Tyler Jorgenson

My lovely wife and I went to the Garth Brooks concert in Los Angeles last night with a couple of our good friends. There was a period in my adolescence that I only listened to Garth and so I own all of his albums and know all of his songs, even the Christmas and obscure ones. Being at his concert was a pretty amazing experience. I haven’t been to many concerts so I am sure I am describing phenomena that are common to stars but I was amazed by the amount of energy that flowed through the Staples Center and directed at Mr. Brooks. We had seats that I really think were underrated. We were in the up stage left corner (any drama geeks reading this know where that is, for the rest of you we were in the back right corner). This location allowed an excellent vantage point to see a lot of what the performers got to see. I was a little overwhelmed when I looked out at the crowd that was cheering so energetically for Garth. To think that one person could generate that much positive attention is impressive. I’m not much of a singer, but I would love to be in front of a crowd like that with people cheering for me. I don’t know why they would but the experience seems worth striving for. The greatest thing for me was to see how genuine Garth appeared to be. I imagine that many performers get to a point where they begin to expect praise from large throngs of fans, but to Mr. Brooks it was as though he was utterly surprised and appreciative every time the crowd went wild for him. In his last of 2 encores he brought up a concession stand worker that had snuck backstage to meet him and had asked him what it was like to be in front of all those people. He brought Alva up and had her stand center stage and experience the view from his perspective. After singing ‘my song’ The River he had her come back to center stage and asked the entire audience to take out their cameras and take their picture. I had seen this amazing display earlier in the night when Garth and Trisha Yearwood were singing and got close to each other. The entire venue went aglow with bursting flash bulbs. Amazing!

After the concert the traffic in our parking structure was at a stand still so I looked up nearby restaurants on google maps on my phone. The closest place was Kiki’s, just a couple blocks away. We headed over by foot in the drizzling rain. When we got close to the corner I spied Kiki’s, a quaint little taco stand that although it had an ‘A’ in the window was most certainly closed. Blasted google maps! We walked back and drove to Clearwood’s Northwood Inn where we threw some peanut shells on the ground.