Bentley, Langley and Rice bring decades of country experience

The couches smell of worn leather. Their cushions sag like a sofa gathering dust in a Midwestern garage, right next to the beer fridge. A bag filled with pickleball equipment leaned against the armrest.

This bus has seen a lot. Bentley has toured with artists such as Carrie Underwood and George Strait over the past two decades. He has been nominated for dozens of awards and has played at The Mark five times, most recently in 2019.

But when the 48-year-old parked the bus there on Friday evening, the tour vehicle might as well have been a country music DeLorean, complete with time travel capabilities in the style of “Back to the Future.”

With the opening acts Ella Langley and Chase Rice, Bentley's “Gravel and Gold Tour” succeeded in bringing together the commercial past, present and future of the genre in one all-encompassing show.

The evening began with the future: Ella Langley.

The 25-year-old from Alabama is currently a meteor on country radio. Her breakout hit, the partially spoken collaboration with Riley Green, “You Look Like You Love Me,” is only a few months old and already has more than 80 million streams.

On Friday, Rice played the role of Green, stumbling and apologizing through the lyrics of his verse but nailing the chorus.

In a set lasting just 25 minutes, Langley's vocal talent was evident and her sense of humor was endearing – she took the stage to Rihanna's hit “Umbrella” (ella, ella, hey, hey, hey).

She easily juggled between boastfulness and separation sentimentality, was willing to portray herself as “beautiful in picture” in “Country Boy's Dream Girl”, but also painted the city blue with sadness in her stunning opening song.

After Langley left the stage, the tour bus (The DierksLorean?) turned the clock back ten years to the bro-country boom of the early 2010s.

During this time, Rice rose to fame, although the former college football player and “Survivor” contestant apparently had a guilty conscience.

“I started this thing called bro country,” he said before playing an acoustic version of the Florida Georgia Line hit “Cruise,” which Rice co-wrote. “That wasn't my intention.”

And that's the problem with a tour that comprehensively covers the history of country music: The genre is not without some flaws.

Rice's songs like “Eyes on You,” “Ready to Roll,” “Lonely If You Are,” and “Drinking Beer. Talking God. Amen.” sounded much cleaner. The lead guitar melodies were looped as if an EDM remix was lurking menacingly around the corner.

Rice really delivered with his cover versions. Two ubiquitous sing-alongs – “Simple Man” by Lynyrd Skynyrd and “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver – brought the place to its knees. He dedicated the former to his old tour mate Jelly Roll and the latter to his father, who had given Rice his first guitar in 2008 shortly before his death.

“I can honor my father every night by playing this,” he said.

Rice's more subdued originals, like “Oklahoma,” sounded like his best work. On “Way Down Yonder,” he brought up a 12-year-old in the audience celebrating his birthday and signing his hat while the boy stood there wide-eyed. And if that wasn't enough to tug at your heartstrings, he brought up his sweet black dog for “Bench Seat,” a sentimental piece about a dog who saves a friend of Rice's from suicidal thoughts.

The dog was carrying a backpack. Inside the backpack was beer. And somewhere in Nashville, a country music executive was smiling.

Rice too. The night was still young.

Wearing plain blue jeans, boots, a black collared shirt and later a backwards camouflage cap, Bentley opened his set with “Gold.” During the song's second chorus, he stood with his arms outstretched as if celebrating a touchdown.

Bentley's 28-song Gravel and Gold Tour setlist was full of catchy country songs about rural roots that just begged to be played on gravel so dusty it left a little amber on your jeans.

But mostly they felt like gold. Shiny, sharp, polished.

Bentley danced around the stage like a mascot and joked like a politician. He shouted out to teachers, held up a sign from a 9-year-old fan and played a montage of his crew members thanking the tour's unsung heroes. Bentley shared a beer with two visibly jaded drinkers and threw three dozen more cans at the too-sober fans in the front row.

It's easy to like the guy. But you can also tell he's done this before. The parts seemed rehearsed. I'm going to give Bentley some leeway though, as this tour is nearing the end of its second year. He knows what works.

“I think she's a girl from the Quad Cities,” Bentley said with a grin after covering Tom Petty's “American Girl.”

His eyes narrowed happily, as if he knew he'd won your vote. And he did. The Mark's electoral college vote was unanimous, as evidenced by the deafening ovation at the end of the show or the call-and-response participation in the addictive hit “Somewhere on A Beach.”

The music itself was solid, too. Guitarists Ben Helson and Charlie Worsham proved why Bentley calls his band the best in Nashville. A gentle use of pedal steel and fiddle was a nice accent. But above all, the band was as impressive as a clock. Consistent, reliable, necessary.

This includes Bentley's vocals, which were so punctual and tonal that I could have been convinced they were taken directly from the studio demos.

During the two-hour performance, the singer managed to park his time-traveling tour bus all over the American South.

He covered Alabama's “Mountain Man” and Garth Brooks' “Callin Baton Rouge” (with Worsham on vocals). He also mixed “Am I The Only One” with the late Toby Keith's classic “Red Solo Cup,” two crowd favorites that worked even better as a duo.

Bentley also credited Rice for “Gone” and Langley for “Different for Girls.” Despite Langley's solid performance, the latter was a low point, a breakup ballad full of condescending platitudes and country cliches.

During the encore song, “Drunk On A Plane,” Bentley dressed like a drunk pilot with carnival beads falling out of his pockets. It was as funny as a witty Southwest Airlines captain could be.

Sometimes what tastes good is what's easiest to get. But the best moments of the set were when Bentley's theatrics were completely toned down.

Like on “Black,” when he sang through a transparent video board with fluttering white lights, or on the sugary “Say You Do,” where constellations streamed across the giant video wall behind him.

The brief glimpses behind Bentley's 20-year-old armor felt significant.

On “I Hold On,” a tribute to Bentley's late father, the singer pointed to the sky at the end of the first verse with a “What's up, Dad?” Before “Living,” he talked about how almost every memory he's made this year was based on the same short piece of stage carpet. He compared it to days spent on tour buses. He didn't sleep much last night on the drive from Grand Rapids.

“I spend my days barely living,” he said.

But you could see Bentley come to life on stage, especially during the second encore when the night ended with the Razzle Dam being turned up to a million.

DierksLorean's last parking job was in the '90s, when Bentley's satirical country band Hot Country Knights played a medley of the decade's hits.

Electric keyboards balanced on upturned feet. There were synchronized kick dances, leopard-print vests, squirt lemonade stickers and mullet wigs.

Backstage, those outfits hung on a rack next to a Quad City Storm jersey. There, Bentley spoke about the Knights in the third person, as if they were just another band on the tour.

The entire encore consisted of a CD of the era's biggest hits bouncing along to the beat: “Heads Carolina, Tails California,” “Achy Breaky Heart,” “Man! I Feel Like a Woman,” “I Like It, I Love It” and more.

It was a blast, ending with the best cover of all, Brooks' sing-along “Friends in Low Places,” a song that predates Bentley's bus by nearly a decade.

By the way, this bus turned out to be a good metaphor for this Bentley tour.

After all, a vehicle doesn't stay on the road for 20 years if it doesn't impress with its durability. And although the DierksLorean hit a few low points in the country music canon on Friday night, it never broke down.