Dreaming Out Loud

by Bruce Feiler

  Meanwhile, all the excitement coming out of Nashville had another effect, which is that the less self-righteous, more populist press (People, Life, Time, TV Guide, Cosmo) began getting interested in Music Row. The reason: It was news. The fundamental rule of the press, as told to me at my first reporting job in Japan, is to tell us something new, something that surprises us, something counterintuitive. At its most basic, the media take what’s small and build it up; take what’s big and tear it down. In the early 1990s, country music benefited dramatically from a startling confluence of trends that made it a phenomenal story: You think country music’s Southern; well, it’s national. You think it’s twangy; well, it’s rockin’. You think it’s old-fashioned; well, it’s hip. And, most importantly of all, you think we’re kidding; well, we can prove it. The evidence arrived in late 1991, and the person it aided most of all was the fresh-faced cowboy from Yukon, Oklahoma.

  From the moment he set foot in Nashville, Garth Brooks understood two fundamental realities about being a recording artist in the nineties: one, the importance of creating an image; two, the importance of communicating that image to the public through the media. Garth set about mastering both sides of this equation with stunning efficiency, and once he had conquered the first part—making himself into a cowboy—he moved on to Phase II—making himself into a media phenomenon. That began in earnest in 1991.

  The widely held view on Music Row is that good songs matter more than anything. Have a hit song (“get it in the grooves,” as the saying goes) and everything else will follow. The cold reality is: This view is mistaken. Music is important. It is the ticket that can get an artist over the threshold and into the room where the ultimate winners are chosen. But once artists cross into that room, only a few still manage to thrive. Why? The answer, to a large degree, is myth. To compete in the marketplace of personality in America—“Entertainment Tonight,” “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “The Tonight Show” monologue, the cover of People—one must have not only good music, but something interesting to say. The best artists at this game—the Rolling Stones, Dolly Parton, Madonna, Garth Brooks—develop images that are uniquely suited to their times. By doing so, they don’t react to the media, but push the media in new directions.

  The first major episode in Garth Brooks’s full-court seduction of the press occurred in the spring of 1991 and was, in all aspects, a classic of the genre. “They should teach Garth 101,” the head of Epic Records told me. If they did, “The Thunder Rolls” would be a classic case study. In early 1991, Liberty Records decided to release “The Thunder Rolls,” the first cut off Garth’s second album, as his next single. Written by Garth and veteran songwriter Pat Alger, “The Thunder Rolls” is a haunting, ominous song (it takes place on a moonless summer night, with a storm movin’ in) about a man returning from a place he should never have been to a house where a woman waits. Introduced by a gravely growl of thunder and highlighted by occasional claps before the choruses, the song, reminiscent of “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” ends with the man arriving home and the woman smelling strange perfume. An earlier version, recorded but unreleased by Tanya Tucker, has the woman reaching for a pistol, but Garth omitted that verse. His version ends with the sound of a steady stream of rain and a clear sense of impending doom.

  The song, though affecting, is hardly controversial. The controversy flowed entirely from the video, and, though Garth would later deny it, the flare-up was carefully, systematically planned. The four-and-a-half-minute video was shot in Los Angeles at a cost of $130,000, an unheard of sum on Music Row at that time. Directed by Bud Schaetzle (who went on to direct many television specials, including Wynonna’s with Bette Midler), it featured the husband, played by Garth in a wig and cheesy beard, committing adultery, beating his wife (in front of their child), and then being shot by his wife at the end. “My goal,” Garth said at the time, “was to make this man hated so much that every person in America wished it was them pulling the trigger.” The first person to object, though, was his wife Sandy, who made Garth promise to do no love scenes. “But then they got to California,” Sandy told writer Alanna Nash, “and Bud said, ‘But you’ve got to—that’s going to pull it all together.’ He called me later that evening, and we had a pretty good-sized fight over that.” Sandy also objected to the scenes showing spousal abuse. “We had a tremendous argument on the child watching,” she said, “and he took it out. But then he put it back in [because he said] it’s missing that one side of darkness.” Sandy protested by refusing to watch the final video.

  Garth, though, knew he had a media bonanza on his hands. Backstage at the ACM (Academy of Country Music) Awards that April, he anticipated the controversy. “I am gonna get a lot of conflict over this video because it’s about real life,” he told reporters. “But I swear I just came to make a video.” The video aired six times a day, for two days, as CMT’s Pick Hit of the Week. Then CMT pulled it. “I’m yanking the thing,” said director of operations Bob Baker. “We are a music channel. We are not news. We are not social issues. We are not about domestic violence, adultery, and murder. Our obligation is to protect our viewers.” As a TNN spokeswoman echoed when that network banned it as well, “It’s a great video, but it doesn’t offer any help or hope to anyone in an abused situation.” Leaving aside the fact that none of their other videos “offer help or hope” to victims of whatever situation, these comments constituted a startling expression of the paternalism of country’s ruling class. Also, coming in the wake of country’s once proud tradition of songs about hardship, they were a sad expression of how caution in Nashville had overtaken passion.

  Their actions, predictably, had the opposite effect. The episode quickly turned into the best thing yet to happen to Garth Brooks’s career. It instantly separated him from the blandness of Nashville and aligned him with the real-life concerns of his fans. Though critics accused him of “pulling a Madonna” (the previous fall, MTV had refused to show her suggestive video for “Justify My Love”), the press still couldn’t resist wading in. Garth and Jimmy Bowen were waiting. Bowen even hired additional staff to drum up support from women’s shelters in a project termed the “Garth Brooks’s Thunder Rolls’/Family Violence Campaign.” It worked brilliantly. In the last week of May, for example, all four major television stations in Dallas ran stories on the controversy. Both newspapers chimed in as well. These, naturally, prompted more airplay, which, in turn, spurred consumers to rush out to stores. Make no mistake: This is how revolutions in taste are made. Five years later, a woman at Fan Fair in Nashville waiting in line to meet Garth told me she had always hated country music until her husband made her watch “The Thunder Rolls” video. She liked it, went to buy the album, started listening to country radio, went to see Garth in concert, and later decided to come meet him in person. All because of the press, because of the video, because of the song, because, ultimately, of the artist himself, who had the savvy to master them all.

  On May 25, in the midst of the “The Thunder Rolls” hullabaloo, Billboard quietly announced that it was introducing a new system of calculating album sales. Instead of relying on reports from store clerks, many of whom knew little and cared less about country, Billboard would begin taking sales figures from a small New York company called SoundScan, which claimed to count the actual albums sold from bar codes scanned in stores (in reality, they took a limited number of scans and estimated the rest). The week the system came out, it became apparent that Nashville had been selling far more records than anyone realized. No Fences moved from sixteen to four on the pop album chart, which includes music from all genres.

  The big impact, though, came in September when Garth released his third album. Ropin’ the Wind debuted at number one on both the country and the pop charts, the first album ever to achieve this feat. Coming amidst an extraordinary attention surrounding the Judds’ Farewell Tour, for which Garth occasionally was the opening act, the album had generated 2.6 million advance orders. Billboard ran an article about f
ans lining up, not only in Houston and Lincoln, but also in Sacramento, California, Mankato, Minnesota, and—in a fit of journalistic flourish—Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the Harvard Coop. Harvard students had become familiar with Garth’s music, a clerk reported, hearing it at bars and parties. “The other albums to open at number one this summer have all been by hard rock/metal bands,” wrote chart analyst Paul Grein, “Skid Row, Van Halen, and Metallica. Such groups appeal to young, active music buyers who are more apt to find the time and inclination to buy an album in its first week of release than are the older, more settled country and pop fans—or at least that has been the conventional wisdom. Brooks’s socko debut suggests that it’s time to recognize that country fans can also be active and committed.”

  Nashville reacted to the event by treating it as the Second Coming. After years of feeling like distant cousins, country suddenly found itself at the center of the entertainment universe. “Sure, Garth Brooks is great for Capitol Records—you bet he is,” Jimmy Bowen declared at a hastily arranged celebration at CMA headquarters. “But Garth Brooks is also great for all of Nashville and all of country music.” This time he was right. In the next year alone, Garth was on the covers of Time, The Saturday Evening Post, People, Forbes, and Entertainment Weekly, which rated him first among male singers, above Michael Bolton, Bruce Springsteen, and Axl Rose. Even Rolling Stone felt obliged to run a report on Garth’s dominance, with reporter Rob Tannenbaum crediting his success (and Nashville’s in general) to upgraded recording techniques and to a general decline in pop radio. In a telling exchange, the article expressed surprise that Garth cited Kiss, Boston, and Styx as influences. “Doesn’t Brooks worry about honoring such discredited groups?” the magazine asked. To which Garth was quoted as saying: “I don’t think anybody’s gonna come out and give me flak for that, because it would only be showing their ignorance in what is good music.” In twenty-five years, few musicians had so directly challenged the canonical wisdom of Rolling Stone. But it didn’t matter; Garth himself was on his way to becoming canonic on his own terms. That year he was invited to sing the National Anthem before the Super Bowl. His records started setting records themselves—20 million, 30 million, 40 million and counting. Asked on Larry King to explain his success, Garth’s answer was a classic mix of his little-boy and big-boy selves and a knowing nod to timing. “God and SoundScan,” he said.

  But there was one more thing behind’s Garth’s success, he gave good answers—deep, dark, fascinating answers—when reporters asked him questions. He became a sort of antihero and superhero mixed up in one. In the fall of 1992, in the midst of his glorious press run, when most artists would have started playing it safe, Garth released a song that not only threatened his standing with many of his fans, but also severely traumatized his family. “We Shall Be Free” was a gospelly, church-picnic Bill of Rights listing Garth’s views on when the world would be free: “When the last thing we notice is the color of skin / And the first thing we look for is the beauty within.” The song, written with Stephanie Davis after Garth was caught in Los Angeles during the 1992 riots, came with another of his save-the-world videos, featuring Paula Abdul, Burt Bacharach, Harry Belafonte, Michael Bolton, John Elway, Whoopi Goldberg, Jay Leno, Nelson Mandela, Martina Navratilova, Elizabeth Taylor, Lily Tomlin, and General Colin Powell. It was the largest gathering of odd celebrities since It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.

  And, of course, it got reams of publicity, all the more so after Garth announced that one line in the song, “When we’re free to love anyone we choose,” could be interpreted as an endorsement of gay rights. Many radio programmers were horrified, a response that only worsened after Garth told Barbara Walters that his sister was a lesbian, a shocking and unnerving revelation for much of his family. “He has no edit on his mouth,” his comanager Pam Lewis, told me. “I used to say to Garth, ‘You should really get a good minister or a shrink because you’re telling the world what you should be telling your counselor.’ He outed his sister on network television. Caused incredible trauma to his family by doing that. Got a lot of press out of it. But at what cost?” Even more telling: After the interview was taped (but before it aired), Pam asked Garth if she could ask Barbara Walters to edit out his remarks about his sister’s sexual orientation; Garth declined.

  Garth, as Naomi once said of herself and her daughter, had begun using his interviews as a form of therapy. It was a way to play out the tension between his two selves: GB and Garth Brooks. In the wake of the “We Shall Be Free” episode, for example, Interview magazine asked Garth if he’d ever had a man come on to him. “No guy has ever pulled the shitty guy thing by grabbing my ass, if that’s what you mean,” he said. But he did have a related experience, he said. “There’s a guy back home that I sincerely love. He works with us. Rumor has it [that] he’s a homosexual. I ran into him one night in a club. We always hug each other, so I’m hugging him, and I’m standing there talking to a bunch of people, and he sits down next to me. We’re talking, and all of a sudden I feel this—what he’s done is reached down and grabbed my hand. So we’re sitting there actually holding hands at the bar. And there are people watching me, making me feel real uneasy about it. Then, all of a sudden, I think: ‘Which is going to bother you more? People seeing you holding this guy’s hand, or how he’s going to feel if you pull your hand away?’ Not breaking that guy’s heart or insulting him in any way means so much more to me than anybody’s opinion about me…People that you care about, you try to take care of, and the image takes a backseat.”

  Not always, though. Indeed, the longer Garth rode the wave of press, the higher he climbed on what seemed like an endless assent of attention, the more consumed he became with his own image. He began to complain about the demands on his time. He began to talk about losing his will (“I have more money than my child’s grandkids are going to be able to spend,” he said). And, in 1992, when Sandy had a difficult pregnancy, Garth shocked the music world by announcing he would consider retiring if his career interfered with his family (though little known at the time, he was involved in intense renegotiations with his label, which made his remark an effective bargaining tool, if nothing else). In 1993, when Rolling Stone finally put him on the cover, Garth admitted, in his most confessional interview yet, that he feared he might have come too far, too fast. “Joe Smith from Capitol was at my house a week ago,” Garth told interviewer Anthony DeCurtis. “He pulled me and Sandy over, and he said, ‘You got all the money in the world. Make some time for yourselves.’ As soon as Sandy walked out of the room, I pulled Joe over. I said: ‘Joe, what do you do when you’ve lived your whole life with stomping the guy’s guts out who’s in competition with you, just try and knock the shit out of him, get number one, do whatever it takes to stay number one—what happens when you feel yourself falling from that because you have a child and a family? Where does the killer instinct go?’”

  Smith’s answer hit Garth hard. “There’s going to come a time,” he told Garth, “when people love you more for what you’ve done than for what you do.” “Right then,” Garth said, “Dan Fogelberg flashed in my mind. I love all his older stuff, but I’m not buying his latest stuff. Then Bob Seger came to me, bam, and all these groups that are gone now, like Boston. I just recently picked up a CD of Kiss’s Destroyer and loved it just as much the second time—but I haven’t bought a Kiss album in twelve, thirteen years. So that hit me. But it did just the reverse of what I thought it would: My shoulders kicked back, my chest stuck out, and I said, ‘Well, I’ll be damned if that’s going to happen to me for a while.’”

  But, of course, it did. Once he reached his peak, Garth experienced a backlash. The main reason—other than the basic law of stardom, which is that people get tired of you after a while—was Garth himself: what he said, what he did, and what he recorded. Simply put, a change came over him. Garth became preoccupied with his own mortality. The red-cheeked boy who had seemed so happy to be playing cowboy in public gradually gave way to a road-weary ad
ult who seemed determined to rewrite the rules of stardom. This was Phase III of his career: trying to outsmart death.

  Premature death had always been a theme in Garth’s life and work. During his senior year in college, Garth was almost killed in an automobile accident, and two friends from that period—Jim Kelley, a guitarist and track buddy; and Heidi Miller, a onetime roommate—later were killed in accidents. Garth’s first album was dedicated to their “loving memories.” In addition, many of his best songs—“If Tomorrow Never Comes,” “Much Too Young (to Feel This Damn Old),” and “The Dance”—are about the consequences of dying young. Even his videos have often contained images of fallen heroes and slain leaders.

  Now, though, there was a difference. Garth no longer merely celebrated martyred heroes; he tried to turn himself into one. Garth’s first two albums—produced between 1989 and 1991—contained a wide variety of songs, but none that could be considered preachy. His songs were “from the heart,” as he said, and they sounded that way, whether one liked them or not. It was not until the video for “The Thunder Rolls” that Garth began urging people to do something rather than just feel something. “That video did in two days what I hoped it would do in its lifetime,” Garth said, “making people aware of a situation which unfortunately exists in our society and causing them to discuss it, sometimes even heatedly. That’s what I want my music to do.” The truth is, that’s not at all what he once said he wanted his music to do. Instead, with success, Garth had embraced the sixties ideal of what a pop star should be: He began believing his music could change the world. Witness “We Shall Be Free,” an application for saintdom of the highest order. Witness the video for “Standing Outside the Fire,” featuring a battle between parents over whether to mainstream a Down’s Syndrome boy.