Copyright © 2009 Patsi Bale Cox
Photos copyright © Alan L. Mayor
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Hachette Book Group
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First eBook Edition: May 2009
ISBN: 978-1-599-95275-8
Contents
Copyright Page
Dedication and Acknowledgments
CHAPTER ONE: “It’s a tough town, son”
CHAPTER TWO: Shitkickers & cowboys
CHAPTER THREE: “Uncle Joe, you know we owe it to you”
CHAPTER FOUR: “I’d have titled it Randy Travis if I could have gotten away with it”
CHAPTER FIVE: “Watch your back, pal”
CHAPTER SIX: Only in America
CHAPTER SEVEN: Good times roll just ahead of the thunder
CHAPTER EIGHT: Bustin’ in like old John Wayne
CHAPTER NINE: “Who in the hell is Garth Brooks?”
CHAPTER TEN: Why should rock ’n’ roll get all the glory?
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Country’s Big Boom
CHAPTER TWELVE: Damn this rain and damn this wasted day
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: “A white tuxedo and a lot of red paint”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: “I looked like hell and smelled worse, but the song was finished”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: “I guess we can work with it”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: “Who the shit is paying for all this?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: New York shows up to kick some ass
CHAPTER NINETEEN: “Hopefully, we’re starting to build a family”
CHAPTER TWENTY: “Has Garth lost his freakin’ mind?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: “Say it ain’t so, Garth”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: If you ever wonder what happened to me
EPILOGUE: Time is not your enemy
Illustration
Garth Brooks Discography
Sources
Dedication and Acknowledgments
This book is dedicated to my friend, the great singer/ songwriter Floyd Tillman, who encouraged me to see country music as a big, inclusive family, one that welcomed a myriad of personalities, influences, and styles. Inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1984, when Floyd died in 2003 country music lost a giant.
Therefore, the first of many hat tips here should go to another industry friend, Kathleen Hayslip, who introduced me to Floyd and his wife, Frances, over three decades ago. Particular thanks go to two of Nashville’s finest journalist/historians, John Lomax III and Robert K. Oermann. They took me under their creative wings in 1983, opened Nashville doors, and offered many professional opportunities. I could not have had two better champions. I am indebted to Jim Carlson, who first hired me to write for CBS artists, and Nancy Nicholas, who taught me much about writing.
Many in the press were crucial to the book, including Billboard editors and writers then and now, Edward Morris, Ken Tucker, Wade Jesson, Ray Waddell, and Melinda Newman; LA Times, Chuck Philips, Richard Cromelin, and Robert Hilburn; AP, Jim Patterson and Joe Edwards; Chicago Sun Times, Dave Hoekstra; Chicago Tribune, Jack Hurst; Tennessean, Robert K. Oermann, Debbie Holley, Tom Roland, Jay Orr, and Peter Cooper; The Believer, Tami Rose; USA Today, David Zimmerman.
Garth Brooks, Bob Doyle, and Allen Reynolds gave open access to archives. This book would not have been possible without that availability. The Country Music Foundation has long been the finest resource around. Kudos to Ronnie Pugh and John Rumble. Joel Whitburn’s Billboard singles and albums series is essential to any music study.
Special thanks go to my Center Street editor, Christina Boys, and to my William Morris agent Mel Berger. And to my family’s continuing support: My son, Adam Cox, daughter, Tracy Nath, and son-in-law, Jake Nath, parents of the inimitable Maria Irina. My sister, and sometimes writing partner, Gladys Bale Wellbrock.
CHAPTER ONE
“It’s a tough town, son”
Nashville was nothing like what Garth Brooks expected on his 1985 trip. Nobody seemed very interested in his music. Well-known songwriters appeared to be unable to earn a living. Men in suits conducted business in office buildings. Where were the guitar pickers? It all seemed out of kilter.
He sat in his truck thinking about what he’d done in making this trip. With little preparation or planning he had come to a major music center and tried to randomly set up appointments with important people. He had no job, no backing, and no connections. He’d left his family behind in Oklahoma, the family he had always depended on for emotional support. And more important, he’d left his girlfriend, Sandy Mahl, with no explanation. But what would people think if he didn’t stick it out?
The more he thought, the more he got clear. His family wasn’t going to be disappointed that he realized he wasn’t yet prepared to make this move. And if his friends found it amusing, well, he’d just have to live with it. And so that night Garth turned around and started back to Oklahoma to rethink and regroup. Driving through Arkansas he remembered that he’d promised to call his mother the minute he checked into a motel. Knowing Colleen Brooks would be beside herself at hearing nothing, he stopped and phoned her.
“It’s three in the morning!” She said. “I was about to call the Nashville police!”
“Hold on, Mom,” Garth answered. “I’m in Fort Smith. I’m coming home.”
THERE IS IN GARTH Brooks both a great fear of losing and a great confidence that he can ultimately win. Fear is a powerful motivator. Over the years since he became a superstar, Garth heard several other public figures admit that fear was an incentive. “I once asked Magic Johnson what separated the guys who made it to the NBA and the guys who might have the same talent, but didn’t make it,” Garth said. “He told me that he thought it was fear. He said it drove him to do his best every day.”
With Garth, as with Magic Johnson, that fear was coupled with a deep-down belief that he could beat the odds. He just had to never let up, to play the game at 100 percent or better every single time.
That combination of personality traits was nowhere more evident than in 1985, when he left his family and his girlfriend behind to make that first trip. The story has been told many times over. Garth came to Nashville believing getting a recording contract would be relatively easy. He met with ASCAP’s Merlin Littlefield, was given little encouragement, then learned that a well-known songwriter was in the lobby needing a five-hundred-dollar loan. Garth was horrified because he made more than that in a week playing clubs in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Dejected, he fled back to Oklahoma.
This scenario is fine as far as it goes, but there’s an element missing. Garth may have been somewhat naïve about all things Nashville, but kid that he was, he had sharp antennae. Many Nashville insiders have a set of talking points they pull out for newcomers who come in with no manager or financial backing. It goes something like this:
“It’s a tough town, son. There’s guys pumping gas that can sing as good as most of the people on the charts and they can’t get arrested. You’re gonna need contacts, help, and a lotta luck to get your foot in Music Row. What you got? Are you tough enough to stick it out four or five years, maybe even more? If you don’t have a big money backer, pack it up and go b
ack home, kid.”
In fairness, these insiders don’t want all these young artists to give up. Most of them have seen plenty of hearts broken and dreams crushed and they don’t want to suggest that there’s a special angel hovering over Sixteenth Avenue waiting to sprinkle magic stardust on every hopeful. But the speeches are canned and Garth Brooks was no dummy. Something else about that encounter bothered him.
He had gotten industry insights from a professional before he ever crossed the city limits. His mother, Colleen Brooks, had been a Capitol recording artist, a professional singer who performed on Arthur Godfrey’s show during the 1950s. Colleen’s career has sometimes been overlooked, mentioned as a mere footnote to that of her son. But at one time she was traveling throughout the United States, building a following and a professional name. Given the right set of circumstances, there is a very real chance that Colleen Carroll could have been a national star. She had a manager, had recorded in Los Angeles, and was relatively well known from her Arthur Godfrey appearances. In fact, when she first met Raymond Brooks, he confessed that he’d been smitten with her from the first time he saw her on television. The problem was that her career took off after she was divorced with three children, and the constant traveling became impossible.
Colleen was an optimist about everything but the music business, having seen what she called the ditches of the industry. Out on the road she’d dealt with dishonest promoters, club owners, and bookers. She’d had to fend off stray musicians and camp followers. Times when she most needed the money owed her, she’d seen it slip through her hands into someone else’s. When Garth made his first trip to Nashville she warned him that there were people in town who would beat him up, then pick his pockets. So while he has said that he initially thought there was a recording contract waiting just for him, there was also his mother’s cautionary message. Don’t listen to everything people tell you.
The other element of the legend that has not been factored into Garth’s first Nashville experience is his sense of right and wrong. Underlying Garth’s shock at learning a famous song-writer needed a measly five hundred dollars was his innate understanding that something was askew. Why couldn’t successful creative people make a decent living in the business? Maybe it was as simple as a songwriter squandering royalties. But maybe it was something deeper, something in the system.
Garth decided he needed to prepare better the next time he approached this town, and so he headed home.
Home was Yukon, Oklahoma, where Garth had grown up in a split-level house at 408 Yukon Avenue. When they met, Colleen Carroll had three children—Jim, Jerry, and Betsy—and Troyal Raymond Brooks had a son, Michael. Once married, they had one immediate mission, to gain permanent custody of Raymond’s son Michael. When Michael’s mother finally agreed, Colleen said, “I had him with us and enrolled in school within the hour!” When sons Kelly and Garth were born the family was complete.
“You know, my mother didn’t want me to marry Raymond,” Colleen once confided to a friend. “She wanted me to marry someone with a lot of money. I guess she thought that with me having three small children I needed extra stability, but she didn’t take into consideration that I really loved Raymond. I knew that he loved me and that he was my rock. I’ve never looked back. In a way, that’s how Garth is. When he knows he’s doing the right thing, he’ll throw caution to the wind and not give up. And it has usually worked out for him.”
Except for scattered performances, Colleen gave up her music career to raise the family. Raymond Brooks was a tough ex-marine who worked as an engineer and draftsman for Union 86 oil, and raised his children with a strict code of ethics, fair play, and integrity. Garth once reflected, “Dad’s always been one of those your-word-is-your-bond men. I took that to heart.”
It is to Colleen and Raymond’s credit that there was never a division among the children, just one big happy family. “There was never any type of jealousy in this family. You couldn’t really tell who belonged to who bloodwise as the years went by,” Colleen told In Country’s David Huff. “Everyone thought Betsy looked like Raymond. For a long time people thought Michael was my son and Jerry was Raymond’s. When you’re trying to raise a family like ours that’s the kind of thing you want to hear.”
In fact, after Garth’s career took off Colleen was always quick to point out that all of their children had had their glory days in school and after. Jim was the great athlete, the family hero, especially to his youngest brother, Garth. Kelly, too, was a star athlete. Michael, who was chosen as Most Likely to Succeed, went on to become an educator. Jerry fulfilled his lifelong dream of becoming a law officer. Betsy, voted friendliest at school, became a musician both on her own and as a member of Garth’s band, Stillwater. The mother-daughter relation was strong in this house full of males. Colleen called Betsy her best friend. “She’s such a free spirit. I worship the ground she walks on,” Colleen said.
Like many youngest children of large families, Garth grew up with both adoration and a healthy sense of competition. Colleen often said that Garth shared many of her personality traits. She liked to have fun, enjoyed being the center of attention. “I was only three when I started singing, trying to entertain the family,” she reflected. “I loved making people happy. And Garth has always been the same way. As a child he was always making us laugh and clap for some little skit he put together.”
Christmas and Halloween were the family’s favorite holidays. Colleen, especially, loved Halloween, and she usually dressed as a witch to hand out treats to the neighborhood kids, gathering the children around for ghost stories, including “Galloping Galoosy,” a takeoff on “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The Christmas tree went up right after Thanksgiving, and Colleen admitted it was usually dead by the time they took it down. She hated to let go of the holiday season, loved sitting in the evening looking at those twinkling tree lights.
Garth remembers Colleen being the biggest kid in the family when it came to Christmas, and that tendency escalated as the years went by. Sometimes when Garth and Sandy drove home for Christmas, arriving by 7:00 A.M. wasn’t early enough. They’d get to the Brooks home only to find that Colleen had been up for two hours, and had already started opening some of her presents.
It wasn’t always easy to buy gifts for everyone; the Brooks family was not well off by any stretch of the imagination. They ate a lot of macaroni and cheese and hamburger gravy on toast. Christmas presents were something that Colleen and Raymond had to think about, plan for, and work into the budget. Garth’s best Christmas memory was of the year he was eight, and he and his brother Kelly got matching bikes. The fact that Kelly was eighteen months older and received the same gift impressed the youngest child.
One member of the family was initially unimpressed with Garth—big sister Betsy. When Colleen was pregnant with Garth, Betsy longed for a little sister. When the call came that the new baby had arrived, one of the brothers played a trick on Betsy and told her she had that sister she’d wanted. Then, when Raymond Brooks arrived, Betsy started asking rapid-fire questions: Did the baby girl look like her? What color were her eyes? How soon could she hold her?
Raymond Brooks was puzzled. “The baby’s a boy,” he said.
“Then don’t bring him home!” Betsy roared, taking out after her brothers, who now outnumbered her five to one. She came around the minute her parents brought the littlest Brooks boy home, becoming his greatest champion.
Colleen’s youngest son says he was an unapologetic mama’s boy. “My mother is the best female singer I ever heard, and the most professional in her attitude about the business, too,” Garth says. “I love her love of life and her spirit. I’ve always been one of those guys who liked women and I don’t mean just as someone to date. I’ve always had a lot of female friends and often they became among the most trusted. I think that tendency comes from having such a good relationship with my mother.”
Raymond and Colleen were a classic case of opposites attracting. Raymond could be a tough tas
kmaster. He believed in discipline and in encouraging his children to strive for perfection. Colleen allowed room for mistakes. Garth picked up both those personality traits. He also learned some lessons from the interaction between his father and older brothers. Years later he would write a song titled “The Night I Called The Old Man Out,” about a son wanting independence and willing to fight his father for it. “It’s a song I lived indirectly,” he said. “Kelly and I were the youngest and we never ‘called out’ our dad, but we sure saw some of the older boys do it. I got to see two sides of my dad during those times. He could be very strict about things he considered important, but he had an incredible softness, too. I sometimes saw him rush upstairs to hide the tears in his eyes after someone confronted him.
“I think I learned several lessons from having that front-row seat. First, I could understand both sides of the thing. The older boys thought they were right. Dad thought he was. And they were both willing to back up their beliefs with action. I could see that being a father was an awfully big responsibility, and you couldn’t ignore moves that you really believe were bad for your kids to make. But most of all, I think I understood that it was somehow good for a child to know that a man can cry and be no less a man. Think how much better off people would be if they knew that.”
Colleen said that Garth always had an empathic nature, that from the time he was a child he could always put himself in someone else’s shoes. “After school he’d bring special children home with him,” she reflected. “These were kids who no one would ever talk to or anything. He would be their friend and they adored him. He would bend over backwards to help anybody because of one thing—he couldn’t stand to see anybody mistreated.”
Music played a big part in the household. In addition to Colleen’s singing and love of everything from the Opry to pop, Raymond played guitar and admired country singers like Haggard and Jones. Again, Garth’s status as youngest in the throng played a role in his musical evolution. The older kids all had their favorites and specialties. His big brothers played the guitar, though never as seriously as his sister, Betsy. Brother Jim loved to play the harmonica. Kelly, just a year and a half older than Garth, tended toward kazoos.
The Garth Factor Page 1
