The Garth Factor

by Patsi Bale Cox

  The family scheduled weekly talent nights featuring music, skits—anything to amuse the group. Garth especially thrived on not just singing for the family, but putting together shows that included dialogue, jokes, and even plot to an extent. He was starting to understand the basics of entertaining and storytelling.

  “Being the youngest of six kids, my influences come from all over the board,” he explained. “I particularly liked James Taylor, Dan Fogelberg, Elton John, Journey, Boston, Kansas. But I also loved Townes Van Zandt, George Jones, Janis Joplin, and Rita Coolidge. The ’70s rock shows probably influenced my live show the most. My older brothers and sister listened to Styx and Queen, so I did, too.”

  Perhaps the biggest influence of all was country star George Strait, who Garth first heard in 1981, while he and his father listened to country music on the car radio. The single, “Unwound,” was George’s first, and it changed Garth’s life. Until then, he’d paid more attention to his siblings’ favorite rock acts. George Strait changed all that. “I knew in that moment that this was the kind of music I wanted to sing and perform,” he later said.

  Strait, too, had been an early lover of rock, but it was his time in the military and exposure to Merle Haggard singing Bob Wills’s music that changed his direction. A native of Pearsall, Texas, Strait was also a cowboy, expert in riding and roping. After serving his time in the army, George enrolled at Southwest Texas State in San Marcos, and formed the Ace in the Hole Band. In 1979, his traditional country sound interested MCA Records enough to agree to release one single, “Unwound.”

  Out of this musical melting pot came Garth’s love for arena rock and singer/songwriters. By his teens, he had picked up the guitar and banjo, which led to a love for bluegrass music. In fact, his first “professional” gig was playing banjo at a McDonald’s with friends Mark Tate, Roy Farrow, and Steve Clark.

  Garth was a quick student who got good grades despite being more drawn to sports than schoolwork. He was well liked, a popular jock who loved to clown around. Just as his love of music came naturally, so did his interest in sports. Raymond coached Little League and encouraged his boys to participate in football, baseball, and track. Garth played for Yukon’s football team, the Millers, and threw javelin for the track team.

  Garth never got over this early love of sports. In 1992, after he was a star, KNIX in Phoenix held an on-air contest asking the question, “Is there one thing that Garth Brooks would like to do just to be able to say it?” Fans called in with every answer from being president of the United States to being a professional athlete. The winner was a guy named Leroy Kloos, from Casa Grande, who correctly answered “play professional baseball.”

  Garth’s answer: “If I could do one thing just to say I’d done it, that thing would be to play an inning of professional baseball. The only thing that stopped me from being a professional baseball player was that I sucked.”

  Raymond Brooks’s participation in his sons’ sports was vital to Garth in immediate and long-term ways.

  “One of the greatest things I got from my dad was an appreciation of the importance of teamwork,” Garth explained. “And as I started out on my career, I really saw how vital it was to everything in life. Artists have to see themselves as part of the group. I don’t mean all decisions need to be made by a committee, but nothing—and I mean nothing—is gonna happen without a team.”

  By the time he followed his brother Kelly to Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Garth was splitting his extracurricular time between sports and music. In fact, his love of music influenced his choice of majors. It was with the hope of breaking into jingle writing that he chose advertising, a decision that would later be misrepresented in the press as “marketing” and result in the first of many untrue myths regarding his success.

  Raymond Brooks once told a story about Kelly and Garth: “Kelly went to Oklahoma State University and two years later Garth followed. Their track coach called us and said, ‘Mr. Brooks, there is something I just have to say. Kelly came here and he didn’t smoke or drink or party. He wasn’t a Goody Two-shoes or anything. He didn’t condemn people or judge them and I’m going to admit that some of the track coaches thought he was putting on a front. Then Garth came here and they roomed together, which is unheard of for brothers in college. Garth didn’t smoke and he didn’t drink and by gosh we realized that these two guys are for real!’ ”

  Sports initially helped pay Garth’s room and board at Iba Hall, the campus athletic dorm. He not only had been awarded a track and field scholarship, but also found a part-time job at a sports equipment store, DuPree’s. Garth’s track future was sidelined when he failed to make the Big Eight Conference finals during his senior year. When a coach told him that he should see it as an opportunity to get on with what was important in his life, Garth wondered just what that might be.

  What it was, of course, was his music. Between track and his off-campus job, he participated in college music jams like the “Aunt Molly’s Rent-Free Music Emporium” at the OSU student union. He played at any campus party he could find and volunteered time at a local medical center to play music for children.

  Garth started several bands, playing in clubs like Shotgun Sam’s Pizza in Oklahoma City and Willie’s in Stillwater. Like all club singers, Garth relied on cover tunes and took requests. After all, more songs meant more tips from happy fans. His repertoire ranged from James Taylor and Neil Young to George Strait. And he loved to close his shows with Don McLean’s “American Pie.” Garth would show up anywhere he could find work, and he’d play solo if required. The club experience was crucial, because later, when he started his professional career, the little clubs of America would be where he continued to sharpen his performing skills and widen his audience.

  He took an additional job at a night spot called the Tumbleweed Ballroom, where as one of the club’s bouncers, he was called on to break up a fight in the women’s room. There, famously, he met his wife-to-be, Sandy Mahl, who had thrown a punch at another girl and gotten her fist stuck in the wall.

  Two deaths during the days at Stillwater affected Garth tremendously: Jim Kelly and Heidi Miller. Jim was a grad student and hurdler who had coached Garth’s brother Kelly, before starting a band with Garth and a friend named Dale Pierce. Like Garth and Kelly, Jim and his brother were extremely close to their parents and often flew home for visits. On one of those trips, with Jim piloting, the plane crashed, killing both brothers.

  When Heidi Miller and a girlfriend needed to find a third individual to share their campus apartment rent one summer, Garth moved in. He quickly formed a bond with Heidi. “She was probably one of my greatest friends,” Garth reflected. “Heidi had been one of those girls who got stepped on by everybody, and she always wanted a man she could love. The other thing she really wanted to do was graduate. Well, Heidi met this wonderful guy—a football player—and fell in love with him. She was ten days from graduating when she was killed instantly in an accident with a drunk driver.”

  The death of these two friends influenced two of the most important components of Garth’s early stardom. First, these two were heavily on his mind when he wrote his breakthrough single, “If Tomorrow Never Comes,” which dealt with the importance of letting people know how much they mean to you. Next, when Garth thought about making the video for Tony Arata’s song “The Dance,” he decided to relate its meaning to death more than to a lost love. That premise became the theme for the song’s award-winning video, and did as much as anything in his first year to establish him as a star.

  After Kelly graduated from OSU, Garth roomed with Ty England, who had a long-standing love of country music. The two had met at Aunt Molly’s, where both played music. Although Garth appreciated country, his real love was still rock. But the more Garth listened to Ty’s tape collection, the more he began to appreciate the sheer power of what a country song could be.

  His appreciation for the truths found in traditional country lyrics never lessened. Talking to Country Fev
er in 1992, he explained: “The country lyric is everyday life, the ten o’clock news put to music. I think people are looking for something to learn from. You know, if you’re upset after listening to a song—that’s good. It’s as good as crying after a song, or it’s as good as changing your life after a song. As long as it brings an emotion, then you know you’re living.”

  England disputes that Garth learned anything from him; he says it was just the opposite. It was he who learned from Garth, especially when it came to the writing he later did with his old roommate. According to England, story songs come naturally for Garth. “Garth is great with melodies, but it’s the lyrics that set him apart as a writer. He’s always looking for just the right word or phrase. But what he understands better than most is how to develop a complete story that lasts three minutes.”

  Unfortunately, Ty and Garth got little accomplished academically that year. As Garth explained: “We couldn’t room together anymore after we both got bad grades because we were playing music all the time. But it was my senior year so I could get by with it. It was Ty’s sophomore year and he couldn’t. So Ty had to go back home and enroll in a school closer to Oklahoma City. We made a deal when he left that if one of us should happen to get a shot at playing music for a major label, he would call the other.” And Garth remembered that deal in 1989, when he got ready to set out on the road with a band named Stillwater.

  While his appreciation for stone country singers like Hank Williams and Merle Haggard was growing, it wasn’t just the male artists who moved him. Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline, and Tammy Wynette became favorites. In fact, despite his belief that his mother was the best female singer he’d heard, he later would say, “If I’d been a female country singer, I would have wanted to sound like Tammy Wynette.”

  Garth briefly considered making the move to Tennessee a year prior to his meeting with Merlin Littlefield in Nashville. In 1984 he auditioned for a gig as a staff singer at Opryland U.S.A. Although he was offered the job, after conferring with Raymond and Colleen, he decided to stick it out in Stillwater and finish his senior year in college. It was a wise move. Opryland acts often felt they were carnival sideshow acts and that would have been anathema to Garth. When he did graduate from Oklahoma State, he asked Colleen for her blessings in his quest for a career in music. She wouldn’t go so far as to say she blessed the idea, but promised to pray for him.

  When he returned from his brief 1985 Music City trip, Garth went back to singing cover songs at Willie’s and working at DuPree’s Sports Equipment. But this time it was with a map back to Nashville. One person he knew he needed with him was Sandy Mahl, and on May 24, 1986, the two wed.

  Garth had often sat in with the Skinner Brothers Band, and when he started putting together his own group, he turned first to Tom Skinner. Together they formed Santa Fe, the band Garth would bring with him on his second Nashville sojourn. The band was a college favorite in part because of the wide repertoire. Garth knew nearly four hundred songs ranging from country to pop to rock and bluegrass.

  Garth had come up with a title and an idea he thought had potential, “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old),” about a musician living a hard life on the road. He finished it late one night, and decided to try it out at a club called Bink’s.

  “That’s pretty good,” his friend Randy Taylor said during the break. “But I think it could be better.”

  “What would you do with it?” Garth asked.

  “I’d turn the musician into a rodeo cowboy.”

  “The minute he said it, I knew Randy was onto something,” Garth later reflected. “There are a lot of songs about the road and not enough about rodeo. Even though I didn’t ride in rodeos, I come from that culture. It’s a world I love and the people who ride those broncs and bulls have always been heroes to me. So we sat down and worked on it, putting in a line saluting Chris LeDoux, who was not only a champion bronc rider but also a musician that everybody admired. Chris was a star in so many ways. It never occurred to me that I would later meet him, play shows with him, and make a lifelong friend.”

  Garth was already developing into the star performer he would become. He was intense and passionate onstage. He didn’t just move, he prowled the stage, bringing his audience into the show on an emotional level. But he didn’t yet have that rock show element that he would later put to such an effective use. That would come after seeing a Chris LeDoux concert.

  But Garth Brooks and Santa Fe were enough of a regional name that they opened for national artists like Dwight Yoakam, Johnny Paycheck, and Steve Earle, and performed on television shows including A.M. Oklahoma. In early October 1986 Santa Fe took third in the Marlboro Talent Roundup semifinals, and later that month they were invited to play a show at New Mexico State University. Their reputation was growing rapidly, and with it, Garth’s confidence.

  In preparing to make the permanent move to Music City, Garth visited Nashville several times to get the lay of the land. He scouted neighborhoods where he and Sandy might find a place to live and attended writers nights to hear Music City’s latest songs.

  When he made those preliminary trips Garth stayed with an Oklahoma songwriter named Bob Childers, who knew publisher/songwriter Stephanie Brown. A former English teacher, Stephanie loved words, music, and writers. After spending some time with Garth, she suggested he help Childers with the melody of a song he’d been writing. They worked late into the night, then Garth put the song down on tape. That one demo, not more than a crude work tape, was all it took for Stephanie to become a supporter. She invited him to writers nights and small shows.

  During a show held at the popular Second Avenue club Windows on the Cumberland, Garth heard Kevin Welch, a smart, poetic writer and fellow Oklahoman who would make some well-received albums a few years hence. Garth listened to Welch’s song set and immediately recognized an unusual talent. Welch’s lyrics were tight, well thought out, and meaningful, his performance riveting. Garth later admitted that he had a similar reaction to the one he had had in 1985 when he sat in Merlin Littlefield’s office and heard a well-known songwriter say he was broke: “If that guy’s playing for twenty people I don’t have any business being here.”

  But later, when a group of Oklahoma friends took him to Kevin’s house for a guitar pull, where various writers and artists take turns trying out new material, Garth was invited to sing. Afterward, Kevin said, “Man, this town is going to be fine for you.”

  Prophetic words. And Garth Brooks would prove to be fine for Nashville.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Shitkickers & cowboys

  Harlan Howard, the most revered songwriter in Nashville, composer of “Pick Me Up On Your Way Down,” “Busted,” and “I Fall To Pieces,” sat at the bar in Maude’s Courtyard. His hair was a great mane of silver, his eyes sharp with a bit of an impish twinkle. He wore a pair of jeans and a blue denim shirt. He ordered a Black Russian, which he called a milk shake. Aside from penning great songs, Harlan was known for his definitive take on country music: “It’s three chords and the truth.” That day in 1987, Harlan sat listening as a young writer lamented the current state of country.

  “I don’t even know what country is anymore,” the kid groaned. “The music is getting way too close to rock.”

  “I don’t pay that much attention to the tracks,” Harlen mused. “I listen to the lyrics. Two things will tell you if something’s ‘country’—the words and the audience.”

  GARTH FINALLY BROUGHT SANDY and the band, Santa Fe, to Nashville in late summer, 1987, this time with his mother’s approval. In fact, she gave him her lucky four-leaf clover as a farewell gift. The whole crowd moved into a house in Hendersonville, just east of Nashville. The band didn’t last long. As Garth once put it, “It was five guys with five different opinions of what it took to make it. None of us were right. We were all very scared and the band blew up after about four or five months. Two of them went back home and three stayed in Nashville. They’re all happy with what they’re doing.”


  Garth found work at Cowtown Boots while Sandy took a series of part-time positions, including a job at the boot store, where she could cover for her husband if he needed to take a meeting. Driving back and forth from Hendersonville to Music Row, Garth listened hours on end to the tunes played on Nashville radio stations.

  In 1987 country music was more diverse than ever and it appeared to be happening with almost a sense of urgency. New faces and styles lived side by side with Old Nashville, and if they circled the other like tail-sniffing dogs, they were hounds chasing the same bone: records that sold.

  Traditionalists were well represented by Randy Travis and George Strait, with newcomer Dwight Yoakam’s critically acclaimed 1986 debut still making both waves and new converts. Randy Travis’s 1987 signature release, “Forever And Ever, Amen,” stayed at the top chart spot for three weeks, and snared CMA, ACM, and Grammy awards. George Strait’s three ’87 hits—“Ocean Front Property,” “All My Ex’s Live In Texas,” and “Am I Blue”—added weight to his own list of career records.

  One of the hottest acts in town was ace singer/songwriter/ guitarist Steve Wariner, whom Dottie West hired to play in her band when he was still a teenager. A favorite of the legendary Chet Atkins, Steve made a name with RCA releases between 1980 and ’84, when he moved to MCA. One of the finest guitarists in any genre, Steve had three number 1 hits in ’87, “Small Town Girl,” “The Weekend,” and “Lynda.”

  By 1987 country music had expanded to include some high-profile alternative artists like Steve Earle and the O’Kanes. The biggest song of the year was Michael Johnson’s “Give Me Wings,” followed closely by Reba McEntire’s “What Am I Gonna Do About You” and the Judds’ “Cry Myself To Sleep.” Established pop-flavored artists including Crystal Gayle, Gary Morris, Lee Greenwood, Earl Thomas Conley, and Dan Seals all scored big hits that year.