Midland’s Most Epic ACM Awards Memory: Finding Thomas Rhett at the Craps Table at 5AM
What do you do to celebrate an ACM Awards win before the show even began? If you're 2018 New Vocal Duo or Group of the Year Midland, you go to the casino. In a recent interview, the country trio recalled an epic night in Las Vegas — and the story of someone who, they found out later, was having an even more epic night than them.
"I was on a winning streak last year, and it came, unfortunately, to an end towards the end of the year," Midland's Mark Wystrach recalls to his record label, Big Machine. "But yeah, at the ACMs I had cash in my pocket," he jokes, "because I took the ACM award and went and gambled with it and doubled my money on it.
"I’m kidding," he clarifies. "I still have it; it’s hanging up on my mantelpiece. That’s a lie — I don’t have a mantelpiece — but it’s sitting somewhere in my house."
That night last year, Wystrach's bandmate Jess Carson was playing blackjack with a number of other artists, including Morgan Wallen. As the night turned into the morning, one by one, the artists left to catch their flights back home, leaving Carson and Wallen as some of the last men standing.
"Morgan and I thought we were the last men standing because we were literally sitting at a craps table at, like, 5AM," he recalls. "And then the casino was, like, empty, and we were walking towards the exit, and we were, like, walking across the casino, and we could hear this shouting, and there was one craps table that had a crowd around it."
"We walked past this craps table," he continues, "and of all people, literally rolling the dice was Thomas Rhett.”
Wystrach points out that Rhett, a father of two, was simply taking full advantage of the fact that he had a babysitter that night. Adds Cameron Duddy, who is also father, "Yeah, you have to."
Midland recently debuted their single, "Mr. Lonely," and its accompanying music video. They are going into the 2019 ACM Awards with two nominations, for Group of the Year and Music Video of the Year, the latter for "Burn Out."
The 2019 ACM Awards are set to air live from the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas on Sunday, April 7, at 8PM ET on CBS.
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