GARTH STAYED ACTIVE IN his charitable work during 2005. That February he joined with Steve Wariner, Stephanie Davis, and Dan Roberts for a fund-raiser in Fort Worth, Texas. Dan organized the event after UCLA’s advanced MRI equipment helped his daughter during a serious illness. Recognizing the need for such equipment at Cook’s Medical Center in Fort Worth, Dan contacted some of his friends and co-writers. The group raised over two million dollars. In November the National Hockey League and the NHL Player’s Association announced Teammates for Kids as their chosen charity. One of the first joint efforts was relief for victims of Hurricane Katrina. The NHL raised $530,470 in December, which was then matched by Teammates for Kids. Then, in March 2006, Garth and Trisha performed at the JW Marriott Desert Ridge Resort in Arizona to raise money for Parkinson’s disease research.
Meanwhile, Garth and Trisha had settled into a comfortable relationship, where Garth’s daughters loved and trusted her, felt she was a part of the family. It was a mutual admiration society. Garth believed the time was right.
And so, during the spring of 2005, while he was driving with his three girls, he asked them how they would feel about his proposing to Trisha. “What took you so long, Dad?” Taylor said, laughing. In May, Garth got on one knee and proposed to Trisha onstage. The occasion was the unveiling at Buck Owens’s Crystal Palace in Bakersfield, California, of the Legends in Bronze, a sculpture garden honoring Garth and eight other country artists. Garth was in good company. The other statues included were likenesses of Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, George Jones, and George Strait. A visibly flustered Trisha happily and tearfully accepted his proposal.
“I’m definitely getting the best of this deal.” Garth laughed.
But just four months after the proposal another tragedy occurred. Trisha had just arrived in New York for a Redbook magazine Mothers and Shakers Award luncheon, when her manager, Ken Levitan, gave her the news that her father had passed away. Jack Yearwood died suddenly of a heart attack on September 20, 2005, at age seventy-two. Shattered, Trisha rushed home to Georgia. Like the Brooks family, the Yearwoods were incredibly close. Second only to his concern for Trisha, Garth’s consideration turned to Trisha’s mother, Gwen Yearwood.
“I told Trisha that the loss of her father would only be a part of what she’d miss,” Garth said. “She’d miss something in her mother. When two people are as close as my parents were, as Trisha’s parents were, the death of one leaves a hole in the other. You have to take care of your own grief, but you also have to be aware of what your living parent is going through and try to help with as much support as you can give.”
Garth and Trisha married on Saturday, December 10, 2005, in a ceremony at Garth’s Oklahoma farm that included Taylor, August, and Allie also exchanging rings with Trisha. “This was a family wedding,” Garth explained. “The girls were a part of everything all along the way.”
Garth and Trisha keep their life with Taylor, August, and Allie private. They allow no photographers at the farm, and try to keep the girls lives very normal. They love to go tubing on the lake and ride four-wheelers around the farm. They spend much time together, taking meals together, playing games, and simply having conversations, finding out what’s on everyone’s mind. They have an honesty night, where everyone can speak their mind on anything they wish. One child psychologist who read about that family event called it perhaps the most important thing a parent can do, to allow children the freedom to be honest.
One thing Garth worries about is how schools have changed. As he told Hazel Smith, “We’re taking the kid out of our kids. They’ve got so much homework. They’ve got so much responsibility. My thing is, ‘Hey, let’s not try to keep these kids up with the rest of the kids in competition. Let’s see that these kids have some common sense, some fun, and let them be kids.”
While both Garth and Trisha are comfortable with their stardom, they share an affection for everyday life, away from the red-carpet, microphone-in-your-face world of the glitterati. They love comfort foods, sweat suits, card games, dominoes, watching sports events on television, and kicking back on lazy Sunday afternoons. They like the fact that they can attend events where the three Brooks girls are participating and remain just another family. Some of the other parents they’ve met through the girls’ activities have become backyard barbecue friends.
Trisha says the three girls are a continual joy to be around, that their humor keeps her laughing and their intelligence keeps her on her toes. For his part, Garth looks ahead with trepidation to the time his daughters start wanting to date. “That’s because I remember being a teenage boy,” he says, shaking his head.
Garth finds he’s come full circle as far as listening to a wide variety of music. When he was a child, the music played in his house ranged from Hank Williams to KISS. Now, with three girls at home, he might walk through the house at any given moment and hear KJ-52, Avril Lavigne, Keith Whitley, or the Disney radio network playing. Daughter Allie, who now likes to be called by her middle name, Colleen, loves to sing. Would Garth encourage it? He wouldn’t discourage it. Although he’d like each of his daughters to have what he calls “a real job,” he knows that if the music pull is there, it can be unstoppable. “If any of them want to be entertainers, I’d probably tell them that they were crazy, but that I wanted them to do the best they can at whatever they choose.
“I’ve said that someday I want my girls’ friends to say, ‘Didn’t your dad used to sing?’ ”
Garth has continued to release music and play some special-event concerts for charity. On November 28, 2006, he released The Entertainer, a five-DVD box set that was available at Wal-Mart. The collection included never-before-seen footage from four of his television specials as well as fifteen video hits. His next release was The Ultimate Hits, three discs, thirty-six fan favorites, with the new history-making single, “More Than A Memory.” Garth added a special “pink” album to the offering, with proceeds raising funds for the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation for breast cancer research. Trisha encouraged Garth to get involved after participating in a three-day walk for the charity. Inspired by the fact that Trisha and a group of her friends did over six hundred miles of training for the event, Garth decided to donate a portion of the proceeds of The Ultimate Hits to the foundation.
He had also been thinking about a way to thank Wal-Mart for its continued support. He wanted to play a show in appreciation, but remained unsure how and where that might take place. Then in 2006, he was approached about playing a show to help launch the new Sprint Center in Kansas City. Once he realized that his daughters could accompany him on the short flight to Kansas City without too much disruption, he agreed to combine the Sprint extravaganza and his Wal-Mart thank-you. As had always happened, once the concert was announced, more dates had to be added to accommodate the fans. He played nine sold-out shows in November 2007. Cable channel Great American Country filmed one show and aired it as One Man, One City, One Night.
In January 2008 he played a series of concerts at Staples Center in Los Angeles for the McCormick Tribune Foundation to benefit firefighters victims of the California wildfires. The Orange County Register described one of the shows as starting out at fever pitch and gathering momentum. The article concluded that with respect to entertainment, “There’s Garth Brooks. And then there’s everybody else.” As she had for the Kansas City shows, Trisha Yearwood also performed, bringing the house down. There is no doubt that this duo, a fan favorite since 1990, still has the magic nearly two decades later.
Despite her marriage and new life, Trisha spent as much time as possible with family after her father’s death. And during conversations about Jack Yearwood, and especially his love of cooking and neighborhood gatherings, the Yearwood family ultimately collaborated on a cookbook in his honor. In 2008, Trisha, together with her mother, Gwen, and sister, Beth, wrote Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen (Clarkson Potter), a combination cookbook and family memoir. Th
e stories are all-American reminiscences of a Georgia childhood that involved both family and many friends. The food is primarily in the down-home category: fried chicken, breakfast casseroles, chicken pie, brownies, fruit cobbler, Jack Yearwood’s famous Brunswick Stew—and a staple in both the Brooks and Yearwood histories, hamburger gravy. It’s a fun read and points to something that Garth and Trisha have always had in common: a lack of pretense. When, for example, making biscuits, Trisha shrugs and says to just go for the Bisquick. Excellent advice.
In 2006 Trisha was reunited with longtime friend and former MCA Records executive Scott Borchetta. When Scott formed Big Machine Records that year, Trisha became his flagship artist. Her first album for the label was Heaven, Heartache and the Power of Love, a stellar collection of songs that caused USA Today critic Brian Mansfield to compare Trisha’s soulful vocal prowess to a latter day Tammy Wynette. One song in particular had great meaning to Trisha: “Sing You Back To Me,” which was for her father. When she first recorded the song, she did it strictly for her mother and sister. But as producer Garth Fundis listened to her performance, he knew it had to be included on her new record. Trisha followed her husband’s advice: “Just go in there and let the horses run.” The new affiliation leaves the duet album door wide open, for the first time in Garth’s and Trisha’s careers.
WHEN IN NASHVILLE, GARTH spends a lot of time at Jack’s Tracks or visiting with close friends like Steve and Caryn Wariner. He sees his old co-writers and musician friends. He is interested in producing records and there is no doubt that he will be back in Nashville as a power, albeit a behind-the-scenes player, very soon. He loves the music too much. Because it would involve too much time away from family, touring might have to wait a bit longer, but the music has pulled him back in. Look for a duet album. It’s no secret that Garth has been looking for duets among Nashville’s writing community throughout his career. The time is ripe for those songs and new ones to make an appearance. Once again, he has a cardboard box of songs, like the one he brought to Allen Reynolds in 1989. Look for a major business move. And expect Nashville to once again have the benefit of Garth’s passion.
It is that passion, the fire behind Garth’s love of music, that sold nearly 130 million records. First and foremost, it was his love of performing, and his ability to connect to masses of people on a one-to-one level. Fans attending his arena shows felt as close to the artist as the people sitting around at the Bluebird when this man played an acoustic set. He was able to bridge that gap. He brought country music concerts to new energy standards, seen now in so many concert tours, Tim McGraw, Kenny Chesney, and Keith Urban, to name but a few. And he did it while keeping his ticket prices affordable.
He also pumped up Nashville’s writing community, bringing so many great songwriters to the attention of the industry: Kent Blazy, Kim Williams, Pat Alger, Stephanie Davis, Victoria Shaw, Jenny Yates, Benita Hill, Larry Bastian, Bryan Kennedy, Dan Roberts, Tony Arata, and others. Garth loves songs and songwriters. Even when it worked against him, as it did during the used CD controversy, Garth stood on the side of “the boys who make the noise on Sixteenth Avenue.” He also greatly broadened the scope of song subjects. The material he writes ranges from western themes to tongue-in-cheek to powerful message songs no one else would touch. As a writer, few in the 1990s surpassed him.
As Edward Morris, former Billboard country editor and the author of Garth’s 1993 biography, Platinum Cowboy, reflected in 2008, “Brooks gave country music the ambition and presence to strive for universality, to move beyond its obsession with personal relationships and to achieve instead something approaching a practical philosophy. His songs and attitude implored people to embrace the world because it is a place filled with small but urgent wonders.”
Garth’s contribution to country music videos is equally vital. It would have been very easy for country to slip into the pattern of ho-hum clips with no purpose other than to remind viewers of a single release. “The Thunder Rolls” changed all that. Garth despised the fact that it became a huge boondoggle, but the conflict ended up opening creative doors. One need only watch the videos included on The Entertainer to see just what a difference he made.
Garth’s refusal to rely on studio tricks and his insistence on keeping things real are also important to the industry as a whole. Time and again he kept a track even when he’d missed a note because the emotion was right. Too often these days we hear fans complain about the difference between an artist’s live performance and what was heard on CD. In a genre where authenticity is everything, that matters.
One of the best things Garth did for Nashville is that for which he is most often criticized. He continued in the Outlaw tradition, and when he believed he had to, he held his record label’s feet to the fire. By paying attention to the business side of music, he often faced reproof. He was called power hungry, a Machiavellian marketer, and an eight-hundred-pound gorilla. One of the charges leveled at him was that he was the “anti-Hank,” referring, of course, to the legendary Hank Williams. And that comparison deserves some dissection.
Appropriating Hank Williams as the example of an all-music-no-business stance is as ill informed as it is disingenuous. For one thing, that theory makes Hank Williams sound like a bit of a dim bulb. He was anything but. Hank Williams was competitive, a voracious reader of Billboard who paid close attention to what records were ahead and behind of his own. He spent hours sitting in the stands at the Louisiana Hayride, checking out other acts while they rehearsed. He paid attention to what worked for the act, and what didn’t. Moreover, Williams also often spoke of himself in the third person, Ole Hank.
Crossing over? Commercialism? Hank allowed Fred Rose to doctor melodies on his songs in hopes of getting pop cuts. And let’s not forget that Ole Hank sold tickets to his own wedding—at several locations. The truth of the matter is that Hank Williams tried hard to keep track of his career. He just had this drinking problem that kept distracting him. It should go without saying that not one of these factors takes anything away from Hank’s musical genius. And, in fact, speaks well of his intentions.
Anti-Hank talk about any artist is insidious. Beyond the spin, it leaves the impression that taking care of business is anti-art. The numbers of musicians who have awakened to face the taxman or the bankruptcy court is legend. Johnny Cash turned around one day and found a million dollars missing. Willie Nelson learned too late about bogus tax shelters. Wynonna Judd was pulled back from financial disaster in the nick of time. Johnny Paycheck was robbed blind, and there were years that George Jones had to rely on Waylon Jennings for pocket money. Dottie West lost everything and died trying to make a few bucks for rent. Tammy Wynette faced bankruptcy. Every one of them wished they’d paid closer attention.
And make no mistake about it—Garth Brooks is a country artist. He has proved it in a myriad of ways, beginning with his songwriting. Unfortunately, his admission of affection for acts including Queen and KISS cost him dearly. His critics seldom remembered that country artists including Hall of Famer Faron Young leaned toward Frank Sinatra before they leapt into Webb Pierce territory. The bogus charge, that ain’t country, has done more damage to the genre than a trainload of synthesizers.
When all is said and done, Garth proved that country music is not only a big tent, but that expansion does not necessarily mean dilution. From “The Dance” to “More Than A Memory,” the music involves great songs performed with great power. There’s an old theory that some people have such overwhelming personalities that when they enter a room they suck the air out of it. Most who have been involved with Garth Brooks and his career will tell you that Garth does just the opposite, he breathes energy into the room. And in a creative industry, that’s a good thing.
Garth’s first Fan Fair, 1989. His first single, “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old),” had entered the charts just a month earlier.
Bob Doyle, Garth, and Pam Lewis in 1990.
Garth and Capitol marketing/sales VP Joe Mansfield.
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Garth is presented with his first gold record at Fan Fair, 1990.
Capitol chief Jimmy Bowen with producer Allen Reynolds in 1991.
Ricky Skaggs with one of his biggest fans at Dollywood in 1991.
Garth with producer Allen Reynolds, Billboard’s Lynn Shults, and engineer Mark Miller in 1991. Lynn encouraged Capitol’s Jim Foglesong to sign Garth in 1988. Both Foglesong and Shults were fired by Jimmy Bowen the following year.
Garth and Sandy at the 1991 CMA Awards, where he won Entertainer of the Year,Album of the Year (No Fences), Video of the Year (“The Thunder Rolls”), Single of the Year (“Friends In Low Places”).
Garth went to George Strait’s Fan Fair booth in 1991, hoping to see his idol—but had to settle for the cardboard stand-up.
Garth opened for the Judds Farewell Tour in 1991.The emotional pay-per-view final concert was the most successful music event in cable’s history at the time.
Kix Brooks, Garth Brooks, and Ronnie Dunn in 1991.
Garth says that from the time he first started working with Trisha Yearwood her vocals left him wondering how he ever believed he was a singer.
Two of the first major acts Garth opened for, Wynonna Judd and Kenny Rogers.
Garth at the Music Row party Jimmy Bowen threw when Ropin’ the Wind entered the pop charts at number 1.
Garth at 1992’s Fan Fair.
Garth at bat in the 1993 City of Hope softball game.
By 1993 Garth’s concert was airborn…
Garth credits Chris LeDoux with inspiring his high-energy stage show.
Garth with Jim Foglesong in 1994.
The Garth Factor Page 32
