of todays photos, you can find them on our FLICKR site.
Looks like you guys are having entirely too much fun. However, the concept of "Stampede shopping" sounds kind of scary.
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