Dreaming Out Loud

by Bruce Feiler

  Eventually he didn’t even wait for music as a platform. In 1993, Garth asked Pam Lewis if she would set up a meeting between him and President Clinton so they could discuss world peace. Afterward they would hold a press conference. “You’re going to look like a fool,” she told him. “It’s a very noble idea. Jesus Christ tried it. Mother Teresa tried it. Neither of them was very successful. Why do you think you’re different?” The following year a former Disney employee approached Garth with the idea of starting a National Kindness Day. Garth took it one step further and said why not begin a World Flag Day in which one day a year every country would fly the same flag. This idea he actually did take to the Oval Office, where he met President Clinton and Vice President Gore. When nothing came of it, he moved on. “I want to make 1996 the Year of Peace,” he told TV Guide. “In that year, during all my foreign concerts, we will try to reach the world’s leaders to encourage them to establish peace on Earth.” The idea, he said, was to create a Peace Chain. “For every day there is no war on Earth, we will add another link to the Peace Chain.” In a little over five years, Garth had gone from wanting to be John Wayne, a grand enough ambition, to wanting to be Mahatma Gandhi.

  None of this would have been so bad (just a bright-eyed boy trying to do good) if it all didn’t seem a bit wacky. Garth was behaving as he thought a pop star should behave, but because of his own political naïveté—at this point in his life, he had never voted in a presidential election, he told me—his gestures came across as more self-promoting than self-sacrificing. More damaging to his career, though: This new strain of martyrdom began to infect his music. In Fresh Horses, which was recorded during this period, Garth often sounds like a man deeply unhappy with his standing in life. The album begins with a reminiscing song in which Garth longed for the days “when the old stuff was new.” Other songs returned to his pet themes of suicide and early death. The album’s signature cut was “The Change,” written by Tony Arata and Wayne Tester, which Garth said was his most meaningful song since “The Dance.” In it the narrator complains that he cannot change the world around him, but that he’s going to keep on trying so the world will not change him. “As long as one heart still holds on / Then hope is never really gone.”

  “Why does Fresh Horses sound so stale?” Michael McCall wrote in the issue of the Country Music magazine that came out just days before our trip to New York. “Perhaps Brooks overexamined himself, retooling the songs until he stole the life from them. Perhaps he felt the strain of superstardom and attempted to make each tune an epic venture that chimed with importance. As the bestselling artist of the nineties, Brooks no longer competes with other Music Row performers. Instead, his peers are Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey, Michael Bolton. Those performers tend to stretch for the everlasting anthem, the Big Statement, trying to blow every horn with every song. Brooks now follows their lead.” Even worse, wrote McCall, Nashville’s most influential critic, none of the new songs were memorable. “‘If Tomorrow Comes’ and ‘Unanswered Prayers’ discussed subjects as big as death and fate, but they did so in intimate terms, and Brooks’s performances were beautifully understated. ‘The Dance’ gained strength from how subtly Brooks unfolded its melodramatic message. But Brooks apparently no longer trusts his fans to pick up on such quiet strengths. Now he blares his stories with sweeping musical buildups and histrionic vocal performances, and he milks every topic for high drama rather than gentle reflections.”

  Perhaps the most surprising consequence of Garth’s change from gee-whiz kid to grandstanding grown-up was that he began to succumb to a completely new flaw: an arrogance toward the media. All during his run as cover boy, Garth and the media were perfectly in sync: The media wanted access—and controversy; Garth wanted exposure—and controversy. As long as each side served the other, both were happy. But once Garth realized he couldn’t control the press (that it had its own agenda—surprise!), he felt used. When a reporter from People got his wife to discuss the details of his affairs (Garth said she was tricked; the reporter denies it), Garth was furious. “My respect for People magazine is totally through the floor,” he told me. Life magazine promised him a cover story, he says, but later switched it for a photograph of a fetus. Garth accused the reporter of being cowardly and weak. “My respect for Life magazine is through the floor, too,” he said. He swore off working with both publications, along with TV Guide, USA Weekend, and most other magazines. “All these people are bullshit artists,” he told me. “I don’t know why they have this ego thing. I mean, would I work with USA Weekend if it wasn’t for a cover? Give me a break.” Finally he developed a rule. “If these people want to work with Garth Brooks again, it’s simple. They’re going to have to bend over, take it like I did, and then, once the tables are even, we’ll sit down and say, ‘Okay, this is what we want.’”

  For those publications he did agree to work with, like Esquire, which hired me around this time to write a story about Garth, he insisted on a written guarantee that he be on the cover and on maintaining approval over the photographs. For country publications, Garth agreed to be interviewed only if he could supply art and only if he could approve the story before it ran. This degree of control was nothing new by Hollywood standards, but in Nashville it was revolutionary. The one difference is that Garth had always been smart enough, subtle enough, and, above all, invincible enough to keep such maneuverings hidden. “Don’t let the audience see the puppet string,” is rule number one among publicists. But now Garth’s domineering was seeping into the open. “Brooks seems insecure about life at the summit,” USA Weekend wrote in its 1996 preview issue, which featured a drawing of Garth on the cover. “Big-guy handsome at six-foot-one, he worries about his weight and receding hairline and rigidly controls his public image. He wouldn’t pose for a cover photo for this issue—and his operatives, when told that an illustration would be used instead, demanded approval (they didn’t get it, of course).” When the press regains the upper hand, it’s a bad sign for an artist.

  Worst of all, Garth kept feeding the story that his career was in a tailspin and that he was spinning out of control with it. It wasn’t intentional—Garth was “just saying what’s on my mind,” as he liked to say—but still it hurt. After country radio rejected “The Fever,” the second single from Fresh Horses, Garth went on “Larry King Live!” and announced the song was dead, as if his fans really cared about chart position. When sales of the album plummeted (after debuting at number one, it dropped out of the Top 5 within two months), Garth told the Los Angeles Times that if people didn’t buy his album he would be forced to retire. “If the record and ticket sales don’t tell me that I’m stirring things up or changing people’s lives, then I think it’s time for me to hang it up,” he said. “You want to be remembered at your best. You don’t want to be a trivia question on some cheesy game show in twenty years and see the contestant get it wrong.” He added, “If someone says I’m only saying that because of ego, I’m not sure they’re wrong. I’m not sure why I feel this way. But when you stop connecting with people, maybe you’re in the wrong field. Maybe that’s what God’s trying to tell you.”

  The net effect of all these actions was that Garth—through his music, his actions, and his public statements—had completely remade his own image. The once confident, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed singer had now been recast as an unsure, perhaps unstable, and, at times, self-obsessed individual. And with that transition came a sea change in the public adulation surrounding him. The narrative of the first half of the decade, the rise of Garth Brooks with Nashville riding his coattails, soon gave way to a dramatic new story, the fall of Garth Brooks and the fizzling out of country music. (Since Garth had accounted for a fifth of all country sales, when his sales started to wane, so did the industry’s, falling 12 percent in the first half of 1996.) It was, as my first editors in Japan might have noted, news. And it was in this suddenly newsworthy climate that Garth came to New York in the winter of his discontent and talked about his nagg
ing obsession with death.

  “Yes, I guess you could say I’m reckless.”

  Garth was sitting, lounging actually, on a small upholstered bench in a tasteful suite of the Parker-Meridien Hotel in New York. He’d been doing nonstop talk shows since his appearance with Regis and Kathie Lee and now, safely out of public view, he’d quickly removed his baseball cap and sneakers and plopped down on the bench. There was little light in the room. No radio or television. The only two things left turned on were his mind, which grinds continually, and his voice, which he alters with near Shakespearean precision from naïf to sinner. On occasion his mind and voice meet in tandem: this was Garth Brooks, the confesser.

  “I’m certainly reckless onstage,” he said. “It’s part of pushing the envelope.”

  This was an interview, a chance to enter that arena that is, in fact, a lot like therapy: questioner and questioned; prober and probed. It was an arena in which Garth had always excelled.

  “You do some things in entertainment, and you wonder, ‘Why hasn’t anyone else done that before?’” Garth said. “Then you see it on film and you go, ‘The reason nobody else does that is because somebody could have got hurt.’ I was that way with throwing cymbals into the crowd. I thought the cymbal would always land flat. Sure enough, the first piece of film I saw it flipped, spun, and went straight down on this guy. I went, ‘Damn! I could have killed that guy.’”

  This sense of danger was always lurking just beneath the surface with Garth. When I first met him, I was struck by his outward boyishness and good manners. There was something magical about his sheer enthusiasm. Earlier that day, Mick told a story about a friend of theirs, a former Wild West performer from Oklahoma who claimed to have built the first recreational vehicle. “Even if it’s not true, so what…?” Garth said when the story was finished. Then he leaned back and said, “I love to believe.” For someone who had tried to make himself into a Hollywood-style icon, this comment was extremely revealing. In Garth’s mind, fiction was often higher than fact.

  But Garth’s other side, his dark grown-up side, was also real. At the moment it was even dominant. Perched at the summit of his career, Garth was deeply scared. He was scared of his power. He was scared of the responsibility of being a superstar. Earlier I asked him about a woman who had called a radio show some weeks before and asked if he wasn’t ashamed that, as a Christian, some songs on his new record seemed to “promote” sex. Wasn’t that a burden? I asked. When he was younger, Garth hoped merely to express himself. Now, with stardom, he automatically became an advocate for positions he took. This was the flip side of becoming an icon: Everybody suddenly paid attention. “Believe it or not, I have thought about that question day and night,” Garth said. “And I know what the answer is. The answer is, very simple: That’s me. My albums talk about God. My albums talk about sex. My albums talk about death.”

  But that didn’t make it any easier. If anything, that mix of emotions—life and death, sexuality and spirituality—were at the heart of what Garth was scared of. He was scared of his own mind, of the conflicting emotions that swirled around his head. He had once even considered suicide, he told me, to “overcome the demons.” At the heart of his problem was the fact that Garth knew he could go no higher.

  “There’s a basketball game called ‘We-They,’” he said. “Greatest game I know. I learned it in the last two years. Two or three guys, and it’s you against them, only they don’t exist. What happens is, if you miss a shot, they get points. If you lose, you’ve beaten yourself.” He raised his eyebrows. “Fair game,” he said. “Fair as fair can be. And that’s what music is: It’s you and the crowd on the same team, and if you lose, if those people walk away unhappy, you’ve beaten yourself. We’re at the point now where we have to disappoint people in order to lose fans. That’s a great position to be in, but it’s also scary. If we lose them, we have no one to blame but ourselves.”

  “Do you think you’re going to lose them?”

  “If I could have a term that I would love to be called, twenty-four hours a day,” Garth said, “it would be ‘underdog.’”

  “But you’re not an underdog,” I said. “You’re a superhero.”

  “It depends on how you look at things. Now is the time we’re starting to hear the comments at the award shows: ‘He’ll be gone by next year. He can’t keep it up. This year’s sweep is next year’s shutout.’ It feels good for people to say it because I can come back and go, ‘Okay, boys, let’s strap it on. Let’s don’t even celebrate tonight. Let’s hit the workout room. Let’s push ourselves to the limit.’”

  And there it was, the “limit.” The “next level.” The “Zone.” Garth, sounding more like an athlete than an entertainer, had hinted about this place for years. But I’d never quite understood what he meant. That spot—that feeling—had always remained elusive, and yet it seemed to be the very essence of why someone as powerfully successful as Carl Lewis, or Michael Jordan, or Garth Brooks seemed to be so much better than everyone else, and yet never seemed happy unless they were at work. Why was that? Surely it was more than money, more than ego, more than power. It must be something almost divine, something they could not live without, even if the quest for that one thing became the source of their demise.

  “I remember the first time I heard a song of mine on the radio,” Garth said. “I almost ran over the person next to me. I was on I-40, right before the 65 split going north. I heard it on WSM, popped it over to SIX and they were right in the middle of the pedal steel solo. I’m all over the place, man. Honking, screaming. People are backing away from me. I don’t care. Hit me with a flame. Drop a bomb on me. I’da lived through it.”

  “What was the feeling?” I asked. “Is it that you wanted to die?”

  “It was the sense of being untouchable.”

  “Do you still have it now?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. “I can play basketball. I’ll be on one of those situations where it’s, like, give me the ball. I don’t care if I throw it up eighty feet out, ten feet out, it’s in. I just know it. It’s got to be some kind of athletic thing, because in my life I’ve heard people talk about the Zone, but I’ve never heard anyone describe it in the same form as I felt it as Michael Jordan did in an interview once, where he talked about the hoop being this big…” He formed a circle with his arms.

  “So how often does it come?”

  “It comes mostly in music. But it happens in your kids, too. You know what’s going to happen before it happens. And—boom!—you’re there, and you’re handling it well. And you know what’s going to happen. Your wife’s going to go, ‘I’m so proud you’re their father.’ You just know it. It’s like you can see it coming before it happens.”

  “What is that?” I asked. “Art, life, love, God?” I had heard other people say that interviewing Garth was like being drawn into the Zone yourself. Now I knew what they meant. This was Garth Brooks, the competitor: at the height of his power, at the edge of his sanity.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “but I know it only happens on things that I really give a shit about. Is it a passion? Is it a total focus? Is it that thing that your dad always told you, ‘Son, if you apply yourself, you can do whatever you want.’ Is that true? You don’t know how bad I’d like to know. You know they talk about knowing what ninety-five percent of the human body can do, but only about five percent of what the brain can do. Because there are times when I feel as if I can do anything. There are times I feel I could hang from the rig, let go, and not drop. There are times when I have flown miles, over trees, canyons, and water. And seen it all.

  “Rupp Arena, Lexington, Kentucky, I got into something I didn’t know what it was. There’s this thing they call the purple thumps you get when you’re hot. You see these purple veins, you get real winded, and every time your heart beats, those veins seem to glow in your sight. In Lexington, I got the purple thumps. But I kept pushing and pushing and pushing. And I walked over into this realm, where everybody slowed down
. I could see the ripples in their shirts, the sweat in their eyes. I could see the fillings in their teeth. I could be sitting there and out of my peripheral vision see someone lifting their hand and before they did it—boom!—I’d be pointing at them. It was the coolest thing. I had all the air in the world. I could hold a note for an hour and a half. Then everything jumped back into speed, like film sometimes does, and all I could think about was getting back there somehow, back into that Zone.”

  “Is that internal,” I asked, “or does it come from them?”

  “I don’t know where that comes from, although something that extraordinary probably has to come from a higher being. But that’s what I mean when I say, ‘How can I find out?’”

  “Are you addicted to that?”

  “If the answer is, is that where I want to spend my time, yes. I do. Of course it would get old because it’s safe. You know everything before it’s coming. But it’s also false because you get a false sense of confidence that you can do things.”

  Garth was distant now. His eyes were out of focus. He was lying on the bench.

  “And is that a place you were once or a place that you can be again?”

  “I don’t know. It was at the end of the last tour. We’ll see if I can get there again.” And then Garth suddenly jerked back into focus. He looked up from the ground and turned toward me. “But I have a deal with God. ‘Please give me the sign when this is over, so I can step down with class.’”

  TEN

  THE PARTY

  In Nashville, you can tell a lot about the status of artists’ careers by the types of parties their labels throw for them or that they throw for themselves. On a warm day in early spring, MCA Records and MCA Publishing threw what would turn out to be one of the more pivotal parties of the year for Wynonna Judd, whose first single in two years, “To Be Loved by You,” had just limped to number one on the country singles chart.