The Garth Factor

by Patsi Bale Cox

  Bob now looks back on his decision with a wry smile. “I don’t think I really understood the risk I was taking, quitting a safe job to try something completely new. But I had a line of credit and an artist I believed in.”

  “When I heard that Bob was working with some kid named Garth Brooks, it caught my attention,” Silver Line Gold Line publishing’s Noel Fox said soon after Garth’s debut album was released. “Bob’s one of the town’s honest brokers.”

  Virtually all of Nashville’s music community concurred. Bob Doyle was a quiet, no-nonsense professional who never played games or pontificated. In a city where the hot-dogging often started at midlevel exec positions, Bob remained a bona fide song man. Cautious in his business dealings, when the Row learned that Doyle had taken out that second mortgage on behalf of a new singer/songwriter, it was almost as if Chet Atkins had tucked an unknown guitar picker under his wing.

  Doyle knew he lacked the public relations and marketing chops needed for a management firm to be fully effective, so he turned to a go-getter publicist named Pam Lewis. A veteran of MTV in New York, Pam had worked for RCA in Nashville. The two formed Doyle/Lewis Management and in 1988 signed Garth Brooks. Attorney Rusty Jones and financial advisor Kerry O’Neal were two other important members of the team.

  Doyle wanted to keep Garth working on songs and performing them at local writers nights. California writer Larry Bastian was among the first to co-write with Garth. In fact, Bastian was formally signed even before Garth to the publishing company Major Bob, named after Doyle’s rank in the air force reserves.

  “When Bob Doyle called me about his new company, I was ready to sign with a Nashville publisher to try and open up that market for me,” Larry said. “I told Bob I’d be coming to Nashville soon, and the first thing he said was, ‘There’s this kid I want you to meet.’ ”

  Bastian was immediately impressed with Garth’s writing and singing, but admits that in the beginning he had no clue that Garth would be a big star. “At first he was so quiet, so shy that I didn’t see it happening. But over time, as his personality and humor started coming out, I realized I’d been a little hasty in my judgment.

  “What I soon realized was that this was a guy who truly loved words, wouldn’t give up on a line until it was right. He is incapable of writing a throwaway phrase or of saying, ‘Oh, that’s good enough.’

  “Garth is also fun to write with. I remember one time when we’d been up a long time kicking around some ideas, and I ended up falling asleep. When I woke up, Garth said, ‘Man, I got a great track here that I think we can work with.’ Then he played me a tape of me snoring.”

  Bob Doyle tried to set up as many writing appointments and demo sessions for his new client as possible, sometimes to no avail. One song plugger at MCA Music tried unsuccessfully to interest his biggest writers in scheduling a co-write with the new kid from Oklahoma. “I tried to encourage these guys for two reasons,” the plugger later said. “First, Garth was writing some good songs. Second, he was after a record deal and I thought he’d get it. In the end, about ten million albums later, one of those writers stormed into my office and raged at me for not pushing him harder to write with Garth Brooks.”

  The people Garth did collaborate with were arguably a better choice. They were good, strong songwriters but in general not Nashville’s elite. Teaming a new artist with a high-powered writer can be daunting, and given Garth’s personality, he would have found some of the experiences difficult. Tales of heavy-handed top-shelf writers looking with amusement at hopefuls are numerous. In one case, an award-winning composer walked into an arranged writing appointment, threw down a cassette tape, and, without introducing himself, told the young singer, “Here’s our song.” Then he left. It doesn’t always happen, of course, and the flip side of the story is that some young writers like having a veteran do all the heavy lifting. But by writing with those who weren’t resting on the laurels of number 1 hits, Garth forged his own identity quicker than he might have.

  Kent Blazy was the first writer who’d had a Top 10 cut who agreed to collaborate with Garth. (Blazy’s “Headed For A Heartache” broke world-class vocalist Gary Morris into the upper realms of the charts in 1981.) Bob Doyle first approached Kent regarding demo work, knowing Garth needed both the studio experience and the money. Kent had been using several demo singers who would ultimately end up with recording contracts: Trisha Yearwood, Billy Dean, Rob Crosby. He agreed to give Garth a shot, and Bob threw another suggestion on the table. Would Kent consider writing with Garth?

  “A lot of writers don’t want to take the chance that they’d waste an afternoon with someone who couldn’t write,” Kent says. “But Bob Doyle believed in him, and that interested me.”

  It took several months for the initial collaboration to happen. “Bob first talked to me right after Thanksgiving,” Kent says. “Christmas was coming up, and I always take January off to write by myself. So I told Bob I could meet with this new kid in February. When we finally got together, Garth walked in and said, ‘I’ve got this idea for a song, but I’ve tried to get a bunch of people to work on it with me, and nobody will.’ ”

  That idea was “If Tomorrow Never Comes,” a song involving a concept Garth’s mother often spoke about. “If you love someone you better tell them so,” Colleen said. “Because life is never sure—you might not get the chance again.”

  “My mother’s words inspired me to write ‘If Tomorrow Never Comes,’ but my dad played a role as well. Dad would snap his fingers and say, ‘It can all be over like that. Keep up with what you’ve got and know what you’ve got.’ That line is never very far out of my head.”

  The two friends Garth had lost during his college days, Jim Kelly and Heidi Miller, were on his mind, as well as both of his parents’ words. “I can only hope both Jim and Heidi knew how much their friendship meant to me,” Garth said.

  Blazy pitched “If Tomorrow Never Comes” to George Jones. “I would never have had the nerve to pitch a song to George Jones,” Garth told a friend. “The idea that a man like Jones would cut anything I wrote was unreal, and at the time we wrote it, I just didn’t see that the song was that special. I liked it. But it didn’t have the effect on me that it did years later. I can still remember the day I finally ‘got it.’ I was driving in my truck, and the song came on the radio. Maybe it was because I wasn’t expecting to hear it, but it was like I was listening for the first time. I actually had to pull over to the side of the road.”

  Blazy had learned Garth’s writing weakness: he often lacked confidence in his own work. “I’m an ideas guy, I’m not a song-writer. They’re just nice enough to let me put my name on a few of ’em,” Garth said. His collaborators scoff at that depiction.

  “It was amazing to me that Garth ever questioned his writing,” Kent says. “He spoiled me for writing with newcomers. I loved his understanding of rhyme and metaphor, and how he could visualize each song and add extra depth to it. He impressed me right on that first day, while we wrote ‘If Tomorrow Never Comes.’ I thought, ‘This guy is twenty-five going on fifty.’ He seemed like he must have lived a lot longer than his age—so good at seeing the microcosm/macrocosm of what a song can be.”

  Blazy was impressed with Garth’s vocals and began hiring him as a demo singer. And it was through this connection that Garth met a young Belmont College student, Georgia native Trisha Yearwood. To help get her foot in the music door, Trisha had taken an internship at MTM Records, owned by film and television star Mary Tyler Moore. There Trisha worked with MTM’s singer/songwriter Judy Rodman, whose “Until I Met You” and “She Thinks That She’ll Marry” had met with considerable success, and Honky-Tonk Piano Queen Becky Hobbs (“Jones On The Jukebox”). As soon as Trisha graduated with a degree in music business at Belmont, the label hired her as a full-time receptionist.

  When Garth and Trisha first met she had recently married Christian / heavy metal rock guitarist Chris Latham and was singing demos to help family finances and get in s
tudio time. Kent Blazy believed that Garth’s and Trisha’s voices were perfect for each other, and that they would be excellent on duet demos, as well as switching out harmonies. Garth was immediately struck by her voice, as would be the entire industry within a few years.

  “Listening to Trisha sing those first few times was a blessing and a curse,” Garth said, laughing. “It was a blessing because I thought, ‘Man! If I ever get anything going I’m gonna beg her to sing on my record!’ It was a curse because every time she opened her mouth I wondered why I ever thought I was a singer.”

  One of the first things he did was take her tapes to Bob Doyle. “You need to sign her,” Garth advised. “She’s going to be the hottest singer in the business.” Doyle/Lewis began working with her on an unofficial level.

  Garth and Trisha had much in common. They were ambitious, knew that the road ahead would be rough, and had the ability to laugh at the ups and downs they encountered along the way. They combined sophisticated savvy with small-town sensibility. The two made a pact that if either one “made it” that one would help out the other.

  Nashville’s writing community soon recognized Garth’s talent. He became known for his intensity during collaboration, pacing back and forth across the room, staring out the window searching for the right word, the sweet chords. He often took on the personality of the song being written, sometimes somber, melancholy, at other times laughing and boisterous. “He really digs down deep into the meaning of a song,” Kent Blazy says. “He puts himself right there, and that’s why he’s so effective.”

  But as active as Bob Doyle and writers like Kent Blazy were in promoting Garth, much of the groundwork laid and contacts came through Garth’s own efforts. One of the first pieces of advice Doyle gave Garth was to always be on the lookout for songs, no matter who wrote them or who had the publishing. “Don’t ever start to think you can outwrite this town on a day-to-day basis,” Bob said. “Because if you do, you’re gonna have a short career.”

  Garth took the advice to heart. He met many of his early contacts in bars. But unlike many new writers and artists who come to Music City, Garth wasn’t in those bars to party. He wasn’t a teetotaler, but he was there for the music, not the beer.

  “That’s where you hear the songs,” he says. “A lot of big publishers aren’t that interested in talking to a new guy in town. And they sure aren’t going to play him their best stuff. But writers are a different ball game. If you go out to those clubs, you’ll hear their best songs. You’ll hear their newest songs. And if you get to know them, they might even let you sing ’em.”

  There was another, more personal side to Garth’s lack of interest in the party aspect of the bar scene. “Sandy and I were working our butts off at a boot store and I was still afraid that it would end up having been for nothing.”

  By 1988 Nashville’s hottest writers showcase club was the Bluebird Cafe on Hillsboro Road. Small and cramped, its employees often shushed the audience with something less than elegance. Some industry types avoided the Bluebird when they could. Trouble was, that’s where they heard the hits. It wasn’t easy to get a spot on a Bluebird show. Singers and writers had to give an audition tape to owner Amy Kurland, a tough but open-minded critic who listened and pronounced judgment. In Garth’s case, she gave the thumbs-up. Garth sang there any chance he got, and spent countless nights listening to other writers, looking for the songs he would need should a record deal materialize.

  Bryan Kennedy was scouting for songs at the Bluebird one night when he heard a voice that he said knocked him on his rear. “I’ve heard it said that unless you’ve been to one of Garth’s concerts, you can’t completely ‘get’ how he connects with huge crowds,” Bryan says. “But I’d also say that if people haven’t heard him in a small, intimate setting, they may not quite understand what an impact he had on people before they had any idea who he was. I’d been around the music business all my life, and let me tell you, I almost fell off my chair the first time I heard him sing.”

  Kennedy grew up in the music business, the son of prominent guitar player, record producer, and former Mercury/PolyGram Records label head Jerry Kennedy. Bryan had two things in common with Garth Brooks: a love of music and a love of sports. An All State football player in high school, Kennedy went on to play defensive end at the University of Mississippi. And like Garth, he went to college on an athletic scholarship.

  After college, Bryan started working for his father’s newly formed JK Productions, and later for MCA Music Publishing, where he produced the first sides on Terri Clark. He made a name for himself as part of the Nashville-based trio Chuck Wagon and the Wheels, a group known for wearing outsized cowboy hats and using tongue-in-cheek comedy between songs. When he first heard Garth sing, Bryan knew this was something big.

  The Nashville Entertainment Association held regular showcases for writers to present new material to producers and A&R personnel. And it was on one night in 1988, while working for JK Productions, that Bryan stopped by the Bluebird Cafe. This was a time when few of Nashville’s working artists wore cowboy hats and boots. It was the era of Steve Earle and David Lynn Jones. Even Randy Travis went hatless. The exceptions were George Strait and Dwight Yoakam, but they were seldom in Nashville. When Bryan walked into the Bluebird wearing his cowboy hat, he saw Garth Brooks wearing Wranglers and Ropers and pegged him as an Oklahoman or Texan. A fellow spirit.

  “Here’s a guy who can sing a pretty good country song,” the show’s host said.

  Then Garth sang “If Tomorrow Never Comes.”

  “I turned to a record company friend of mine who was there, and said, ‘You ought to sign that guy,’ ” Bryan says. “When Garth came offstage, I introduced myself and fell all over him with praise—I gotta admit, I embarrassed myself. Then I went home and called my dad.”

  A native of Shreveport, Louisiana, Jerry Kennedy started out playing the Louisiana Hayride and touring with artists including Johnny Horton. He wound up doing session work in Nashville, playing on records with Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, and Roy Orbison to name a few. He headed Mercury Records for twenty years, worked with Roger Miller, Reba McEntire, the Statler Brothers, and Tom T. Hall, and remains one of the industry’s most respected executives.

  As it turned out, Kennedy had already heard about Garth from Bob Doyle. So after hearing his son’s endorsement, he was anxious to meet the singer. And when he did, he called his son and said that Garth was the greatest artist he’d ever heard. “That stunned me,” Bryan says. “Given all the artists Dad had worked with, and the fact that he doesn’t usually heap praise on people, it was just astonishing.”

  Kennedy called up his friend Joe Harris at Buddy Lee Attractions and asked him to meet with Garth. Joe hesitated, because Buddy Lee didn’t book acts without record contracts. But again, he had also heard about Garth from his friend Bob Doyle. Getting a second pitch from Jerry Kennedy told him that he ought to give the kid a listen.

  Harris had a long history of booking acts. He’d started out while stationed in Vietnam in the late 1960s, bringing package shows to entertain the troops. After an injury and exposure to Agent Orange, Joe returned to the United States to try and find his way back into society. He worked a series of unfulfilling jobs including punching time cards at a milk company, a tire company, and the post office, before starting to ease back into the band-booking business.

  One of the people Harris met during that time was power booker Buddy Lee, who in 1979 convinced him to move to Nashville. Despite Lee’s implied sponsorship, Harris had to start out at the bottom of the company, the mail room. Once he worked his way up in the pecking order, he started booking some of the top acts in the business: Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, George Strait. He’d been at the company just under a decade when Garth Brooks walked into his office and handed him a tape.

  Garth didn’t stop at giving him the tape, though, as Harris later explained. “He asked if it would be all right if he played a couple of songs on his guitar. Before he got th
rough his first line I knew what I’d been told about this Oklahoman was true. Corporate policy stated that no artist could be signed without a record deal. Normally, an artist is showcased then discussed at a weekly meeting among all agents as to whether to sign or pass on booking that act. But I heard something in Garth and I was afraid of taking the chance of losing him to another agency.”

  “I figured Joe Harris would throw me out on my butt,” Garth said. “But he shook my hand and offered to work with me.”

  In fact, Harris had some fancy footwork ahead of him, and for the next few days he felt he was on pins. “I kind of overruled everybody and because of my standing in the company they took my word and signed Garth without going through all the formalities. But then, I couldn’t track down Bob Doyle right away so it was a week before I actually got a signed contract.”

  Joe Harris had to tap-dance as fast as he could to get an unsigned act bookings, and slid Garth into gigs every chance he had. One that brought a chill to Garth’s bones involved a show at his old college town, Stillwater, Oklahoma, and the True Value Country Showdown. The opportunity came up after Tulsa promoter/agent Ray Bingham had booked his client Pake McEntire. When the show date changed from September to October, Pake was already booked and Bingham turned to Joe Harris at Buddy Lee Attractions. Harris immediately said, “Hell, Garth Brooks would be perfect for that, being as how it’s in Stillwater, where he went to school.” Bingham got Randy Schell and the Shot Glass Band to back him up. Right after the show, Bingham told the Tulsa World’s John Wooley how much he appreciated the newcomer’s professionalism: “Garth sent me a letter, thanking me for booking him on his first big job.”