Stagecoach 2012: Backstage with Jason Aldean

Jason Aldean vividly remembers playing the first Stagecoach Country Music Festival back in 2007, when the Macon, Ga., singer looked out on a very different scene than the one that greeted him Friday night as the opening-night headliner for the festival's 2012 edition.

Five years ago Aldean was one of the opening acts, charged with trying to capture the attention of a relatively sparse crowd under less than ideal conditions. That was well before he had the biggest selling country album of the year, a feat he achieved last year with his fourth release, "My Kinda Party," which also was named album of the year by the Country Music Assn. and has generated four No. 1 hits, the fifth single on its way up the charts now.

"Man, it's a tough gig," Aldean, 35, said on his tour bus a couple of hours before he and his band would perform. 'You go out in the middle of the day, it's 100-something degrees. A lot of times when you play early on, not everybody's at the show yet -- they're hanging out in their campers or whatever they doing. It's not like later in the night, when the weather starts to cool down and everybody comes out. It's a tough gig, to go out and let people see what it is you do. It's tough for an artist who has to go on early in the day, and we did our fair share of that stuff.'

PHOTOS: The scene at Stagecoach 2012

This year, however, those early slots were left to others ' on Friday it was the Eli Young Band, Brett Eldredge and Sara Evans who were on stage before the sun went down on the Empire Polo Club in Indio.

By the time Aldean arrived, Alabama had pumped the crowd up with a generous dose of clap-and-stomp-along hits largely drawn from its heyday in the '80s and '90s.

Aldean and the other performers Friday also had the advantage of no competition or distraction from music emanating from other stages. In expanding Stagecoach from the typical two days to three this year, event organizers served up a low-key first-day offering, with just a single stage up and running and half a dozen acts playing from late afternoon into the evening.

'To come back here a few years later and go from opener to headliner of the show is pretty cool, especially the first night when you know everybody's excited to get it going,' he said, stretching out in the back of a tour bus parked next to the Mane Stage.