Dreaming Out Loud

by Bruce Feiler

  After Garth’s standard two-song set, the audience refused to be quieted. They bathed the stage again with applause, strobing flashes, and a veritable menagerie of stuffed animals (presumably for his children). Porter Wagoner appeared back onstage and asked the crowd if they would mind if Garth sang another song. Reluctantly, they agreed.

  “Before I do that,” Garth said to the crowd—he was warming to the role now; less consumed with his own insecurities—“I would like to introduce you to someone. She’s my best friend and my wife, and I don’t know what I’d do without her…”

  Sandy stepped forward from her perch at the back of the stage and waved politely to the crowd. She was wearing a blue dress with lace around the collar and her shoulder-length blonde hair was draped around her face. She looked like a small-town Sunday school teacher.

  “Somebody asked me recently what I wanted for Christmas,” Garth continued. “I said I think I’ve already got it. Sandy’s not been feeling too well in the mornings…” The crowd erupted in cheers. “So, if you don’t mind, I’d like to dedicate this next song, ‘Little Drummer Boy,’ to Sandy, my two girls, and the third one on the way…”

  As he reached his final “ra ba ba bum,” Garth stepped to the base of the stage one last time, collected the animals, the flowers, and the chocolates, and headed back to his makeshift dressing room. He was sweating profusely when he arrived. With his hat removed, his hair clung in matted strings against his scalp, and his eyes still had a distant, aghast glow of someone stunned by a near-religious encounter. He grabbed a bottle of Evian and started gulping it down.

  “Wow! That felt great,” he said and, for the first time in several months, seemed genuinely uplifted. In particular his decision to announce Sandy’s pregnancy had been a masterful stroke. “I thought this was as good a place as any to confirm it,” he said. Indeed, the Opry seemed made for such announcements, which is why, I now realized, he was there to begin with. On my first trip to Nashville, long before moving, I had purposely planned to leave town on Sunday so I could visit the Opry. Its existence was part of my basic understanding of life in the South: football on Friday night, Opry on Saturday night, church on Sunday mornings. What I soon discovered, though, was that nobody on Music Row cared that much about what was happening in front of the red barn backdrop out by the airport. That was about nostalgia, certainly not business. It certainly wasn’t the least bit important in determining what artists to sign, what music to cut, or what songs to release to country radio. Radio is still king in country, but it’s FM radio now. And since most FM country stations refuse to broadcast the Opry (its listeners are too old, its ratings too small), the Opry is out of the loop.

  Though shocking to me at the time, I changed my ticket to Friday afternoon and never even went to see the Opry. Now, visiting the place for the first time, I was beginning to realize how telling my decision actually was. One of the central challenges facing country music is how to exploit the unprecedented opportunities of the present while still maintaining a link with the past. If anything, Garth Brooks’s current problems—becoming so obsessed with his own empire that he seemed to be forgetting his roots—were a reflection of this problem. Sure, Garth Brooks didn’t need the Opry: His forthcoming three-year world tour would earn him close to $1 million a week. By contrast, his stint on the Opry that night would earn him a mere $221. But his appearance on that stage still bought him a badge of legitimacy that he, more than most people in Nashville, needed. The Old South may be dead—the Opry itself may be little more than a living museum—but country music fans, more than those of most other genres, still hold on to the one remnant of the past that remains foremost to them: its old-fashioned values.

  Within minutes, Garth was ready for the reunion part of the evening. After handing his gifts to his road manager, meeting a terminally ill teenager who had been flown in from Milwaukee, and kissing his wife good-bye, Garth stepped outside the office. What followed was a stunning display of celebrity endurance, not to mention public relations. Fans, neighbors, elders, youngsters, Opry staff, and other performers from the show all gathered in an informal throng outside the door to the manager’s office backstage, just in front of the men’s room. Though the show was still continuing onstage, few here seemed to care about that. No one shoved. No one screamed. And Garth stood there on the linoleum floor and began to sign autographs. If anything, he was defying orders by being there. A special notice was posted around the facility urging guests not to pester performers for autographs or pictures. Garth not only ignored the order, but also asked the manager if it had been placed there on his behalf. (It was for security concerns, the manager explained. Earlier that year, two runaway girls from Ohio, ages sixteen and twenty-two, had initiated an ill-fated scheme to meet Reba McEntire by taking all 4,400 fans at the Opry hostage with semiautomatic machine guns and demanding that authorities produce Reba as ransom. When the girls’ landlord, an eighty-six-year-old grandmother, refused to give them bus fare, the younger girl hit the woman twenty-five times over the head with a porcelain clock, then smothered her to death with a pillow.)

  Garth not only flouted the manager’s order, but went out of his way to test the propriety of his fans. The fans, meanwhile, went out of their way to push the limits of propriety as well. They tickled him, hugged him, tried on his hat, and pinched him on the seat of his Wranglers. Though most maintained a respectable degree of distance, what was more striking was how close they actually came. Not in a physical sense, but in a personal sense. They acted like family and were treated as such. Garth, for his part, seemed to recognize most of the people in line: “How you doin’, girl!” “Weren’t you here last year at this time?” “How’d that picture we took in Dallas in 1989 come out?” “How’d your daughter do on that geography test she took after Tampa in ’92?” The fans knew this was coming, and they were prepared for it. They brought those pictures from Dallas. They brought the report cards from their children’s tests. And, even more surprising, they brought phone numbers, which he asked for and which he then gave to his road manager, who then promised that Garth would call them next time he was in their neighborhood: Tampa, Cleveland, Houston, or Phoenix. It’s an absurd notion to believe that Garth Brooks could possibly know every one of the 60 million people who had purchased one of his albums, but I actually spent several minutes that night trying to contemplate the mathematical possibility.

  “There is something about my mind,” he told me later, “that if I see a face, I’ll remember seeing that face. If I sign somebody’s name, I can go back to when I signed it, look down at the picture, and read the name.”

  “But how do you maintain that?” I asked. Most people who achieved his level of fame, I suggested—Michael Jackson, John Lennon, Elvis—descended into isolation and oddity.

  “But none of them are country music,” he said. “I think that’s part of the whole rock ‘n’ roll image. Inaccessibility. Having weird things. It ain’t country. The thing that I love the most about country music is that it can give you the sales you can have in every format, and, at the same time, when you come off that stage, they treat you like an average Joe.”

  Garth Brooks, the Dale Carnegie of popular music, had built a fortune based on this principle: You can be ambitious and still appear accessible. Indeed, it might even be in your best interest to do so.

  “You know how I could have sold a hundred million records?” he once asked me in a tone that indicated he wished he could have. “Sign every autograph I could have. After a while, though, I just couldn’t. I was becoming late for my next dates. One morning after a show in Dallas I looked up at the end of a night of signing and realized that the sun was coming up. I went home that night—I remember it was my birthday—and cried. The next week I had to stop signing.”

  After almost two hours on this Friday evening, Garth had made his way through most of the crowd. The rest of the Opry was empty by now. The other performers had all gone home. The staff had cleaned up the popcorn boxes fro
m the seats. Even Rosa, the seventy-seven-year-old nurse who distributes coffee and pink lemonade backstage in front of the dedication plaque signed by President Nixon, had packed up her swizzle sticks and gone home for another night, her latest in an unbroken span stretching more than twenty-six years. When the hallway seemed to be clear, Garth straightened his hat, gestured to his road manager, and rounded the corner to the entrance desk, where the woman still sat underneath the blue and green portrait of Minnie, Porter, and Hank. Almost instantly there was a roar. Without realizing he had been just around the corner, several dozen people were camped out at the entrance. Though it was after eleven by now, over two hours since he had last sat down, Garth instinctively plunged into the crowd. It was almost as if he was drawing life from the people.

  Once again he stood. And once again they came. Each couple, or mother-daughter, or group of high school friends having him sign as much as they could, then running to their cars to retrieve more belongings. Another hour passed. Midnight came and went. It was just before one o’clock in the morning when he hugged his last fan and stepped into the chilly night, where another fifteen or so people had waited since the end of the show. Fifteen more minutes. Then thirty. “Doesn’t he ever go to the bathroom?” one of the women asked. At this point the ten or twelve people still awake in Tennessee were standing in an informal clump around the bestselling bladder-control expert in America. “So much has changed for you,” one man said, nearly weeping, as he finally arrived for his audience. “But you haven’t changed one bit.” Garth embraced the man. And by this point, it was becoming clear that this marathon session was serving a much different purpose than it appeared. Though perhaps originally intended to send a message to the world that he was still accessible, Garth’s effort was actually sending a message to himself: that not only did the public still care about him, but that he, more importantly, still cared about them.

  In that sense, Garth reminded me of Bill Clinton. I often thought it was no coincidence that Bill Clinton was the dominant political figure in America during the period when Garth Brooks was the dominant musical figure. Both were children of the New South, who had larger-than-life appetites (food, women, power) and great marketing savvy. Also, both were challenged on the motives of many of their actions, which were often criticized as being manipulative and insincere. Regardless, both men succeeded because they were able to communicate a profound sense of empathy and shared purpose with the American public. That feeling of camaraderie (“I feel your pain,” Clinton said to voters; “I am you,” Garth said to fans) was vividly on display this night, when Garth, like Clinton, seemed to gain strength by coming out of isolation and pressing the flesh with his constituents. If anything, as he set out to relaunch his career, it was becoming apparent that Garth still needed his fans in a way that was much more visceral—much more desperate—than they needed him.

  Finally, at 1:42 in the morning, three hours and forty-five minutes after he finished his three-song set at the Opry, Garth Brooks was finished for the evening. He unlocked the door of his new 4x4, hopped behind the driver’s seat, and started up his Christmas gift for the brief ride north to his home. As he backed out of his parking space, he rolled his window down. I was now the only person standing in the cold.

  “Can I offer you a ride to your car?”

  “No, thank you,” I said. “It’s just around the corner.”

  “Well, then, have a safe drive home,” he said. “And don’t forget. We’ll be back here again tomorrow.”

  TWO

  THE STUDIO

  The men gathered in the soundproof room on Division Street, just east of Music Row, were legends. They had come, on this day, to help create another.

  It was just before two on the first Monday in December when the Toyotas and Chevys, the pickups and hatchbacks, started squeezing into the cramped parking strip alongside the Soundshop Studio, a somewhat dreary, single-story, cedar-sided studio down the street from the Country Music Hall of Fame. The first few cars to arrive were dented and bruised, the men who emerged from them less than pristine themselves. With stringy hair, faded jeans, and bleary, late-night barroom bags under their eyes, these middle-aged men hardly seemed the stuff of the white-bright smiles of America’s newest glamour industry. And, in many ways, they weren’t part of that smile. They were the Frankenstein pieces behind the smiles: the hands, the ears, the strumming arms, the pedaling feet, and most of all the fingers behind the music that made those smiles ring true. They were the session players, heard but not seen.

  The last person to arrive drove the nicest car of all. It was a power red Mercedes coupé with a license plate that monogrammed its owner as DKC. The initials claimed the parking spot of honor, directly in front of the studio door, and the man behind the initials—perky, preppy, a jolly roger on this cruise—strode through the glass door, down the short hallway, and directly into the seat of power, an aqua blue rolling office chair on the upper level of a split-level room.

  “Okay, gentlemen,” he said upon arrival. “What do you say we make some music?”

  The first day of a recording session is invariably a moment of some circumstance in Nashville. The producer is expectant, the musicians abuzz. And the artist is both of those—expectant and abuzz—and also a little bit scared. The artist in this case was a twenty-six-year-old former construction worker turned reluctant stud when the debut single off his debut album stunned everyone in Nashville (including most of the people in this room) by steadily climbing the country charts a year earlier and peaking for two triumphant weeks at number one. More than just a song, “Old Enough to Know Better (But Still Too Young to Care)” was that rare gift in popular music, a clever lyric, a catchy tune, and—that indefinable—an irresistible spirit that together helped set up a young man’s dream. The single, “Old Enough to Know Better,” went on to become one of the most-played records of the year. The album, of the same title, went on to become the bestselling debut record of the year. And ultimately the phrase itself helped create a certain aura around a still-lanky young man from Oklahoma, Billboard’s Debut Artist of the Year, as he sang it often, discussed it even more, and, on this day, arguably his most important in a year, even wore it around his waist in the form of a giant silver and gold belt buckle.

  Wade Hayes was a new kind of country star, with the looks of a dashing video hunk, the voice of a deep-canyon echo, and the somewhat old-fashioned sensibility of a young man trying to do the right thing even as his life spins out of control. He was, for starters, extremely well mannered. Even after knowing him for over a year, when I attended a small luncheon in honor of his new album some months after the recording session, I received a handwritten note from Wade two days later thanking me for attending. In three years in Nashville, including dozens of such luncheons, Wade’s was the only personal note from an artist I ever received.

  As cordial as he was in private, in public he was awkward. Shy to the point of being taciturn, Wade almost never spoke in a group (including his own band) and when called on to make brief remarks—at a reception at his label, say, or at a ceremony awarding him a gold record—he would offer abject apologies for his inability to express himself. Once, several years into his career, after being introduced to a crowd of well-wishers at the Wildhorse Saloon in Nashville, all of whom had come to hear of his participation in a new tour, Wade became so flustered that he sat down without finishing his remarks. Minutes later, after his colleagues on the tour offered reams of effortless repartee, Wade returned to the podium, confessed he was so nervous he was sick to his stomach, and politely finished his thank-yous.

  Because he was so uncomfortable with speaking, music was how Wade communicated with the world. As he put it in a television interview at the start of his career: “Music is about the only way I feel comfortable expressing things. I’ve always been a real emotional person, but I’ve never felt comfortable about being emotional in front of people. I’ve always had these feelings inside of me going crazy. My mind’s always
going a million miles an hour, but I try to stay quiet and stay reserved in front of people. Sometimes it drives me crazy. Writing a song or playing an instrument is a pretty good outlet for that. Maybe that’s why it means so much to me.”

  On this day, Wade was even more anxious than normal. Dressed in deep blue Wranglers, a long-sleeve teal T-shirt, and brown cowboy boots, he looked lean and fit. Without his normal hat, his shoulder-length hair was pulled back from his head, drawing more attention to his flat, globular nose, thin lips, and deep-set, dark and mournful eyes. Despite his height, broad shoulders, and widely acknowledged powerhouse voice, he looked at this early stage in the session like a sapling just waiting to be toppled by a gust of wind. He wasn’t glamorous. Not even sexy. More like “adorable,” in the words of one female friend of mine.

  “I guess I slept a little more last night than I did a year ago,” he said as the musicians gathered around the console. Even his speaking voice was deep, but pleading: pure Oklahoma, a rich cousin of twang. “Back then I didn’t sit down for weeks. I was so nervous.”

  “That was your first time, though,” offered DKC.

  “I know, and I almost didn’t make it through.”

  Callow as he appeared, Wade Hayes was rapidly maturing into a full-bodied star—perhaps even more than he realized himself. His shooting status was no more apparent than in the roster of country music legends who dropped by the darkened studio this afternoon to pay their respects. First there was Bill Anderson, Opry luminary, one of the few singer-songwriters in Nashville to have hits in every decade since the 1950s and coauthor of “Six Feet Tall,” a song on the album. With a quick smile and standard-issue baseball cap (Atlanta Braves), he was one of the handful of men who settled in for the afternoon on the baby blue sofa in the back of the control room. Next to him sat Ronnie Dunn, the red-bearded half of the superduo Brooks & Dunn, headliners of the most recent tour on which Wade was the opening act and cowriters of the first song to be cut, “Our Time Is Coming.” (Kix and Ronnie, along with Don Cook, alias DKC, had also written “Steady as She Goes” on Wade’s first album.) Out of respect for the nature of the occasion, Ronnie removed the cellular phone from his belt, turned it off, and put it in his lap.