The Garth Factor

by Patsi Bale Cox

  “Ray called and told me that Garth put on an amazing show,” Joe Harris recalled. “I told him that Garth always came through. I never knew him to have a bad night. But I also knew that it was important for Garth to go back and make his college town proud.”

  Years later, Garth nearly teared up remembering that show. “The whole time I was working on my first record, all I could think about was making the people back in Yukon proud, the people in Stillwater. You feel like you are representing them out there in public, and if you fail, you fail them.”

  Bob Doyle says that Joe Harris was one of the most important people in Garth’s early career. “I give credit to Joe for breaking Garth as an act,” Doyle now says. “In the beginning Garth didn’t even have a label. But Joe used his contacts and his powers of persuasion to get him booked into clubs all over the country. These promoters and club owners had no idea what they were getting. They just took Joe Harris’s word. And then, of course, Garth delivered.”

  Two more who played a central role in Garth’s early career were Capitol chief Jim Foglesong and his A&R man, Lynn Shults. Known around town as “Gentleman,” Jim Foglesong at Capitol was the elder statesman of Nashville’s record executives. He began producing for Columbia in 1953, working with a wide variety of artists: Roy Hamilton, Robert Goulet, Lester Lanin, Al Hirt, and Miriam Makeba. He later was hired by RCA, then moved to Nashville in 1970 with Dot Records, where he handled a roster that included Donna Fargo, Hank Thompson, and Roy Clark.

  After ABC bought Dot, Foglesong signed Barbara Mandrell, the Oak Ridge Boys, Don Williams, and John Conlee. Yet another merger made Foglesong the president of MCA, where he signed George Strait and Reba McEntire to the label, which already had Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, and Conway Twitty. After an L.A. transplant named Jimmy Bowen took over MCA, Foglesong was named president of Capitol.

  Lynn Shults had a background in radio and record companies, and was known as an affable lover of unique stylists, like Capitol’s Tanya Tucker. He was often out and about, scouting the clubs for new songs and new singers. That would prove vital in Garth’s ultimate signing.

  One day in late March 1988, Foglesong stopped by Lynn’s office and told him that he’d scheduled an audition with a new artist Bob Doyle was working with. On April 4 Garth sang several songs, including “If Tomorrow Never Comes.” When he finished, Foglesong was convinced the label should sign him. But in a meeting later that day, Lynn was less than enthusiastic. Foglesong decided to hold off, and told Bob Doyle to keep sending him tapes.

  Doyle had been pitching Garth all over Nashville. “I went to everybody,” Bob said. “Besides Jim Foglesong, the one person who really ‘got’ Garth’s potential was Renee Bell at MCA. She took a tape to her boss, Tony Brown, who set up a meeting with Jimmy Bowen. But Bowen also turned us down.”

  On May 11, Lynn Shults happened by the Bluebird Cafe for a writers night, and heard Garth sing “If Tomorrow Never Comes” for a second time. “Everything changed for me,” Lynn later said. “It was like I saw Garth for the first time and he blew me away. That night at the Bluebird, in an intimate setting, with a real audience, Garth was as good an artist as I’d ever seen.”

  Lynn immediately walked over to Bob Doyle. “Where did Jim leave this?” He asked.

  “We’re supposed to stay in touch,” Bob answered. Lynn was relieved that Garth was still unsigned.

  Shults said he was convinced that Foglesong would guarantee an album contract, as opposed to a singles only, and the two shook hands. Label offers vary in scope. A development deal means the artist gets a producer and the opportunity to work on his or her sound. It works for some, but many languish in endless demo sessions with no end in sight. A singles agreement means that songs will be chosen for hit potential, and if the hits don’t come, neither does the album. A guaranteed album at least means a real shot to prove oneself.

  A little over a month later, on June 17, Garth signed with Capitol. That presented a problem for Jerry Kennedy. After disagreements with Capitol during the time he produced Mel McDaniel, Kennedy didn’t feel that he had good relations with the label. So he bowed out and told Garth he should ask Capitol for a slate of potential producers.

  Lynn hoped Garth would choose Allen Reynolds as his producer. He had worked with Reynolds in connection with Jack Clement’s JMI (Jack Music Incorporated) in the 1970s and knew him to be a producer who stretched out, was willing to experiment, and who treated his artists with great respect.

  “I thought Garth needed that kind of guy at the helm,” Lynn noted. “Allen knew how to keep country honest but he was always open to newer or alternative musical influences. I also liked the Cowboy Jack connection. Jack had a way of looking at music that influenced us all. Maybe it was his Sun Records connection, but for Cowboy an album was never just a bunch of songs. It was something bigger. Garth saw things that way, too—your music is a reflection of something inside you.”

  “Cowboy” Jack Clement first made his name as an engineer/ producer at Sam Phillips’s Sun Records working with Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Roy Orbison, among others. When Clement moved to Nashville he worked with Cash and Charley Pride, building several studios throughout town in the process. One of those he sold to a songwriter/producer in his coterie, Allen Reynolds. The two shared this: a love of good music and a suspicion that it was just possible that industry executives could be something less than trustworthy. Out of respect for Clement, Reynolds kept the name: Jack’s Tracks.

  Allen Reynolds had given up a safe banking job to work with Clement in Memphis, then moved with him to Beaumont, Texas, to open a recording studio. In 1970 Clement came to Nashville with Reynolds and Dickey Lee, a writer (“She Thinks I Still Care”/George Jones) and artist (1962’s pop hit “Patches”). Reynolds wound up writing some big songs including “Ready For The Times To Get Better,” “I Saw Linda Yesterday” (with Lee, who had a pop hit with the song), and “Five O’Clock World” (a 1966 pop hit for the Vogues). Reynolds’s grasp of well-crafted lyrics that tapped into far-reaching topics would play into his production of Don Williams, Crystal Gayle, Kathy Mattea, Emmylou Harris, and Garth Brooks.

  On first look, Reynolds is an unlikely comrade for the flamboyant, oft-outrageous Cowboy Jack. Quiet, thoughtful, and thorough, Reynolds preferred to be behind the board in deep thought while musicians and artists took the spotlight. The Cowboy was more often waltzing through the studio strumming on a ukulele. But the two had one thing in common: neither played politics.

  Like Lynn Shults, Bob Doyle believed Allen Reynolds was the perfect producer for Garth. “The genius of Allen Reynolds is that his records have a timeless quality to them,” Bob said. “If you listen to Crystal Gayle’s ‘Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue,’ you’ll find that the music is there as a setting for the song,” Bob notes. “A Reynolds record isn’t about the latest technology—it’s about the song.”

  Since her debut in 1970, Crystal had suffered from a series of records on Decca that showed little of her own vocal character, but were vaguely imitative of her sister Loretta Lynn’s style. Crystal moved to United Artists in 1974 with Allen Reynolds as her producer. With the studio freedom Reynolds encouraged, she found her voice and began a hit-making streak that included “Wrong Road Again,” “I’ll Get Over You,” “You Never Miss A Real Good Thing,” and “I’ll Do It All Over Again.”

  Then, in 1977, Reynolds put a jazz-flavored touch on her recording of “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue,” and it made Loretta Lynn’s little sister an international superstar. The song spent four weeks at number 1 on the country chart, and hit number 2 in pop and number 4 in adult contemporary. Crystal took home two Grammy awards: Best Female Country Vocal Performance and Song of the Year. For the next two years she reigned as CMA Female Vocalist, and for three as ACM Female Vocalist.

  When his studio business slowed down in the early 1980s, Reynolds briefly considered putting Jack’s Tracks on the block and returning to songwriting full-
time. Then, he said, he realized that he stood at an important career crossroads. “I finally said to myself, ‘I’m gonna stay right here on this corner and make the best music I can, whether anybody wants it or not.’ But I also decided to stay as far away from record labels as possible. I wanted to make music away from label interference. My ideal situation was to find an artist I could work with where the label stayed out of my business—the music—and I stayed out of theirs—selling records.”

  He found just that arrangement working with the eclectic Kathy Mattea, who ran up a string of hits at Steve Popovich’s Mercury/PolyGram, including 1987’s “Goin’ Gone” and ’88’s signature “Eighteen Wheels And A Dozen Roses.” She was the CMA Female Vocalist of the Year in 1989 and 1990.

  Reynolds knew the first time he heard Garth sing that he was listening to an important talent. But it went deeper than that. Reynolds saw Garth as a solidly grounded individual who loved music and took it seriously, someone who wanted to be an artist more than he wanted to be a star. Reynolds thought Garth’s value system would hold him steady when stardom arrived. For his part, Garth knew he’d found his producer fifteen minutes into that first meeting. And he came to rely on his producer for sanity in a crazy business.

  “There’s an angel missing in heaven and his name is Allen Reynolds,” Garth confided early in his career. “He knows how important it is to separate the career and the music, but, and this is a big one, he also believes that artists have to pay attention to the business side, and stand their ground when things get cross-ways. I can always go to his studio and get away from it all. But the best thing about recording with Allen at Jack’s Tracks is that he’s got this motto: check your ego at the door.”

  Right away, Garth and Allen started putting together a team of musicians. One of the first people Garth mentioned was bassist Mike Chapman. Reynolds says he was thrilled with the suggestion: “Mike Chapman and drummer Milton Sledge had been friends since childhood. I was a great fan of Milton Sledge, so we brought him on board as well. To have that kind of musical history on the bass and drums was tremendous.”

  Next, they added Mark Casstevens on acoustic guitar and Chris Leuzinger on electric. Bobby Wood on keyboards rounded out the rhythm section. They then called in Rob Hajacos on fiddle and Bruce Bouton on steel. “That’s the core band we had from that day one,” Allen Reynolds says. “I thought that we’d make changes from time to time, but Garth was very loyal to these guys, and over the years I came to understand that his instincts were right on.”

  A few years later Garth talked about working with his customary crew, explaining that he never liked drum loops, metronomes, or any sleight-of-hand studio techniques, and neither did they. “I don’t mind making a mistake,” he said. “I can come up with some incredibly stupid idea and they’ll run with it. And, of course, they feel free to come up with dumb ideas, too. If it works, fine. If not, nobody is keeping score.”

  One of his primary considerations was that he wanted the group to sometimes sound like a band and not a collection of studio musicians. “Garth likes his music to kick and kick hard, sometimes to the point of suggesting that we put in the kind of musical punches and stops that a bar band would do,” Chris Leuzinger explained. “We get away with a lot of things on Garth’s records that we wouldn’t normally be able to do on a typical Nashville album.”

  The next step in putting together the debut album was to establish perimeters. Allen Reynolds believed in making music in what was considered by some to be an antiquated method. Even though Jimmy Bowen had ushered in the age of digital technology, where out-of-tune vocals are pitch shifted, or shrugged off with a “fix it in the mix” attitude, Allen preferred analog. He didn’t like the idea of dressing up bad songs with studio tricks, either.

  “You know the old Jack Clement saying,” Allen laughed. “If a song’s not good enough to be recorded two-track it’s not good enough to be recorded.”

  Of course, recording at Jack’s Tracks was not a two-track experience, but more than any major studio in town, what you heard was what you got. Garth loved the idea of keeping his records real and agreed on the no-nonsense analog approach. Reynolds and Brooks were of like minds when it came to songs, too.

  “We determined right away what an album should and should not be,” Reynolds says. “It should not be a selection of radio-friendly songs to release as singles, surrounded by filler. An album should be able to stand alone as an actual show. You should be able to get on a stage and sing every song in the sequence that it appears on the album and hold an audience’s attention.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “I’d have titled it Randy Travis if I could have gotten away with it”

  I think every song on an album should be a song of consequence,” Allen Reynolds said.

  “Songs of consequence?” Garth repeated, then smiled. “I think I’ve got ’em.”

  The next time the two met, Garth put an overflowing box of cassette tapes on Reynolds’s desk. “I’ve been collecting songs ever since I got to Nashville,” Garth said. “I’ve been hitting all the little clubs, the writers nights, the showcases—and these are the best of what I heard. Most of them knocked me to my knees.”

  “Those are just the kind we’re looking for,” Reynolds replied.

  “I’D BEEN WRITING AS much as possible, but didn’t want to overload the album with my own material. No more than five songs, for sure,” Garth explained. “I think it works for some writer/artists to record an entire album of their own compositions—but I didn’t see myself as a writer of that caliber. I’d been out in the clubs and heard the wealth of material Nashville writers had to offer. Plus, I was afraid of sending the wrong message. I didn’t want writers saying, ‘Oh, he’ll just cut his own stuff’ and send their good songs to somebody else.”

  Reynolds was relieved to hear that Garth’s writing ego wasn’t going to get in the way of his selections, but he soon learned that the attitude could be a double-edged sword. Garth often hesitated to cut his own songs that Reynolds believed in. “I loved quite a few of Garth’s songs and couldn’t believe it when he balked at recording some of them,” Reynolds says.

  “I had to be pushed into cutting ‘Not Counting You’ because it didn’t seem right for me,” Garth adds. “I wrote the song for a friend who was trying to get a record deal and wanted exactly that kind of light tune. But I didn’t see it as being right for me.”

  In fact, both Reynolds and Bob Doyle saw the song as classic midtempo country fare, perfect for anyone from Faron Young to George Strait. Reynolds believed in the song so much that, in looking at the album selection as a performance set, he believed it should come first, the show opener. Indeed, Garth opened shows with the song for the next four years.

  Although George Jones had considered cutting “If Tomorrow Never Comes,” and even had it on hold for a few months, when Garth signed with Capitol Records the song was once again available. At Reynolds’s insistence it was included on the debut album. It would have been a serious omission had it not been. The song is what won Garth his record contract and it went on to be one of the most awarded of the time. In 1991 “If Tomorrow Never Comes” was named Favorite Country Single at the American Music Awards. London-based Country Music People magazine named it the International Single of the Year, and at the Music City News Songwriter Awards the song took home honors as one of the Top 10 songs of the year.

  Guitarist Mark Casstevens talked about the importance of being sensitive to the story during the recording of “If Tomorrow Never Comes.”

  “It’s critical that what I play follows the emotion of the story line. That usually means starting with simple parts and voicings and then building them as the story develops.” That technique was critical on the intro to “If Tomorrow Never Comes.”

  “I wanted to play a simple, yet recognizable, part, so I suggested this intro. We ended up making it a turnaround lick that the whole band played.” And because Casstevens started out as a banjo player, and plays his
guitar with both a thumb pick and his index and middle fingers, a close listen to “Tomorrow” will show the banjo technique where the thumb hits two notes at once.

  “If Tomorrow Never Comes” wasn’t the only song Reynolds had to sell Garth on. “The Dance” almost didn’t make the cut.

  “If I was at a writer showcase and heard something, I made sure I either got a tape that night or knew where I could pick one up the next day,” Garth said. “And I brought them all to Allen when we started working on my first album. When I came back in a couple of days, he asked me about ‘The Dance.’ I told him it was one of the best songs I’d ever heard, but that I didn’t think it was country. Allen said, ‘Country or not, you’ve got to cut it.’ ”

  There was another initial concern. The song dealt with what must have been an obviously devastating breakup, a hurt Garth hadn’t experienced. Later he would see “The Dance” on a deeper level, but at first he wasn’t sure if he was the person to convey the meaning. After reflection, he decided that there was no way he could ever personally experience every sentiment in every song he wrote or recorded.

  “I don’t think a writer can live everything he writes about. Of course, sometimes it helps, even if it’s something you’ve heard or learned from a friend or acquaintance,” Garth says.

  Reynolds advised against trying to country the record up. “Allen told me he wanted Bobby Wood, a writer and keyboard player, to be heavily featured on the song,” Garth recalled. “I’d never imagined putting keys on the record, and got nervous about it. But once I heard that haunting track I knew it was right. I’m always in awe of Bobby’s playing. He is without a doubt one of the best, most original and innovative I’ve ever heard.”