Dreaming Out Loud

by Bruce Feiler

  Some people might have called that confession foolishness. By sharing his own mixed identity with the world, Garth all but guaranteed that his duality—his managed schizophrenia, if you will—would become the source of controversy. Garth Brooks, on paper, can make no claim to being a cowboy. He’s a product of the cul-de-sac, not the farm. He didn’t ride a horse until college. So where did he get off creating such a buckaroo image? Was “Little Boy Garth,” the authentic cowboy, just some super marketing creation by “Grown-Up Garth,” the ten-gallon tycoon? Ultimately, this tension boiled down to perhaps the most frustrating issue in contemporary country music: authenticity. Can a child of modern America—the frontier of plastic—actually transform himself into something as steeped in integrity as the cowboy? Or must such a persona, coming as it does from an ambitious entertainer steeped in the American tradition of packaging, necessarily be fake? Even among those who knew him best, this was the central question about Garth Brooks: Was he for real?

  We arrived at the plane. Garth was talking about American Air Lines. He had thanked them in the liner notes of his last album, and I asked if they sponsored his tour. “No,” he said, “they just take care of me—let me put things on planes without a ticket. So we take care of them.” Once on board, Karen and I retreated to our seats as Mick began storing his briefcase. Garth, though, didn’t have his ticket, and the flight attendant refused to let him board. When told that Mick had the ticket, she turned toward the cabin. “Excuse me,” she called. Mick didn’t hear her. “Excuse me,” she repeated, louder. “Do you have a ticket for this person?” By this time, everyone in the plane had turned to see what was happening. And for a second I wondered: Did she not recognize him? Did she recognize him and not care? And then I thought: For what other person of his stature would I even ask?

  The most remarkable thing about spending time with Garth Brooks is how unremarkable he is most of the time. He’s casual, talkative, and, above all, very guylike: he loves sports and statistics; he loves stuff (T-shirts, trinkets), particularly free stuff; he loves technology—bangs and explosions. When he heard I had been in the circus, he was fascinated with the human cannonball. Also, he loves to exchange locker room banter. “Did you have that goatee last time we were together?” he asked me that afternoon. “Yes, but I’m going home in a few weeks and I’m not sure it’s going to survive my mother.” He loved that. “The question is not whether it’s going to survive,” he said. “The question is whether you’re going to survive.” Above all, like an athlete, he’s extremely competitive. Later, when the subject turned to football and the abysmal Washington Redskins’ recent victory over the Dallas Cowboys, Garth was intrigued that the underdog had beaten the champion twice in one season. “I think Norv Turner’s got something on Troy Aikman,” I mentioned, referring to Aikman’s former quarterback tutor, now head coach of the Redskins. “He probably calls him up in the morning and says, ‘I know what’s in your mind.’” Garth’s eyes grew wide. “Football off the field,” he cooed. “I love that.” If music is a sport, with Garth it’s mental.

  Both those traits—his casual everydayness and his keen competitiveness—have been with him since childhood. The future mayor of American music was born in what demographers would later call the most “typical” city in America: Tulsa. His father, Troyal Raymond Brooks, was a stern oil company draftsman whom Garth describes as having a “thundering, velvet hand.” His mother, Colleen Carroll, was a sometime country singer (she had cut a few songs for Capitol Records in the 1950s) with an effervescent personality and salty wit, whom Troyal Brooks first saw singing on a local television show in 1957. The two met, married, and created a sort of “Brady Bunch” family. He had one child from a previous marriage; she had three; and together they had two more: Kelly, a studious boy, later to become Garth’s tour manager, and Troyal Garth, the younger, born February 7, 1962.

  When Garth was four, the Brookses moved to Yukon, a bedroom community of five thousand located fifteen miles northwest of Oklahoma City, which Garth once described as being “an average city in the middle of average Oklahoma in the middle of average America.” The family settled into a compact, split-level house on 408 Holly Street. The house, modest by even middle-class standards—“The houses were small, but there was no shame,” Garth told me in his often self-mythologizing way—was located in a flat, well-tended neighborhood. A short walk away, on what is now Garth Brooks Boulevard, was Yukon High School, home of the Millers (named after the town’s dominant industry and tallest building, Yukon’s Best Flour mill). A few blocks in the other direction was the town’s main street: Route 66.

  Life in the Brookses’ house was dictated by the strong arm of Garth’s father, softened by the encouraging hug of his mother. “One’s a realist, my dad,” Garth told me. “One’s a dreamer, my mom. If the gas tank’s on empty, and she’s got a hundred miles to go, she believes she can make it. Dad’s going, ‘We’ve got to do something.’” From his father Garth inherited his stubbornness, his work ethic, and his sense of right and wrong. Once, Garth told me, he went to see the screenwriter, William Goldman, to talk about film projects. Though Garth was intimidated, the two hit it off famously. “Everything I said,” Garth told me, “he was like, ‘Man, that’s exactly how I feel.’ I’m hanging, man. I’m thinking, ‘This is unreal.’” Then the film Pulp Fiction came up, which Garth hadn’t seen. “And I lied,” Garth said. “I told him I had seen it, but that I didn’t like it, ’cause I knew that’s what he was going to say.” Garth guessed wrong. “No kidding,” Goldman said. “I loved that movie.” “And just then,” Garth told me, “I heard my dad laugh. He was fifteen hundred miles away, but I heard my dad laugh. I knew what was right; I knew what was wrong; and still I chose the wrong. That wasn’t the John Wayne thing to do.”

  From his mother Garth inherited his penchant to dream big. As a child, he dreamed of becoming various things, but always as a hero. He would be a baseball player, he said, snagging the final catch, smashing the game-winning home run. He would be an actor, dashing in to save the heroine, riding off into the sunset. He would be a forest ranger, stomping out fires, rescuing stranded campers, nursing injured bears. To his mother, it came as no surprise that later he tried to become a hero through music. “Garth says he wants to bring prayer back to the dinner table and an American flag back to the front porch,” she told me. “I think that’s wonderful.”

  Though Garth may have fantasized as a child, he did little to realize his goals. “I was always more of a talker than a doer,” he said. A popular if unspectacular student, Garth eased through high school with little distinction, except for his ability to throw. “His talent was his arm,” said Mick Weber, a friend since second grade. “He could throw things a million miles: football, baseball, javelin, rocks.” After graduation, Garth proceeded to Oklahoma State at Stillwater, eventually earning a partial track scholarship. In his senior year at college, his athletic career fizzled, freeing him to follow a newfound passion: playing guitar. “The real big Shakespearean bell went off in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1984,” he told me. “I’m lying in the pole vault pit, right after not qualifying for finals. It was the first time in my four-year-college career that I did not qualify for Big Eight finals. Suddenly this female trainer walks by and says, ‘Now you can get on with what you’re supposed to be doing.’ Wow! I knew exactly what she meant. For me, music was the other side of the coin from sports. It was no talk, just get out there and go.”

  Where he went was something of a surprise. With eight different people living under one roof, Garth had grown up with all sorts of music, from George Jones, whom his father liked, to James Taylor, his brothers’ favorite. Garth tended toward soft seventies rock—Elton John and Dan Fogelberg—as well as the megarock bands Journey, Boston, and Styx. At the time he had little interest in country, which he thought was “prettified and slick.” That was the age of Olivia Newton-John and Kenny Rogers, after all, two pop stars who crossed into country. All that changed when Garth first he
ard George Strait, a true-bred Texas rancher who emerged out of Nashville in 1980 with a sparse country sound and throwback appearance that instantly distinguished itself from its Urban Cowboy-era competition. Suddenly a new path became available: Garth Brooks could try to become “George Strait II,” a sort of cul-de-sac cousin of country, an Okie not from Muskogee, but from a Clean, Well-Lighted Place.

  He started playing clubs. On weekends, he played “revved-up” country with a swing band. On weeknights, he played solo. “It was everything from Elton to Merle Haggard,” he said. “My repertoire got up to over three hundred songs. You knew that the more songs you learned, the more money you were going to make. And that helped because the more I knew, the more diverse my music became.” All the while he fretted about that next move: Nashville did have George Strait, but still only a niche share of the marketplace; New York and L.A. had crossover possibilities, but for a mostly coddled Oklahoman, frightening reputations. “New York was definitely out,” he told me, “because, to me, the only time I’d seen New York was on a show called Escape from New York and I thought that’s what it looked like. L.A. was going to be an island someday. The biggest city I had gone to before Nashville was Des Moines, Iowa, for a track meet.”

  In 1985, Garth made his first trip to Nashville (driving, appropriately enough, the country’s most popular car, a Honda Accord). Through a friend he obtained a meeting with Merlin Littlefield, a vice president at ASCAP. Unimpressed with Garth’s demo tape, Littlefield discouraged him. Thousands come to Nashville every year, he said, only a handful manage to make a living. During the meeting, a songwriter stuck his head in Littlefield’s office and asked for a $500 loan to fend off foreclosure of his home; Littlefield turned him down, stunning his visitor. “See, you’ve got your choice,” he told Garth, “you either starve as a songwriter or get five people and starve as a band.” Humiliated and now insulted (“I hated his guts,” Garth said), he fled back to Oklahoma and hid in his parents’ home for weeks. “I thought Nashville would be like Oz,” he said later. “You came here and all your prayers were answered. I thought you’d flip open your guitar case, play a song, and someone would hand you a million bucks, tell you, ‘Come into the studio right quick, son, we got ten songs we want you to cut.’ You cut them that day, go back home, and people would be asking you for your autograph that night…The people in Stillwater had passed the hat and got the money for me to come to Nashville. I was going to be their hero. Now I had to go back.”

  Once back, he married his college girlfriend, Sandy Mahr, whom he had just humiliated by not even telling her he was going to Nashville. (Sandy, a soft-spoken but steely blonde from Owasso, Oklahoma, had met Garth in Stillwater after she put her hand through a bathroom wall at a bar where he worked as a bouncer. He walked her home, but refused her request to kiss him good night. “He was the most mannered man I had ever met,” she told me.) Then he put together a band, Santa Fe, with whom he made a pact (“Actually, I made the pact for us,” Garth said): When they had played every place they could, they would move to Nashville. In 1987, five band members, two wives, two kids, a cat, and a dog did just that, setting up house north of town. When their attempt to get a deal floundered and the band split up, Garth and Sandy took jobs in a Western apparel store while he looked for a deal. A songwriter introduced him to Bob Doyle, also an executive at ASCAP. Doyle was so enthusiastic about Garth’s work that he quit his job and formed a publishing company. He gave Garth a $300-a-month stipend and rallied jobs for him singing demos. Looking for a comanager, Doyle, a quietly passionate man, recruited Pam Lewis, a fiery publicist with New Age crunchiness who had once worked for MTV in Manhattan before moving to Nashville to work for RCA.

  Despite all the good omens, all seven major labels promptly rejected Garth. He had an undistinguished voice, they said, was a mediocre songwriter, and wasn’t very attractive to boot. The one catch: No one had seen him perform in public. On May 11, 1988, Lynn Shults, an executive at Capitol Records, finally did see Garth before an audience at the Bluebird Cafe, the quaint songwriters’ club in a strip mall not far from Belle Meade that was later lionized in the movie The Thing Called Love. After watching Garth sing, Shults offered him a handshake deal on the spot. “Being on the road with a lot of great artists, you get a frame of reference for what is exceptional,” Shults said. “And that night Garth was exceptional. He didn’t even have a band. This was just Garth Brooks with an acoustic guitar. But his vocal performance and the magnetism of his personality connected with the people who didn’t even know who Garth Brooks was. What went through the mind was that I had just seen somebody who was as good—if not better than—anyone I had ever seen.” It was less than a year after he moved to Nashville, and already Garth’s earnestness, his ability to connect one-on-one with the fans, was becoming his calling card.

  The next step was capturing that sincerity on tape.

  From the beginning, Garth fulfilled the one expectation of country music and captured its one true secret: He sounded like the place he had come from. What made him groundbreaking was that that place was subtly different from what had come before him in Nashville—and profoundly similar to where the rest of the country had come to at that time.

  Yukon, Oklahoma, is a vintage barometer of the changes in American life. As one local historian wrote in 1990, “Yukon started as a small village on a new railroad and has grown into a large suburban city during its ninety-nine years.” Originally part of the Chisholm Trail, on which early ranchers moved cattle from Texas to Kansas, Yukon was founded in 1891 by squatters, who named the town after the Yukon River in Canada where gold was being discovered. Though it remained a frontier outpost for much of the next century, by the 1960s, the town had been overrun by franchises: McDonald’s, Dairy Queen, Ace Hardware, Mobil. In 1970, the town experienced its first big boom when residents of nearby Oklahoma City started flocking to the mostly white community to escape mandatory busing. The population doubled in the next two years.

  This transition from old-fashioned town to up-to-date suburb dominated life in Yukon, right down to its street plan. Garth’s childhood home on 408 Holly Street, not far from the center of town, was almost exactly halfway between the town’s two main roadways: Route 66, the legendary Western highway that ran from Chicago to Los Angeles, and Interstate 40, the new main east-west thoroughfare across the southern United States that runs from Wilmington, North Carolina, through Knoxville, Nashville, and Memphis, to Little Rock, Oklahoma City, Albuquerque, and finally to the San Fernando Valley in California. Much of the story of contemporary country music can be seen in the tension between those two roads: the mythical and the modern. And though I-40 may lack the allegorical clout of Route 66, it has become, in effect, the new yellow brick road of country music. Fully two thirds of contemporary country artists grew up within 100 miles of that road, from Alan Jackson and Travis Tritt in northern Georgia, to Wynonna in Kentucky, to Garth, Wade, Reba, and Vince in Oklahoma, to Dwight Yoakam in California. Even in the age of airplanes, most of those artists drove an old family vehicle, a borrowed truck, or a dented van into Nashville not along a dusty dirt road, as they might have us believe, but along the six-lane comfort of Interstate 40, which, when approaching Nashville from the east, passes within honking distance of the Grand Ole Opry and promptly deposits present-day Dorothys precisely where they want to go, the Shoney’s at the base of Music Row—Oz with grits.

  Garth’s self-titled first album, released with little fanfare on Capitol Records on April 12, 1989, was a classic, if not entirely groundbreaking synthesis of these two strands in country music—the allegorical and the mundane, the brash lone wanderer of Western myth and the sensitive, angst-ridden man of modern, six-lane America. The first single off the album, which is to say the first song the label sent to the two hundred stations that reported their playlists to Billboard and Radio & Records (and thus forced the two thousand other country stations to play), was “Much Too Young (to Feel This Damn Old).” The song, written by Garth
and Randy Taylor, is a fairly typical country romp that fit squarely into the back-to-roots tenor that had taken over country music after Urban Cowboy. It tells the story of a veteran rodeo rider hustling down the highway, complaining about his lover not answering the telephone, and fretting about his younger competition. To a warbling solo fiddle, quiet drumbeat, and an understated steel guitar whine, he laments the white lines getting longer and the saddle getting cold. Though Garth, hinting at his darker side, suggested the song might be about cocaine cowboys, it was received by critics as the debut of a promising devotee of honky-tonk tradition. “By God country to the core,” wrote Bob Oermann, the flamboyant critic who is Hazel’s rival for chief-flitterer-about-town. “A hurtin’ vocal, chiming steel, sawing fiddle and toe-tapping hillbilly beat. Garth Brooks has my heart as ‘Discovery of the Day.’”

  Country radio, however, was less welcoming. The song lingered on playlists for several weeks, but eventually washed out in the forties, an unembarrassing but hardly encouraging result. Jim Fogelsong, the genteel, if old-fashioned head of Capitol Records, declared the song a success and told his radio promoters to stop urging stations to play it. Garth and his managers refused to roll over, though, and started calling radio programmers themselves, a naive if quaint reminder of the old days when Loretta Lynn could pay a flirtatious visit to a disc jockey and have her song on the air that afternoon. Miraculously, it worked. The song regained its forward momentum and eventually peaked at number ten.