“The video hardly advocates spouse abuse. Critics will note that the words to ‘The Thunder Rolls’ don’t mention wife-beating, but videos have never been limited to strict interpretations of lyrics.”
The Arkansas Gazette’s television critic, Paul Johnson, wrote in his “Small Screen” column,
Even a cursory examination of Brooks’ phenomenal output of monster songs reveals that many deal with thoughtful topics of greater than average relevance. For every “Friends In Low Places” type of song Brooks has recorded, there’s a sober-minded and contemplative song such as “Wolves” or “Unanswered Prayers” or “If Tomorrow Never Comes.” So, TNN executives obviously were aware that Brooks occasionally deals with topics other than drinking till you can’t see straight, moaning over a two-timing lover or driving an 18-wheeler faster than the law allows.
Which brings us to the point: TNN has found nothing objectionable in literally hundreds of country music videos that deal with adultery, alcoholic lovers, two-timing drunk adulterers, drunk two-timing truck-driving adulterers and other topics of a less-than-savory nature.
By Thursday, May 7, when VH-1 announced that the pop channel would begin airing the video, “The Thunder Rolls” had taken on a life of its own.
Capitol was turned into a clearinghouse of information. Employees took calls from hundreds of shelters, women’s groups, and individual women wanting information, assistance, or help raising visibility for the domestic violence issue. Within weeks the label had compiled a nationwide bank of contact numbers. Radio and retail outlets undertook huge fund-raising efforts. Women within the Nashville music community reported that many began sharing personal experiences previously kept secret even from their closest friends. One woman talked about her experience in a very frank letter to the Nashville Tennessean:
The video supports those victims of abuse who live in destructive relationships. I am a survivor of such a situation. I knew changes had to be made in my home when I, like the woman in the video, saw what my child went through having to live with this abuse. However, instead of getting a gun, I got a lawyer and subsequently divorced. The resulting hardships for what was left of my family included total financial collapse, bankruptcy, loss of my business, home, autos and then major depression.
Rebuilding our lives has been accomplished through hard work and desire, with assistance from support systems. For those caught up in the same video re-runs as those pictured in “The Thunder Rolls,” I say: “There is help available for you and your family. You are worth it.”
“The Thunder Rolls” had a lasting impact, giving other artists the freedom to make higher-impact videos relating to family violence. They would range from Martina McBride’s powerfully charged “Independence Day” to the tongue-in-cheek “Goodbye Earl” from the Dixie Chicks and Big & Rich’s potent “Holy Water.”
By early summer, when the initial Country Music Association award nominations were being considered, Jimmy Bowen sent out a mass mailing of “The Thunder Rolls” in case members still had not seen the video. For his part, Bowen loved the controversy. “It sells records,” he laughed. “You can’t buy this kind of publicity.”
On October 2 Garth was named CMA Entertainer of the Year. “Friends In Low Places” won Single of the Year and No Fences Album of the Year. And when “The Thunder Rolls” was announced as Video of the Year, the applause at Nashville’s Opry house, with President George H.W. Bush in attendance, was deafening.
The win was bittersweet for Garth. His video had massively raised awareness for a very serious social problem and his vision was vindicated. But the controversy had overshadowed the song. It was not the result he’d wanted. As he explained, the video controversy “didn’t hurt my career. It hurt my feelings.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Bustin’ in like old John Wayne
The 1991 tour schedule was grueling. Between the coliseum and amphitheater dates was a long string of one-night gigs at clubs, jamborees, fairs, festivals, and rodeos. As the holidays approached, Garth realized that just getting home for Thanksgiving was going to be a problem. He had shows booked through December, with only a brief break between a November 23 date with the Judds in Lexington, Kentucky, and a December 6 show at the Mississippi Coliseum in Jackson. On Thanksgiving Day, Garth and Sandy made a quick trip home to Yukon, Oklahoma.
Colleen Brooks was horrified when her son walked through the door.
“I looked like hell,” Garth said. “My voice was gone, my hair was gray on the sides. So when I left early the next morning I wrote her a note that read, ‘Mom, if this kills me, I’ll die happy.’ ”
IN JUST ONE YEAR Garth’s life and career changed with frightening speed. Instead of his management trying to capture interviews with prominent reporters, Pam Lewis was having to field requests. Garth’s time was no longer his own. Joe Harris was flooded with concert requests. “Friends In Low Places” certainly started the gusher, but Garth’s tour kept it pumping, and it was starting to garner a lot of high-profile press. On December 30, 1990, the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Hilburn wrote, “Advisory to rival country music singers: Think twice before agreeing to follow Garth Brooks on stage.”
As his career had heated up in 1990, Garth was still signing autographs until late in the night. By 1991 he would find it impossible, and the decision to cut signing sessions short was excruciating. As he explained to the L.A. Times, “I stayed up nights, wondering what I was going to do. I finally had to look at the reality of the situation, that things had changed, and hope they understood. This business has a way of changing you, picking away at you until you are a different person. I want to give people the best show we can, but more than anything I want the people who came to see us a long time ago to go away from the show now thinking: ‘That guy was real then and he’s real now. He hasn’t changed.’ ”
By the beginning of 1991 Garth could have easily fronted a headline tour. He could command a hefty concert fee and sell tickets in record-setting times. However, he had made many commitments for far less money, and he kept them all, losing millions of dollars worth of offers.
As the Dallas Morning News reported, “After ‘If Tomorrow Never Comes’ and ‘The Dance’ hit #1, Garth was making as much as $100,000 a show, but he kept a $10,000 gig at the Silver Spurs Gala fund-raiser in Arlington. ‘Some acts will readjust their fee after they shoot up into the stratosphere like Garth had done,’ says KPLX DJ Steve Harmon. ‘Not only did Garth play for the amount which had been agreed upon months earlier, but he turned around after the concert and donated his check to charity, which benefits cancer research.’ ”
In January 1991 Garth kept a commitment to play two shows at Denver’s Grizzly Rose honky-tonk. The Denver Post reported that he was the hottest ticket in country music, packing the club with people in town for the National Western Stock Show. This was just one month before he shattered the all-time world attendance record for a single rodeo concert performance in February at the Houston Astrodome, performing for 55,986 fans attending the Houston Livestock Show.
Garth felt that the most important promise he had made was to open shows for Naomi and Wynonna Judd for what would be their Farewell Tour through 1991. The Judds’ drama had started while the mother/daughter team was on tour in 1990, just six months after Naomi had married her longtime love, gospel singer Larry Strickland. Throughout early 1990 Naomi had felt sick, to the point that she could barely get to the studio to sing her harmony parts for the album Love Can Build a Bridge. After Naomi was diagnosed with hepatitis C, a potentially fatal illness, a news conference was called at the now-vacant RCA building where the Judds had first auditioned for label head Joe Galante.
It was a dreary, rainy day and the two women were shocked at how shabby the old office building looked, with peeling paint and threadbare carpets. The music press was taken by surprise by the Judds’ announcement, some even questioning whether the illness was feigned so as to launch a solo career for Wynonna. But it was very real, and very serious. Wyno
nna was in a charged state of emotions as the two started on their final tour. She worried about her mother’s health, about whether the tour was worsening the hepatitis and possibly shortening her life.
Worst of all, from the very beginning, manager Ken Stilts was pushing Wy to record a solo album to be released soon after the tour wound up. Wynonna felt so guilty about listening to demo tapes for her upcoming MCA album that she hid them when Naomi came to visit. “I felt like a part of me was dying,” Wynonna said.
The tour, the industry’s top grossing in 1991, marched on with shows opened by Garth and a new act on Capitol, the Pirates of the Mississippi. Putting a rowdy garage band like the Pirates out on the Judds Farewell Tour was a stretch, but Ken Stilts also managed them and he was adamant that they get the exposure.
The Judds’ pay-per-view final concert was the most successful music event in cable’s history at the time, grabbing more viewers than comparable shows by the Rolling Stones and New Kids on the Block. Wynonna, her emotions still wound tight, returned to the studio to work with producer Tony Brown on her solo debut, due out in 1992.
Garth alternated between shows where he was the opening act and those where he needed an opening act. For the latter, there was never a question in his mind that friend and fellow demo singer alum Trisha Yearwood had the gig. Moreover, when Garth began to record for Capitol, Trisha sang harmony on every album. When asked about the magic the two had in the studio and onstage, Garth told Music Business International, “Anybody and Trisha Yearwood is a great couple.”
By this time, Trisha was an MCA artist, produced by Garth Fundis, who’d made great records with Keith Whitley from 1987 to the year of Whitley’s death, 1989. Fundis had learned of Trisha through writer Pat Alger, who first heard her singing backup at a Garth Brooks showcase. As it had with Brooks, it only took Alger one listen to become a Trisha-True-Believer. He phoned his friend Fundis singing her praises. The first thought Fundis had on hearing the Georgia vocalist was of a song he’d rat-holed years earlier, waiting for the right singer with the right image. Enter Trisha Yearwood, all-American girl with a golden voice.
“Let me play you a song I got from this guy in Colorado,” he said. “ ‘She’s In Love With The Boy.’ ”
Now that Trisha had found a producer and was working on an unofficial basis with Bob Doyle and Pam Lewis, Garth wondered if she might find a recording home at Capitol. At the time, 1990, there was some behind-the-scenes tension between Brooks and Bowen, though nothing to get excited about. But Trisha balked.
According to author Lisa Gubernick, who wrote Get Hot or Go Home about Trisha’s early career, the singer was suspicious of Bowen. First, she was determined to keep Garth Fundis as her producer and knew she’d be pressured to choose Bowen. Additionally, even if one didn’t mind that Bowen tried to get in charge of every artist, it was the way he didn’t stay in charge once he took the job. Gubernick explained: “Bowen had come to believe that a performer is primarily responsible for his or her own music. In practical terms, that meant that Bowen supervised from afar, an absentee landlord.”
Trisha ended up signing with MCA, by then headed by Bowen protégés Bruce Hinton and A&R ace Tony Brown, who had been looking for MCA’s next superstar. He found her in Trisha Yearwood. She decided to break out on her own as far as management was concerned and ultimately decided on L.A.-based Ken Kragen, who handled Kenny Rogers and Travis Tritt.
When Trisha started opening for Garth, her MCA Records debut single, “She’s In Love With The Boy,” was just taking off. As she later explained, the lack of a track record caused her some concern. “I was intimidated at first,” she told Country Music Special in 1992. “I didn’t think Garth’s fans would give me the time of day. I thought I’d be playing to people still walking in or folks talking all through my set. My first single wasn’t even Top 20 yet at that point. But they were so accepting and excited. I got great response, partly because my band is so great. Also, we were in a better position than most opening acts because Garth was such a friend and he took good care of us.”
Prior to playing the Carolina Coliseum, Trisha told the Columbia, South Carolina, State: “We aren’t herded in and out for the sound check. Garth always tells the technicians to ‘… make sure Trisha sounds good.’ ”
But there was also a downside. Rumors of an affair kept cropping up, although both denied that their relationship was anything more than a friendship. Because Garth had been open about his 1989 road fling, people around Nashville were always on the lookout for fresh gossip. And when Trisha and Chris Latham divorced in 1991, it was too easy. Except that it was wrong. Trisha was particularly offended by the talk, since she considered Garth a big brother figure.
Trisha talked about making the tabloids with Country Fever editor Linda Cauthen: “My dad wanted to go kill the National Enquirer, or whoever it was. The first time that something like that happens, you want to call everybody you know and say, ‘It isn’t true!’ because I’ve never done anything that interesting! You can’t control what people say about you. If there’s no dirt to report then they’ve just got to go make something up. I don’t read it. If you sit and think about it, it’ll just make you mad. Let them talk. But people who know me, and who know Garth and Sandy, well, most people know it’s stupid.”
And there was an additional charge that Trisha answered in no uncertain terms with the Los Angeles Times: “It’s no fun to hear people saying you rode somebody’s coattails to get where you are. Okay, I probably wouldn’t have made it as quickly without Garth, but I would have made it somehow. I do have talent.”
The tour got across-the-board raves. Music journalist Michael McCall was among the first to sense that Garth’s show was not merely rivaling rock concerts, but had the potential to leave them in the dust. Writing in Country Music magazine, McCall described Garth’s November 7, 1991, concert at the Murphy Arena in Murfreesboro, Tennessee:
The spectacle he unleashed that cool November night awed even those who thought they’d seen it all. It was almost as entertaining to watch industry veterans react to the euphoric atmosphere as it was to watch the crowd itself. The hysterical reaction Brooks draws has long been a part of American culture. It happened to Frank Sinatra, to Elvis, to The Beatles, to Bruce Springsteen, to Michael Jackson, even New Kids on the Block. But when has it happened to an artist who proudly says he plays country music? There are stories about the tens of thousands who lined up for Hank Williams’ funeral, and veterans like Minnie Pearl and Chet Atkins say that Roy Acuff’s popularity was so massive during World War II that hundreds of fans would line the streets of Southern towns waiting for his concert caravan to roll by. Since the coming of the rock ’n’ roll era, though, it hasn’t happened to a country artist—not on this scale anyway.
When Garth sold out the Memphis Mid-South Coliseum on September 27, it became the first sell out since ZZ Top the previous January. The Commercial Appeal’s Larry Nagar made a prophetic statement: “Country music is pop’s poor relation no more.”
This kind of press not only benefited Garth, it affected all of country music. Joe Harris said that once the comparisons to rock ’n’ roll started being made, promoters stepped up offers for country acts across-the-board. It didn’t matter that every country artist didn’t put on the high-energy show Garth did, either. The press he began to generate both from his recordings and concerts made country a hot commodity.
If No Fences made Garth Brooks a superstar, then its follow-up, Ropin’ the Wind, reached out and put all of country music in the spotlight. It would have made a splash anyway, but a change in Billboard’s methodology brought Ropin’ the Wind to the fore with a tidal wave. The industry’s bible, Billboard had previously tracked sales through the stores. What that meant was that an employee, often a young rocker, was asked for a report of what had sold in the past week. The kid remembered pop acts, but country was a big, “Huh?” Because of that, the Billboard Top 200 chart, usually referred to as the pop chart, was often a wasteland for
country product.
Billboard didn’t set out to change the industry’s perception of country music, but when they changed to an electronic scanning system known as SoundScan, that’s what it did. The change had taken effect during the No Fences run, and affected that album’s chart position. When the revamped chart was first published in May 1991, there were fifteen more country albums that suddenly appeared on the Top 200 list. Then, when Ropin’ the Wind was released in September, SoundScan’s full impact sent shock waves through the industry.
There is a line from one of Ropin’ the Wind’s songs, “Against The Grain,” that contains the description “go bustin’ in like old John Wayne,” which sums up what happened when Ropin’ the Wind met up with SoundScan. The album was released on September 10, 1991, and on September 21 it entered the Billboard country and Top 200 charts at number 1.
The Irish Times described Ropin’ the Wind as a “revolution,” saying, “Late last year, as rock deities Prince, Michael Jackson and U2 loudly unleashed albums… Garth Brooks quietly saddled up his horse and rode past them all on the trail to the top of the American charts.”
Capitol PR VP Gurley advised Bowen to seize the moment and throw a party for Music Row. Because there were many other country albums showing up in the so-called pop chart, Bowen gave the audience a “rising tide lifts all boats” speech. “We invited representatives from every organization, publishing company, and record label,” Gurley says. “The sad thing was, a lot of people who resented Bowen refused to attend. And the other artists who ended up on Billboard’s Top 200 were all spotlighted. But Bowen was polarizing, so too many people missed sharing it.”
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