If Bowen noticed the lack of fellow label heads in attendance, he said nothing. He was still smarting from a July 8 article that had appeared in Music Row magazine, the insiders’ must-read published by David Ross. Publisher Ross and journalist Brian Mansfield interviewed Joe Mansfield about Garth’s impressive sales, titling the piece, “Joe Mansfield, The Six Million Pieces Man.”
Mansfield was quoted in the article: “When Bowen came to Capitol mine was the only position he didn’t bring with him. Originally it was going to be a vice president of sales. I said no, marketing and sales go hand in hand. You don’t have one without the other. ‘You stay in the studio and make good records,’ I said. ‘And I’ll do the rest of it.’ It’s worked out just great. I couldn’t be happier, he couldn’t be happier.”
In fact, when he heard about those words Bowen couldn’t have been more pissed.
Without meaning to, Mansfield had turned Bowen into “the studio guy” and himself into the brains of the outfit. One promotion man heard the full extent of the anger that same day when he waited in the foyer of Bowen’s home for a meeting. The phone rang in the living room and after a short conversation the guy heard Bowen swear loudly. “I’m telling you, that bastard Mansfield is gone as soon as his contract is up. The six million pieces man? He’s got a hell of a nerve taking credit for those sales.” Bowen listened a moment longer before slamming down the phone. “You think I give a damn what Garth Brooks thinks about anything?”
The pronouncement unnerved the promotion guy to the extent that he almost left before Bowen could get off the telephone. Everyone knew that Garth trusted Mansfield and considered him his key man at Capitol. People knew that Garth and Bowen were often at odds. If Mansfield got canned it could turn into all-out war.
When Bowen took center stage at the Music Row celebration the outward reaction he got from guests was good-natured camaraderie. But right under the surface lurked a fair amount of sour grapes. For some of the record executives who did show up, watching Bowen’s artist in the driver’s seat of the entire industry was almost too much to take. Unfortunately, that begrudging attitude began to spill out to include the artist himself. Initial grousing involved one of Garth’s song picks: “Shameless.”
The song was an easy target, playing right into the old pop-versus-traditional bias. Never mind that many country artists at the time were making pop-flavored records, and radio had been balking at playing some of the traditional acts for several years. When stone country singer Larry Boone released the Faron Young classic “Wine Me Up” in 1989, the single stalled midchart. When PolyGram promo chief Frank Leffell tried to get the bullet back, several programmers told him that the song was “too country.”
“Hell, Frank,” one said. “Randy Travis is too country for me these days.”
But while some thought Garth was both pandering to certain country programmers and going for pop play, the singer was clear about why he recorded it. From the beginning, Garth had depended on his audience to tell him what worked.
“I know a lot of people thought that song came out of left field,” Garth said, laughing at the time. “But ‘Shameless’ had been one of my favorites of everything Billy Joel wrote, and when I sang it in concert the audiences went crazy.”
This presented a dilemma for Capitol. Pop stations began playing the cut, and the logical thing to do would have been to hire an independent pop promotion team to take it to the top of the pop singles charts. Crossover hits had long been sought by country music. Interest in broadening the scope and market for country went as far back as 1933, when the Opry hired the Delmore Brothers hoping their more sophisticated bluesy qualities might attract new listeners. Fred Rose was known to fool around with Hank Williams’s melodies hoping to garner pop covers. Patsy Cline had “Walking After Midnight,” “Crazy,” and “I Fall To Pieces.” Cash had a string of crossover successes, the biggest being 1969’s “A Boy Named Sue.” Lynn Anderson’s million-selling “Rose Garden” in 1970 and Donna Fargo’s 1972 back-to-back million-selling singles, “The Happiest Girl In The Whole USA” and “Funny Face,” were among the records that confirmed pop play meant sales hikes. And, of course, Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” had made her a multigenre superstar.
It would have been an easy decision to put together a pop team and work “Shameless,” well, shamelessly. Ever since the debacle with “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old),” Bob Doyle had believed in hiring outside radio promoters if needed. But he and Garth agreed that chasing pop radio would be counterproductive.
“Country radio has had my back from the beginning,” Garth said. “I’d rather have pop listeners cross over to our side of the dial. Some pop stations played ‘Friends In Low Places,’ too, and while I appreciated the support, I loved nothing more than to hear about kids switching over to country stations because of the song. So we made the conscious decision not to promote at pop, and I stand by it.”
Beginning with “Shameless,” Ropin’ the Wind reflected the large umbrella that was country. There were ballads like “What She’s Doing Now” and “The River.” “Rodeo” and “In Lonesome Dove” swung to the western side of C&W. “Papa Loved Mama” was a hard-core honky-tonker.
“Rodeo” was originally titled “Miss Rodeo,” written as a first-person woman’s song. Garth loved it and pitched it to every female singer he knew. When it was turned down he decided to turn it into a more general third-person song and sing it himself. It was a Larry Bastian song that again paid tribute to cowboys like Chris LeDoux. Garth felt honor-bound to include this constituency on each offering. “I think country music owes the folks in cowboy hats a lot for stickin’ with the music through thick and thin,” Garth said.
The last five singles released had all hit number 1, but “Rodeo” broke the streak and only climbed to number 3. The main reason? “Shameless.” The song simply couldn’t be held back, and as a consequence the label went ahead and released it two months after “Rodeo.” That experience, plus the memory of how “Friends In Low Places” had threatened to overshadow “Unanswered Prayers,” kept Garth up at night over one of his favorite songs on the album, “What She’s Doing Now.”
“I’m amazed at the numbers of people who remember every word on this song because I was afraid it was gonna get buried,” he said later. “Look at the four other singles from Ropin’ the Wind— ‘Rodeo,’ ‘Shameless,’ ‘Papa Loved Mama,’ and ‘The River.’ A quiet ballad could easily get lost in that. One of the things that happens when you are planning the set list for concert tours is that often it’s the ballads that get cut because fans want that high energy. But from the beginning, people were singing ‘What She’s Doing Now’ start to finish.”
“What She’s Doing Now” stayed at number 1 for a month in early 1992, followed by the deliciously sinister Top 5 hit “Papa Loved Mama.” This was a song that Garth feared radio might question, but not for any lyric misstep.
“At our recording sessions, the music is always the boss,” Garth says. “ ‘Papa Loved Mama’ is a perfect example. Bruce Bouton pulled out his lap steel and played this nasty, loud part that was absolutely perfect. I didn’t know if country radio would even play it—but you gotta cut what has to be cut.”
Garth’s co-writer, Kim Williams, laughed when he thought back to the “Papa Loved Mama” writing sessions: “I was living in a little Music Row apartment with so many roaches running around that we had to spray every time we tried to write.” The hook line, “Papa loved Mama, Mama loved men / Mama’s in the graveyard, Papa’s in the pen,” came from a list of “Things I Wished I’d Said,” and was attributed to Carl Sandburg. But when Williams checked with the Sandburg family, it turned out the poet had heard the line in an old folk song.
Although Kim had been working in Nashville for several years, “Papa Loved Mama” was the first song he had written with an artist. The collaboration offer came from Garth, who had been pitched a Williams song and asked the plugger to put them in touch. Kim
was shocked when the request came in and Garth offered to come to his apartment for the session. “I thought I’d have to jump through hoops to work with an established artist,” Kim laughed. “That wasn’t the way it came down.”
That blistering Bruce Bouton lap steel solo on “Papa Loves Mama” is sometimes confused with Chris Leuzinger’s slide work. “Ever since we started working with Garth, Bruce has been getting compliments for parts I played and vice versa,” Chris laughed.
The album’s final single and number 1 hit was “The River,” an ode to pursuing dreams against all odds, written by Garth and Victoria Shaw. It was also the final, therefore favorite, song on Ropin’ the Wind. “This is the first time the tenth cut has been a song where I had anything to do with the writing,” Garth said. “I live by this song every day and hope it gives courage to people who have ever been in a fight they didn’t know if they could finish.”
Even some usually jaded industry types confessed that “The River” affected them. One writer told a Capitol employee, “I had just about given up on this damned business. I honest to God had one A&R person who threw my tape in the trash and spit on it. Spit on it! Right in front of me. I was only about a half a fan of Garth Brooks, to tell you the truth. I liked his stuff but didn’t quite get all the noise. But when I heard that song [“The River”] I felt like it was talking directly to me. I thought, ‘Okay, now I get it.’ ”
It generated more fan mail than any other song Garth has released. “I thought ‘Friends In Low Places’ or ‘The Dance’ would be the all-time biggest when it came to mail,” Garth says. “But ‘The River’ beats all others maybe three or four to one. It’s been amazing. Entire classes have drawn very involved, intricate pictures showing what the river is to them. It’s a song for dreamers, and it turns out that a lot of us are dreamers.”
Ropin’ the Wind’s impact on country music and the industry was noted in Billboard, when chart analyst Paul Grein wrote, “The other albums to open at number 1 this summer have all been hard rock/metal bands—Skid Row, Van Halen, and Metallica. Such groups appeal to young, active music buyers who are more apt to find the time and inclination to buy an album in its first week of release than are the older, more settled country and pop fans—or at least that has been the conventional wisdom. [Ropin’ the Wind] suggests it’s time to recognize that country fans can also be active and committed.”
By the end of 1991 Garth’s overall record sales accounted for 40 percent of Capitol’s sales. As of 2008, Ropin’ the Wind has sold over 14 million.
HIGH ON GARTH’S REVENUES, Bowen wrestled control of Capitol Nashville away from New York and L.A. the following year, renaming the Nashville label Liberty Records. It was a coup for Nashville even if few appreciated it and Bowen overestimated his win. New York still held the real power. And most didn’t refer to Capitol as Liberty. But still, it made a statement.
If Bowen and Garth appeared to have something of a truce going, it would end when Garth was advised to renegotiate his contract. In late 1990, Bowen had offered him a bump in royalties, from between the 10 and 11 percent he’d been given when he first signed to Capitol, to 16 percent. Garth was thrilled with it and took out a thank-you ad in the trade magazines. But within a year it was obvious that further adjustment was due the artist responsible for the label’s sales, over $130 million. What Garth wanted was his own imprint and complete creative control. He would be paid no advance, would pay for his own recordings, but would own them in the end.
Bowen told Garth that he didn’t deserve that kind of a deal and that it could only be negotiated in New York, anyway. And so that’s where Garth negotiated it. He stayed involved with every step of the deal making. “I did that simply because I couldn’t expect somebody to stand up and ask for what I thought was right,’ he said. “Especially since what we asked for had never been asked for before [in country music].”
As he explained to Billboard, “It’s a full incentive contract where we start from scratch every time. If we don’t sell any records, we don’t get a cent; and if we sell a lot of records, we get a lot of money. It’s that black and white.”
All artists on major labels, be they country or pop, would be well advised to take a look at the top management in the parent company. In the end, these are the people who will make decisions that affect everything they do. Label heads in Nashville may have control over what goes on within their offices, but Bowen’s renaming Capitol to the contrary, New York and Los Angeles executives are the ones who choose country’s executives and whose overall business decisions affect country’s future.
Jim Fifield had been president and CEO of EMI Music (Capitol’s parent company in the United States) since 1988, after having been an executive VP at General Mills and president/ CEO of CBS/Fox Video. Although he came from outside the record business, Fifield was a confirmed music lover who tried to balance out the books and the art. Those close to Fifield said he was a rarity at top corporate levels, a man who despised office intrigue and any hint of gamesmanship.
He was deliberate, unaffected—and an unabashed Garth Brooks fan. That didn’t mean he was willing to give him anything just to keep him happy. Fifield represented EMI. Garth represented himself, the biggest artist on the label, but one artist, nonetheless. And so their relationship might best be described as cordial, but cautious.
Joe Smith, the man who had cut the deal for Bowen’s takeover, was president and CEO of Capitol-EMI Music. Smith was originally a radio guy, who went on to become one of the top music executives in the business. He had run Warner Bros. and Elektra/Asylum before arriving at Capitol-EMI in 1987. Smith had long been close to Garth, spending time at his home and offering advice on keeping his feet on the ground during heady times.
Standing behind those executives, of course, was Sir Colin Southgate, the British chairman of the board who came to power at Capitol’s international parent company, Thorn-EMI, in 1987 and hired Fifield soon thereafter. Southgate was not without detractors. Fortune’s analysis of his business style was that he sold music as he might sell widgets, never quite grasping the volatile personalities and egos involved. Fortune referred to the EMI board of directors as “a clubby institution that’s thoroughly British, clanking with knighthoods and for the most part clueless about the music business.” On the other hand, Southgate took charge of a company that was buried in subsidiaries as disparate as defense contracting to movie houses and turned it into a commanding global music presence. Southgate accomplished the feat with the help of men like the ever-cautious Jim Fifield, who agreed that Garth Brooks deserved a new contract, one that gave him a joint venture. In the end, Garth had his own label, Pearl Records, complete creative control of his music, paid for his own recordings, and ultimately owned them.
Bowen didn’t like the new contract, believing it would hurt the label’s revenues. But in fact, Garth’s joint venture was not heavily criticized in the industry. Many saw it as perfectly justifiable. After all, in 1992 his albums made up more than $177 million of EMI Music’s $2 billion-plus annual revenues.
On January 7, 1993, the L.A. Times’ music business analyst, Chuck Philips, explained one of “the largest and most uniquely structured deals ever negotiated.” As Philips noted, “Sources said the 30-year-old singer will receive almost 50% of the profits from each album he sells in the United States. That rate is said to match Michael Jackson’s much-touted 1991 pact with Sony Music—and to surpass the Madonna and Prince deals with the Warner Music Group.
“Unlike superstars such as Madonna and Prince who have demanded cash advances of $5 million to $10 million per album, Brooks opted to receive no cash advances and will pay for all recording and music video costs out of his own pocket, sources said. He used to receive a 16% royalty rate and about $500,000 cash advance per album.”
Eric Kronfeld, president and CEO of PolyGram Holding, Inc., the company that distributed, among others, country rival Billy Ray Cyrus’s multimillion-selling album, told Philips, “Garth blazed the trail f
or other artists like Billy Ray. If somebody would give PolyGram an artist who sells as many records annually as Garth does, I would be the first to recommend that this company give him a joint venture.”
Not to be outdone, and because Bowen was ending his own three-year deal with Capitol, the label head floated a rumor that PolyGram was offering him a high-dollar contract. For weeks on end the staff at PolyGram was on pins and needles, making secret calls to friends at Capitol to see if anyone knew which way the wind was blowing. Bowen loved every minute of it. He even asked his PR staff to prepare two press releases, one announcing that he was staying at Capitol, and why; the other stating that he would move to PolyGram, and why. When asked for quotes about the “why” of either move, he laughed and said, “Who gives a damn? Make something up.” Bowen loved running a bluff and he was a master at the game.
Ultimately, EMI offered Bowen an astonishing five-year deal. In his words, “millions in salary, bonuses, and other perks, but also a Christian music deal potentially worth tens of millions through the life of the contract.” Bowen was right about the Christian music market, and it is to his credit that he got EMI into that end of the business. It had long been underappreciated and underpromoted. With EMI’s machine behind it, the genre moved further into the mainstream.
CHAPTER NINE
“Who in the hell is Garth Brooks?”
Garth drove through Los Angeles on his way to the Universal Amphitheatre at Universal City Walk. He’d been opening for the Judds’ Farewell Tour on a California run beginning in Costa Mesa, winding up at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View the previous night. He was juggling a tight schedule, fulfilling opening-act commitments as well as headlining his own sold-out tour.
Thinking ahead to sound check at the venue, he pulled up to a stop sign and noticed a bumper sticker on the car ahead of him. He thought he was reading it correctly. Squinting in the bright California sunlight, he took a second look. Yes, he’d been right. There on the car’s bumper was a question:
The Garth Factor Page 12
