The Garth Factor

by Patsi Bale Cox

  This latest takeover had started during Bowen’s second run at MCA Nashville. Like most of Bowen’s deals, the Capitol deal had roots in L.A.’s pop world, where Bowen had old friends and old enemies. Al Teller fell into the latter category, and when he was named president of MCA Records, Bowen knew his reign as head of the label’s country division was in jeopardy. Bowen didn’t like Teller. He believed him to have both a lack of respect for the music and an ego problem. And as Bowen wrote in his 1997 memoir, “I wasn’t going to kiss his ring—or his butt.”

  Bowen went higher up and started a joint venture with the head of MCA Music Entertainment Group, Irving Azoff. MCA funded the new label, Universal Records, and as part of Bowen’s deal he was allowed to start a publishing company, Great Cumberland Music. Of course, that set tongues wagging about label/publishing collusion, but Bowen never minded gossip. Universal signings favored established artists including Lacy J. Dalton, Eddie Rabbitt, Eddie Raven, Gary Morris, Larry Gatlin and the Gatlin Brothers, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

  Although Universal had sales and critical success with the Dirt Band’s Will The Circle Be Unbroken II, the label had trouble with radio. Lacy J. Dalton’s “The Heart” hit number 13 in 1989 and that was about it. Once rumors started flying that the label hadn’t received the amount of funding it had anticipated, Music Row observers figured that Universal was a wash.

  With Universal apparently under a deathwatch Bowen approached EMI and suggested he could fix Capitol Nashville. Jim Foglesong had long been perceived as a less than aggressive marketer, something Bowen could never be accused of. So Bowen promised to have Capitol viewed as a major label within six months, vowing that Capitol would be making $50 million to $60 million with a 10 to 15 percent profit a year in seven years.

  Capitol had potential as far as Bowen could see. He had passed on Garth Brooks when Bob Doyle made his pitch a year earlier. But when he heard “If Tomorrow Never Comes” on the radio, he thought it sounded familiar. Then he remembered the intense kid from Oklahoma, whose second single was catching fire. Bowen approached Allen Reynolds at a party Waylon Jennings threw for some friends. “I really screwed up,” Bowen told him. “I didn’t get what a talent Garth Brooks is.”

  In one of the most astonishing cases of a secret well kept, Bowen actually started promoting Garth Brooks while he was still negotiating with EMI. He called his Universal promotion team together a couple of months before the takeover, and gave them their instructions:

  “Every time you talk to a radio station, after you give them the Universal pitch, tell them that when all is said and done, Garth Brooks is what’s making news in Nashville.”

  Some of the Universal team said they felt guilty when talking to Capitol promo pals. “They’d say radio was telling them that other labels were singing Garth’s praises,” one said. “I knew what was coming and it made me feel like hell.” But nobody talked out of school, and nobody connected the Bowen dots.

  Bowen believed that a marketing push and expanded roster would right the Capitol ship, not to mention new employees. “I needed a staff with a proud, kick-butt attitude. There’s a negativity that comes off being a perennial loser,” he later wrote.

  Label head Jim Foglesong would be an obvious casualty. But Bowen knew that firing Lynn Shults, the likeable around-town guy who was credited with Brooks’s signing, would make him enemies. But as Bowen often said, he’d rather be successful than popular on Music Row, and besides, he planned on bringing his Universal A&R guy, James Stroud, with him, along with the label’s roster.

  Capitol employees felt as if they’d been body slammed, and left their building in shock. There had been no warning that a tsunami was headed straight at them. The label wasn’t making money, but sales were flat all over town.

  Despite the fact that country music was in an exciting time creatively, the hit singles and innovative records were not bringing out a record-buying public in droves. Most labels on the Row were nervous, and not in the mood to hire. The group of people who’d been let go perceived their prospects as slim to none.

  Lynn Shults, in particular, was devastated. Every A&R person in the business wants a legacy, that one great successful discovery he or she can point to with pride. The day he was fired, Lynn knew two things: Garth Brooks was on the verge of a career that would put Capitol Records on the map and Jimmy Bowen was going to grab the credit. Shults went on to work at Billboard and Atlantic Records, but he never really got over walking out the door at Capitol Records that day in December 1989.

  When word reached Garth, he was shaken. “I’d never heard of a wipeout like that—so many people losing their jobs at once,” he said. “I had no clue what to expect from Jimmy Bowen. When I talked to Allen Reynolds, he said, ‘Watch your back, pal.’ ”

  Two days after the takeover Bowen phoned Reynolds and asked for a meeting. Bowen had a history of doing business from his Franklin Road mansion. Or, once in a while he had his driver stop by offices and pick people up for a rolling meeting through Music Row. He didn’t like offices, and, some said, if he was actually in the office people took note of the amount of time he spent on the golf course. In Bowen’s defense, a lot of business got done on Nashville’s golf courses. Bowen offered to pick up Reynolds in his chauffeured Town Car.

  “I don’t hear anything else on this album,” Bowen said. “I’d like you to get me a new one ready by February. Can you do that?”

  “No,” Reynolds answered. “We can’t do that and measure up to our standards.”

  “Then how soon can you get one ready? Can you do it by June?”

  “Yes,” Reynolds said. “But before you leave this album, you really should listen again. There’s some more great music there, and one song in particular, called ‘The Dance.’ Garth is doing it live and the audience loves it. I know he wants it as a single.”

  Reynolds talked at length about “The Dance” and its ability to reach a range of emotions. “It’s a song that will help distinguish Garth from the competition,” he concluded.

  Bowen dropped off Reynolds at the studio, promising to give the album another listen.

  He called back a few hours later and said, “Two more singles.”

  THE CAPITOL BUILDING STOOD empty for some time, producing a deathlike atmosphere on Music Row. Bowen waited for the air to clear, then started putting together a staff. One of the first aboard was Cathy Gurley, president of Gurley & Co. Public Relations, who had handled Bowen’s media through the Universal days. She would play a critical role in much of Garth’s early career, but especially during his first major controversy, the “Thunder Rolls” video.

  After Bowen went out to one of Garth’s shows he again called Reynolds and asked for another of those Town Car meetings.

  “Allen, I just got back from seeing Garth play live at Tennessee Tech in Cookeville. The kid’s a natural—a true natural. We don’t have many of those. You’re lucky if you know one in a lifetime. What I want you to do as you make this album is to get as much as you possibly can of that guy I saw onstage onto that recording. Get as much of that energy as you can capture!”

  Reynolds says it was the best mandate he could have hoped for. “Nashville was a pretty conservative town then,” Reynolds reflects. “I don’t know of another recording CEO who would have said what Bowen did. What it meant was that we could make the music we wanted to make without worrying about label and radio filters. It meant we could have all the fun we wanted to—and we did.”

  Bowen knew that he had a superstar in the pipeline, and began to fuel the career in earnest. He hired the L.A. firm owned by Sandy and David Brokaw to help boost Capitol’s image in general, and Garth’s in particular. The Brokaws, one of the most effective teams in the business, got Garth exposure on telethons, at fairs, and even a choice spot on Night of 1,000 Stars at Radio City in New York. The 1,000 Stars show was one of Garth’s first experiences in rubbing elbows with nonmusic celebrities. On one elevator ride, he stood next to Muhammad Ali and confessed tha
t he could barely catch his breath. Later, while the show’s taping went on, Garth sneaked off to a pay phone where he could call his parents out of earshot from the other participants.

  “You won’t believe all the stars here!” he whispered, hastily hanging up when a group of people ambled by.

  Doyle and Lewis were busily setting up press opportunities and radio station meet-and-greets as well. The Doyle/Lewis team’s importance during these early years cannot be overstated; Pam, in particular, was a street fighter when it came to her artist. “Pam and I did everything we could to get Garth known,” Bob Doyle laughs. “Sometimes I felt like we were Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, saying, ‘Let’s put on a show!’ ”

  Bowen then brought in a high-powered marketer. Because he loved to make noise in Nashville’s executive suites, he went outside the country end of the business and hired Joe Mansfield, who had started out with CBS Records working with Barbra Streisand, Pink Floyd, the Pointer Sisters, Hall & Oates, and Jefferson Starship. He left CBS to develop CEMA, EMI’s distribution arm in Los Angeles, where, as VP of marketing, he was instrumental in breaking Bonnie Raitt, Heart, Hammer, Poison, and Tina Turner.

  Mansfield was named Capitol/Nashville’s VP of sales and marketing, and the way he saw it, his first charge was to get Garth Brooks in as many stores as possible. Under Foglesong, the label had shipped a mere thirty-thousand units. Both Bowen and Mansfield were aghast at the lack of a serious sales push. “I give Jimmy Bowen a lot of credit for the free hand he gave me when it came to marketing Garth,” Mansfield said. “I believed in keeping his debut album, Garth Brooks, alive even as we started marketing the follow-up album. It took a leap of faith on Bowen’s part to okay that budget.”

  A lot of insiders thought Mansfield was crazy to start heavy promotion on Garth’s debut while a new album was coming within months. But Mansfield refused to dump Garth Brooks. He believed the buyers were out there, and he planned on getting them on board. In Texas especially, where live music ruled, he found fertile ground. He shipped more records, and once “The Dance” kicked in, sales soared.

  Mansfield believed two marketing strategies could play well for Garth’s career: maximizing the catalog and event marketing. After all, a good part of Capitol’s wealth had been built on catalog items from acts such as the Beatles, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Pink Floyd, and Steve Miller. While many labels tended to ignore catalog, an artist’s entire body of previously released work, it was at their peril. Further, lessons could be learned from the role television exposure had played in breaking out Capitol’s biggest-selling act, the Beatles. Anything and everything having to do with the Fab Four became an event. And years later, when the label looked to the band’s catalog, they understood that without radio airplay, new marketing strategies had to be considered.

  “There’s no reason—especially for an artist like Garth—to turn your back on the previous album just because a new one is coming out,” Mansfield said. “That’s one reason I don’t buy into that album-every-year concept. I think you end up leaving both singles and sales on the table. Every new release can generate renewed interest in the previous one. And as the catalog grows, I see it as a whole artistic package, not just a series of records.”

  That was music to Garth’s ears. When Bowen had briefly considered ceasing to promote the debut album, Garth Brooks, he’d been horrified. “So much great music has been forgotten because labels either didn’t give them the attention they needed or shelved them for the next thing,” Garth explained. “Through my life I’ve run across wonderful albums that nobody ever heard of because they either got overshadowed or ignored. What I hoped to do—what I set out to try and do—was record a body of work that fit together, could be heard from the perspective of the times of an artist’s life.”

  For that reason, Mansfield was no fan of greatest-hits packages, especially those released after just a few years of hit making. “Think about the songs that get lost because of greatest-hits albums,” he said. “Some of the finest songs on an album are never released as singles for one reason or another. They might not quite fit into the radio niche, or they might run too long. When you issue a hits package and discourage people from hearing the original collection, I think it diminishes the craft.”

  For Garth, it meant something else: protection for songwriters. When a writer has a song on an album and it’s not released as a single, they are paid “mechanical” royalties, based on the number of albums sold. Singles royalties are paid per times played on the radio, plus for sold copies. There are in Nashville, as with the entire industry, many writers who have hundreds of album cuts, but not many singles for the reasons Mansfield noted. Garth felt close ties to the writing community and many of the songs he most loved from his own releases were not the singles, but the album cuts. By keeping the albums in play, the continued sales benefited him, certainly, but the writing and publishing community as well.

  Mansfield also understood that Garth was a natural for event marketing, television specials, widely promoted concerts, and appearances. “He had the personality to pull that off,” Mansfield said. “He was a real guy, smart, honest—sometimes to a fault—and people loved him for that. Some artists start to lose their luster as people are around them. Familiarity often breeds contempt. But I noticed that for the people Garth interacted with it was exactly the opposite. The more people got to know him the more they liked him as both an artist and a person. We couldn’t get him out to meet every fan personally, but we could bring him into their homes through television, and bring his shows to their venues.”

  Nobody was happier about Bowen hiring Mansfield than Bob Doyle. “I’ve always thought that the genius of a great record executive was when they understood that an artist knew who and what he was, and said, ‘Okay, let’s give him the resources to make this work.’ That’s how Joe Mansfield looked at Garth’s career.”

  The longer Garth spent working with Mansfield, the more he trusted him. The two only had one real disagreement in those first months. “I believed that the price of each CD should be raised by one dollar,” Mansfield recalled. “When we did it, Garth told me that he saw it as a hardship on the consumer. So I said, ‘I’ll give you back a dollar for every fan who complains.’

  “Garth immediately told me that he’d already had one fan question the decision. I handed him a dollar and told him to send it to the fan. In the end, I don’t believe his fans paid much attention to the price change. But it was a concern for him.”

  Although Garth had never been the marketing major so many reporters were determined to claim, he was a quick study and loved being an integral part of both planning and execution. It never occurred to Garth that his “key man” at the label could be jerked from the equation as quickly as his original Capitol team had been.

  Allen and Garth were convinced that “The Dance” should be the fourth single, so that left number three to pick. Since Garth hadn’t even been sure that “Not Counting You” belonged on the album, he was surprised that it was chosen. But it was probably the wise choice. It was midtempo, with an infectious melody and strong lyrics with a humorous twist—a perfect interlude between two serious ballads. It was released on February 3, 1990, and shot up the chart to number 1 so fast that “The Dance” had to be released just four months later.

  “The Dance” stayed at the top of Billboard’s chart for three weeks, nourished in part by a clip that changed the standard for music videos. Garth knew that his vision for the video would take the song to a different level.

  “I decided very early that I wanted to make videos with a third dimension,” Garth said. “I wanted to expand the vision instead of funneling it. That way they would reach more people and more emotions. To a lot of people ‘The Dance’ is a song about love gone wrong. But to me, it was also about life and death.”

  He wanted to spotlight people he believed lived life to the fullest, and with few regrets: Martin Luther King Jr., John Wayne, Keith Whitley, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the crew
of the Challenger, and rodeo star Lane Frost. They were all dreamers and risk takers.

  “I’d never compare myself to these people,” Garth said. “But if somehow I leave this world unexpectedly, play ‘The Dance.’ I don’t think I would trade one yesterday for one more tomorrow. I’m gonna have a ball with the time that the Good Lord has given me. And if anybody’s crazy enough to shed a tear for me, don’t do it. I had the time of my life.

  “This piece means the world to me. And while I’m proud of the awards it has received, I’m even more proud of the letters I’ve received. People have written to say that the video helped them deal with the death of a loved one. People played it at funerals. That’s real life. And the Good Lord willing, that means the video is doing what it’s supposed to do.”

  As with “If Tomorrow Never Comes,” when Garth recorded “The Dance,” the deaths of friends Jim Kelly and Heidi Miller weighed heavily on his mind: “Until Heidi and Jim died, death hadn’t been a part of my life. But the deaths of those two friends happening fairly close to each other really hit me. In fact, when Jim died in 1982, there was a period of about six months that I don’t even recall happening. It just seems black to me. But during that time I realized what death is. Death is a cheat. It’s a cheat because you don’t get to do the things you want to do. Then and there I decided that I was going to try to do everything I wanted to do. But then the video for ‘The Dance’ freed me from death, from worrying about when it happened. I have myself right there in film and audio saying that if I die, play this for me. It’s okay.”

  Making this video made Garth think a lot about dreamers: “When I first started doing music, maybe my dreams seem small to some. But they were big to me at the time. My first goal was to hear my debut single, ‘Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old),’ on the radio. I still remember where I was when I first heard it. I was driving home from a writing appointment, coming up on the 440/65 split. The song came on and I was all over the highway! Then I flipped to the other Nashville country station, and there it was! If I had wrecked that truck and that was it, it would have been enough. That’s the lesson I hear in ‘The Dance.’ ”