Tim McGraw Recalls How Kenny Chesney Once Got Them Both (& Tracy Lawrence) Fired From Playing A Hot Dog Shop In Nashville

There’s nothing like looking back on some of those odd jobs that made ends meet early on.

I’m sure we’ve all got an interesting gig or two that gave us some of our first work experience. You’ve got to cut your teeth somehow, someway, and that goes for country music artists as well. Before some of the biggest names in the genre were playing in front of packed stadiums… they were playing in places you’ve never even heard of.

Don’t believe me? Well just take this hilarious, hot-dog-adjacent story that Tim McGraw recently shared.

As the story goes, in McGraw’s early days in Nashville, Tennessee – long before he made it big and became the star that he is today – he busked near a hot dog stand with two other names you might recognize: Tracy Lawrence and Kenny Chesney.

Think about that. Someone that was hammered and just trying to get some calories in their system once ate a cheap, potentially lousy hot dog while being serenaded by Tim McGraw, Tracy Lawrence, and Kenny Chesney. Back then, they were just trying to make it by and help out a local hot dog stand. Now? Those three together on the same billing would be one hell of a show.

And as McGraw explained things (courtesy of Big Machine Label Group), the trio used to put together shows next to an old Hot Dog place in Music City:

“There was a place called Houndogs Hot Dogs that was right on the corner of where the circle is now in Nashville, where the statues are. And ‘Flash’ Flanagan was the guy who owned it. So, Kenny Chesney, Tracy Lawrence and I sat with guitars on stools just playing music for people that would come up and buy hot dogs. And we lived off those hot dogs.”

Cue the quote from The Office about wishing you knew you were in the glory days before you actually left them.

Not entirely sure if “living off hot dogs” connotes “the glory days,” but I’m sure McGraw, Lawrence, and Chesney look back on those times fondly. Especially since they have a funny story to tell about getting fired from that gig. How in the world do you get axed from a job that has you playing next to a dirty hot dog stand?

Well, it appears that the blame falls entirely on Kenny Chesney. The “When The Sun Goes Down” singer evidently forgot to follow through on an important part of the trio’s job one night, and that was all she wrote for the group’s hot dog gig. This is a wild sentence to type out, but McGraw said that they all got fired because Kenny Chesney forgot to lock up some clown heads:

“And I think Kenny got us fired because there were clown heads on the trash cans, and our job at the end of the night when we finished singing, we were supposed to take the clown heads, run a chain through ‘em and lock ‘em up. And I think Kenny didn’t do it one night and they got stolen, and we got fired.”

Ahh the early (or earlier) days of Nashville. A hot dog stand missed out on having Tim McGraw, Tracy Lawrence, and Kenny Chesney as their regulars because some clown heads got stolen. You can’t make that stuff up… and now it’s only right that we get a collaborative song from the three artists called “Clown Heads.”

Of course, Kenny would go on to get Tim McGraw arrested in 2000, after he stole a police horse at a country music festival. But that’s a whole other, much longer, story…The post Tim McGraw Recalls How Kenny Chesney Once Got Them Both (& Tracy Lawrence) Fired From Playing A Hot Dog Shop In Nashville first appeared on Whiskey Riff.