{"id":141077,"date":"2025-03-11T12:11:07","date_gmt":"2025-03-11T16:11:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/2025\/03\/11\/you-guys-are-the-champs-chris-stapleton-hands-off-hardware-in-a-new-road-show-tradition-3\/"},"modified":"2025-03-11T12:11:07","modified_gmt":"2025-03-11T16:11:07","slug":"you-guys-are-the-champs-chris-stapleton-hands-off-hardware-in-a-new-road-show-tradition-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/2025\/03\/11\/you-guys-are-the-champs-chris-stapleton-hands-off-hardware-in-a-new-road-show-tradition-3\/","title":{"rendered":"You Guys Are the Champs: Chris Stapleton Hands Off Hardware In a New Road-Show\u00a0Tradition"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tWhen Luke Combs<\/strong>\u2019 team won road crew of the year at the CMA Touring Awards on March\u00a03, it marked a passing of the baton \u2014 or, more accurately, a passing of the road case \u2014 as Combs\u2019 crew took control of a trophy that Chris Stapleton<\/strong> had carted around the country and across the Atlantic during 2024.<\/p>\n

\n\tLast year marked the first time that the Country Music Association honored an entire crew, and Team Stapleton decided during a post-awards celebration to take the award out where it had been won: on the stages, on the highways and in the back of semi-trucks that took the All-American Road Show from Nashville to the people.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe trophy was unloaded at every venue and placed somewhere on, or near, the stage as a reminder to all of Stapleton\u2019s employees of the reputation they had created. The crew of the year hardware visited the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, The O2 in London and the set of NBC\u2019s Saturday Night Live<\/em> in New York, just to pick out a few spots on its itinerary.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\t\t\"2025<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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\t\t\t\t\t19th CMA Touring Awards Celebrate Country Music\u2019s Touring\u00a0Community\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3><\/div>\n

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\n\t\u201cThey can never change that,\u201d tour manager Jason Hecht <\/strong>says. \u201cWe\u2019re always the first name on the trophy. For us, that\u2019s a very cool thing, and to get to carry it around, and hopefully set a little bit of a precedent, that was definitely a really big sense of pride for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tStapleton\u2019s team had pride in the gig before there was ever a trophy to recognize it. The team had to have been working hard to get that first crew award in a line of work that\u2019s grueling at its very foundation.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cA lot of these people are up at 6\u00a0a.m., 7\u00a0a.m. \u2014 first people in the door, and they\u2019re not walking out until you\u2019ve got doors closing, sometimes in the morning with trucks rolling away,\u201d says Stapleton\u2019s manager, Red Light Management\u2019s Clay Hunt<\/strong>. \u201cThere\u2019s ebbs and flows throughout the day, but this is really long, hard work.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIf they do that work correctly, most of the concertgoers won\u2019t give a thought to the quasi-miracle that took place in the venue, as a stage was constructed and complicated sound and lighting was installed all on the day of that particular show.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI always kind of look at it like a sports official, a referee,\u201d Hecht says. \u201cIf somebody\u2019s saying your name, then something\u2019s gone wrong. By definition, your job is to be in the shadows and to stay out of the way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe work is likely appreciated most by Stapleton who, along with his wife\/band member, Morgane Stapleton<\/strong>, makes it a point to look after their team. She insisted on having a women\u2019s bus for the female members of the crew, they remember employees\u2019 birthdays with gifts and celebrations, and when several on the team came down with an illness during their recent Australian tour, they didn\u2019t even ask about what kind of expenses might be involved in their recovery. They made sure the employees got medical attention, a place to recuperate and plane tickets to catch up to the tour once they had rebounded.<\/p>\n

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Subscribe to\u00a0Billboard Country Update<\/a>, the industry\u2019s must-have source for news, charts, analysis and features.\u00a0Sign up for free delivery<\/a>\u00a0every week.<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/figure>\n

\n\tThat kind of attentiveness is not surprising for Stapleton. When he left the 2023 Academy of Country Music Awards in Frisco, Texas, he saw the roadies hard at work and picked up a blower to help clean up confetti. He is known, according to his team, to greet the local crew at the end of a show and recognize their role in his success as they prepare to tear it all down.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI like to play music,\u201d Stapleton said when his team won the crew of the year honor. \u201cEverybody [involved] helps me do that every night in ways that would not be possible in any way, shape or form if everybody wasn\u2019t at the top of their game.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe CMA rules around the crew of the year trophy don\u2019t allow consecutive wins, though individual members of a team can still collect honors. Two Stapleton employees \u2014 tour videographer\/photographer of the year Andy Barron<\/strong> and backline technician of the year Derek Benitez<\/strong> \u2014 were with Stapleton in Australia and unable to claim their awards in person this year. But the team watched a CMA livestream of the event from Down Under and saw the owner of Stapleton\u2019s PR firm, Sacks\u00a0& Co.\u2019s Carla Sacks<\/strong> (who also reps Combs), win publicist of the year. Sacks was visibly emotional.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI really was very overcome in a way I didn\u2019t expect in that room,\u201d she allows. \u201cTo look out at that community of people that rarely wants, or gets, the spotlight, and then to be recognized by those peers, hit me in a way I wasn\u2019t really prepared for.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Billboard<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tTime to Speed It Up? Country Radio Programmers Ponder Shorter Life Spans of\u00a0Singles\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3><\/div>\n

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\n\tIn the days after his win, Barron kept at the job in Australia and New Zealand, a camera in his hands every day, constantly looking for new angles on the same songs and the same people as he documents Stapleton\u2019s work for social media and for posterity. Even as he moves about the arenas and amphitheaters, he\u2019s cognizant that after the artist and crew head for the next city, they leave an impression behind them.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe want every person who\u2019s working at the venue \u2014 the promoter, everyone involved at the place that is opening their doors up to us \u2014 we want them to be excited when we\u2019re coming back,\u201d Barron says. \u201cWe\u2019ve just always treated every show like that, and everyone on our team has the same mentality.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMirroring the one-nighters that it represents, the crew of the year trophy moves on after one year to its next recipient, though it will still carry a plaque with Stapleton\u2019s name \u2014 and the names of each of his team members \u2014 as Combs takes it back on the road. In some cases, the award will revisit concert halls where Stapleton carted it in 2024. But it\u2019s certain to expand its travels with Combs\u2019 entourage.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe\u2019re excited for the Luke Combs team and for them to continue on,\u201d Hunt says. \u201cIt sounds like they\u2019re going to try to carry on the tradition.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Aller \u00e0 la source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Luke Combs\u2019 team won road crew of the year at the CMA Touring Awards on March\u00a03, it marked a passing of the baton \u2014 or, more accurately, a passing of the road case \u2014 as Combs\u2019 crew took control of a trophy that Chris Stapleton had carted around the country and across the Atlantic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musique","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141077\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}