Weren’t fans of that move, eh?
By now everybody’s familiar with the story of an up-and-coming Eric Church getting kicked off the Me & My Gang tour with Rascal Flatts back in 2006.
It seemed like an odd matchup from the very beginning, having this brash, rockin’ new guy who sings about teen pregnancy and smoking weed open for Gary LeVox in his bedazzled jeans singing slicked-back “mom country.” It was doomed to fail from the start – and it did.
according to Rascal Flatts, they asked Church several times to keep his set to the allotted time for the opener, and even let him go on earlier so he had more time to play. But Chief still wouldn’t follow the rules:
“We asked him four times to stay to the allotted amount of time that he had to play. We sat him down in our dressing room and were like, ‘Look, we’ll put you on early so you can play longer. But please, just be off the stage because we still have to do our show.’
And for every minute that you go over time, especially in New York City, you’re charged thousands of dollars by the minute in labor fees. So the last time was Madison Square Garden. We said, ‘It’s really important that you get off on time.’”
Spoiler alert: He didn’t. Church has admitted that he basically went into the Madison Square Garden show knowing that he was going to get fired, so he gave it all he got for what was likely to be his final show on the tour. And sure enough, he was kicked off what was at the time the biggest tour in the country, and replaced by another up-and-comer named Taylor Swift.
Well that left Church with a lot of unexpected free time, and he had already had plans to be on this tour. So he decided he was going to keep his travel schedule, and just follow Rascal Flatts from city to city for his own tour.
He called it the “Me & Myself” tour, and he went around playing rock clubs in the same cities that Rascal Flatts was playing in. Smaller crowds? Sure. But they were HIS crowds, fans of Eric Church coming to see Eric Church and not fans of Rascal Flatts who were just sitting through an opening set.
But surprisingly, Rascal Flatts weren’t big fans of the move.
As Church put it during a podcast with Lindsay Czarniak a while back, he was “stalking” the band on their tour – and they were well aware of it:
“Oh yeah, they hated it. Yeah they knew what we were doing.”
Church also admitted that he did it as a little bit of a “fuck you” to Rascal Flatts for kicking him off the tour. But according to Church, by the last stop on the Me and Myself Tour, he had managed to build up a following of his own:
“So we get to the last one and it was like, we had a pretty big following. Like it became a thing. And it gave us identity.
We stood for something, we made a decision. We’ve tried to do that our entire career, I mean I’ve done that a number of times where I don’t care if you agree with me, I’m gonna tell you what I think. I don’t care how it affects my career. That’s just who I am.
And I think that the real fanbases, they understand that and I think it makes them more passionate.”
Spot on. I think it’s safe to say that things worked out pretty well for Church in the end.
And it’s just hilarious to think of Gary LeVox, sitting in his dressing room getting his hair spiked for a show and seething about this guy named Eric Church following them around on tour after they kicked him off.
Gotta love the Chief. I mean, could Rascal Flatts ever write a song like this?
