“Thank you guys for coming to the Route 99 festival,” Dwight Yoakam said during his Saturday-evening set at the Route 91 Harvest country-music festival, and while he quickly corrected himself, the gaffe was emblematic of a first-year festival looking for a distinctive identity. An estimated 20,000 people flocked to the MGM Resorts Village, the repurposed parking lot across the street from the Luxor, and the response to the performances—led by headliners Blake Shelton, Miranda Lambert and Jason Aldean—was strong. But the mainstream-heavy lineup demonstrated the bland sameness of so much current country, which extended to a festival that did little to set itself apart from other big country-music events.
For most fans that probably didn’t make a difference, and the performers offered up exactly what the audience wanted. On Friday night, Shelton went past his scheduled end time to deliver a set full of hits, from his current single “Neon Light” all the way back to his very first release, “Austin.” The feel-good set had a few genuine moments, especially a solo acoustic performance of “Over You,” a song Shelton co-wrote with wife Miranda Lambert (she played it herself on Saturday) about the death of his brother.
Saturday’s lineup had the strongest performances (including Yoakam, Lambert and Ashley Monroe, whom early-arriving fans were lucky to see at 3 p.m.), but also some of the lineup’s most baffling choices, including two main-stage slots for performers who aren’t actually country stars, but play them on TV. Actors Clare Bowen and Charles Esten of ABC’s Nashville got 45 minutes each to fill with covers that ranged from uninspired (Esten’s “Born to Run” and “Lay Down Sally”) to atrocious (Bowen’s butchering of The Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done”), songs their characters have performed on the show, plus one or two originals.
Thankfully, Saturday wrapped up strongly, with Yoakam barreling through an hour-long set of honky-tonk gems, followed by Dierks Bentley building on his rock-star presence, riling up the significantly inebriated crowd with rowdy anthems like “Am I the Only One” (during which he challenged a fan to a beer-chugging contest), “Feel That Fire” and, of course, “Drunk on a Plane.”
Lambert was her typically charismatic, fiery self in her headlining set, bringing Pistol Annies bandmate Monroe out to duet on “Heart Like Mine,” dedicating the woman-done-wrong revenge anthem “Gunpowder & Lead” to her father, who was in the audience, and showcasing a range of songs that highlighted her winning mix of Nashville slickness (sappy mega-hit “The House That Built Me”) and raw authenticity (debut single “Kerosene”).
The day after Route 91 ended, Lambert and Shelton were announced as two of the headliners for next year’s Stagecoach festival in California, and future installments of Route 91 would do well to take some cues from that veteran festival, which offers a much more appealing mix of mainstream acts along with alt-country, Americana and bluegrass. It’s clearly not difficult to convince people to scoop up tickets to see Shelton, Lambert and Aldean. But a bill with lower-tier acts of the same caliber and a second stage offering up real variety (instead of the dregs of coattail-riding Nashville aspirants, playing to a nearly empty tent) would make for a stronger festival, one whose name everyone would remember.
