Can Shakira fill a stadium in Fresno? We're about to find out
Plus, was Grizzly Fest ahead of its time?
For those of us in the business this stuff, the big music news in Fresno this week was Shakira.
Even before Live Nation officially announced that the Colombian singer had added a Fresno date to her Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran world tour, there was this flier floating around the social media inter ether.
It was either A.) a fake or B.) a flub up from someone in the logistical chain who had access but wasn’t supposed to share.
Between the artists and venues and media partners, there are a lot of moving parts when announcing these kind of large-scale shows and sometimes things slip. I myself, had a story accidently publish days early, against embargo, and pre-announced Paramore’s Save Mart Center show in 2013.
So, it happens.
And it can make for a good bit of mystery and speculation, especially in a case like this, where the news seemed a bit far fetched.
I mean, Shakira is on a stadium tour. She’s playing venues like Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas and Oracle Park in San Francisco.
Fresno seemed suspect on that list.
And yet, here we are. Shakira is set to perform Aug. 7 at Valley Children’s Stadium. The concerts follows two nights at SoFi Stadium, to give a sense of things.
Valley Children’s Stadium, the old Bulldog Stadium, is home of Fresno State football and a place that has historically been fairly sports specific. Until this week, it wasn’t even on my radar as a possible concert/entertainment venue.
The last non-sporting event at the stadium was Billy Graham’s Central Valley Crusade in 2001.
To be fair, that was a big deal. It ran four nights and drew some 200,000 people.
But concerts of this scale are rare for Fresno.
You’d have to go back to the days of the Police playing Ratcliffe Stadium, and even then that was just a few shows in the summer of 1983 … Chukchansi Park has had some success with concerts tours and one-off festivals and the like.
Most notably, the Regional Mexican band Marca MP, with Peso Pluma as an opener, sold-out at 21,097 tickets in 2023.
But Valley Children’s Stadium has a listed capacity of 40,000-plus for football games, which doesn’t include the on-field seating that looks like it will be added as part of Shakira’s production setup. Which means, if things go well, if people buy tickets and show up, this could be the largest single-night concert in the city’s history.
And it’s not me saying that.
That’s from the music industry trade publication Pollstar.
Blake Shelton, Pitbull party in Fresno’s Woodward Park
In other concert news, Woodward Park is apparently now open game for large-scale music parties, which seems odd for those of us who remember the trouble that the Grizzly Fest organizers went through trying to host their event at north Fresno’s most popular regional park.
Maybe Grizzly Fest was just ahead of its time, or maybe there was something in the line up of bands it was bringing into the park or that they were calling the thing a music festival, but it is interesting (to say the least) that Boots in the Park (which bills itself as an all-day country music festival) managed to find a home at the park without all the public hoop-jumping the Grizzly Fest went through.
And that it is now expanding its reach.
This week, it announced Blake Shelton and Pitbull would headline a two-day run of concerts September 13 and 14. The all-day events will transform the park with “art installations, bars and vendors,” according to ABC30. Tickets are on sale now, with a full line up of artist expected soon.
That’s it for this week. Remember you can now hear me on the Homegrown Show Sundays at 8 p.m. on New Rock 104.1 FM. Tonight I’m in studio by my lonesome. But I’ll have new music from Brujoz, Low Spell and Heusera. Follow my other writing at The Fresno Bee. If you have anything you think I need to be looking at or listening to, feel free to let me know: jtehee@gmail.com