By Adam Lucas

GREEN BAY—Eric Church was enjoying some quality family time during the first weekend of the Free the Machine tour. Both his sons had come out for the first weekend on the road, and they were looking at the calendar.

“I think,” said his ten-year-old son, “that I’ll come to Milwaukee.”

“Hold on,” Church told him. “You cannot miss Green Bay.”

And then the Resch Center went out and proved it.

Let’s see, how to best describe it. There was tailgating with live bands across the street from the venue five hours before Church took the stage. The first fans in the Church Choir early entry line showed up around 8 a.m. As a reminder, this was a Thursday show.

By venue size, this sold-out arena was the smallest of the tour. But it was also the mightiest. A Green Bay crowd could whip some Saturday crowds and not spill a drop or put down their brat.

Trombonist Roy Agee was walking through the back hall just before taking the stage and gave a very accurate assessment of the crowd: “Green Bay,” he said, “is lit for everything.”

And it was. Let’s put it this way: one of the lines the crowd sang the loudest was “Rockin’ Randall, gettin’ rowdy” during “Talladega.” There were a whole lot of Rockin’ Randalls in this crowd. With the Green Bay Packers at home against the Cowboys on Sunday, this was the official start of a four-day weekend, and most of the crowd seemed pretty intent on celebrating all the way from “Hands of Time” through Jordan Love’s last touchdown pass 72 hours from now.

That’s part of why this particular crowd gets along so well with Eric Church. He understands passionate fans because he is one, and there is nowhere more passionate about anything than Green Bay is about the Packers. There is no NBA team sharing the Resch Center. No NHL squad taking up key dates. The dominant aspects of life here are the Packers, who play next door at Lambeau Field, and talking about the Packers.

If you didn’t know better, you might think you were in an SEC town. Close your eyes on Thursday and you might have been in Tuscaloosa. The map definitely says Green Bay is Midwestern, but at heart, it’s southern.

There were plenty of specific references to make it clear this show could only happen in Green Bay. Church opened the door during “Mistress Named Music” by tweaking a line. “I was doing what I know,” he sang, “And I was chanting Go Pack Go!”

The crowd responded the only way they knew how. When the song was finished, “Go Pack Go!” began echoing from every corner of the Resch Center. It was a little disorganized, so Church took control as he grinned. “If you’re going to do that, you need syncopation, OK?” he said. And he promptly led the crowd in a much more organized—and even louder—“Go Pack Go.”

By the time he let the crowd sing almost the entire first verse of “Springsteen” on their own, they were flying. The usual “Oh-oh-ohohoh” became “Go Pack Gooooo!” and at that point you wondered if Church could maybe just play all the way through to kickoff on Sunday night (don’t give him a challenge).

There was only one way to follow it: by uttering, “Turn the quiet up.” At that point, it sounded like a Micah Parsons sack in the building.

That’s a room where Church thrives.

“I feel like we are kindred spirits,” he told the crowd. “The kind of people I grew up with are the people I see here.”

And so he gave them an epic performance. He played four different songs for the first time on this tour: “Country Music Jesus,” “Those I’ve Loved,” “Love Your Love the Most” and “Carolina.” Three of those four came during an extended audible portion of the show when Church rolled through several songs that were nowhere to be found on the original set list. But that’s what happens when he gets in sync with a crowd that featured one fan holding a Wisconsin license plate that read “ECB Fan” and a pregnant woman on the front row of the reserved seats who held a tiny baby boot aloft during “These Boots.” It was just, quite simply, a textbook Eric Church crowd, a club vibe packed into an arena.

He saluted them in every possible way, a mutual respect that was made obvious in every song, including a tweak to “Record Year” that perfectly encapsulated the night. His altered verse went like this:

“If I gotta get stuck anywhere

Any night of the week

Any month of the year

I’d choose to be stuck in Green Bay,

Where they’ve had a lot of record years.”