The Garth Factor

by Patsi Bale Cox

  Garth again handed production control to Jon Small, who was just wrapping up work on Ireland and Back. The first meeting in New York was held outside Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s office at city hall and involved Small, his two associates, and an incredible lineup of city departments. “Central Park is under the jurisdiction of four or five various police and fire departments, each one dealing with separate areas—that’s even before you get to the various divisions of the Parks Department,” Small ruefully reported.

  Many of Central Park’s big events had been held on the Great Lawn, but it was being renovated. So Garth’s concert was to be held at the North Meadow. But neither the Great Lawn nor the North Meadow had an infrastructure, so everything had to be brought in. Exits and entrances had to be established, toilets, handicapped facilities. The area in question was larger than nine football fields. “It took six months to work out the logistics,” Jon Small said.

  Ultimately, Small used over one thousand speakers and four thousand lights. In addition to a one-of-a-kind Russian-built crane for aerial shots and twenty-four cameras, a “rail cam” was used to allow viewers to track every move the entertainer made. Director Marty Callner told the Associated Press that even on a platform sixty feet longer than a football field, the rail cam would be able to track Garth’s every move on five JumboTron screens so the Central Park audience could see the entire show.

  “No man can run that fast with a camera in his hand,” Callner said. “Also, we have a satellite stage, which is going to come out to the middle of the house. It’s going to be unbelievable because he’s going to be out there with all these people around him.”

  Callner told the New York Times that the Great Lawn, with its grand view of the New York skyline, would be sorely missed on the HBO show. To give television viewers a sense of being in the city, cameras would cut to shots taken from blimps and helicopters.

  But, as the Los Angeles Times’ Steve Hochman later wrote, other than those shots, and the appearance of Billy Joel, Garth “did little to tailor his show to the setting. That was smart. Brooks’ greatest gift is as a natural entertainer, and that’s where he kept the focus.”

  Fans from all over the world showed up at what by now was being called “Garthstock.” The crowd quickly overflowed into a field west of the North Meadow and into the East Meadow. Initial attendance estimates went from a quarter of a million (from the police department) to over a million (from the park service). But in May 1998, the New York Fire Department officially announced the final attendee numbers at 980,000. This made the concert the largest ever held in Central Park, beating out attendance for Simon and Garfunkel, Barbra Streisand, James Taylor, Diana Ross, Elton John, and others. When told of the fire department’s announcement, Garth said, “There’s something we’ve never said before, and now I’m glad it’s out. I was handed a piece of paper right before I walked on stage from the parks department. It said 1.1 million people. But then we got the reports of a quarter of a million people. I didn’t know why it came out that way.”

  And for those who had speculated that country music wasn’t for New Yorkers, Garth led with “Rodeo” and followed it with “Papa Loved Mama.” It was rough and rowdy country music and the crowd went nuts. After the initial rousing numbers, Garth turned serious and delivered an inspirational version of “We Shall Be Free.”

  Other concert highlights included Garth’s walking through the crowd during his performance of “The River” and “Fever,” with fiddle player Jimmy Mattingly taking the instrumental lead. Then, of course, there were the special guests. New York’s own Billy Joel not only showed up, he sang along on “Ain’t Going Down (Til The Sun Comes Up).” Then he and Garth collaborated on a moving version of “New York State Of Mind.” The New Yorkers loved it. In an encore that beat all encores, Don McLean walked onstage to sing “American Pie” with Garth.

  The HBO live concert ended, but the audience still wouldn’t let Garth go. He stayed and performed song after song, some of which are included on the home video.

  HBO’s Nancy Geller summed up the cable network’s feelings at the end of the day: “My job is to give HBO viewers something they can’t get anywhere else. I’ve done that. I’ve given them one hell of a show.”

  Garth even convinced the skeptical New York press. The Daily News wrote, “No country star has pulled this kind of crowd anywhere, and to do it in New York City, well, anyone who thinks they can do better is welcome to try.”

  Garth Live from Central Park was HBO’s highest-rated original program in 1997, as well as the most-watched special on cable television in 1997, drawing 14.6 million television viewers. Live from Central Park also drew the largest audience of any program on CMT Canada since its inception. On April 22, 1998, Trisha Yearwood presented Garth with the Academy of Country Music’s Special Achievement Award for Live from Central Park. Garth received a standing ovation when he walked to the stage to accept his award. The show was nominated for six Emmy awards at the September 13, 1998, show at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium.

  BUT AS SUCCESSFUL AS Central Park was, as a promotional tool for Garth’s new album, it was a wash. Prior to the Central Park show, and unrelated to Garth Brooks, EMI fired Capitol’s top management in New York, including Charles Koppelman and Terri Santisi, leaving the label in disarray. But a huge buzz already surrounded Sevens, with advance orders upwards of 6 million. Garth felt he had no option but to withhold the release until stability was restored.

  But, as Bill Bell of the New York Daily News spoke with Garth from his home in Goodlettsville, Tennessee: “[Koppelman and Santisi] set up the album and the concert. And then thirty days before I’m supposed to deliver, this happens. I figure it’s best to wait until things settle down, see where we all are.”

  Garth further explained to entertainment journalist Paul Lomartire, “The massive shifts and cuts and restructuring of our label from EMI has totally wiped out the branch that was handling the new album in conjunction with the HBO Central Park release. Timing is everything in music. This time it’s worked against me.”

  Garth left New York for California, where he had a fifteen-show run scheduled in three cities. Garth had seen little in recent months to make him believe that, without New York, Capitol/ Nashville could be counted on to promote Sevens. Despite the high he felt from Central Park, he was deeply troubled about his record label and his new recording.

  Unbeknownst to Garth Brooks, the corporate changes had begun in 1996 when EMI made the decision to cut back on budgets and bodies. And because key Garth supporters Koppelman and Santisi were shown the door, anyone who thought Garth was secretly running his record label should have seen the error of their thinking.

  The president and chief executive of EMI Records Group International and Virgin Music Group, Ken Berry, was named worldwide president of the newly formed EMI Recorded Music unit in a corporate restructuring. It would have been foolish to release a new album until things settled down.

  Garth saw trends that were both encouraging and troubling in country music during 1997. One of the bright spots was the growing list of country record labels, under ten when he arrived in Nashville, now over thirty. But he wondered if the music was suffering from such rapid growth. He spoke at length with Ben Fong-Torres in the Gavin Report about some of his concerns.

  “You gotta never forget that I’m a fan, and was a fan of country music before I was ever an artist. So I speak from the point of view of a guy listening to the radio. Narvel Blackstock, Reba’s husband, said in an interview that in the first twenty weeks of this year, forty-four debut singles from forty-four new artists came out. I don’t see how we can ask fans to keep up, to find something recognizable and distinguishable, and something to follow. And it’s tough to ask that of me as a fan.”

  The effect of the federal Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed companies to buy up any number of stations in one market, was also a problem. When that law went into effect the money people moved quickly and over four thousand radi
o stations changed hands. Radio has long been accused of making music decisions with little concern for purity, diversity, or merit. As fewer companies owned more stations, the already short playlists were tightened even more. Fewer chances were taken with material because it might cause some listener to switch the dial. More than ever, music was seen as something to sandwich in between advertisements as opposed to something to entertain the audience. Disc jockeys often fought this trend, but it was a difficult battle.

  Garth used an example from Nashville’s WSIX as his kind of country radio programming. When the morning show producer Devon O’Day took charge one week she played exactly what she wanted, paying no attention to prescribed lists. “It was the best radio I’d heard in years. For me. She’d play one of those new people that you think you might know, but you’re going to wait for two, three singles down the line and see what’s going on, followed by Gene Watson’s ‘14 Karat Mind,’ followed by something like Deana Carter’s ‘Strawberry Wine’ mixed in with John Anderson’s ‘Black Sheep.’

  “It worked so well that I was glued to the station. [Nashville’s] WSM-AM does old and new country together and it works for me. Maybe that’s showing my age. But it’s punks like me that need to be reminded of how country is done—like Merle Haggard and Gene Watson.”

  Garth had had a difficult time recording Sevens. He was solidly on the road, so writing was slow. He wasn’t sure what was going on with his label and with his career. And yet this is the album Garth now listens to when he wants “to feel happy.”

  “Sevens is really Allen Reynolds’s album,” Garth told Steve Morse at the Boston Globe. “I think Allen saw me questioning myself and wondering if I still had a future and how long was it. So he just sort of took over and drove. Allen never gave the wheel back over. In a good way, he kept driving, even coming down to the sequencing and the number of songs. I wanted eleven and he wanted fourteen. I always get what I want, but no way this time! He just didn’t let go.”

  Even though Garth had written only six of the songs, the album sounded very personal. “People thought I wrote most of the album,” Garth said. “But it’s because the songs were so perfect for me, songs like ‘Longneck Bottle’—which Steve Wariner wrote. When some of the promotion guys heard it they said it was too much of a honky-tonker for radio. I said, ‘Who’d have thought you’d hear GarthBrooks and too country in the same breath?’ ”

  The potential for airplay wouldn’t have been central to Garth’s song selections anyway. Garth explained his thinking on songs, songwriting, and airplay to Country Weekly.

  “You try to be emotional,” he said. “If you want to laugh, you want to laugh your butt off. If you’re going to cry, you just want to be so dang miserable you just can’t stand it. But never, ever do you let it cross your mind, ‘Will country radio play this?’

  “Please don’t ever do that when you’re writing. If we had all thought, ‘Will radio play this?’ we would never have heard the Beatles. Their stuff was so new and out there.

  “Our job is to surprise ourselves, surprise country radio and surprise the people. Country radio wants what fits their format—they know that. But if you surprise them and it’s a good surprise, they’re all of a sudden ten times further down the road than they would have been if they had got what they expected.”

  On the Jim Rushing/Carl Jackson bluegrass gospel song “Fit For A King,” Garth combined two of his favorite musical touches: a fuzzed-out ’70s electric guitar and a mournful country fiddle. And most would have thought that Garth wrote the opening lines in the Gordon Kennedy/Pierce Pettis song “You Move Me,” lines comparing life to therapy that costs a lot but comes with no guarantees.

  “Two Piña Coladas,” by Sandy Mason, Benita Hill, and Shawn Camp, was a number 1 hit beach anthem written on a cold, dark day in Nashville. It was so dreary, in fact, that all the three could think about was how much they wished they were at the beach. Sandy Mason later laughed that even though she wasn’t a drinker, she pictured herself dancing around a cabana with a drink in each hand. The writers planned to pitch the song to Jimmy Buffett until Reynolds said, “Not so fast. I hear this for Garth.”

  “Two Piña Coladas” was recorded with a drum, bass, keys, two acoustic guitars, and one electric. “At its best, music has space,” Reynolds explains. “I love to hear musicians and writers who can say a lot, sparingly.”

  Benita Hill collaborated on another song included on Sevens, and the two cuts were life changing. Benita was forging a career that included singing backup for Conway Twitty, the Allman Brothers, and J. J. Cale. She was an accomplished songwriter and member of Nashville’s Two Desperate Women. But she dreamed of making a recording, and it hadn’t happened.

  Finally she took matters into her own hands, maxed out her credit cards, and made her own CD, Fan the Flame. Working as a receptionist and worried sick over her financial situation, one day she handed Garth a copy of Fan the Flame, simply hoping for some encouragement. He loved her song “Take The Keys To My Heart” (written with Tommy Smith and Pam Wolfe) and called her with those magic words: “I want to cut ‘Keys.’ ” When he also recorded “Two Piña Coladas,” Benita paid off her credit cards.

  The songs that Garth did contribute to Sevens were among the standouts. “Cowboy Cadillac” combined his love for tongue-in-cheek lyrics, all things western, and rapid-fire lines with internal rhyme schemes. Most of Garth’s co-writers groan when he starts a song with this shotgun technique, coming at you “bam-bam-bam,” because it is so difficult to sustain.

  “How You Ever Gonna Know” returns to his love of “go-for-the-gold” optimism, and “She’s Gonna Make It” finds a man hanging on and a woman moving on. “Belleau Wood” is yet another historical three-minute movie, in this case the inspirational story of German and American soldiers laying down their arms on Christmas.

  “Sevens has become my favorite album,” Garth said in 2005. “For a long time it was The Chase, but now I have to say it’s Sevens, mainly because of two songs. When I wrote ‘How You Ever Gonna Know’ I hoped it would encourage someone to try even when the odds were against them. A few years after the album came out someone told me that the song had been life changing. I don’t want to say what her circumstances were, because she told the story in confidence. But she made some decisions that turned her entire life around. In your dreams, you want music to do that for people.”

  Perhaps the finest performance on the album, and one that would win a Grammy the following year, was the Garth/Trisha Yearwood duet, “In Another’s Eyes,” penned by Bobby Wood, John Peppard, and Garth. “It was an inspired performance,” says producer Reynolds. “They nailed the vocals on the first try.”

  This was a song that started out as something entirely different. Wood had taken some of Peppard’s title ideas to Garth, including “Through Another Man’s Eyes.” Garth liked the general idea, but changed it to “In Another’s Eyes,” about two people in love who can’t bear to leave their partners because of the resulting pain.

  People speculated that the song was a description of Garth and Trisha’s relationship, but that was not the case. They were not star-crossed lovers, but were trying very hard to hold on to their own marriages. Garth and Sandy had a new baby at home, and three daughters took up what little free time Garth had. And Trisha was still wed to the Mavericks’ Robert Reynolds, although the relationship was said to be strained by the directions their two careers had taken.

  Trisha remained one of country’s most important superstars, lauded by critics, radio, and fans, while the Mavericks’ time on the charts appeared to be over. The group remained critical darlings, able to book into nearly any hip venue they wanted, but their last Billboard showing had been 1996’s “All You Ever Do Is Bring Me Down” from Music for All Occasions on MCA. The single hit number 13, the highest of their career. Writers who knew Reynolds said he was unhappy over being seen as “Trisha Yearwood’s husband,” and it bubbled to the surface from time to time. Once, at the L.A. House
of Blues, Reynolds was visibly irritated when a fan shouted, “Say hi to Trisha!” Reynolds responded: “Make sure you ask about me when you go to her shows, okay?”

  Garth made an interesting musical decision for “I Don’t Have To Wonder.” Although penned by Shawn Camp and Taylor Dunn, “I Don’t Have To Wonder” is a bone-chilling finale to the scenario started by the team of Blazy, Williams, and Brooks on “She’s Gonna Make It.” With “I Don’t Have To Wonder,” the listener actually is left to wonder if a disheartened lover is not “gonna make it” and commits suicide. When guitarist Chris Leuzinger first listened to the demo, he assumed the song needed a big guitar part. Instead, Garth said he wanted sorrowful steel provided by Bruce Bouton. Chris Leuzinger shook his head: “Well, I’ll be home by the phone if it doesn’t work.” It worked, as did the soaring choir: Trisha Yearwood, Susan Ashton, Vicki Hampton, Robert Bailey, Yvonne Hodges, and Kathy Chiavola.

  Nowhere is the wisdom of those two decisions more obvious than on the song’s video, where the musical drama sets up every scene. The piece opens with a forlorn man standing on a bridge during a hard rain. Does he kill himself? And what might the afterlife for a suicide be: reliving that final day for eternity?

  Sevens was ready to go when EMI’s 1997 summer shakeup happened. The album was not released until November, when EMI named Pat Quigley Capitol’s executive vice president and general manager. It was later announced that Scott Hendricks would head another EMI label, Virgin Records. Two things, however, should be noted. Some insiders at EMI expected Quigley would go, along with Koppelman and Santisi. But EMI knew that firing Koppelman and Santisi would upset one of the company’s biggest stars. So while Garth did not ask for it, Quigley’s promotion was a kind of consolation prize offered to both executive and artist. Second, from the beginning EMI didn’t see the Quigley transfer to Nashville as permanent.