And so they returned.
From South Jersey and Philadelphia and regions beyond, an army of 35,000 raucous, stars and stripes-bearing country music fans flooded Wildwood this weekend for the fourth installment of the sprawling Barefoot Country Music Fest, which has commandeered the beach each summer since 2021.
The four-day, booze-soaked bacchanal kicked off Thursday night but didn’t get fully underway until Friday, where the fest’s first all-day lineup was headlined by Aussie hitmaker Keith Urban. Fellow country A-listers Kane Brown and Luke Bryan would lead Saturday and Sunday, respectively.
Friday also happened to be “red, white and blue” day, the mammoth fest’s most popular fashion theme — each day encourages different dress — as a sea of star-spangled supporters stumbled across the powdery Wildwood sand. We’re talking American flag hats, shirts, overalls, dresses, socks, boots, sunglasses, capes and stick-on tattoos, plus an untold amount of patriotic glitter spread across bare chests and cleavage. The imposing Ferris wheel overlooking the fest was, of course, colored to match.
As Barefoot has now built its reputation as not only New Jersey’s but the entire Northeast’s biggest summer country party — welcoming top-line acts like Carrie Underwood, Blake Shelton and Dan and Shay over the last few years — fans were ready to get rowdy. The Miller Lite (the fest’s main sponsor) tallboys were flowing, and the lines for the alcoholic slushie trucks were always robust (a frozen Blue Hawaiian is apparently worth the wait).
READ MORE: 2023 Barefoot review: Blake Shelton weathers the storm
And while this particular fest has been the unlucky target of thunderstorms in past years, Friday was all sun, easy breezes and a full, strawberry moon as Urban took the Miller Lite main stage for a 90-minute set. Donning a red flannel, torn blue jeans and the ugliest pair of chunky, white platform shoes I’ve ever seen — disparaging comments were made throughout the crowd; “what are those shoes, Keith?!” — Urban, 56, was in fine spirits, leading wide singalongs to his enduring hits “Kiss a Girl,” “Somebody Like You” and “You’ll Think of Me.”
But Urban’s performance style is defined more so by all the musicality he wedges within his pop-leaning summer jams. He’s an excellent (if not a bit showy) guitar player, apt to rip a piercing solo or inject some energizing ad-libs to brighten up his tunes and fill out the wall of sound already booming from his six-piece band. His opening cut, a vibrant new tune called “Straight Line” was colored by one such solo, establishing quickly that Urban was not like the strum-happy openers who filled the rest of Friday’s card.
Though this thankfully never devolved in “the Keith Urban guitar recital” as Urban injected some fun covers, most notably an extended version of Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker,” which found Urban off the stage, down in the crowd, signing a fan’s hat while the fan held his microphone so he could keep singing. He also tacked on Ed Sheeran’s “Bad Habits” to his own “Kiss a Girl,” Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” to “Somebody Like You,” and Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” to “You’ll Think of Me,” which he performed solo acoustic in the middle of the crowd and upon finishing signed his guitar and gave it away.
During “Long Hot Summer,” which included a bunch of improvised lyrics, Urban trotted over to the show’s dutiful sign-language interpreter, Stephanie,” and apologized: “I must be giving you a hell of a time.”
Urban didn’t say much else of substance to the crowd — the usual urgings to have fun, let music wash your troubles away, etc. — but he did make one reference to his childhood, prefacing the jaunty “Wild Hearts”: “The first concert I ever saw, when I was seven years old, was Johnny Cash,” he noted, “and when you’re seven, that s--- goes deep, man. And when he walked out on stage, it just struck me, that was what I wanted to do.”
That’s all well and good, but Johnny Cash would’ve thrown those shoes into the Mississippi River.
Just before Urban, the Florida star Jake Owen took the main stage with his own brand of stadium-country and million-dollar smiles. Owen, 42, was also gregarious, signing hats, dancing with the interpreter and rolling a weathered beer cooler down the stage’s center ramp and tossing some cold ones to fans. His set was otherwise standard festival fare, all the hits — the twangy “Down to the Honky Tonk,” the appropriate “Beachin’,” and his biggest country radio smash, “Barefoot Blue Jean Night” to finish. Jersey fans perked up at the Bon Jovi “Wanted Dead or Alive” intro tacked to the front of “Best Thing Since Back Roads.”
As the sun set behind Adventure Pier, ‘80s hair metal mainstay Bret Michaels led a high-octane, hour-long mix of hits from his Poison heyday and some crowd-pleasing rock and country-adjacent covers: “Sweet Home Alabama,” “Your Mama Don’t Dance” and Sublime’s “What I Got.” Michaels, who has somehow become an honorary party-country band leader, was all over the stage, leading sing-alongs to “Talk Dirty to Me” and “Nothing But a Good Time,” the latter featuring a line of Philadelphia Eagles cheerleaders who trotted onstage for some lively choreography. Michaels, 61, grew up in Pennsylvania and was sure to mention his link to Wildwood: “My entire childhood was spent on that boardwalk and under that boardwalk as I made some less than reputable decisions.”
And in early evening, the Nashville singer-songwriter Niko Moon offered up a bounding set of his own, finishing with his party anthem “GOOD TIME” and a message for fans: “Yeah, music, yeah, community, but we are out here celebrating life tonight.”
It’s as simple as that: Barefoot Country Music Fest was, once again, a bonanza of well-natured groups of family and friends dancing on the beach, laughing, snapping selfies, riding a mechanical bull and ambling back to their motel rooms to do it all over again tomorrow. Sure, it’s easy to discredit this brand of music as overtly vapid, but anything that brings upward of 35,000 people together to forget their problems (other than a hangover) for a few days, it can’t be that bad. And as Barefoot has established itself as a well-organized purveyor of warm, summer memories, I trust it will continue its run as the New Jersey country event for years to come.
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Bobby Olivier may be reached at bolivier@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @BobbyOlivier and Facebook.
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