On this day in 1996, Garth Brooks kicked off a three-day residency at the Hilton Coliseum in Ames, Iowa. Fresh Horses, his sixth album, had been out for less than a year, and Brooks was still fueled and fired-up from a sold-out run of shows in St. Louis the previous weekend. Now, nearly two decades later, he’s visiting St. Louis once again, thanks to a pair of recently-added dates at the Scottrade Center.
Brooks’ world tour, which grossed $12 million during its opening residency in Chicago, will visit St. Louis’ largest venue on December 5th and 6th. All tickets are $71. Although that’s a solid price for an arena performance by a legacy act — tickets for Fleetwood Mac‘s upcoming show at the same venue are as costly as $176.50 — it’s still a notable increase from Brooks’ 1996 residency at the Scottrade Center (then called the Kiel Center), when fans could buy mezzanine level seats for $18.25.
Trisha Yearwood, who toured with Brooks in the Nineties before marrying him in December 2005, will open all shows of her husband’s post-retirement tour. Both stars will be supporting new records by then, too, with Brooks’ Man Against Machine hitting stores on November 11th and Yearwood’s PrizeFighter: Hit After Hit arriving six days later. Before pointing their tour bus toward St. Louis, though, the two will also perform a string of six gigs in Jacksonville, Florida, two shows in Lexington, Kentucky, a whopping 11 shows in Minneapolis, Minnesota (where Brooks has already sold a record-breaking 188,000 tickets), and five gigs in Greensboro, North Carolina, three of which were announced this morning. Currently, there’s nothing on the books after Missouri, although Brooks — who’s been unveiling his tour schedule one city at a time — is likely to add more pre-Christmas dates.
