The Garth Factor

by Patsi Bale Cox

  The Bowen/Brooks dispute was both predictable and tragic. It was tragic because the two might have forged one of the most powerful teams in music history, not as artist/producer, but of artist/label head. It was predictable because of the personalities. Bowen’s power-driven maneuvers had worked on almost every artist he’d dealt with in the past. Artists he couldn’t charm could be backed down. Only too late he understood that Garth was impossible to intimidate. Bowen loved calling Garth the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. In fact, if there was one, there were two.

  Likewise, Garth didn’t anticipate a whisper campaign that would still be around long after Bowen was hitting the greens in Maui. Bowen portrayed himself as a music guy who came to town to make great records and Garth as a control freak. According to Bowen, his contracting for multiple millions in salary and bonuses was just good business, whereas Garth’s new contract, which had been worked out with EMI, gouged the label. And, according to the former label head, Garth resented the fact that Bowen had turned him down when he headed MCA.

  Worse yet, the flurry of Bowen-instigated press releases about Garth’s sales were dumped squarely on the star’s doorstep, leaving the impression that he was concerned only with selling records. In fact, sales were very important to Garth, but not sales for sales’ sake: “For me, sales mean people are hearing your music, that somebody is being affected by it.”

  Garth refused to defend himself in public. In private he was confused on one level and angry on another. “To say I carried a grudge because Bowen turned me down in 1988 makes no sense,” Garth said to a friend. “It’s almost a point of honor to get turned down at least once by every label in town. Foglesong had turned me down once before he offered me a deal at Capitol. If I didn’t trust Bowen when he came to the label, it was because of all the stories floating around and the friends who’d been fired when he took over. But I was ready to work with him, anyway. I appreciated the freedom he initially offered about our recording, too. But did I resent how he approached The Chase and InPieces? Yes.”

  He paused, and shook his head. “You know the wildest thing about this mess? All the time we were having those arguments, I still went out to Bowen’s house to meet with him. For some reason—call it charisma or whatever—but you can mistrust Bowen, you can get mad at him, you can want to punch him in the face, but you’re still drawn to him. You want to hear what he has to say even if you disagree with it.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “I looked like hell and smelled worse, but the song was finished”

  Allen Reynolds hung up the telephone in disgust. It had been an industry observer relaying more complaints about Garth and his dealings with Capitol Records. “A lot of the people blaming Garth for disagreements with Jimmy Bowen are the very same people who have been bitching about Bowen for years,” Reynolds angrily told a friend who was sitting there in his office. “As far as I’m concerned, what Garth has done in trying to take control of his music is simply an extension of what the Outlaw Movement did in the ’70s. People ought to be thanking Garth for taking a stand.”

  At the moment Capitol didn’t even have a label chief. Reynolds believed his job was twofold: to offer a creative oasis and to get Garth’s mind right for making a new album. “This is insane,” Reynolds said. “You hear all kinds of rumors about what’s going on. First you hear that Mansfield is coming back, then you’d hear that the idea is off the table. It’s difficult to work when things are that unstable.”

  Garth stopped by the studio later that day and Reynolds had a talk with him.

  “You can break your neck for country music,” Reynolds said. “You can wave the flag for country music. Hell, you can even die for country music. But the most important thing you can do for country music is to take care of your own music.”

  IN THE YEARS SINCE The Chase was released Reynolds had seen the toll that label battles had taken on Garth as well as the damage done by Nashville’s critical attitude. The carping most hurtful to Garth involved what he had or had not done to country music. After his years of steadfast rejection of the Pro Tools that keep vocal performances on pitch, his refusal to release singles to pop radio, and his insistence on using Nashville writers and pickers on every project, he was being accused of weakening the genre. Sometimes people even questioned the fact that fans at his concerts wore rock T-shirts.

  “I never understood how a Metallica fan getting interested in country and buying a George Strait album was a bad thing,” he said. “I thought it just helped widen country’s audience.”

  In early 1995 Garth began making a new record, Fresh Horses. Even though he was supposedly taking a year off, it wasn’t easy to find the time. For one thing, he was getting ready for a three-year tour set to kick off in March 1996. He had put together a new stage and light rigging, all designed to make the shows more fan-friendly for stadiums and arenas.

  He was also trying to spend as much time as possible at home with Sandy and his daughters. The intense career demands had resulted in the couple spending more time away from each other, and both Garth and Sandy felt they needed to shore up the marriage. And Garth also wanted the experience of having some around-the-clock time with Taylor and August while they were small. He was thrilled when he was able to see August take her first steps and hear her say her first words.

  On March 10, he officially became the fastest-selling artist of all time, with sales of 50 million albums in just six years, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Appropriately, he was honored at the EMI manufacturing plant in Jacksonville, Illinois. Garth and his mother, Colleen, hosted a luncheon for over a thousand employees, at which Garth said, “Behind every extraordinary achievement what you’ll find is no big secret—it’s a bunch of people working their butts off.”

  In private, however, Garth was getting tired of sales comparisons. He was trying to make his girls his priority, and yet people from journalists to some EMI executives were reminding him that he just might surpass the Beatles’ numbers. “It’s fun to see numbers and all that,” he confided. “I’d be lying if I said anything else. But every time I get asked those questions, and admit that it’s great to see, then I look obsessed. You have to fight to keep music the priority.”

  When Garth was in Nashville, he and Reynolds spent hours in the studio, and soon found an unexpected pattern. This album was moving full circle, back to the more straightforward country of Garth’s debut. In thinking back to the early years, Garth was moved to write “The Old Stuff.”

  “George Strait’s movie Pure Country inspired that song,” Garth said. “The film reminded me of those first road trips. The fans love this song. People will yell out what clubs they saw us at back in the old days—some of those shows only had twenty or thirty people in the audience.” Thinking back to the older, simpler times was something Garth often did. By this time he had a $3 million annual payroll and a lighting system for his show that cost $4 million. Everything was big and getting bigger.

  “Material like ‘That Ol’ Wind’ and ‘Cowboys And Angels’ both remind me of the first CD,” Garth says. “And the fiddle and steel exchange in ‘It’s Midnight Cinderella’ also takes me back to the beginning. ‘She’s Every Woman’ reminds me of ‘The River’ [from Ropin’ the Wind]. Maybe that’s because it was written with Victoria Shaw and was written around the same time ‘The River’ was done.”

  “Beaches Of Cheyenne” started out to be a story about a guy who lives at the beach but dreams of being a cowboy. It ended up a dark tale of doomed lovers and a ghost that haunts the beach by night. By the time collaborator Bryan Kennedy finished writing with Garth and started home late, he was so into the idea he feared seeing the apparition somewhere in the middle of the road.

  “The Change” by Tony Arata speaks of an individual standing firm through hard times, of not allowing the world to change him for the worse. It is a song that almost slipped by Garth, only to be brought back to the table by Allen Reynolds. “It’s a noble song in my
mind,” Reynolds explained. “One small deed juxtaposed against the enormous voice of cynicism.” Ultimately, this became the favored final cut on Fresh Horses and a powerful video.

  Garth’s belief in sometimes letting a song stand despite mistakes affected one cut, “Rollin’.” Recording the entire song in one take, Garth missed a line and some harmony wasn’t exactly on target, but it was all left in. “I don’t make perfect records,” Garth explained. “That’s not to say I never go back and work on a line or overdub guitar parts, because I certainly do. But if we do something in one take and the energy is right but I’ve screwed up something here or there, I’d rather leave it. That song is about a tough young woman who’s out there driving a truck and raisin’ hell. I thought I owed her a tough performance.”

  “There’s a lot of rodeo and cowboy culture in Fresh Horses,” noted producer Reynolds. “ ‘Cowboys And Angels’ has those classic campfire harmonies. It’s a wonderful cut.” Written by Garth, Kent Blazy, and Kim Williams, the song speaks of a proud and reckless cowboy who God realizes needs help, because he will never make it on his own.

  Thinking back on how his first single, “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old),” had been rewritten to represent rodeo riders instead of musicians gave Garth an idea for reviving one of his favorite Aerosmith songs, “The Fever.”

  “I’d been on the bus, thinking that even though the Aerosmith song was about a band, it could fit the traveling life of a rodeo rider,” Garth said. And when he took the idea to Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, the rocker said, “Go for it.” Garth got Bryan Kennedy and Dan Roberts involved and replaced screaming guitars with high-powered fiddles.

  The song “Ireland,” about a doomed soldier far from home, reflected the emotional high experienced during the European leg of the ’93–’94 tour. It almost didn’t get finished in time to make the album.

  “I couldn’t get the last verse right,” Garth said. “So the last night before the last day of the recording sessions, I stayed up faxing and phoning my co-writers. I was so anxious that I threw up twice. It was dawn when we finally nailed it. I had just fallen into bed when the phone rang. My neighbor lady said, ‘Garth, I have a yard full of horses and they all look like yours.’ So I ran over there and rounded them up, then headed straight to the studio. I looked like hell and smelled worse, but the song was finished.”

  Garth had a change of attitude during this time: “I never claimed to be a great vocalist, but for the first time I fully understood that I really was just an entertainer who could sing. That freed me up. I lightened up in the studio. I had so much fun that I felt like crying when the album was finished. I wasn’t ready for it to be over.”

  When asked about the title Fresh Horses, Garth explained, “It’s all about giving one more bang for the buck. It’s about being on your toes.”

  Capitol was leaderless from March until May 1995. Speculation had been running high through the spring. Many were convinced that Garth had the clout to insist on Joe Mansfield. Others thought the mantle would be passed from within the company, to the chief financial officer, Wayne Halpurn, or VP of promotion Bill Catino. Lawyers representing half the producers and executives in town had been circling the label through those months. Many times the person tapped to head a label after an abrupt resignation is the one who has hired the most high-powered mouthpiece.

  In the end EMI hired Faith Hill/Brooks & Dunn producer Scott Hendricks to try to fill Bowen’s shoes. An Oklahoma native, Hendricks was a top-flight producer with very specific musical tastes. Some around him said the difference between Hendricks and Bowen was that Hendricks was less experienced and more opinionated.

  Garth would have preferred Joe Mansfield but it was not his decision to make. Truthfully, it wasn’t Hendricks’s idea either. Although the producer liked the idea of being the creative head of a label, he had never run a large company and was said to have suggested a sharing of power with an experienced player like Mansfield. That didn’t happen. It was widely thought that Koppelman was absolutely convinced that record producers should run record labels.

  One of the early decisions was to change the name Liberty, the historic name Bowen had resurrected during his tenure, back to Capitol. It made little difference, because the name had primarily only been used in print materials. Around Music Row it had stayed Capitol all along. Two of the most respected professionals in town were let go, A&R VP Renee Bell and PR chief Cathy Gurley, as were the heads of the international and creative divisions, Cindi Wilson and Sherri Halford respectively.

  Hendricks dropped dozens of artists, including John Bunzow, the man who had been wooed away from MCA and whose debut album had generated such press interest. It wasn’t Hendricks’s kind of music and the promotion team seemed to have problems working Storiesof the Years at the Americana record charts. Ironically, Americana was a format Garth had recently discovered and loved, saying it was presenting a fresh, important side of country music.

  Unfortunately for Bunzow, the project had been very expensive, and the Bunzow buzz had died down while he languished in Capitol’s no-man’s land. Storiesof the Years would prove too costly for another label to pick up, leaving many of his best songs and an impressive album on the shelf.

  Still, most around Capitol were hopeful that the new team would be effective. Those who had heard parts of Garth’s new recording were ecstatic about the music, and it seemed like Garth and Hendricks were a natural fit. After all, they were both Oklahoma boys.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “I guess we can work with it”

  Garth wasn’t in Nashville on the day Capitol called people together to listen to the new album, Fresh Horses. His personal representatives, including Joe Mansfield and Allen Reynolds, stood along with label employees in the lobby of a Music Row mastering facility. A few of Capitol’s established executives were secluded in the facility’s soundproof room with the new team.

  The distancing from the rank and file didn’t surprise the people at Capitol. The staff knew that big corporate changes were fraught with tension, and, in reality, were glad that Hendricks hadn’t pulled a Bowen and put them on the street. But on the day of the listening event they were surprised to see people from the artist’s contingent left out of the inner sanctum.

  Staffers cheered for rowdy tunes like “The Fever” and were nearly in tears at the emotion in “Ireland.” But when the execs emerged, only one of Hendricks’s crew had anything to say: “I guess we can work with it.”

  DESPITE THE NEW REGIME’S initial lack of enthusiasm, the first single from Fresh Horses, “She’s Every Woman,” was a number 1 record. Fresh Horses was released on November 21. The Pittsburgh Post’s Jerry Sharpe called it Garth’s best album to date. The New York Daily News’ Bill Bell said Fresh Horses punched all the buttons: “There is some stripped-down, barn-burning boogie, a graceful waltz, a Chuck Berry riff or two, a couple of things with strings, a dramatic ballad, a bit of mad surrealism, and a sentimental bagpipes-and-all tribute to Ireland.”

  The one song that had trouble at radio was “The Fever,” which only made it to number 23 on the charts. Even with the stripped-down band—guitars, bass, drums, and fiddle—the song was too close to rock for country radio. It was ironic that on this, Garth’s most country album since his debut, rock charges surfaced over one song.

  Some questioned the rock anxieties. J. D. Considine wrote in the Baltimore Sun about what Garth was doing. Considine said he didn’t simply crank up the guitars until his music was more Lynyrd Skynyrd than Lester Flatt. “The rock and roll element in Brooks’s music is more a matter of attitude than instrumentation, a sort of go-crazy delivery that’s miles away from the well-mannered reserve most country stars convey. That’s why Brooks seems so at home in arenas.”

  A few years down the line “Fever” would gain two very passionate fans: Garth’s daughters, Taylor and August. “The song they first started singing—they were about the right age and it was easy for them, both of them—was ‘Fever,’
” Garth said. “They knew the one word and they’d run around the house naked screaming, ‘Fever!’ ”

  Hendricks’s favorite, “The Beaches Of Cheyenne,” was released in January 1996 and topped the charts. Then “The Change” was released and suffered a fate similar to “The Fever,” reaching only number 19. The next two singles, “It’s Midnight Cinderella” and “That Ol’ Wind,” hit numbers 5 and 4 respectively.

  Fresh Horses enjoyed the biggest first-week sales of any of Garth’s previous albums, nearly half a million copies. After the first week of its release, eight of the ten songs on the album appeared on the country singles chart, a first in music history.

  But Capitol pulled back on advertising in many major cities. The radio ad budget was cut. It couldn’t have been a worse time to neglect marketing because Fresh Horses was competing with new albums from Whitney Houston, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, and Vince Gill. Predictably, sales flattened. (Fresh Horses sales are now at 7 million.)

  As the train jumped the tracks, Garth’s hopes for a happy ending to label issues were quashed. The mishandling of his albums during this time raises the question: was Nashville prepared to deal with a career of this magnitude?

  One artist who offered insight into Garth’s dilemma was Gary Morris, whose successful venture onto Broadway had hurt him at country radio. He remained a player in Nashville, one of the greatest vocalists in any genre, and the publisher who’d first hired Faith Hill. When No Fences began to sell in astronomical numbers, Morris foresaw a predicament: “When somebody sells on that level early in his career he’s going to be forever judged by those numbers. Ten million in sales is staggering in country and Garth probably won’t match that every time out. Unfortunately, he’ll be in a situation where three or four million will be considered a failure.”