Garth Brooks sets first San Diego shows since 1996

Sept. 9, 2015 10:25 AM PT

Garth Brooks is returning to San Diego for his first concerts here in 19 years.

The country-pop superstar, who resumed touring last year after a 13-year hiatus, will perform Nov. 6 and 7 at Valley View Casino Center. His wife, singer Trisha Yearwood, will open both shows.

The concerts mark Brooks’ first area appearance since June of 1996, when his three consecutive concerts at the San Diego Sports Arena (since renamed Valley View Casino Center) set an all-time venue record by selling out all 42,129 available tickets in just two hours.

Tickets for his Nov. 6 and 7 Valley View performances will go on sale Sept. 18 at 10 a.m. on the axs.com website and phone line: (855) 411-4849. Tickets will not be sold at the valley View Casino Center box office.

Tickets are priced at $74.98 each, including service charges, and there will be an 8-ticket-per-customer limit. To expedite purchasing, concertgoers can create a ticket account in advance via axs.com. To avoid ticket scalping, all tickets “will be protected with paperless delivery.”

Brooks three-year-long “Sevens” tour, which concluded in 1991, drew close to 5.5 million attendees. It was the first country-music tour in history to gross more than $100 million, a feat made more impressive by the fact he charged a top price of just $20 per ticket, far less than the going rate at the time.

Brooks has performed sporadically since he quit touring in 2001. In 2001, he played a one-off show at The Forum in Los Angeles. In 2007, he and Yearwood did nine shiw in Kansas City, Mo., It was followed, in 2008, by five shows at the Staples Center in Los Angelesand nine shows at the Bridgestone Arena in Nashville.

Between 2009 and 2012, he performed periodic one-man solo acoustic shows at the Wynn in Las Vegas. In 2014, he returned to the Wynn to perform some full-band shows, a move that in retrospect was a precursor to his return to touring later last year.

Source: DiscoverSD

Music

George Varga

San Diego Union-Tribune music critic George Varga began drumming in rock bands at 12 and writing professionally about music at 15. A Louisiana native who grew up mostly in Germany, Varga has earned three Pulitzer Prize nominations for his writing at the U-T and is a voting member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In addition to providing live coverage of the Grammy Awards and festivals from Coachella and KAABOO to the 1994 edition of Woodstock, he has interviewed everyone from Miles Davis, Britney Spears and (over a game of chess) Ray Charles to Willie Nelson, Kanye West and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis. A triple first prize-winner for criticism and arts writing at the 2022 San Diego Press Club awards and a first prize-winner at the 2022 San Diego Society of Professional Journalists awards, Varga is also a contributing writer for Jazz Times magazine and has written for Billboard, Spin and other publications. After attending San Diego City College and San Diego State University, he created and taught the 2002 UC San Diego Extension course, “Jazz in a Post-Ken-Burns World.” Varga has written liner notes for more than a dozen albums, including by jazz sax greats James Moody and Michael Brecker, and contributed two chapters to the book, “Dylan: Disc By Disc.”

Garth Brooks sets first San Diego shows since 1996

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