Blake Shelton’s “Most Unusual Performance” Was With Charlie And Debbie
So, this was a truly surreal moment this morning. While preparing for this afternoon’s show I came across this little tidbit from Al.com:
Blake Shelton was recently doing a radio interview when he was asked to describe his most unusual live performance. AL.com quotes him as saying, “I had to do a breakfast performance at a McDonald’s down there for the radio station. This guy pulls into the McDonald’s and he’s kind of standing off to the side, and he’s like, ‘Hey, man, you’re Blake, right?’ I go, ‘Yeah, it’s good to meet you,’ you know, and he said, “I brought something for you,’ and he handed me this little paper sack. And it was a bag of weed. And I remember thinking, ‘Oh, my God, I just got set up, like, he handed me this bag of weed and like, are the police going … I had no idea what was going on. I ran to the bathroom and flushed it all down the toilet, you know — which I would have never done now, right, I’d be like, ‘Hey, hey!’ At the time, you know, I was 24 years old in Alabama, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I just got set up. I’m going to jail.’ But I didn’t.”
Why was this surreal? Well, because the performance Blake is referencing was on OUR MORNING SHOW. We were working at WZZK in Birmingham, Alabama at the time. We would host various artists for extended “meet & greets” and one/two song acoustic performances at locations around the area as we did our show live. “Johnson & Johnson’s (our name at this point in our career) Hometown Handshake Tour” was indeed on location at an Arby’s (Blake mistakenly remembered it as a Mickey D’s) that morning. As was our usual procedure, we hired an off-duty policeman for security. He was standing right next to Blake when a man from “Bud’s Best Cookies” (nope, not making that one up) came up and did just as Blake says-shoving a small bag of weed in his pocket-right in front of the cop. Blake then unexpectedly and unexplainedly disappeared for several minutes. When he returned, he was white as a sheet. Later, he told us what happened, and we all cracked up. The two things I love most are: 1. The picture above. This was the first time (2 years?) that we had seen or talked to Blake since the incident. We had so much fun reliving the moment with him and blaming it for why he’d been avoiding us. By this time we were working here at Country 1037 and this was taken prior to his show at the amphitheater. And 2. He’s never forgotten it, or us. Every time we speak (as late as a couple of months ago), it is ALWAYS referenced.
