by Bruce Feiler
The next single they released was “If Tomorrow Never Comes,” a more touching song, both musically and lyrically, about a man wondering if his wife—or daughter—will know how much he loved her if he dies in the night. It quickly reached number one and, more importantly, became an early benchmark establishing Garth’s persona as a bastion for male sensitivity, a warm hug set to a campfire guitar. It was followed by “Not Counting You;” a nondescript Texas two-step, which also reached number one, but not before Garth criticized his label for selecting a single he felt did not make a strong statement. It was the first hint that Garth might have a larger agenda in mind (and that he didn’t mind picking fights in public). “Being able to stand up for three minutes in front of the nation is quite a gift,” he said. “And I think it’s very important that you say something. I love this country, but the downfall of the United States is that nobody makes stands. Everybody wants to be a fence-walker.” His current single, he said, was part of the problem. “I like doing ballads and the serious songs a lot more. Music is really for the heart and soul, yes, but it’s also a teaching process. I know whenever I’m depressed I still go into a room and put on an album by Dan Fogelberg or James Taylor. That’s what music is for, to create emotion.”
Garth would soon get his emotional song.
Among music industry insiders, there are various types of songs: a song that gets cut, a song that makes an album, a song that becomes a single, a song that charts, a hit song, a number one song, an impact song, and the most coveted honor of all, a career song. “The Dance” was the career song for Garth Brooks and, as it turned out, the defining song for the entire modern era of country. Six years after its release, “The Dance” was voted the number one song of all time by readers of Country Weekly. The song was written by Tony Arata, a thin, wire-spectacled copywriter from Savannah, Georgia. In structure, as well as message, it is subtle and deeply emotional. It opens with a haunting one-handed piano climb, then expands with strings, at the time still taboo in Nashville, until it mesmerizes the listener with Garth’s stricken yet reassuring voice. As the narrator, Garth—and it’s hard to imagine anyone else singing this song—looks back on the memory of a relationship that’s ended: By choice? By fault? By death? The participants in the relationship are not articulated, nor is its ending defined, but the pain at its collapse is deeply felt. Yet, in the hopeful way of the religious ode the song so clearly emulates, the man left behind treasures the memory of the dance and the moment it took place. He could have “missed the pain,” he declares emphatically, but only by missing “the dance.”
As clearly as this song has been associated with Garth Brooks, he almost didn’t record it. He first heard Tony Arata sing it at the Bluebird and passed it on to his producer, Allen Reynolds. After cutting it, though, Garth lost interest. With its sentimental, Robert Frost-like themes, “The Dance” didn’t seem to fit the more traditional sound of the album. Reynolds pushed, though, and Garth relented. “The Dance” was placed at the end of the album, a position of ceremony. By spring 1990, with Garth already sitting on two number ones, his label didn’t want to release “The Dance” to radio. It was “too pop,” said Jimmy Bowen, the craggy but brilliant executive who had come to Capitol the previous December. Why jeopardize Garth’s graces with the country audience? This time Garth pushed, and Bowen relented. He was glad he did. The impact of the song was immediate and overwhelming. Audiences embraced it as they had few songs in recent memory. In the year since its release, Garth Brooks had sold approximately 300,000 records—a respectable sum, but far less than rival Clint Black, a handsome hunk in a hat from Houston. In the month after “The Dance” was released, however, Garth’s album sales tripled. They reached 1 million by early summer and 1.5 million by Labor Day.
By that time, radio was already itching for new material. A programmer in Oklahoma City who knew Colleen Brooks talked her into giving him a copy of Garth’s upcoming CD, No Fences. Against all rules of industry decorum (as laughable as that seems, there are such rules in country), the station started playing the first cut, a rousing, barroom singalong with the irresistible hook, “Friends in Low Places.” Listeners loved it—the song captured the fun-loving honky-tonk side of Garth that made his treacly self-confessional side less threatening—and soon programmers across the country were clamoring for copies. The controversy, of course, only generated more attention. “Leaks like this happened to me when I worked in pop music,” Bowen said, “but never in my career in country music have we had a situation like this.” Helped by Bowen’s aggressive marketing campaign, No Fences sold 700,000 copies in its first ten days and reached a higher position on the pop album chart (number three) than any country release in five years. By early fall, Garth was earning all the honors that being a star in Nashville had to offer. He was asked to be a member of the Grand Ole Opry, his name was painted on the water tower in his hometown, and he won the CMA’s Horizon Award for newcomers. “I want to thank God,” he said upon receiving the award. “He’s done a hell of a lot for me.”
Garth apologized for that remark later, but the unconventional nature of his ascent was already well defined. In the next year alone, his first two albums would sell 8 million copies combined, figures unheard of in Nashville history. Garth Brooks would become the bestselling country album of the 1980s. No Fences, with sales of 13 million, would become the bestselling country album of all time and the tenth-bestselling album of any genre in history. “Music has a new name and it is Garth Brooks,” read the opening statement of the press bio, and for once the hyperbole seemed understated. What Garth was in the process of doing, in a manner he clearly understood at the time, was making himself into more than a musical phenomenon. He was turning himself into an icon. It was not just his music that was capturing attention. Others in Nashville had done that before him; others would do that after him. But Garth was on his way to becoming something more. He was becoming emblematic of an entire era. It was an era, like many, that would come to be embodied by a single accessory of style.
The hat.
We arrived at the airport in Washington, D.C., and headed for the car. All the way through the terminal and into the late-afternoon sun, no one seemed to notice Garth. No one stopped him for an autograph. No one asked him for a kiss. It was almost as if he was completely anonymous without his hat. In full panoply—lace-up ropers to dimpled crown—his six-one frame, strong arms, and mesmerizing stare were subtly striking, even handsome. Stripped of his costume, though, he looked numbingly normal, a gerrymandered version of American midlife afflictions. First there was his weight, which fluctuates freely in a 50-pound zone and was, at the moment, at 217, somewhere in the middle. (“If they ever opened a theme park called Garthland,” he said, “the food would have to be free, and there’d have to be lots of it.”) Then there were his swollen lips, his fleshy arms, and his broad neck. And finally, even with evidence of a transplant, there was his first-team-all-American receding hairline. What’s more, the hair he had left was now graying as well. Elvis Presley may have been the “most beautiful person on Earth,” as Carl Perkins once described him; Garth Brooks would hardly have been the most noticeable person on a used car lot.
“I’ve always been one of those guys that if I could change one thing about me it would be everything,” Garth told me. “I’m kind of squatty. I don’t have long legs. The word ‘round’ keeps coming to mind.” (Sandy, asked about this description, was more charitable. “He’s an attractive naked man,” she said.)
Over the years, Garth had become quite adept at sidestepping this problem. Before photo shoots, he would starve himself for days, work out aggressively, and lose as many as ten pounds. Onstage he’d wear Wranglers that were three sizes too small. “When I was one-ninety I was wearing twenty-nine Wranglers,” he told me. “Even now, my sizes will vary four or five sizes from what I wear offstage to what I wear on.” His reason: “You want to look good for the people.”
As a relative newcomer to country music, I found Ga
rth’s obsession with perfecting his image fascinating, but troubling. After all, what’s the point of being successful if you can’t wear pants that fit? What I realized, though, is that while this single-mindedness certainly helped him become successful, it also defined him in a fundamental sort of way. More than a means unto an end, becoming a cowboy was an end unto itself with Garth. Indeed, the opportunity to become a larger-than-life persona was the reason he got into the business. Garth wanted more than money, sex, or attention—all of which he got more than his share of. Garth wanted to become an icon. He wanted to become like those all-American heroes he had idolized as a child. He wanted, in essence, to leave his seat at the last picture show and step onto the screen. When, early in his career, an interviewer asked him who he wanted to play himself in a movie, Garth had his answer ready: the Duke.
Within minutes, we arrived at the car and Garth started loading his luggage—as well as that of his publicist—into the trunk. His hatbox was the last to go in.
“So when did you start wearing the hat?” I asked him.
“Mostly in college,” he said. “In high school, I wore baseball caps. We didn’t have any land then, we couldn’t afford it, so I didn’t have any occasion to wear cowboy hats and do all that ag stuff. Really, the reason you’re supposed to wear them is to keep out the sun and the rain. Now that I have land, if I could go out to Colorado and work outdoors twenty-four hours a day, I still couldn’t make up enough time for all the years I haven’t spent outside.”
We got into the car. Garth, Karen, and I got into the backseat. Mick sat up front. Garth continued talking. “I like the cowboy thing,” he said. “To me, cowboys are honest. Cowboys are real. It’s all the ‘ities’: integrity, responsibility, honesty. One of the coolest stories I ever heard was at Oklahoma State. Me and the boys were just sitting around talking. This gal comes in, sits down, and says, ‘Man, this cowboy I picked up last night turned out to be the biggest asshole.’ Everyone laughed, and this one kid, who was always quiet, said, ‘He wasn’t a cowboy then.’ And I thought, ‘Yeah, all right. Good deal.’”
“So are you a cowboy?” I asked him.
He thought for a second. “My goals are the same,” he said. “If I reach those goals, it’s someone else’s place to say that I’m a cowboy.”
Those goals, it turns out, are surprisingly complex and together form a kind of personal code that defined the parameters of his ambition. For Garth, a sort of idiot savant of American culture (he doesn’t read books, he told me, or study movies, he just deals in myth), there are three basic elements to being a cowboy: the public face, the private values, and the lifestyle. He attacked them one at a time. First, he appropriated many of the outward symbols of the cowboy: the lace-up ropers (casual boots worn by cowboys while working); Wrangler jeans (cowboys wear Wranglers because the rear pockets are higher and the inner seams are less abrasive); and his familiar starched cowboy shirts. He even adopted the slightly bowlegged walk that riders use when they dismount from a horse.
At the heart of this image was the hat. Invented in the nineteenth century and standardized by John B. Stetson in the 1860s, cowboy hats have been part of country music from its earliest days. In the 1920s, rural Southern musicians donned cowboy garb to distinguish themselves from hillbilly imagery imposed on them by outsiders like New York executive Ralph Peer and Indiana native George Hay, who made Opry performers wear overalls and floppy hats and adopt names like Possum Hunters and Fruit Jar Drinkers. The first Southerner to appear on a record, Eck Robertson, wore cowboy clothes, and that was in 1922. Even at this pre-Hollywood stage, cowboys were equated with rugged individualism and hearty Anglo-Saxon stock, even those who met neither of those criteria. Jimmie Rodgers, the first country music superstar, wore cowboy attire, even though he was a sickly train worker from Mississippi.
In the 1930s, Hollywood cemented the cowboy, particularly the singing cowboy, in the American imagination. Gene Autry, known as “Oklahoma’s Singing Cowboy,” made ninety movies between 1934 and 1954, and suddenly millions of Americans wanted to be cowboys—not real cowboys, but imaginary ones. By contrast, few Americans wanted to be hillbillies. The Appalachian imagery so exalted at the Opry, the happy-go-lucky “musical mountaineer,” as historian Bill Malone labeled it, was dying out. In its place, the wrangler was carrying the day. By the 1950s, Hank Williams, from Alabama, called himself the “Drifting Cowboy,” and Hank Snow, from Nova Scotia, became the “Singing Ranger.” Authenticity, the weapon later branded against Garth Brooks, had already given way entirely to invention. Unlike pop stars, country artists rarely changed their appearances to suit the times, but instead tried to appeal to a timeless ideal. Invariably, the ideal was more appealing than reality. The best example of this was Hank Williams himself, who, like Dwight Yoakam, Ricky Van Shelton, and later Garth, rarely took off his hat once he put it on because underneath he was almost entirely bald.
By the 1980s, the cowboy had undergone so many incarnations that it became little more than a gaudy token. During the Urban Cowboy years, ten-gallon hats suddenly sprouted feathers and brightly colored bands and became synonymous with a kind of brash tackiness. In the years that followed, more new artists, like Randy Travis and Ricky Skaggs, shunned the hat. Two notable exceptions were George Strait, a Texas traditionalist who actually was a rancher, and Dwight Yoakam, a California honky-tonker who, though he wore his out of genetic necessity, also managed to make it sexy by pulling it over his eyes and wearing it with butt-hugging leather pants. Garth, debuting in 1989, had a choice: risk pigeonholing himself as a honky-tonk singer by wearing a hat or open the way to greater crossover appeal by not wearing one. Ultimately his decision was based partly on practical reasons (“As much as I hate the label a hat puts on you,” he said, “if you take it off, nobody knows who you are…”) and partly on his desires to represent the larger-than-life creation that the cowboy hat still embodied.
This spoke to the second central element in Garth’s desire to be a cowboy, the private values. “When I talk about John Wayne,” Garth explained to me in the car that day, “I talk about the characters that John Wayne’s played. I don’t know anything about the kind of person he was. But that’s what Garth Brooks’s private life is striving for: to be the kind of person that John Wayne was in public.” As surprising, or even quaint, as this sounds—that a grown man would hold onto this boyish fantasy—it is the key to understanding Garth’s appeal. Though he quickly perfected the public part of being a cowboy, he still struggled to fulfill the private part. It was that struggle that made him recognizable. He had an eating problem. He was stubborn. And, as the public soon learned, he was a womanizer. Instead of dooming him, though, it was his reactions to these flaws, particularly the last one, that made him emerge as a living, breathing creature of the nineties, not just a cartoon of the fifties.
In the months after Garth started appearing on the radio, he stopped calling home almost entirely. Flush with success, he would trot up and down the stage, point to women randomly in the audience, and have his cronies bring them backstage. He became, in other words, just another typical guy with an ego who suddenly struck it rich. Sandy, inevitably, learned of his indiscretions and phoned him in November 1989. Her bags were packed, she said. The following night, as an opening act for Eddie Rabbitt and Kenny Rogers, Garth went on stage in Cape Gerardeau and delivered what would become a legendary performance, witnessed by Peter Kinder of the Southeast Missourian:
This relative newcomer to stardom strode out and played for twenty minutes, managing to establish a rather good rapport with the audience, most of whom had come to see the other two performers. He was able to accomplish this despite a persistent hoarseness…[After several songs] Brooks exhibited another, far more debilitating problem as he seemed near tears. This became particularly acute as Brooks launched into that heart-tugging ballad for the lady in his life, “If Tomorrow Never Comes.” Some forty-five seconds into the song, Brooks startled the crowd by stopping his band, falling sil
ent, and then speaking of the “hell” of being on the road, and his love for the woman back home, and how some “bad things are going on.” Upon regaining composure, he asked of an empathetic and appreciative crowd, “Could I try again?” and proceeded through a workmanlike version that the crowd loved. After two more songs, Brooks departed to a standing ovation, telling a puzzled audience that he hoped they might see him on another evening, one that was “not so sad.”
Once he arrived back home, he begged his wife to stay. She agreed, though slowly, and then the two of them proceeded to go public, in newspaper and magazine interviews, and, eventually, on TNN, confessing their difficulties and renewing their vows. It was the first of many public acts that would bind Garth Brooks ineluctably to his time: A flawed man confesses his infidelities, a strong woman agrees to take him back, and a singer-songwriter from America’s heartland suddenly redefines the dispassionate cowboy for the Age of Oprah as someone who recognizes his weaknesses and opens his heart (and tearducts) to the world. “Cowboys Ain’t Supposed to Cry” Doodle Owens once memorably sang; Garth Brooks, a postmodern cowboy, did so often and in front of the world.
And he got away with it. Why? Because in private he believed what he said in public: that he was not worthy of his own image. This was no more apparent than in his attitude toward his third basic tenet of being a cowboy: mastering the outdoors.
“Hey, Garth,” Mick called out suddenly as we crossed the 14th Street Bridge into Washington, “look at that moon.” The moon, just rising over the Capitol, was covered with clouds.
