Dreaming Out Loud

by Bruce Feiler

  This rapid turn of events, though tragic, gave everybody a graceful out: Bowen could take his fortune and retire to Maui and play golf. Garth could plausibly deny having Bowen fired (“I thought it was his illness,” he told me) and still come across like a dignified winner. “You got to know, I truly did and still do like Bowen a lot,” Garth told me. “I probably dug him so much because we were so much alike.”

  Still, the underlying reality did not change. Garth Brooks had completely rewritten the rules of business in Nashville and was increasingly acting like a lone vigilante, all the more so since he now had no manager, because Pam Lewis and Bob Doyle, his original managers, were locked in a bitter legal dispute over how much money each one deserved from their partnership. For Garth, the dispute was crippling. By 1995, at exactly the time he was supposed to be concentrating on his new album, Fresh Horses, Garth was now managing himself, his recording obligations, his merchandise arrangements, and his international touring responsibilities. In the ageless battle to balance business and artistic concerns, he had completely succumbed to the burdens of tending his own exploding empire. This set the stage for the saddest irony of all. Wade Hayes, after a brutal first year, had earned a mere $75,000 and was, at least for the time being, happy. Garth Brooks, meanwhile, after an explosive half a decade, had earned $300 million and was deeply unhappy. This was not an expression of music; it was an expression of character.

  Wynonna, meanwhile, had the opposite problem. If Garth cared too much about business, she cared too little. Especially in the years with her mother, Wynonna was legendary in her lack of interest regarding financial matters. “I think that you can probably not be any more ignorant of the details of the business side of the career than she and her mother were,” John Unger, her lawyer and later her manager, told me. “She just had no interest in that.” Wynonna agreed. “Here’s what I thought,” she told me. “I do the singing, you manage. You call me and tell me what to do, I do it, then I can go back and have my personal life.” Unfortunately, that lack of attention amounted to an invitation to rip her off.

  After Woody Bowles, the Judds’ first manager, stepped down in 1986, Naomi and Wynonna were managed exclusively by Ken Stilts, the businessman whom Bowles had brought in. (Naomi remembers telling him after their first meeting, when she thought he looked like a “mafia don”: “Ken, if you decide to work with Wynonna and me, I promise you’ll find us infinitely more interesting and rewarding than all your previous business ventures.”) Twelve years later, those words would prove prophetic. In early 1994, John Unger, then Wynonna’s lawyer, walked into her farmhouse and announced: “So, do you want to know how screwed you are?” With the help of his clients’ willful disregard, Stilts had amassed an enormous financial empire on the backs of the Judds. According to a story first reported in the Globe (which a judge later determined was “essentially true” in response to a libel suit from Stilts), Stilts and his partner, Steve Pritchard, made $20 million from their association, while Naomi and Wynonna made $5 million combined. As Wynonna described the situation to me: She and her mother believed they owned Pro Tours, Inc., the company that handled most of their affairs. It turned out that Stilts and Pritchard each owned a third, while Naomi and Wynonna together owned the other third. The Judds thought they owned their $350,000 tour bus; Pro Tours owned it and charged it to them. The Judds received an $80,000 bonus in their last year together; Stilts, $250,000. “There was no way to describe how I felt when I learned this,” Wynonna said. “Just the audacity of some of the things he did: His sister was my accountant. His lawyer was my lawyer. His best friend did my insurance.”

  Though Naomi wanted to sue Stilts, Wynonna initially refused. “I just wanted gone,” she told me. “I loved Ken. I didn’t want to take him through this fight. He was my father figure.” Also, as she knew, she had given him control. “When you willingly give away the title of executive producer and you make two hundred thousand dollars from the farewell concert, you’re screwed,” she told me. Eventually Wynonna did join her mother in a lawsuit, and though Stilts and Pritchard denied they were liable for wrongdoing, they did acknowledge the essential facts of the relationship. The suits were settled out of court.

  Either way, the damage had been done: The “Female Elvis” proved to be like her namesake in another sad and crucial way. “This is the part that’s really hard to admit,” she said. “I had a manager that dominated my every move. I didn’t even buy a car without his approval. I was isolated from making my own decisions because I didn’t have enough confidence in myself, I didn’t think that what I had to say mattered. I’ll just let him do it all. His way of dealing with it was he’s Colonel Parker, I’m Elvis, he made all the decisions, I did what I was told.” And why did she do this? “You place a worth on your life and I didn’t feel I was worth very much.” Sadly, her wish came true. Though she was two years into her solo career at the time and had the bestselling solo album by any female in country music history, Wynonna, in early 1994, was broke.

  Even worse, just as her relationship with Stilts collapsed, her relationship with her record label disintegrated as well. Though it’s seldom noted, the Judds were originally signed not by Joe Galante at RCA, but by Mike Curb, the maverick businessman from California who later moved his company, Curb Records, to Nashville. Curb signed the Judds to a production deal, then agreed that RCA would promote and distribute the duo. Later, when Wynonna moved to MCA, Curb remained attached. (“Mike’s either got the greatest lawyer in the world or he sleeps with the devil,” one MCA executive told me.) As part of that deal, MCA believed it controlled the Judds’ recordings. When Curb disagreed with this assessment, MCA sued. Curb countersued, alleging that MCA had excluded Curb from decisions surrounding Wynonna’s solo career. Though both suits were essentially frivolous (and were later settled out of court), the hostility between the two camps was calamitous. “It got to the point that everybody was paranoid,” a former MCA executive told me. “I remember having nightmares about this. Literally having nightmares, looking at an ad that didn’t have Curb on it and fearing being dragged into court. It was just pure silliness.”

  These dealings, of course, devastated Wynonna. “It was like being a child between two divorced parents who hate each other,” she told me. “You love both of them, but they’re so intent on destroying each other that they don’t realize they’re killing you too.” At the heart of the battle was the seemingly never-ending question of whether to keep Wynonna a country artist or cross her over into pop. The latter would mean taking her videos to VH-1, working her singles to different radio stations, and generally shedding her Nashville imagery. On one side was Mike Curb, who wanted to take her pop. “I think Mike Curb had a more expansive view of Wynonna’s potential than MCA did,” John Unger told me. On the other side was MCA, who urged her to remain country. As Tony Brown, the president of MCA and Wynonna’s producer, explained: “Wynonna has a pop voice, but she’s part of a country music legacy. Had she and Naomi broken out as a pop duo, it’d be simple. But they didn’t.”

  John Unger clearly sided with MCA. “I thought this whole country/ pop thing was semantic,” he said. “Don’t talk about it. Just do it and nobody will know the difference. You can be a country artist and still have Elton John come sing with you. And that’s cool, as long as it’s perceived that Elton John wanted to come hang with you, rather than you wanting to be something you’re not.” Indeed, as Garth had shown, you could be country and still rule the world. As Unger put it, “The mountain did come to Mohammed.”

  Wynonna initially resisted this argument. When the head of radio promotion for MCA came to see her and told her she was too rock ‘n’ roll and needed to get back to her roots, she exploded. “Show me the size of your penis, and then we can talk!” she said. “I thought I was beyond that. I thought I was in that space of not having to prove myself anymore.” Her conclusion: “To hell with politics, I’m a heart person. I’m going to do what I want.” This conclusion, though liberating, had two i
mmediate conclusions. First, it forced John Unger to quit. “Wynonna just wasn’t in the mood to listen,” he said. Also, it terminated her relationship with MCA. “They just don’t have the vision of what to do with me,” she said. Privately Wynonna sent a message to Doug Morris, the head of MCA/Universal, who had come to see her in a secret meeting some months earlier and tried to lure her to his boutique label in L.A. under the MCA umbrella. She was ready to make the move, she told him. A week later, Wynonna became a Curb/Universal artist: a country singer with an out-of-town label; a pop star, basically, with country roots. Elvis.

  Wynonna’s decision to leave MCA marked the end of an era. Her debut album five years before had heralded a new moment, one in which country, pop, gospel, and blues could combine into a new American music based in Nashville. Now that music was homeless again. Nashville had grown so big, so fast, it no longer seemed capable of accommodating its own genre-bending artists. Not surprisingly, this coincided with a downturn in sales. At exactly the moment Wynonna was contemplating her future, the rest of the country woke up to the fact that Nashville’s boom had come to an end. In a little over a month, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, even The New York Times Magazine, which hadn’t run a story about Nashville in years, all wrote articles about the slump of country music. This was the Revenge of SoundScan: The chart that several years earlier had so documented country’s rise now equally vividly chronicled its sag—down 12 percent from the previous year, 21 percent in the last quarter alone. Though typical media overreaction (this was the “take something big and tear it down” part of the perennial press equation), the stories did capture Nashville’s mood. “We’re really greedy right now,” Wynonna said, “and when you get greedy, you don’t put out your best product. You get into the cookie cutter mentality.”

  Naturally, this frightened her. As Wynonna prepared to go back into the studio, she realized, if nothing else, that she could no longer wallow-in her own laziness. “There is a fight in me now that I don’t really know that I’ve had in my whole life,” she told me. “I’ve fired a few people. I’ve started battling back. I’m just saying, ‘I’m not going to take it anymore.’” The little girl, it seemed, might finally be growing up. “I got into this business to sing,” she said. “And I thought the way it worked was that they sold the records. Now I realize it doesn’t work that way at all. If I don’t get in there and make decisions, nothing gets done. So now I’m making decisions. I have a plan. And I’m going to make it come true.”

  FIFTEEN

  THE FANS

  By late afternoon, they’d already missed lunch, an ice cream break, even a chance to see Shania Twain dance in the rain in her black leather pants on the stage in the infield of the Nashville Speedway. But still they stood, necks craned, on the balding sawdust ground. Still they waited, three abreast, in the long and winding line. And still they thought, even now, they were blessed with such good fortune they could hardly believe their dumb luck.

  “I’ve been in this line since noon,” said Chris Lowe, forty-three, of Sioux City, Iowa. “I got up at four-thirty in the morning, waited by the gate until they opened, then went to his booth. But they said he wasn’t coming. I was horrified. Then I was standing in line for Wade Hayes when I heard he was here, and I ran to this line. I’ve been here ever since. I told my husband, ‘If I have to stay here all day and half the night, I’m going to get his signature.’”

  Chris, a guest services operator at Target, was wearing blue jeans and a gray T-shirt that was crowded with buttons from all the stars she had met at Fan Fair: Alan Jackson, Vince Gill, Aaron Tippin, Alabama. This was her third Fan Fair, the annual backstage festival-cum-family reunion in which 24,000 die-hard country music lovers flock to Nashville in early summer for the chance to rub cheeks with their favorite stars. This was also Chris’s vacation and was, in a moment, about to become the highlight of her life.

  “There’s a story behind this,” she said. “I had a panic attack problem for over thirty years of my life. I never went anywhere. Even as a child, I never went camping, or to Girl Scouts, or to anything that made me stay overnight. Then a song that Garth Brooks put out, called ‘The River,’ changed my life. It got me to see that I could get over my panic attack problem if I could just give it to God. There’s one line in particular: ‘Don’t sit along the shoreline and say you’re satisfied. Choose to chance the rapids, dare to dance the tide.’ That inspired me to leave the house, to come to Fan Fair, and now to meet him.” She paused to look up at the tan cowboy hat, now just several paces away. “Because that’s the man that put out the song that changed my life.”

  Twenty minutes later, Chris Lowe reached the front of the line that stretched out through the stockyards of the Tennessee State Fairgrounds, around the comer toward the Nashville Speedway, and out toward the vinyl cowboy boot vendor, so far from the front that fans who were waiting there would not reach their target until sometime the following morning—twenty-three hours and twenty-one minutes after the biggest star in country music history had started signing autographs.

  “Oh, my God, I can’t believe I’m here,” she said when her turn finally came.

  Garth Brooks looked at her with the smile of a storybook Good Humor man. “What’s your name?” he said. Like her, he was wearing blue jeans and a gray T-shirt. His boots were dusty from half a day in the dirt. Since he arrived, he hadn’t sat down, hadn’t eaten, hadn’t gone to the bathroom. It was perfectly in keeping with the spirit of Fan Fair: two parts dedication, one part obsession.

  “My name is Chris.”

  “Nice to meet you,” he said.

  “I’m from Iowa,” Chris said. She launched into her story. She told him about the panic attack problem, about never leaving the house, about going to see him in Des Moines in 1992. “You mentioned from the stage that night that we should all come to Fan Fair, and I told my husband that night we were going.” For two years, she had come, she said, but Garth hadn’t. Chris and her husband went home empty-handed.

  “Thanks for not giving up on me,” Garth said. He started to sign her T-shirt.

  “I would never give up on you—ever,” she said. She started to cry.

  “Did you have fun at the show?” he asked.

  “It was really a great concert,” she said. After taking a few snapshots and posing for a few pictures, she reached up to give him a farewell hug. He would do it hundreds of times on this day alone. She would do it with a half dozen others in the next several days. But at that moment, it was the most important embrace of her life.

  “Oh, my God!” Chris squealed as Garth let his arms linger a tad longer around her back. “I’ll never forget this as long as I live. I could die right here in your arms.”

  Certainly the most impressive feature of country music today is the intimate, almost familial relationship that exists between artists and fans. That relationship is so familial, however, that at times it seems codependent, even gothic. Perhaps the South’s biggest legacy to country music is a tradition of morbid family closeness. Think of Faulkner’s Snopeses hanging out at the food court, eating fried chicken, and simultaneously cozying up to and smothering one another, and you get a sense of what it’s like being around most country artists when they come in contact with even their most casual fans.

  Increasingly that relationship has been turning violent. Though Robert Altman’s Nashville ends with an obsessive fan shooting the Ronee Blakely character in front of the Parthenon, not until the 1990s did some younger stars, like redneck balladeer Tracy Lawrence, begin wearing bulletproof vests at their outdoor concerts. Lawrence, himself no stranger to violence (he once pulled a gun on a carload of people who chased him on a highway), was both stalked and mobbed early in his career. “There was one lady who grabbed me when I was getting on the bus after a show,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “They couldn’t get her to let go. She got away with a hank of my hair.” Reba McEntire was later the focal point of the bizarre incident in which two young women from Ohio hatched
an aborted scheme to meet their idol by taking visitors to the Grand Ole Opry hostage. Garth, meanwhile, who told me he “has more guns than he could count,” has people camping out in front of his gate most months of the year, thereby forcing local law enforcement to provide protection. He also regularly received bomb threats at his concerts and even devised a special way for his staff to notify him of such incidents—by courier underneath the stage.

  The flip side of fan violence, of course, is fan sex. Musicians have always had groupies, and Nashville, despite its Baptist leanings, has been no exception. Hank Williams was deluged with women, even during his two marriages, and one of his many girlfriends gave birth to his only daughter two days after his funeral. With the Outlaws, Nashville had its first gang of artists prepared to flaunt their indulgences. “The music, the pills, and the women,” Waylon wrote in his autobiography, “that was our life on the road. Sometimes I’d screw two or three a night. My road manager remembers me reserving extra rooms in hotels, running up and down the emergency staircase to get from one to the other. Once, in Louisville, I had girls stashed on three floors. I had been awake for several days and was determined to please them all.” Twenty years later, those activities had hardly changed. “I literally chuckled to myself when I was reading Waylon’s book,” Travis Tritt told me. “There’s one section where he says, ‘I had a reputation for being able to take more drugs and screw more women than anybody in the business.’ I just thought, ‘That’s me, man.’ Because I could drink more liquor and screw more women than anybody I knew. And I had ’em lined up.” He grinned. “In case you wondered, it is possible to have sex with three people in one night. I know because I’ve done it—on numerous occasions.”