The Garth Factor

by Patsi Bale Cox

  Nashville was fertile soil for professional songwriters, and publishing was growing at an unprecedented pace. Many of the genre’s biggest acts seldom tried their hands at songwriting, and turned to the well of local talent. Reba McEntire, the Judds, George Strait, and Randy Travis depended on local publishers for most of their recordings.

  And so, when Garth moved to Nashville he found a city full of professional songwriters, tunesmiths who had no plans for stardom but who made their living penning songs for those who did. Harlan Howard had been the first of this breed when he arrived in the 1960s. But it was not until the ’80s that songwriters outnumbered stars, pickers, and label personnel. Publishers and the organizations that collected their royalties, BMI, ASCAP, and SESAC, had a renewed clout.

  The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers was born out of outrage after Stephen Foster died in poverty, having made several fortunes for sheet music publishers. The organization was founded in 1914 and sought to financially protect composers, primarily those associated with New York’s Tin Pan Alley. Even after radio became popularized in the 1920s, neither country/hillbilly nor ethnic/race music received much attention. SESAC, the Society of European Stage Authors & Composers, was formed in 1930, originally to represent European artists. It wasn’t until 1939 that BMI, Broadcast Music, Inc., was established, partly as a reaction to the ASCAP monopoly and partly to represent country and ethnic composers.

  The 1980s witnessed perhaps the most visible identity crisis country music ever had, beginning with Urban Cowboy, the film that for many observers came to personify schlock country. Like most great yarns, the story that juiced up country music’s image in 1980 involved a house divided. The setting was Gilley’s club in Pasadena, Texas, and the players were the Cowboys and the Shitkickers. Within that movie is a conversation snippet that captures the question haunting the decade.

  It happened when John Travolta, as Urban Cowboy’s blue collar Bud, and co-star Debra Winger, as the tow-truck driving Sissy, uttered their first lines.

  Sissy: Are you a real cowboy?

  Bud: Depends on what you think a real cowboy is.

  That line reflected an age-old quandary in the music industry: what’s real country and what isn’t. When the industry dropped the “and western” part of country’s identity, what did that really mean? Is “country” a regional issue, with the hill music of Appalachia more pure than the honky-tonk sounds of West Texas? Where do the cowboy poets fit into the picture? Moreover, is country music defined by a musical style, by lyrics, by message, or possibly, by the audience?

  It’s certainly worth taking a more reflective look at the 1980 freight train that started rolling with a magazine article, picked up full steam with a movie, and blew into the station with a newly hip redneck culture two-stepping across the nation.

  Gilley’s was a sprawling honky-tonk in Pasadena, Texas, that captured the interest of Esquire publisher Clay Felker when in 1976 he visited Houston and friends took him for a big night out. When Felker returned to New York he asked one of his writers, Texas-born Aaron Lathan, to go there and get a slice of pure Americana for the magazine’s readers. And if not for Hollywood, the story of Gilley’s, which had been named after singer Mickey Gilley, would have been just another example of a transplanted writer taking a look at redneck America with a wink, a nod, and a check in the mail. Lathan’s cover story, titled “Ballad of the Urban Cowboy: America’s Search for True Grit,” appeared in Esquire on September 12, 1978.

  There were two crowds at Gilley’s. There were the Shitkickers, as owner Sherwood Cryer called them: redneck rockers, refinery workers, hippies, off-duty cops, secretaries, and beauty operators; the guy still living off his parents; the divorcée whose ex had picked up the kids for the weekend; and married couples on a budget who loved good music and cheap beer. It took the Houston Chronicle’s venerable pop critic Bob Claypool to bring in the second bunch. When he called Gilley’s “the biggest, brawl-ingest, craziest honky-tonk in Texas,” it interested the uptown Houston crowd. They bought new Stetsons and headed to Pasadena, which they’d formerly called “Stinkadena” because of the refineries. Sherwood tagged them the Cowboys. But in the end, they were all Gilleyrats.

  Just under the shitkicking and hell-raising at Gilley’s lay an important truth long reflected in country music: a lot of bar revelers were, in fact, lookin’ for love, as Johnny Lee’s hit from the movie soundtrack would say. And that was the story Aaron Lathan found in the short-lived honky-tonk marriage of Dew Westbrook and his ex-wife, Betty. Esquire readers loved the article, and Gilley’s employees soon started seeing a new out-of-town clientele. If Houston was your destination, a side trip to Pasadena just might prove fun.

  Many of the Gilleyrats resented the article’s tone, for although Aaron Lathan was originally from Speer, Texas, he treated his subject with no small amount of condescension.

  The Chronicle’s Claypool weighed in:

  “It seemed to irritate [Lathan] that these cowboys lived in the city and didn’t really ride the range—he never, for one moment, considered the fact that both groups, old and new, were simple, country-bred men who were doing the best they could at the only jobs they knew, then hoorawin’ it up on Saturday night.”

  It didn’t take Hollywood long to see the silver screen sex appeal of hoorawin’ it up on Saturday night. After all, another magazine article, this one a New York magazine piece titled “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night” by Nik Cohn, had two years earlier been turned into the blockbuster film Saturday Night Fever. And if it worked in disco, why not country?

  Urban Cowboy didn’t live up to ticket sales expectations, but there was enough excitement to encourage hundreds of bars to go honky-tonk with an almost religious fervor, while in Los Angeles alone, four radio stations jumped on country’s fiddle-and-guitar bandwagon. People who saw the movie not only liked the gigantic neighborhood bar concept, but were also reminded that Americans love cowboys more than almost anything else. And they usually don’t care if the person behind the image works on a cattle ranch or in a machine shop.

  The advertising copy on the movie soundtrack reflected an understanding of the appeal of both film and recording: “It’s more than just music. It’s a way of life.” When the soundtrack sold 3 million copies, Nashville’s marketers perked up.

  “Nashville didn’t learn that you can’t consider a soundtrack album indicative of anything other than the buzz on that movie,” Chet Atkins explained, referring to the Urban Cowboy–inspired country sales spike of the early 1980s. “That’s why—as my friend Tom T. Hall might say—the bean counters spent about five years as nervous as long tailed cats in a room full of rocking chairs.”

  Many in Nashville scorned Urban Cowboy and all that it spawned. It was the new Stetsons, carefully pressed Wranglers, and the two-steppin’ dance clubs that often switched to disco after midnight that caused the nose holding. Then there were the radio stations changing to country but keeping on ill-prepared pop and rock deejays. Some said the film and what followed did little more than encourage a bunch of pop pap.

  Country music had long been sensitive to the idea that it was pop rock’s “redheaded stepchild.” Very few country artists had ever been able to compete in the pop/rock world, and those were usually iconic figures like Johnny Cash. With few exceptions, their edge, when it held, was more evident in celebrity than tours and per-album sales figures.

  Barbara Mandrell took on Urban Cowboy by grabbing the mechanical bull by its nonexistent horns. In 1981 she countered the film’s influence with “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool,” which included a cameo performance by George Jones. The song easily hit number 1, and when Jones stood up in the audience to sing it with her at the Country Music Association Awards, it was something akin to the pope making an appearance at a Catholic League dinner.

  But Urban Cowboy has taken a bad rap. The biggest influence that the movie had was seen in pop culture, not recorded music. Some of the finest albums of the
decade were released the following year: Rosanne Cash’s Seven Year Ache, Ricky Skaggs’s Waitin’ for the Sun to Shine, George Strait’s StraitCountry, Guy Clark’s The South Coast of Texas. The positive effect that the movie had on Nashville music was the fact that clubs catering to country opened in droves, venues that booked emerging acts and opened up a far bigger market.

  The crossroads where country stood in the ’80s had more to do with age and society than with a movie. A new generation started listening to country music, and many had never heard of Ernest Tubb or Floyd Tillman. That generation’s idea of classic country was not Webb Pierce’s 1953 “There Stands The Glass,” it was Waylon and Willie singing “Luckenbach, Texas,” which had stayed at number 1 for six straight weeks in 1977.

  Some of the decade’s biggest acts tried to modernize both image and music. Kenny Rogers, Ronnie Milsap, the Oak Ridge Boys, and Alabama all took some criticism for popish crossover hits like “Islands In The Stream” and “Elvira.” Conway Twitty even revamped his look and got a perm. Others, like the decade’s biggest chart impact artist, Willie Nelson, made no attempt to do anything other than exactly what he wanted. And it worked, because with Willie image is never an issue. He’s always the hippest cat in the room.

  Critics chastised ’80s country music for being too “slick,” but the decade itself fed on glossy imaging. The ’80s put on a public face of peace and prosperity with lavish Reagan-era White House galas, television shows like Dynasty and Dallas, the Donald worship, and yuppies. But just beneath the surface was a world where homelessness grew, the United States built never-before-seen debt, and investors went broke on junk bonds and inevitably faced 1987’s Black Monday, when the market saw shares fall half a trillion dollars. So the question about what a cowboy really was could be expanded to what the entire populace really was. One has to wonder, was the real America that of oil executives in Dallas or refinery workers at Gilley’s?

  In a very important way the shape of the country music business was a reflection of the veneer of success covering some tough economic times in the ’80s. Because even with a wealth of consequential music, radio tightened playlists and spun fewer records, especially those from the genre’s older artists. Personality radio was on the wane, with more homogenized formats and fewer disc jockeys talking about artists.

  One bright spot was The Nashville Network (TNN), which launched in 1983. The network was a joint venture between WSM (of radio and Grand Ole Opry fame) and Group W Satellite Communications. TNN in general, and Ralph Emery’s Nashville Now in particular, helped connect Nashville’s artists and music to mainstream America. Emery gave artists the opportunity to show their personalities—sometimes warts and all. Once, when Johnny Paycheck appeared, he held a note a little too long and spit out his bottom denture. Another time a fiddle player accidentally caught his bow on a singer’s toupee and sailed it almost into the laps of those seated in the front row. Audiences loved it, and TNN became the genre’s greatest marketing tool since the Grand Ole Opry.

  If Nashville attorneys and accountants were hand wringing through much of the decade, America’s creative youths still flocked into town. Arguably, because of one song. In 1982, the year that twenty-year-old Garth Brooks won fifty dollars at a college talent show in Stillwater, Oklahoma, one of Columbia Records’ most powerful vocalists, Lacy J. Dalton, released a single that quickly became an anthem for singer/songwriters throughout the nation. Garth was just one of the hopefuls who listened and understood that “16th Avenue” contained lines aptly describing the Nashville Dream. The song spoke of lonely songwriters in cheap rented rooms writing some golden words that allowed them to finally “walk in style” on Music Row. No artist ever held those songwriters in awe as much as did Garth Brooks. Nobody wanted the miracle more.

  Despite efforts to slick up and cross over, Nashville still had back-door and alley accessibility in 1987—literally. Songwriters, journalists, and floaters of one sort or another could park in an alley and slide in the back door of CBS or RCA to stop by almost anyone’s office. And on Friday afternoons at most record labels and publishing companies, more than a few pulled open a drawer and opened up a bottle of Scotch for all comers searching for a TGIF party.

  The Outlaw Era, when stoned cowboy singers played pinball down at corner markets, was on the wane but a lot of rowdies still hung at the Third Coast, otherwise known as the Rock ’n’ Roll Hotel, where visiting rock bands had holed up while recording in Music City. David Allan Coe still blew into town every so often to upset the Spence Manor management with an entourage of rambunctious chimpanzees. Harlan Howard held court most afternoons at Maude’s Courtyard, offering advice to all seeking help from the Dean of Nashville Songwriters.

  It is a misconception that Nashville’s stars are the ones on the stage. Inside the town’s business the real stars are the personalities who run record labels. They control artists and they often control the music. Sometimes that works out, sometimes not. It is a lesson artists would do well to understand, and one that Garth learned early on.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Uncle Joe, you know we owe it to you”

  What’s the secret?” Trisha Yearwood asked Garth about his becoming the fastest-selling artist in music history.

  It was October 2000, and Garth was preparing for a black-tie blowout at the Nashville Arena hosted by Capitol to celebrate his sales of 100 million albums in one decade. Facing career decisions of her own, Trisha brought up Garth’s experience.

  Garth hesitated a moment, understanding that she was asking a rhetorical question. But then he said, “I had a tight group of people around me who never blew smoke up my butt.”

  GARTH TIPPED HIS HAT to one of those people on his 1995 release, Fresh Horses. The album kicked off with “The Old Stuff,” a nod backward to 1988 and 1989, the days when he and the band were playing clubs like the Kansas City Opry and Tulsa City Limits. When Garth sang the line, “Uncle Joe, you know we owe it to you,” it was in tribute to Joe Harris, the agent who took a chance on an unsigned kid from Oklahoma and started booking him prior to anything that resembled success. Harris was only one of the people who recognized in Garth a sense of purpose and a strong will in addition to unmistakable talent.

  Garth’s first year in town could serve as a primer on how to make it in the music business. He hooked up with smart, savvy people, but more often than not they were not part of the business-as-usual crowd. Most were old-timers, outsiders—or insiders who thought like outsiders.

  “I was lucky that the people I found in those first couple of years were on the side of writers, artists, and musicians,” Garth said. “I met too many creative people who had been run over by the business and I won’t say it made me paranoid, but it did make me watchful. Mom’s warnings were always right there in the back of my mind.”

  Stephanie Brown hit the mother lode for Garth when she played one of his tapes for ASCAP’s Bob Doyle. One of the first songs on the tape was “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old).” Though it was a rough demo that inexplicably switched tempo midstream, Doyle was immediately taken with it. “What makes that song great is that it’s universal,” Doyle says. “You don’t have to be a rodeo rider to understand that feeling of getting beat up, of being tired of the struggle. No matter what ‘road’ you’re on, it does seem like it just keeps getting longer.”

  Because ASCAP had once represented primarily pop writers, Nashville writers had been in the BMI camp through the early decades of the industry. But a concentrated effort by ASCAP, along with the smaller SESAC, had changed that trend by the 1980s. By the time Garth came to town, writers debated which company offered the best deal, gave better advances against royalties, and treated writers with the most respect. More important, which one might give you a loan? In many cases, it all boiled down to how various personalities at the organizations were perceived. When it came to public opinion, the guy Stephanie Brown took Garth to meet was one of the favored.

  Bob Doyle was one of the most respect
ed song men in Nashville. A trained percussionist, his experience had included rock and symphonic work. An air force pilot, Bob was stationed in Selma, Alabama, when he first started listening to the classic country music of artists such as Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams. After his tour, Nashville seemed like the natural place to land. He worked in A&R (artists and repertoire) at Warner Bros., then moved to ASCAP. A&R and publishing are closely intertwined. A&R is the department within the label that looks for songs and artists, and helps develop talent and often career direction. So when Doyle moved to one of the publishing rights organizations, he brought with him a deep understanding of what labels looked for. In both positions the courtesy and respect he showed songwriters made him one of their favorite executives.

  Once he heard Garth’s demo tape, he asked Stephanie to arrange a meeting. “I guess on a purely personal note, the first thing that impressed me about Garth was that he was a ‘West of the Mississippi’ guy. He wore the jeans, the boots. And he had a western, rural attitude. I sensed an authenticity in him, honesty and integrity. Combine that with the talent and you just had to be impressed.”

  Bob had been mulling the idea of striking out on his own for some time, and after he met with Garth a few times, his plans took more solid shape. After trying unsuccessfully to get Garth a publishing deal, he decided to take the plunge. And with an in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound attitude, Doyle decided to take an even bigger chance and manage Garth. He believed in the idea so much that he took out a second mortgage on his house to finance it all.

  “When you sit on the business side of the desk across from talented people, people with so much potential, you sometimes start wondering if you’re really helping them make their dreams come true,” Doyle reflected. “I thought a lot about the courage it took to come to town and put everything on the line—it takes a lot of nerve to go for a creative career. Just think about the times these people get turned down. And even after they get going, if they do make it as a ‘star,’ they get slapped down from time to time. I have a tremendous amount of respect for anyone with the guts to take that path. And in the end, what I decided was that I wanted to be someone who helped people live out their dreams, not one who at some point or other killed their hopes.”