by Bruce Feiler
While the long-term impact of these promotions, coupled with the warehouse visits and in-store singalongs Wade had been doing for months, might be to make a “major statement” as Mike hoped (advance orders were so high, he upped his initial shipments to 235,000 units), they were also having a more immediate consequence: They were starting to overwhelm the one person they were most intended to help. Originally Wade had welcomed Sony’s aggressive stance. “He’s an intensely competitive guy,” Mike Kraski said, “which is surprising because when you meet him he appears to be very aw-shucks and humble. But he wants to win in the biggest way and he told us, ‘Put more on me, put more on me, I’ll tell you when it’s too much.’”
In the weeks leading up to the release, though, Wade did begin to bend under the pressure. The steady increase in confidence that had been under way for most of the previous year suddenly started to regress. First, at the Academy of Country Music (ACM) Awards in late spring in Los Angeles, Wade was visibly horrified when Bryan White defeated him (and David Lee Murphy) for the New Male Artist of the Year. “I assumed it would be me,” Wade told me, “because I had been on more tours, sold more records, and had more hits than anybody in the category. So how could I not win it? It hurt my feelings pretty good.” Even worse, instead of gamely applauding (which is the award show custom) he openly grimaced and slumped his head on national television. “I was embarrassed,” groused one executive at Sony. “If he doesn’t know how to behave, he should stay at home.”
Next, in his prealbum interviews, he came across as a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “Hayes frets so much about his career that it has actually made him ill,” wrote Bob Oermann in The Tennessean. “He admits that he’s in constant fear that it will all end tomorrow.” The article went on to quote Wade as saying he was consumed with the business aspects of his career. “I’m a chart watcher, an everything watcher,” he said. “It’s to a fault, to the point where I make myself sick physically. I get headaches and start losing weight and stuff like that. When my career started unfolding is when it got bad. I just recently figured out that I’m going to kill myself if I keep going the way I am.” It got so bad, Wade told me, that the hair in his beard stopped growing in places.
Ultimately, the pressure erupted at Fan Fair. Two nights after his fan club picnic, Wade took his turn before the fifteen thousand people gathered in the stands of the Nashville Speedway. It was the night of the Sony show and the entire management of the label gathered on the stage, along with Don Cook, Chick Rains, and Wade’s parents. The sight of so many people swaying and singing along to “Old Enough to Know Better” and “I’m Still Dancin’ with You” was enough to bring tears of joy to Debi Fleischer’s eyes. “I think we have a superstar on our hands,” she said. When Wade’s set was over, the team of supporters rushed to the side of the stage to celebrate. Wade, though, never showed. Instead of stopping by for a congratulatory hug and high five, Wade ducked into the scrum of security officials and hurried away to his bus. Once inside, he retreated to the back of his cabin, locked his door, and sobbed.
The following day, three days before the album release, Carol Harper, one of his managers, called me at home. “Wade’s in a bad position right now,” she said. “There are so many people who are counting on him—his parents, his band, the label. He’s gone in a little over a year from being a construction worker who had a dream to being the head of a multimillion-dollar corporation. He needs to concentrate on what he’s doing right now. Its okay if you go to Oklahoma, but we prefer that you not try to talk to him. He just needs to be left alone.”
“I feared this would happen,” Wade’s mother said. Trish had finished mixing the banana bread and had placed it in the oven, filling her compact home with a storybook aroma. She cleaned her hands and sat down at the table, pausing to retrieve a scrapbook from a crowded shelf of photographs of her son with Merle Haggard, Marty Stuart, Waylon Jennings. She flipped through the yellowing pages—Wade as a boy with his first guitar, in the living room playing with his band, and on the way to his high school prom. In that picture, Wade was wearing a white tuxedo, accented with a pink cummerbund and pink tie. His hair was dyed blond and permed—the high school perk of having a hairdresser for a mother.
“Wade would kill me if he knew I showed you that picture,” Trish said. “But it’s the only picture we’ve got from that night. Wade wanted to take Don’s Adonis guitar to the prom that night. Don said, ‘Okay, you can take it, but I don’t want you laying it anywhere. You play it, you bring it home.’” Wade took the guitar in his pickup, and after playing it, drove it back out to his parents’. “And we lived way out,” Trish said. “So while he was home, he changed into his shorts and then went back. But they hadn’t had their pictures taken. Boy, his date was really steaming.” She smiled when she realized what she had said. “I guess he’s always put his music before his girlfriends.”
She closed the book.
“I guess what concerns me now is his spreading himself too thin,” she said. “I’m a mom. At Fan Fair last week, I could see he wasn’t feeling too good. He seemed distracted, not his usual self. It doesn’t surprise me, but as a mother it hurts me. I’ve seen him sing when he was too sick. But, of course, I’ve seen his dad do that too.”
It was, she believed, part of his legacy. “It’s also the pressure of the position,” she said. “I told Wade this once, I said, ‘Son, the journey getting there isn’t going to be as hard as what happens once you arrive. The hard part is going to be staying levelheaded. Keeping your feet planted. The world needs heroes. You’re going to be one of those heroes, but it’s an awesome responsibility.’”
Which, of course, raised the question of whether he could handle that responsibility. I told her about my conversation with Garth’s mother, who had said backstage in Atlanta that if she could tell her son anything, it would be that he was what he had wanted to become. And that he should be happy and enjoy it. Trish nodded knowingly.
“If I could tell my son anything,” she said, “it would be: ‘Don’t be too serious. Enjoy where you are.’ Wade is real business-minded. He is obsessed with getting in there and getting his security. I understand that: It’s still shaky ground out there; there are no guarantees. But I told him that recently, when he was in L.A. for the ACMs and called to say, ‘I hope you’re not disappointed that I didn’t win.’ I said, ‘Wade, let me tell you something. We couldn’t be prouder of you. We are honored that you are even there. I want you to stop and look around at who you’re with. You are with the people and in the places that most people only dream about. If you walk away tomorrow, you’ve lived the dream that most people never get. Go out and enjoy being young tonight. Have a ball.’”
“And did he follow your advice?”
Trish looked up at the portrait of Wade on the wall. For the first time all day, there were tears in her eyes. “Not really,” she said.
“And why is that?”
“Because his dad was that way. When Don was that age, he was obsessed too. The music came first. It takes special women to stay with these men. I’ve told people before: ‘I don’t care how hard it got. I would never ask Don to leave music.’ That’s who they are. Wade is the accumulation of centuries of musicians who have been put into his one body. He is music. And he is that age when music is more important to him than life. Yet he’s also at the stage where he’s competing with so many other talented people. It’s very intense out there. We all can’t stay on the highest plateau.” She sighed. “As long as he pays attention to God, though, he’ll be okay. We’ve all got to have pain in our lives. I wish a parent’s pain could take care of a kid’s pain. But it can’t. The only way to learn is through the struggle.”
A few hours later, Wade arrived at the Wal-Mart. He was running late. His flight from Houston had been delayed. He had to be driven to a local television station in Oklahoma City for an interview, then drop by two radio stations, and finally pay a brief visit to a local distributor. By the time Wade made t
he drive to Bethel Acres, he got caught up in rush hour traffic and was forced to divert directly to the store. “Where have you been?” he snapped at his mother, who had been waiting for him at home. She looked at him coolly, then reached to embrace him. As soon as they separated, Wade was hustled into the showroom.
By the time he arrived, an enormous crowd had gathered in front of the makeshift signing booth—a stack of paper towel boxes covered in denim and decorated with bales of hay. They whooped when Wade appeared. Close to six hundred people were crushed together in a three-person-wide line that stretched from in front of the music department, through the ladies’ underwear, past the popcorn maker and fifty-cent airplane ride, out into the mall, and through the front doors into the parking lot, where all three country radio stations from the area were blasting music. Wade took a step back and blinked his eyes when he realized the magnitude of his draw. The mayor, Chris Harden, appeared from the huddle and read a proclamation in honor of Wade Hayes Day that few outside her immediate presence could hear. Wade stooped down and gave her a hug. It was over so quickly, Trish didn’t even have time to snap a picture. Presently, Wade squeezed behind the table and began to greet his fans.
He would stand there, by himself, for the next six hours, until well after midnight. He would wait there, smiling, until the last fan had brought one of the six hundred CDs or four hundred cassettes that Wal-Mart had bought for the occasion. And he would stay there, alone until so close to his flight time the following morning that he’d have to go back to his hotel when he finished and wouldn’t even have time to stop off at home for a piece of his mother’s banana bread.
VERSE V
SEVENTEEN
THE SHOW
The only thing visible onstage is the giant light rigging, which lies dormant on the ground. Crumpled, it looks like those futuristic tangles of catwalks and robot arms that litter the ends of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. Bursts of steam spew from the sides. Yellow spotlights spurt from the center. Presently, as a space-alien wail emanates from the rigging and a “Wrestlemania” roar radiates from the crowd, the Cyclops begins to quiver. The outer arms are the first to move, lifting themselves off the ground in a slow, enticing galactic come-hither. Next the body itself lifts into the air—pink and white with grasping lights. Finally, as the Cyclops reaches its destination overhead, a white grand piano rises from the base of the stage. A man is perched at its bench, looking remarkably like Garth Brooks. Then from a different place comes a voice: “Oh, I said a little prayer tonight.” And suddenly, from the belly of the piano, like Venus from the shell—or, it seems unavoidable, Christ from the grave—the real Garth Brooks emerges, his legs pressed together, his arms spread apart, his head thrown back toward the sky. “With all due respect to God,” he announces, “tonight we’re going to raise some hell!”
By fall, Garth Brooks had reconquered the stage. From the moment he leaped off the piano in Atlanta, it became clear that he did still have the hunger, the drive, the all-consuming “it” that Garth quoted Katharine Hepburn as mentioning and that Garth feared he had lost. GB, in other words, did make his return. “But it wasn’t from me,” Garth explained. “That’s what was so cool.” In fact, at the first show in Atlanta, the show Garth said was his worst in ten years, GB originally did not show up. “But the crowd lifted us and took us across the finish line,” Garth said, “and GB showed up because they brought him, and if that makes me sound egotistical or crazy, then so be it. But he wasn’t there at the time we went on. That’s because he’s out there. The people bring him out in me.”
It’s a feeling, he said, of being comfortable—more comfortable onstage—than he is in other arenas of his life. “I’ve often described it as being sick as a dog—things can be bad at home or at work—but once you hear that molecular sound, the show starts. When the lights go down, when that crowd goes up, when you feel that first wave of stage smoke across your face, it’s like reaching down, grabbing a doorknob, and comin’ in. I run in, strip down to my underwear, jump on the couch, and sit there for two hours, just tell jokes and sing.”
If anything, the stage became the one place Garth felt totally free. There, Garth was the person he’d always hoped to be. He was humble. He would lumber around, remove his hat, muss his hair, and just stare, wide-eyed, at the unabashed joy of twenty thousand people singing the words to “Friends in Low Places.” “Man, I just can’t believe you all came,” he said, awestruck, in Atlanta. He was raucous. He would dart around his playground like a hyperactive Pac-Man, gobbling up the gifts from the audience and screaming in his drummer’s ear, locked in a mad race to get through his most spirited hits like “American Honky-Tonk Bar Association.” “This is country music with muscle,” he said, defiant, in Birmingham. Above all, he was fun. He would strut like an NFL receiver, slap high fives with his fiddle player, and dash up and down the Plexiglas drum pod with reckless abandon. “You don’t know how much this means to me that you still love my music,” he said, teary-eyed, in Los Angeles.
And naturally the fans were teary-eyed themselves. His concert tour was the biggest in North America, with 2.55 million people paying to see him in the first year alone. They got up early, waited in line, and set records in almost every city he played: three shows in Calgary, four in Indianapolis, five in Detroit, six in Jacksonville. The critics mostly loved him as well. “The opening is 2001: A Space Odyssey meets Billy Bob,” wrote the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk. “Imagine Garth Brooks songs done by James Taylor acting like Billy Joel on Van Halen’s stage,” said The Cincinnati Enquirer. “It would be easy enough to find fault with the show,” commented The Baltimore Sun, saying Garth’s voice was weak, his microphone was malfunctioning, and the sound was badly mixed. “But if you think all that added up to a bad or even a disappointing performance, you’d be wrong. What Brooks does isn’t about perfection—it’s about heart.”
And, of course, Garth was prepared with a series of media stunts to stimulate publicity. In Denver, he presented the one-millionth ticket buyer with roses, T-shirts, hats, and the keys to a green Chevrolet Z-28 Camaro convertible. “We couldn’t do this for everyone,” he said at the backstage ceremony, “so we wanted to make you their surrogate.” In Charleston, West Virginia, he presented his two-millionth customer with a choice of two cars, a Chevrolet Tahoe or a Pontiac Grand Prix (the fan, Melinda Huffman, chose the Tahoe), as well as a Sony video camera, an Olympus still camera, beach towels, snorkels, underwater goggles, and a four-day vacation to the U.S. Virgin Islands. “What we’re doing for you we’d love to do for the other 1,999,999 people who came out to see us on the tour.”
But all the excitement and adulation masked the larger truth. Garth Brooks was deeply unhappy. His concert sales were robust (in the music business, conventional wisdom holds that people will always pay to see you sing your old hits), but his records sales had plummeted. “It’s a tough time right now,” he confessed. “To me, ticket sales and record sales are the direct voice of the people. One of our legs is strong; the other is weak.” The press, with the exception of local reporters, had started ignoring him. Plus, since leaving his AMA trophy at the podium, no one dared give him another award. “Maybe I need to do something to right the course,” he said. So naturally he tried. In his quieter moments onstage, surrounded by the love he had craved for so long, bathed in the lights focused only on him, he concocted his most daring plan yet to resurrect his falling star. In a way, what he imagined was every child’s dream, that secret fantasy that boys and girls have when they feel the world has turned against them: Garth would have himself killed.
From the moment he came of age as a boy, Garth Brooks was fascinated with movie stars. His childhood heroes were Hollywood legends: John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe. His earliest musical idols were artists who were the most theatrical: Kiss, Styx, and Queen. His entire persona was built around being a showman. “At Thanksgiving dinner,” he told me, “when that fight breaks every year at the table about something stupid: Dad gets choked up, vei
ns start popping out, and people start screaming about the best live concert they’ve ever seen. I want somebody at that table to yell out our name.” Millions, of course, did. “You know me, I don’t take credit for many things,” Garth told me, “but this is one thing where I look at the crew and band and say, ‘Boys, step up and take your bows. You brought a whole new meaning to entertainment in country music.’”
That meaning had to do with taking country music off the front porch and moving it into the bedroom. As he told Alanna Nash, Garth viewed music as making love to the audience. “And like good sex,” he said, “the wilder and more frenzied it gets, the quicker you turn that around and get gentle, tender, and slow, keeping your partner off balance, then smacking it again with something wild and crazy, and just doing that over and over until one of you drops dead…That’s great physical sex. That’s also great, physical music.” Like sex itself, though, performing became both a source of pleasure for Garth and a way for him to act out his demons. On the one hand, he told me, he craved the intimacy. “The gig is,” Garth said, “the people come to a place and fall in love with the artist. The problem with our gig is, the artist comes to a place and falls in love with the people. It tears me up because I can’t stop everything, walk over, and say, ‘You wanna talk? Tell me what you’re feeling right now.’ It’s an ego thing. I’m sorry, but when you see that look in someone’s eyes, that’s very attractive to me.” On the other hand, he also craved the dangerous part. At times he would lose himself onstage, take physical risks, or disappear into a delirium. “I mean, that’s what you want,” he said. “You want to feel invincible. You want to feel scared to death.”
