Staff photo / Andy Gray
Crews worked around the raindrops Tuesday to assemble the stage for a pair of YLIVE concerts on Friday and Saturday at Wean Park.

On Tuesday the parking lot at the Covelli Centre was filled with platforms and metal bars and workers dodging raindrops while assembling a massive stage.

On Friday and Saturday, the lot and Wean Park will be filled with concertgoers (and a rain-free forecast) as YLIVE expands to two nights.

In some ways, it’s two years of concerts in one weekend. Tim McGraw’s concert on Saturday originally was scheduled in 2024, but was postponed following the downtown infrastructure disruptions caused by the Realty Tower explosion. John Mayer was booked as the 2025 YLIVE concert and will headline on Friday.

But turning YLIVE into a multi-concert weekend has been the dream of promoter JAC Live since Zac Brown played the first YLIVE at Stambaugh Stadium in 2017.

“The vision was always to make it two days,” JAC Live COO Ken Bigley said.

“Nobody in the world has more faith in the Youngstown, five-county market than we do.”

A two-day event allows JAC to spread out some of the major expenditures — stage construction set up and tear down, rental fees — but back-to-back shows bring additional challenges as well.

Mayer’s concert will end around 11 p.m., and it will take his crew a couple hours to pack up all of their gear, Bigley said. JAC’s crews will have to have the stage and backstage areas ready for McGraw’s entourage’s arrival early Saturday morning, while other workers will have to clean the reserved seating and lawn areas for when gates reopen at 5:30 p.m. Saturday.

There will be at least 500 workers — local stagehands, security, concessions, merch sales, clean up, etc. — working the event between set up and tear down, Bigley said, and that number doesn’t include the artists’ crews and employees for the food trucks and outside vendors who will be serving concertgoers.

“It’s definitely a daunting task to do shows of this magnitude back-to-back days,” Bigley said. “Still, the benefits outweighed any of the (additional) labor to do it.”

Tim McGraw has been under contract for YLIVE for well over a year. By himself or as a featured artist with another performer, Tim McGraw has had 30 singles top either the Billboard country and / or country airplay chart.

He has sold more than 90 million records worldwide, won three Grammys and was awarded Entertainer of the Year by the Country Music Association.

However, JAC had to find new opening acts when the show was bumped to 2025.

“The Band Perry had a little bit of a resurgence with the anniversary of their big hits with ‘If I Die Young,’ and they were getting back together after pursuing different music avenues,” Bigley said. “They fit perfect with Tim. And Chase McDaniel is somebody that’s really on the upswing. I thought he was a great act, and he fit the vibe pretty well.”

The bigger challenge was finding a second YLIVE headliner. The goal was to find an act in a different genre so that some concertgoers wouldn’t be forced to pick one or the other, but also a performer complementary enough that it might attract more out-of-market visitors to travel to the area and make a weekend out of it.

Normally, promoters see who is going on tour and make an offer for one of their available dates. Mayer, a seven-time Grammy winner who has sold more than 20 million albums worldwide and had his songs streamed billions of times, wasn’t booking a tour, but he had a show with Zach Bryan at University of Michigan’s football stadium on Saturday and a music festival gig in the Nashville area on Sunday.

“McGraw and John Mayer are with the same agents,” Bigley said. “We know they’re representing John, but he’s not going on tour. He’s not looking for a date to play … I wish I could take the credit, but I believe it was the agent that just said, ‘Well, I wonder if we should take a shot at John Mayer or what do you think about John Mayer?’ And my response very quickly, was, ‘Absolutely.'”

Charles Kelley, who is a member of the group Lady A and recently released a solo album, and regional favorites The Clarks will open for Mayer.

Out-of-market ticket sales for McGraw are slightly elevated compared to past YLIVE headliners, Bigley said, but Mayer is drawing many from outside of the area, based on ticket purchase information. Ticket sales are strong in Cleveland and Pittsburgh, and the concert is attracting fans from Columbus, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit and Chicago.

“YLIVE has always had a dual objective, which was to bring in A-tier acts to entertain the people of Youngstown, to have something to call our own, but it was also to showcase it to other people and have an economic impact on the hotels and restaurants downtown (and beyond),” Bigley said.

Past attendees will notice some changes. Primary concession and merchandise sales are more centralized instead of separate stands for reserved and general admission attendees. Changes have been made at the main entrance to streamline that process.

The layout is tweaked every year, but this year’s YLIVE concerts have about 7,700 reserved seats, and the lawn area can accommodate twice that, but neither of this year’s shows are expected to match the 20,000-plus crowds some of the past shows have drawn.

“We’re anticipating over 30,000 between the two nights,” Bigley said on Tuesday. “We’re hoping to finish it out strong. We still have three days to Mayer, four days to McGraw, and tickets are selling, they’re still moving. Hopefully that number keeps growing, but we’re happy there. We’re always looking for that sellout. We won’t hit that, but the numbers are strong.”