By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
November 27, 2002
Maybe it was jet lag that made him do it, but Tim McGraw actually said something Tuesday in Chicago that drew boos from diehard fans.
During a break from his nine-song set at a private listening party at Isaac Hayes’ downtown club, McGraw friskily said, “I’m a Packers fan.”
Them’s fighting words in the Windy City, McGraw! But the 500-plus crowd quickly forgave the country music star and lavished him with applause and wolf whistles when he resumed playing.
One-half of country’s glamor couple–his wife is Faith Hill–McGraw dutifully answered several women’s pleas and turned around to show off his backside. While not the subject of as many magazine covers as his photogenic wife, he didn’t seem fazed by the nonstop clicking of cameras aimed right at his face.
“I really like his music,” says Angela Antilles, 11, who attended the party with her father. “He’s better than the Backstreet Boys.”
Though most of the fans were older, and there were a few men sprinkled in the audience, the majority of fans were women. A few wore cowboy hats. But if anyone caught his eye, he didn’t let on. He gushed about his three daughters and Hill, whom he bragged was making Thanksgiving dinner all by herself. His job that day was “to do as little as possible.”
McGraw, 35, was dressed a little more conservatively than usual in dark brown dress pants and a matching vest, and black dress shoes rather than boots. It may have been because he had just left a CD and book signing at Borders on North Michigan Avenue. His album “Tim McGraw and the Dancehall Doctors” was released Tuesday, and the making-of book, Tim McGraw and the Dancehall Doctors: This Is Ours ($25, Atria Books), hit stores this month as well.
Accompanied onstage by the seven-man Dancehall Doctors band, McGraw went through an evenly paced set that was top-heavy on new material (“Sing Me Home,” “Watch the Wind Blow By,” “Illegal”). But he also included a cover of Ace’s “How Long,” and on his breakthrough hit “Indian Outlaw” he forgot some of that song’s lyrics and had a good laugh at his own expense.
McGraw week continues at 7 tonight with a NBC special, “Tim McGraw–Sing Me Home.”
