The Garth Factor

by Patsi Bale Cox

  In January 1999 the Los Angeles Times announced its 1998 Top Ten of Pop Music: “The King of Country had the Midas touch in 1998, both in record stores and at concert box offices. Nashville powerhouse Garth Brooks is the runaway #1 in the second annual Calendar Ultimate Top 10 of Pop Music, a tally that combines the year’s album sales and concert grosses. Brooks finished 1998 with about $144 million in U.S. album sales, based on SoundScan reports, and $37.2 million from North American concert grosses, according to Pollstar, the concert industry trade publication. That adds up to $181.2 million, which blows away the 1997 winner of the Ultimate Top 10, the Rolling Stones, who amassed a mere $100 million.”

  You’d think those figures would buy a guy a lot of political capital within the industry.

  But by then Garth should have known that life sometimes gives you an ice cream cone with one hand and smacks a pie in your face with the other.

  The film Babyface proposed was a biopic wrapped in a mystery. The original idea was that a rock star name Chris Gaines has died under mysterious circumstances. One of his fans suspects foul play, and starts investigating the star’s life, stage by stage. The Gaines character, played by Garth in his later years, would appear via interview and concert footage.

  Garth had been interested in films since the early days of his career, when he had opened a film production company, Red Strokes, with friend Lisa Sanderson. It was possible, Garth thought, that this idea Babyface had brought him was a perfect vehicle for Red Strokes’ first major venture. Garth’s interest in scriptwriting had intensified over the years. During the 1993–1994 tour he began working on script ideas at night on the tour bus. Despite the flap over his portrayal of an abusive husband in the video for “The Thunder Rolls,” Garth still loved the idea of playing the heavy in a movie. “I thought Dwight Yoakam’s role in SlingBlade was a great bad guy. That’s the kind of role you look for.”

  Other movies inspired him. To Kill a Mockingbird was one, and he even thought that if he ever had a son, he might name the boy Atticus, after the protagonist, Atticus Finch. Two more favorites were Field of Dreams and Forrest Gump. Of Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams character, he said, “Thank God there are still crazy people in the world who believe in the impossible dream.” And after seeing Forrest Gump, Garth said he wanted “to stand up and hug everybody in the theater.” The Los Angeles Times’ Robert Hillburn mused that in film, as in music, Garth tended to love the concept of the common man put in extraordinary circumstances. And the Chris Gaines story would certainly give Garth the opportunity to help create a character who was in extraordinary circumstances.

  Once Garth decided to get involved with Babyface’s project, he jumped in with both feet, dividing his time between the character and the concept of releasing a soundtrack first to promote the film. But while he usually saw marketing from the same perspective as Capitol’s new chief, Pat Quigley, this time they differed. When talking with the L.A. Times, Quigley posed the question, “Can you put out an advance soundtrack and succeed without benefit of the movie being in theaters?”

  One of the first things Garth thought about was how difficult playing a character would be in the audio format, something like an established artist who made a Broadway show album and tried to keep his or her own style out of it. And from the early stages of putting the album together, Garth worried that there might be more initial interest in the character than in the music, especially with his involvement. That this was simply a “role,” he thought, would have to be carefully explained up front.

  The writing team of Gordon Kennedy, Wayne Kilpatrick, and Tommy Sims penned “Change The World,” which both Wynonna and Eric Clapton recorded. The Clapton cut resulted in three Grammy awards: Best Male Vocalist/Pop, Record of the Year (awarded to Clapton and his producer, Babyface) and Best Song (awarded to Kennedy, Kilpatrick, and Sims). The Grammy made the three writers Nashville celebs. It was only the second time Nashville writers had ever competed and won in the all-genre Grammy category. (The first was “Wind Beneath My Wings.”) The three had a strong writing history, including cuts by Bonnie Raitt, Joe Cocker, Peter Frampton, Trisha Yearwood, Alison Krauss, Tim McGraw, and George Strait. But it was the Clapton/Babyface cut of “Change The World” that gave the writing team a connection to The Lamb from two directions, because Gordon Kennedy was the brother of one of Garth’s closest friends, Bryan Kennedy. In fact, the history went back to 1991.

  “Wayne and I were recording some of our songs, trying to get a pop music deal,” Gordon said. “My brother gave Garth one of the demo CDs. One day Bryan called me and said, ‘You aren’t going to believe this, but Garth was into your music so much that he got a speeding ticket driving through Arkansas!’ ” Three songs from those sessions ended up on Chris Gaines—“White Flag,” “My Love Tells Me So,” and “Digging For Gold.”

  When Garth decided to get involved with The Lamb, he knew he needed a collection of pop songs that would work for a “greatest hits” package, dating back to the 1980s. One day, Gordon Kennedy was playing a Brooks session with a young guitarist Garth believed had a big future in Nashville, Keith Urban. After they finished Garth pulled Gordon aside.

  “Babyface got me involved in this film project,” he said. “It’s about a singer, and the story will play out over a period of several decades of recordings. Can you send me some songs?”

  “Country?” Gordon asked, puzzled.

  “No, pop/rock,” Garth said. “Beatles, Eagles—the guy’s music will change over time.”

  Gordon went back to PolyGram Publishing and ran a CD of ten songs from the 1990s, spanning about eight years. Then he dropped it off for Garth and went to lunch thinking that “It Don’t Matter To The Sun” might have a chance of making the soundtrack. By the time he got back he had a message from Garth asking him to put “Maybe” on hold.

  “I was stunned at his pick,” Gordon said. “But just a little while later he called back and said he also wanted ‘It Don’t Matter To The Sun.’ Then I realized that he hadn’t heard all the songs when he first called. But the most exciting thing was that after listening to that one CD, he asked to hear our entire catalog.”

  The result would be music primarily drawn from the Kennedy/Kilpatrick/Sims catalog, but also include material such as the socially conscious rap written by Cheryl Wheeler. Garth declined to write anything for the project because he wanted to keep it from being a “Garth-singing-pop-music” album.

  “As we went through the material, Garth would use each song that he liked to help him create a backstory,” Gordon explained. “These demos had been done over a long period of time, so there was a definite ‘feel’ to each of them. For Garth, that translated into the time period his fictional character was going through. Actually, Garth contributed to the writing on a couple of the newer songs, but we couldn’t get him to take a writer credit for it.”

  But what Kennedy, Kilpatrick, and Sims didn’t expect was to hear Garth say that he wanted to use the original demo tracks and build the recording around them in order to reflect the passage of time. “We thought we’d be doing completely new sessions,” Gordon said. “One of the songs, ‘Maybe,’ was recorded in my garage! Garth loved that. He said that was perfect. Then he put a George Massenburg forty-piece orchestra around it.”

  Drum machines were replaced. Additional instruments were added. But the base remained those demos done over two decades. Gordon’s “garage demo” took an unexpected turn. “While the final mix was being done, J.B., the engineer, asked me to come in and listen to something. He’d separated everything down and all of a sudden on this one track you hear a door open and a little voice—my two-year-old son Dylan—say ‘Hi!’ Then you hear my wife, Tracey, say, ‘Dylan just made a stinky. And so did your daughter Caitlin. There’s stinky everywhere in here!’ The engineer was falling all over himself laughing. But don’t listen for that little conversation on Chris Gaines, because we obviously took it out!”

  There were several times when those in the studio
believed a song wouldn’t work, starting with the first song Garth put his voice on, “Lost In You.” Tommy Sims had sung the original in falsetto. When Garth stepped up to the microphone, the falsetto was there. “Our jaws were on the floor,” Gordon Kennedy recalls.

  Even when something didn’t work, it did. Garth had planned that “My Love Tells Me So” would be the song included from an early album when the Chris Gaines character was in a band named CRUSH with a now-dead lead singer, Tommy Levitz. That was the one song demo in a key Garth couldn’t navigate. So they left the original vocals on the track—Gordon Kennedy, aka Tommy Levitz.

  It was new territory for Garth. He was working with both music and with Paramount Pictures and his film production company, Red Strokes. Once Garth had the backstory down, a “bio” was prepared for The Lamb’s lead character, pointing to his childhood in Australia, the son of Olympic swimmers. As a writer on the project, Garth invented names and chart positions for five fictitious Gaines albums over a fourteen-year career—Crush, 1986; Straight Jacket, 1989; Fornucopia, 1991; Apostle, 1994; Triangle, 1996—the cover designs to be displayed inside the CD, Garth Brooks in… the Life of Chris Gaines.

  The album’s producer, Don Was, who had worked with Garth on “To Make You Feel My Love” for the film Hope Floats, said he was impressed by how serious Garth was in scripting the character for the film. Was told Reuters’ Gary Graff, “When [Garth] wasn’t doing stuff at the sessions, he sat there at the word processor, and his wife said he was up at night, shaping the character. He was never confused about it.”

  He was fascinated with the idea of creating a singing character away from his own musical style, and listened carefully to how Kennedy, Kilpatrick, and Sims performed their own songs. He was even more fascinated with how artists evolve, especially a rock performer, over a period of time. And as intrigued as he was with the musical evolution, he was equally absorbed with the development of the character.

  “I love writing this so much that Don Was finally had to order me to get my nose out of my laptop and get back in front of the microphone,” Garth told a friend. “Now I’m just praying that people ‘get it.’ ”

  As a fan of the songwriters involved in the project he tried to keep coming back to the music. But very quickly Garth noticed an unsettling tone entering into interviews. Reporters were more interested in Garth Brooks–as–Chris Gaines than in the character as a fictional entity. R&R’s Steve Wonstewicz, who conducted an even-handed interview the month prior to the album release, pointed to an emerging problem: “The dilemma seems epitomized in the Chris Gaines song, ‘Right Now,’ which features you rapping and a sample of the Youngbloods’ classic ‘Get Together.’ Some people really love the song, yet they give each other puzzled looks because it’s pretty removed from Garth.”

  Garth answered: “If this project does not succeed, it will be because we did not get past the stumbling block that it’s from Garth Brooks. That’s it.”

  He continued to explain that this was not an attempt to “go pop” and that he did not have an alter ego. “I’m just doing a character for a movie, and the character happens to be a pop-rock artist who has a catalog and a career.”

  For better and worse, Garth’s whole career had played out in the press. But at no time did the media ever dictate public opinion as it did with Chris Gaines. In the beginning the press seemed to better understand that this was strictly a way to approach a film project and that Garth found the idea an interesting challenge.

  On July 5, 1999, the Los Angeles Times said, “Garth Brooks will shed his twang and assume an alter ego that will have him singing pop songs for an upcoming movie, The Lamb, scheduled for release next year. Brooks will also release a collection of fictional artist Chris Gaines’ greatest hits in September. [Brooks’s] fans may not recognize his voice on the 14-track album. He reportedly hides his twang and sings in a higher pitch.”

  But just a few days later, on July 9, the Times’ Geoff Boucher worried that there was a risk: “The 14 songs on the [Chris Gaines] ‘greatest hits’ package range wildly in style, a purposeful effort to depict the evolution of a career artist. One song has a calliope and horns that evoke the Beatles, another sounds like a Bruce Springsteen anthem, yet another has the distinct drum sound and rhythms of Fleetwood Mac. The most startling may be ‘Lost In You,’ a smoky R&B song and the first single.

  “There is one constant among the songs: None of the vocals sounds anything like Brooks. Singing high and with unfamiliar cadences, Brooks deeply submerges his familiar baritone and twang. Will this new persona and voice bring Brooks to a whole new plateau or is he risking the foundation he’s already standing on?”

  Ironically, Garth’s real-life foundation was already shaken at the time. After a long illness Colleen Brooks died in August 1999, just a month before her son’s experimental album project was released. Colleen’s final days were spent at Deaconess Hospital in Oklahoma City, where she was surrounded by her family: Raymond, Garth and Sandy, Betsy, Kelly, Mike, Jim, and Jerry. The family was desolate, drawn together missing the woman who had been such a bright light in their world. Colleen’s death made any reaction to Chris Gaines pale by comparison.

  On September 9 two singles were shipped to radio prior to the CD release: the pop/R&B “Lost In You” and country “It Don’t Matter To The Sun.” Videos, produced by Picture Vision and Jon Small, were made for both songs.

  Garth had some initial worries when “Lost In You” started playing on some country stations, fearing that if it was played strictly because of his name value, it would be bad for the format. “I didn’t want to bring ‘Lost’ to country radio,” he said. “When you turn on country, you’re hearing decades of music.”

  “It Don’t Matter To The Sun,” on the other hand, reminded him of “To Make You Feel My Love,” and in his mind, did fit the format. “It’s the best-written song on the album,” he said. “And because of my allegiance to country radio, it’s the only one I’d take to them. I don’t want them not to have this project, but at the same time, I don’t want to bring country radio something that makes their format even more unidentifiable.”

  With the singles’ releases, it was obvious that some would listen to the music without bringing a Garth-the-country-star bias to the experience. A third single also received airplay: “That’s The Way I Remember It.”

  The Record reported: “Lost” became the #1 most added song on Top-40 and adult contemporary stations and “It Don’t Matter To Me” was the most-added track on country stations. After previewing a Brooks-as-Gaines industry showcase, Stan Atkinson, program director for Milwaukee’s WLTQ-FM, where “Lost” was featured along with the Backstreet Boys and Eric Clapton, said: “I was blown away. He just did Chris Gaines songs, and he had some dance songs like Prince, some rock, some softer songs. It’s top-notch music.”

  On September 28 Garth Brooks in… the Life of Chris Gaines was released, and on September 29 NBC aired the Chris Gaines special, Behind the Music. This was a fictional look at Gaines’s life, introducing a costumed Garth as Chris to the potential audience for The Lamb. It was an interesting experiment in advance marketing, and cross-promoting music and film. Extremely experimental, in fact, given that the film was not yet in production. And Garth was crucified by many for donning a wig and playing the role of Chris Gaines in this promotional film and on a variety of television appearances.

  When he had first started on the Chris Gaines project, Garth said, “I think it’s gonna be a lot of fun.” He couldn’t have been more wrong. It only took a few weeks after the television special and the CD release for the idea that this was an identity crisis to catch on. Then the fun died fast. Even though many early reviews of the music were glowing, and pop radio played singles from the CD, the mood turned. The L.A. Times went from embracing the idea to worrying that it was a risk, to calling it a huge mistake.

  One critic asked, “Has Garth lost his freakin’ mind?”

  Another couldn’t get around the fact that G
arth often referred to himself as GB. “Some music fans continue to insist that Chris Gaines is make-believe and Garth Brooks is real. But this is preposterous when you look at the evidence. In interviews Mr. Brooks always refers to himself in the third person as if he has just created a character. Mr. Gaines speaks of himself in the first person.”

  This “evidential” theory is what was preposterous. Garth had long separated himself and his music from the career phenomenon that included sales numbers, press coverage, management decisions, label operations, fanfare, and folderol. Almost as absurd was the accusation that Chris Gaines was more important to Capitol than Garth’s Magic of Christmas album because it received more marketing and promotion, selling 1 million. Christmas albums almost never receive the same intense marketing as other albums. Moreover, Chris Gaines was approached as a soundtrack setting up a movie, which in turn would set up another album. A lot was potentially at stake.

  It was also speculated that the entire Chris Gaines project was Garth’s payback because the Backstreet Boys had beat out his record for single-week sales of the previous year’s Double Live. “What’s next? Master P transforming into a patchouli-loving Lilith Fair performer, or Andrea Bocelli switching it up to go ghetto fabulous?”

  In a New York Times article titled “Split Personalities Can Be Better Than One,” Frank DeCaro questioned all this questioning and wrote, “[Brooks] got more grief from critics than the Village People got when they put on face paint and poet shirts for their 1981 New Wave album, Renaissance.”