Koe Wetzel: Red Dirt Renegade Smashes Confines & Rocks The F Out!

Koe Wetzel never thought about No. 1 singles or sold-out arenas when he was coming up. Barely out of his teens, the firebrand live sensation was just trying to outrun the injury that ended his football scholarship to Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas, by blowing it up on the road; just having a hotel room after rocking the faces off the people who’d come to the local bars he was playing was plenty. Indeed, Wetzel realized early that chasing that rowdy Texas music scene was better than anything: school, steady work or the so-called “normal life” many seemed wedded to.

Yet, despite those simple aspirations, the dark-haired hell-raiser is currently No. 1 on country radio airplay charts. “High Road,” a jagged not-quite-breaking-up anthem featuring Jessie Murph, ticked off another unthinkable milestone for the renegade Red Dirt rocker. Not only was it No. 1, it had been sitting there for four straight weeks.

Nine Lives, produced by Gabe Simon, known for Noah Kahan’s Stick Season, both expanded and refined the Pittsburgh, Texan’s aggressive form of grunge country. Leaning into his feelings, there’s an emo-tinge to the hard-lived, full-gauntlet hybrid of Red Dirt, old school outlaw country and rock’s thrust. For the 32-year-old under-the-radar superstar, his latest album was never meant as a means to grab casual fans as much to grow as an unrepentant hard-living truth teller, artist and son of working people.

In 2024, Wetzel moved into major amphitheaters and arenas, but retained his commitment to secondary and tertiary markets. Twenty-seven dates sold out, including his first headlining show at Red Rocks, an Oct. 13 show that sold 9,029 tickets and grossed $468,105. The highest grossing stops submitted to Pollstar Boxoffice include a July 27 show at The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in The Woodlands, Texas ($717,978 grossed and 15,796 tickets sold) and a Sept. 6 show at Colonial Life Arena in Columbia, South Carolina ($647,265 grossed; 12,230 tickets). Wetzel believes, “Growing up in those outlier markets, that’s more our crowd. I know those people, who come out and support you – and it’s not about [a radio hit]. They’re the people I’d hang out with, so why would we abandon them? We wouldn’t jump ship like that.”

“Koe makes music that’s authentic to his story,” says manager Jeb Hurt, the owner/CEO of Floating Leaf Entertainment and who spent a decade as an agent, “which seems to resonate with a lot of people across the country. It isn’t the prettiest or the shiniest, but it is his story. 

“We didn’t follow the trends. We’re more interested in setting the trends. Koe’s part of the genesis of a generation who have embodied that mentality of counter-culture similar to music in the ’90s with bands like Nirvana. Koe doesn’t hold back onstage. He says outlandish things. He cusses. He tells wild stories. Fans respect that and have come to expect it from him. 

“They look forward to Koe’s shows, because it’s an opportunity to be yourself and not worry about who’s watching or listening.”

Never a fan of social media, that feels organic – and real; always about the music, he’s even more about taking it to the fans. If 2017’s demi-juvenile Noise Complaint took him from playing to 30-100 people to 2,500,  he and his team all recognized the power of Wetzel’s live show. He remembers, “2011, 2012 when I started touring – shithole bars with chicken wire, free beer, maybe a hotel room thrown in – I fell in love with Texas music, its lifestyle.

“My first show was Stoney LaRue at the Waco Fairgrounds when I was 6. We’d gone for a cousin’s wedding, and I’d asked to go along. I’d never felt anything like that. When Noise Complaint dropped, it exploded: every week, every show, we were sold out. That same feeling; there was no turning back, only turning up.”

Like so many of today’s Red Dirt acts, Wetzel is a second-generation hybrid. Raised on Cross Canadian Ragweed, Reckless Kelly, Randy Rogers Band and LaRue, he understood there could be legitimate success without ever thinking about Nashville, mainstream country music or radio. That freedom lets him reflect 311, Soundgarden and Lil Wayne as easily as Charlie Robison, Keith Gattis and David Allan Coe, whom Ropyr Madison Koe Wetzel was named for.

Ed Warm, a partner in Chicago’s Joe’s On Weed Street and Joe’s Rosemont and who co-promotes the Windy City Smokeout, as well as booking the country shows at the Rave in Milwaukee, jokes, “Joe’s has been the furthest point north for all the Red Dirt acts, long before even mainstream country.” 

He’d heard the buzz about Wetzel, intrigued by a song “about a girl who misses Ragweed like he does.” Warm took the plunge in 2018. Since then, Wetzel’s played Joe’s three times, then sold out the 1,500-capacity Joe’s Rosemont. This year, he will headline the Smokeout on July 10. 

Warm says, “Koe didn’t build it from Tik-Tok or one radio hit. It was one fan at a time, one city at a time, but everywhere he played, they came back with three or four friends. That first time he played (for us), I was energized. I thought, ‘This is different. This isn’t your Dad’s Red Dirt music, it’s a seismic shift in how the music’s going. But it fits how raw and real and genuine Red Dirt is.’”

That build-it-from-the-ground-up ethos sparked the interest of AEG’s Adam Weiser when manager Hurt reached out in 2020. Confessing that he’s “a pop-emo/hardcore kid from New York with that old school tour-til-the-wheels-come-off” way of doing business, Weiser – the man behind massive touring success for Kane Brown, Luke Combs and Zach Bryan – responded to the “mentality ‘We want everybody to get into our shows. We don’t need the quick sell-out.’ They were about markets like Evansville, Indiana, and Columbia, South Carolina.”

“They’re very much about smart tactical support, not just being on a tour,” Weiser added,. “Koe supported Eric Church last summer. He did a 4/20 Weekend with Snoop Dogg at Pinnacle Arena in Lincoln, Nebraska, and back to Sioux Falls, South Dakota.”

When Weiser says “back to,” he’s referencing what for many artists would’ve been a Dumpster fire. He’d booked Wetzel into the venue early in their working together; there were 4,000 tickets sold – and his drummer missed a flight out of Chicago. While most artists would’ve cancelled or rescheduled, “Koe had the best idea.”

Taking the stage, Wetzel explained to the crowd what had happened and said he was going to play the show without a drummer. Weiser recalls, “Then he said, ‘Refreshments are on me. Go get beers. Go get whatever. I’m buying the concessions.  I’m coming back in 15 minutes, and I’m gonna play.’”

That fearlessness is an outgrowth of the music. But it’s also Wetzel being the kind of act he was raised on. Scrappy bands who came to play, no excuses, no fancy trappings. As Chad Kudelka, Wetzel’s agent at CAA, explains, “He was very independent, because those acts had the attitude [that] if you wanted to be successful, you went out and got it on your own. They believed road touring was where you build a strong fanbase for longevity.”

Or as manager Hurt says, “Koe isn’t the type to live in front of a camera, asking people to buy tickets. That said, Koe is like Santa in the sense that seeing’s believing. We are fortunate that most people who see Koe for the first time are certain to bring a few friends the next time. Our ticket sales grew exponentially year after year through word-of-mouth marketing from those fans who’d attended shows.”

Warm confirms, “His fanbase is as passionate as it gets. They line up really early in the cold – and when I say cold, I mean, Chicago dead-of-winter cold.”

Authenticity, the one thing you can’t fake or buy, was critical. Admitting it was a party pretty much 24/7 when they were building it, he’s gotten smarter about how they attack the road. Shaking his head, Wetzel explains, “On the ‘Damn Near Normal Tour,’ I was actually working out, then on the bus after the show. I felt a little like a caged animal, but I was good with it as I could take all that energy to the stage.

“I never sounded better, and it was the best shows we’ve ever done.”

Adding Weiser to the team, they also ramped up the number of shows they could play. To the veteran promoter, that drive was impressive. He offers, “We went from weekend warrior touring to Koe saying, ‘Hey! There’s seven days in a week. We can play a lot more shows…’ That opened up a lot of markets and opportunities.

“We could go into new markets. Venues could take a chance on us. David Farrar [GM] at Santander Arena in Reading, Pennsylvania, had been saying, ‘I’m a massive fan. I’m telling you this will work here.’ Reading, Pennsylvania? It was the fastest sell-out of the tour.

“…At the IEBA Convention, the number of people telling me we should book a Koe show in Peoria, Illinois, or Evansville, Indiana, was amazing. These venues were like regional A&R for us. They’d say, ‘We see the T-shirts coming in for every show we have: Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs, Five Finger Death Punch. We’re seeing his shirts a lot.’”

They’re also seeing the beer sales. Warm cites a Wetzel show at Milwaukee’s Rave where he tied Cody Johnson’s bar record. Admitting new fans sometimes are startled by the intensity, Wetzel begins, “My thing has always been to come out and forget the week if it was shitty. I know if it was great, they’re there to celebrate.

“This tour, we had a lot of new fans who weren’t used to how hard we go. I could see it on their faces. It’s so loud and they’re so drunk, people leave going, ‘That was a lot.’ But they love everything about it. And the beer sales? We have some records across the country; but in Texas, where we sell a lot of booze, we need to get a percentage of the bar sales.”

That fan thirst – literally and metaphorically – carries over to Europe, where Wetzel toured for the second time. Though it had been six years, the shows in Germany, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom were sold out. Even more, the fans knew the material dating all the way back to Noise Complaint.

As BBC Radio 2’s “Country Show” producer Mark Hagen extols, “What Koe does very well is not be any one thing – not a straight up country player, not a Southern rocker, not a metalhead, but a bit of all those at once. Historically, that really appeals to the UK audience accustomed to the idea that genre is not as important as the quality of your songs.

“He did this tour with little or no mainstream publicity at all, and sold it out in the blink of an eye, which speaks volumes. Our fans’ habit is to ferret around the edges of any scene to find the nuggets and take them to our hearts. We have a fondness for acts who have a distinct character to them. Koe certainly has that. You can’t mistake him for anyone else.”

That singularity that defies easy definition also offers the ability to straddle festivals. While he appeared on several “country” festivals, he excelled at Welcome to Rockville, Hangout and Bourbon & Beyond in 2024.

“There are so many kinds of music, and it’s a long day,” Wetzel says of the festival world. “Unless we’re headlining, I want to be the band who hypes everybody up. We’re balls-to-the-wall start to finish with the hammer down.”

Weiser confirms, “When we booked him on Hang Out in ’23, I remember calling Dante [DiPasquale, VP Talent at Bowery Presents] to see how it went. Dante said, ‘He was massive.’ That’s how Koe really connects.”

Wetzel isn’t thinking about world domination, but what people are looking for. “I’ve always loved baritone guitars that bring in the low end, that nasty-gritty tone of it that really fills out a song. I love that punk garage music, all the grunge as well as Wade Bowen and Ragweed. You know, you never know what people are going through or why they’re there. 

“So I figure any outlet they can find to unwind, reset or just forget – and have fun – we all go through the same stuff. Let’s go through it hard and together.”s