Ah yes, the joy of being an opening act

Being an opening act can be a matter of extremes.
You get a small space on a big stage, a brief set in a long day. You see lots of people, few of them interested in seeing you.
“We’ve all been in that position of (facing people who) not only don’t know who we are, but don’t care,” Keith Urban recalled in a Zoom press conference. “We’ve got to try and grab them in that minimal amount of time.”
Now he’s at the other end, in “The Road.”
The 90-minute opener (9 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 19) ends with a song by Urban — whom the crowd came to see. Before that, a dozen contestants do one song each, while Blake Shelton (shown here) and Keith Urban watch. Both of them know the turf.
Urban recalls “several years of just grinding and grinding it out” in his native Australia and then in Nashville, where Kix Brooks discovered him “at this crappy place called Jack’s Guitar Bar, with shag carpeting.”
And Shelton? He was opening for Lone Star … or, more specifically, opening for Jamie O’Neill, who was opening for Lone Star.
“I’d had one single and it was just coming out on the chart,” he recalled. “And I was given 20 minutes to perform (on) like a three-foot stage.”
There was no sound check … and sometimes that 20 minutes was cut in half.
That’s life for an opener. As Mary Chapin Carpenter once wrote in a song:
“You don’t get a soundcheck
“‘Cause you’re not worth the time
“You’re gonna have to face it, you’re no better than slime
“You don’t know me, I’m the opening act.”
Sometimes, opening acts graduate. Urban has had 18 songs reach No. 1 on the country-airplay chart; Shelton has had about 30. (Carpenter, incidentally, has gone on to win five Grammys.)
And often, they don’t. “I’m still an opening artist,” Gretchen Wilson said. Such experiences, she said, help make these three -Urban, Shelton and her — “so compassionate (with) the contestants.”
She’s called the “stage manager” and offers advice to all the contestants. Shelton produces the show, along with Taylor Sheridan (the “Yellowstone” producer) and Urban.
Shelton and Urban have judged on “The Voice” and “American Idol,” respectively, but this experience for contestants this time is different.
They’re not “in the TV studio with a prompted audience,” Shelton said. They’re in raucous places, working as strangers. Then they’re back on the bus.
“It’s kind of crowded,” Wilson said. “You get to know each other very well. Sometimes, you get to know them too well.”
That’s the opening-act experience, times 12. And at the end of it, one of them might become a star.