Dierks Bentley's Country Cares Concert to Benefit Yarnell Firefighters Sells Out Immediately

There's no shortage of ways to contribute to efforts benefiting the families of the firefighters killed in Yarnell late last month, but if you were hoping to see Dierks Bentley as part of the arrangement, you're too late: July 22's Dierks Bentley Country Cares concert is sold out.

The hastily organized show -- Bentley himself is on tour and has stops scheduled for July 20 in New York and July 24 in Delaware -- added The Band Perry, Randy Houser, and David Nail to the bill soon after the initial announcement, but the real draw was always where the money was going. (Specifically: The United Phoenix Firefighters Charities.) All 6,000 tickets were gone almost immediately after they went on sale.

You could just donate money -- you could even donate money through the Country Cares concert, put on some Dierks Bentley CDs, and park outside Tim's Toyota Center for a couple of hours -- but Country Cares isn't the only show benefiting the firefighters' families.

Whisperfest, a DIY festival in Prescott that's been in the making since well before the wildfire, will be donating 100 percent of its profits to 100 Club of Arizona. (We profiled the festival here.)

Less than a week after the Yarnell fire, musicians in Tucson organized and held a benefit of their own, raising a little less than $5,000.

On a macro, U2-simulcast-across-Central-Asia level, benefit concerts can get a little weird; they're often enormously expensive, and sometimes they seem as much about raising an artist's profile as raising money that could be more efficiently piled up if the stars involved just wrote checks. At their most bloated, they can look like elaborate efforts to turn a million dollars for charity into several thousand dollars for charity.

But it's been bracing to watch the people involved in these more organic shows -- not just Dierks Bentley rerouting a big tour but Whisperfest finding a new purpose and the Tucson musicians turning something around in a week -- donate so much time and effort toward pulling some good out of a singularly awful event.