Rarely does an A-list celebrity come to Carbondale, but Lil Wayne will be celebrating and performing on April 20 at Levels for the 16th spot on his ‘Sorry 4 the Wait 2’ release party tour. 

Tickets for the show are limited and only available on Eventbrite’s website for $50, plus a small fee. 

All VIP tickets are sold out and ran at $100 each, giving buyers direct access to the section where Wayne will be seated. 

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“We’re going to only sell our exact capacity,” Greg Knoob, owner of Levels said. “No extra, no sneaking in, no nothing.”

The concert will also be an early celebration of Knoobs’ 30th anniversary as a disk jockey and he will be backing Wayne during his performance. 

“[Lil Wayne] is the biggest artist of this generation,” he said. “There is going to be more demand than what we are going to be able to take care of … but its not going to be an overflow of people trying to get in.”

Wayne will be making roughly $100,000 per tour stop and Levels is no exception.  The venue may not make much money from the concert, but the 30th anniversary occasion is worth the deficit, Knoob said.

Wayne will be performing anywhere from 30 minutes to upwards of an hour depending on the vibes from the audience, he said. 

Levels is not new to booking artists from Young Money Records.

Knoob said since Chanel West Coast performed last year, the process of booking Wayne was much smoother than expected.

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Michael Blakemore, an independent event planner at the Blakemore Entertainment, made the initial move to bring Wayne to Carbondale.

“Greg has given me the opportunity to help promote for Levels and just put the show over the top,” Blakemore said. 

The entire building will be utilized for the set up and performance, not strictly the Levels side, he said. 

“I’m excited for it,” Sean Majer, bartender for Saluki Bar N’ Grill said. “It’s going to be a lot of work, but it’s going to be 100 percent worth it.” 

People from all around Southern Illinois have taken to social media to comment both positively and negatively on the popular artist’s scheduled performance. 

“We thought it was a joke and that they were just going to play his new music,” Edith Porter Liddell, a sophomore from Chicago studying early childhood education, said.

Liddell and her friend Jamie Ragan, a sophomore from Decatur studying animal science, will both be attending, Liddell said.

“It’s going to be a great time. Im super excited,” Ragan said. “I might cry when I see Lil Wayne.”

One main concern people have is the safety of attendees with such a huge artist in town, but the event security will be heavy for Wayne and the crowd, Knoob said. 

“I’ve seen a lot of positive [responses] and of course, I’ve seen some negative,” he said. “There’s always going to be negative for anything big that comes to town.” 

Besides Wayne’s security, Levels has booked two security teams, along with the Stix security staff for the night, he said. 

“Lil Wayne has such a specific security requirement, that I don’t see how anything can go wrong,” he said. “He has his own staff with him, on top of what we provide.” 

He said he expects the tickets to sell out quickly so people wanting to see the Grammy award-winning artists must buy their tickets with time to spare. 

This is only the beginning for celebrity appearances in the Carbondale area, Blakemore said.

“We have a lot of things up our sleeves,” he said. “It will be artists, actors, celebrities and athletes. The people that you see on everyday television are going to be the type of people that will start coming to Carbondale.”