It takes a Real Good Man to be the first country star ever to crack
The Buzz List Top 20. Tim McGraw jumps this week to number 16.

The Buzz List caught up with Tim's tour in Uncasville, Connecticut
for his two-night-only stop at Mohegan Sun Arena.

Without the luxury of a warm-up act, Tim presented himself the
unappetizing challenge of taking the performance from 0-60 with the
help of only a microphone and his trademark black hat.

But whipping the crowd into a fervor would prove to be McGraw's
easiest trick of the evening, bringing the standing-room only
audience of 10,000+ to a raucous frenzy as he opened with perennial
crowd-pleaser "Comfort Me ."

The initial thunder morphed into a dull roar as four minutes later,
the hit-hungry crowd jumped to its feet once again for a barbecue-
stain-filled sing-along of "Something Like That."

Tim's two hour 23-song set list played like an extended greatest hits
album, including a satisfying mix of staples with "Red Rag
Top," "Real Good Man / The Ride," "Indian Outlaw," and "I Like it I
Love It."

There were plenty of surprises, including covers of Steve
Miller's "The Joker" and a special encore performance of "Tiny
Dancer." But the biggest surprise -- a semi-expected cameo of Tim's
ever-present significant other -- never actually materialized,
despite the ubiquity of excited murmurs in the crowd ('Is she here?
Is she here?') every time the lights went low.

Though short on crowd contact, Tim -- sporting a fitted black long-
sleeve v-neck and stylish faded jeans -- did take an opportunity to
address the throng just before launching into a soulful rendition
of "Don't Take the Girl."

"We were playing this tiny club in Texas," said McGraw, "and there
were 3,000 people packed into this place that was built to hold
1,500.

"We played this song for the first time ... and we knew we had a hit
when by the end, everyone was singing along with us."

If exacting audience participation is McGraw's gold standard for
measuring hits, then he might as well have been playing his Friday
night set in Fort Knox. From the first note, the crowd was Tim's to
lose.

He never did.

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