SOLD OUT: ALAN JACKSON & LEANN RIMES WILL FILL THE SHOW ME CENTER

Perennial country music hitmaker Alan Jackson and 14-year-old wunderkind LeAnn Rimes have sold out their concert tonight at the Show Me Center, the first show to fill the venue since October 1993.

Jackson and Rimes will perform at 8 p.m. before a full house of 7,000 at the Show Me Center.

The last sellouts at the venue occurred in succession -- the Oct. 7, 1993, Brooks & Dunn concert and the Oct. 30, 1993, Reba McEntire show.

Jackson's most recent Show Me Center appearance on Oct. 16, 1994, fell a bit short of a sellout with an attendance of 6,411. Sharing the bill was Faith Hill, who was making her first-ever arena appearance.

Rimes, whose voice often is compared to Patsy Clines', is still riding the buzz over her achy single "Blue." She recently won an Academy of Country Music award as best new artist, and "Blue" won another prize.

"We've been getting a lot of calls from people who want to see the LeAnn Rimes concert," said Show Me Center Marketing Director Terry Dederich. "We say, the Alan Jackson show. And they say, Oh, is he going to be there, too?"

"I'd estimate 50 percent of the crowd will be there for LeAnn Rimes," Dederich said.

But the Country Music Association's 1996 Entertainer of the Year has plenty of drawing power of his own as his 21 No. 1 singles attest. And from "Here in the Real World" on, he wrote or co-wrote all but four of those chart-topping singles.

David Bova, a Cape Girardeau member of the Alan Jackson Fan Club, won't be at the Show Me Center concert simply because he has second-row tickets for Jackson's show Friday at the Riverport Amphitheatre in St. Louis.

Bova joined the fan club last year because members can get tickets easier and receive discounts on merchandise. But he also joined just because he's a fan. "I really like his music. It's down home, old country," he said.

Bova, who works for Venture and likes to sing but only to himself, is fond of the fact that Jackson once worked for Kmart and worked his way up in the music business.

"He seems down-home friendly. He wants his music to make other people's lives better, not just to make money," Bova said.

"I guess that's me in a nutshell."

This will be his sixth Alan Jackson concert. Last year he listened in the rain on the lawn at Riverport.

As for Rimes, the traditionalist Bevo liked "Blue" because it sounded so much like Patsy Cline.

"If she could sound like that all the time I'd buy her albums all the time," he said.

The 25-year-old Bova and his fiance Julie Evans are getting married June 7. They clashed over their musical tastes at first.

"She was into Ozzy and Megadeth. I'm into Alan Jackson, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra," he said.

But they found a happy medium. "Now I kind of like Ozzy Osbourne and she likes Alan Jackson," Bova said.