It’s a Radio Christmas Show. Buy Accordingly.
A poster started making the rounds this week with Zakk Wylde’s name stamped over six December dates and the words ONE NIGHT. ONE STAGE. NEVER TO BE REPEATED. Save yourself the excitement. This is not a Zakk Wylde acoustic tour. It is a radio station Christmas show, and he is one name on the flyer.
Unwrapped: An Acoustic Holiday is a six-city package produced by Audacy and hosted market by market by its rock stations, with iHeart running the Florida date. Zakk Wylde and Dario Lorina play all six as a single act on a bill of seven or eight per night. Smith and Myers of Shinedown, Ice Nine Kills, The Warning and The Funeral Portrait carry most of the run, with Everlast, Black Stone Cherry, Jakob Nowell of Sublime and others rotating in by city. Audacy ran the first one last December as a single Seattle show. This year it is six markets and a tour logo.
Tour Dates
12/01 — St. Augustine, FL, St. Augustine Amphitheatre
12/03 — Minneapolis, MN, Target Center
12/05 — Kent, WA, accesso ShoWare Center
12/06 — Lincoln, CA, The Venue at Thunder Valley
12/09 — Jersey City, NJ, Landmark Loew’s Jersey Theatre
12/11 — Baltimore, MD, Chesapeake Employers Insurance Arena
Tickets: on sale now at unwrappedlive.com
Here is the part I refuse to be cynical about, because acoustic Zakk is real. Book of Shadows in 1996 proved he was more than Ozzy’s guy with the bullseye. Book of Shadows II followed twenty years later, and Unblackened in 2013 rebuilt a full Black Label set around a piano and a Les Paul with the gain off. He can hold a quiet room, and he has done it on purpose for thirty years.
What he cannot do is carry eight bands. On a bill this size everybody gets a short set, and the night belongs to the station: personalities between acts, VIP laminates sold separately, a lineup built to move one market on one night. That is a perfectly good December evening. It is not a Zakk Wylde acoustic show.
And nothing for us, again. The only California date is Lincoln, four hundred miles north of Los Angeles. We got our Zakk in March, plugged in, at YouTube Theater with Zakk Sabbath opening, so I am not going to cry about it. Just know that acoustic holiday tour means a plane ticket if you live here.
If you are in one of those six cities, go. In This River played quiet, in a room with the lights up, is worth a ticket on its own. Just do not walk in expecting a Zakk Wylde tour, because that is not what is being sold.
Source: Unwrapped: An Acoustic Holiday