Annual Kenny Chesney Concert Headache in Pittsburgh Shows Some Improvement
For the last two years, the annual Kenny Chesney concert at Pittsburgh’s Heinz Field on the city’s North Shore has resulted in awe-inspiring images of the trash accumulated by tailgaters arriving early in the morning and drinking to excess before the concert even begins, and jaw-dropping tallies for the amount of arrests, citations, and paramedic activity necessary by city police and EMS personnel. The annual concert has been the unofficial pop country kickoff party for a summer concert season filled with fights, arrests, citations, deaths, rapes, hospitalizations, ambulance rides, and other issues for what used to be the most family-friendly genre in America.
READ: From Checklist to Bro-Country: The Subversion of Country Music
Kenny Chesney has played the same Heinz Field event for many years, and the tailgating scene grew to a fevered pitch in 2013 when pictures went public of how Chesney fans left the parking lot and 70 arrests were made. The concert sparked local outrage at the way the grounds were left and the amount of money necessary for cleanup, and a national debate about the behavioral descent at country music concerts.
Then in 2014, even though Chesney took a year off as the headliner and Luke Bryan filled in, multiple Pittsburgh news outlets were specifically stationed on the scene to report on any potential problems, and an aggressive plan by organizers to hand out trash bags to attendees as they entered the grounds, the scene was still one of trashed parking lots and many issues for police and EMS personnel to sort out.
So how did the 2015 installment of the annual concert go?
There was still plenty of trash around, EMS officials say they receive around 170 calls due to mostly alcohol-related issues, 10 arrests were made, including one of a man who threw a chair at officers and had to be tazed, 17 citations for underage drinking and 8 other citations were handed out by police. But overall the scene seemed a little less chaotic, aided by the decision to not open the parking to tailgaters 3 hours later than previous years, and rain showers that cooled off concertgoers. It was certainly nothing to be proud of, but it did show improvement from previous years.
“We really appreciate their behavior and the most important thing is we appreciate how they behaved before the show, after the show and how they helped clean up,” said Pittsburgh Chief of Operations Guy Costa. “We required every parking lot to have a significant number of port-o-Johns. I believe there was over 100 port-o-Johns in the North Shore area, we required every parking lot operator to have trash bins in their parking lot.”
There was still a sizable amount of cleanup by the looks of the pictures WTAE snapped of the tailgating portion of the parking lot, but the scene was not as bad as previous years. Hopefully this bodes well for the upcoming summer concert season after a 2014 where seemingly every weekend was greeted with headlines about the amount of arrests and other incidents at mainstream country music concerts.
May 31, 2015 @ 6:53 pm
What is the world coming to? You go to a fight and a Kenny Chesney concert breaks out!
May 31, 2015 @ 7:15 pm
Don’t be fooled – Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia provide us with some hardcore rednecks. Much more devilish than what we have in my neck of the woods in Alabama.
May 31, 2015 @ 7:21 pm
Well, given that Northerners (particularly Midwesterners) drink a lot more than Southerners, and so the fact that Northern rednecks are more hardcore does not surprise me 😉
June 1, 2015 @ 6:21 am
Well, outside of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania may as well be Alabama.
June 1, 2015 @ 1:02 pm
I’ve been to Pennsylvania. That observation by Carville is flat out untrue, by both cultural and political measures.
May 31, 2015 @ 8:04 pm
Who are the openers for Chesney on this Fury Road Tour anyways? With this level of violence I can only guess that the opening acts had names like McBride, Pickler and Underwood! What other artists would have Sons of Anarchy type hellions like this for fans????
As for me, I am only going to Mikel Knight shows from now on where I don’t have to be worried about being ripped apart limb from limb by marauding bands of Chesney fans!
May 31, 2015 @ 10:21 pm
wunse agin a bunch of yankees arested at acountry music concert in a northern sity. Im gettin tired of hereing about a bunch of yankees that dont no how to behave at a country music concert. Ive had it.
June 1, 2015 @ 9:28 am
Plz space you letters
June 8, 2015 @ 5:20 am
Wunse agin? You sound like a 4 year old
June 1, 2015 @ 6:22 am
Considering the problems really ramped up when the shale gas industry took off and there was a sudden influx of Texas and Oklahoma license plates around here I wouldn’t necessarily give all of the credit to Pennsylvania/Ohio/West Virginia rednecks.
June 3, 2015 @ 9:01 am
In the past two years, I’ve gone to concerts by Jason Isbell, George Strait, Wade Bowen, Hayes Carll, and Dwight Yoakam and behavior like this never occurs.