Dreaming Out Loud

by Bruce Feiler

  In general, Garth’s show was built around the idea of making him seem larger than life. “We like to have big special effects at the beginning,” he explained of his strategy. “Then take the people down. Then we pump it up again for ‘Shameless.’ At the end of the song, when the crowd is on its feet and cheering, the lights will pan down and hopefully blind everybody on the floor. Then suddenly everything will go black and this O-ring will be tilted so that it looks like a halo. The last thing you’ll see is this halo shooting down from above and illuminating Garth, in the dark, all alone.”

  Inevitably, he decided to transfer this role of savior to the screen. Several years into his career, Garth did what he’d always secretly wanted to do: He opened a film company in Hollywood. Called Red Strokes, the company was affiliated with Twentieth Century-Fox. On screen, Garth said he wanted to play darker characters, “polar opposites” from his country persona, “like a priest by day who, at night, turns into a psychopathic killer.” The first picture he planned to make would capture that grim side and, he hoped, also stimulate his lagging sales. Called “The Lamb,” after the sacrificial lamb in the Bible, the film would tell the story of a major artist who fought with his record label. When the artist’s sales start to slip, wreaking havoc on the company’s bottom line, the label hatches a surefire plan to resuscitate his career. They would have the artist assassinated, then sit back and watch his posthumous sales soar. Even though Garth said he would not play the artist, the symbolism was still unavoidable, made more so when Garth said he would tape his concerts for the soundtrack. Further, he arranged for the climactic scene of the film to be shot in Central Park at the culminating event of his three-year tour. After less than a decade in the public eye, Garth Brooks had become so consumed with his own mythic downfall that he decided the best way to revive his reputation was to turn himself into a martyr.

  All of which raised perhaps the ultimate question about him: How did this happen? How did the genre’s biggest star, a man beloved by millions of Americans, a man who had achieved greater success in a shorter period of time than any recording artist in American history, become a sacrificial figure in his own mind?

  The answer comes back to the basic tension at the heart of Garth Brooks, which is also, not surprisingly, the fundamental battle at the center of country music: the struggle between art and commerce, between the desire to express yourself (to create genuine, heartfelt music) and the desire to be successful (to create a product and an image that Americans will buy). In the early part of his career, Garth Brooks embodied the first half of that equation: He and his music were fresh, humble, and indisputably sincere. Nashville, sensing that sincerity (and reveling in his success), embraced him. Garth Brooks was what everyone on Music Row wanted to believe they were: genuine, self-sacrificing, and interested in the music. Also, he was a good citizen. When I moved to town, Bruce Bouton told me a story. Bruce, a steel guitar player, worked on all of Garth’s records, as well as Wade’s. Bruce’s wife became pregnant with their first child at the same time Sandy Brooks got pregnant with hers. In the middle of his wife’s pregnancy, Bruce lost his insurance. When Garth heard this, he called Bruce from a gas station in Arizona and offered to pay the cost of delivery. “I’ve worked on over two hundred albums in this town,” Bruce told me. “I can tell you something shitty about every artist I’ve worked with. I’ve never even heard one bad thing about Garth Brooks.”

  A year and a half later, I ran into Bruce again and we both realized how long ago that seemed. In the intervening time, it was hard to recall hearing one good thing about Garth Brooks. The reason: As Garth’s career progressed, he began to reveal his alternate side—less genuine, more contrived; less neighborly, more cutthroat. Garth was not the first superstar to make this transition, nor will he be the last. But he was the most visible. And Nashville, sensing the shift from a man who was humble because he felt that way to a man who was humble because he liked how it looked, turned on him. At first this change in attitude toward Garth surprised me. After all, Garth merely did what everyone else on Music Row did (try to make more money; try to manipulate the media), only he did it better. Eventually I realized there was more to it: Nashville turned on Garth Brooks in part because they didn’t like what his transformation said about them. Music Row would like to think of itself as being genuine and pure, while in fact it’s often conniving and ruthless, too.

  Indeed, the wholesale disengagement of Garth from Nashville—and Nashville from Garth—only served to focus attention on one of the unspoken lessons of country music in the 1990s: The veneer of values that lies at the heart of the music, its artists, and the community that promotes them can be astoundingly fragile. If anything, the foundering of Garth Brooks was merely the latest chapter in a timeless story, where, for the hero, hubris triumphs over humility and, for many of his followers, disappointment replaces infatuation. As it turned out, this was the dramatic denouement of the “Gone Country” era: The king would fall.

  Garth Brooks’s fall from grace took place slowly and over time. First it happened with his show. All during his career, of course, Garth had gone out of his way to litter his show with Barnum-esque pyrotechnics that he hoped would gain him entrance into the Showmen Hall of Fame. One of those stunts, though, backfired severely. In the three performances that were taped at Irving, Texas, in 1992, Garth prepared a special ending for “Friends in Low Places.” Standing in the center of his plateaulike stage, he and Ty England, his roommate from Oklahoma State who became his background guitarist and later went on to an ill-fated solo career, strutted around the stage waving their acoustic guitars above their heads. After awhile, they lined up like dueling baseball sluggers, counted to three, and smashed their guitars together, sending splinters shooting in the air. When they had finished, they stomped the remaining pieces to shreds and cavalierly flung the debris around the stage. Though the crowd roared its approval, all across the country people were horrified. Letters of disapproval flooded radio stations, and Garth was forced to issue an explanation that the gesture was merely for visual effect. This comment only made matters worse. As one industry executive and self-described former fan told me: “First, it was offensive because he said it was just for effect. For someone who says he’s such a ‘normal’ person, it showed he was really calculating. Second, it showed his disrespect for tradition. The guitar is the most sacred symbol of American music; to destroy it diminished us all.”

  Later, when Ty England’s smashed guitar went on display at the Country Music Hall of Fame, it became the most controversial exhibit in the museum—with more people saying they disapproved of it than any other item in the collection.

  Second, the change happened within his label. After Jimmy Bowen left Liberty Records, a new team was hired, led by Scott Hendricks, a tall, handsome, soft-spoken Oklahoman who had produced successful albums by Alan Jackson, Brooks & Dunn, and his onetime fiancée Faith Hill. Scott (unlike Bowen, he was referred to by his first name) also hired several executives from MCA, including Walt Wilson, who became general manager of the renamed Capitol Nashville. Garth was originally furious that Scott was hired. “I would’ve loved to see Joe Mansfield with Capitol Records,” he told me, “simply because in my belief, the guy did everything that he should’ve to sell a ton of records, and he never got the chance to finish what he started.” Also, as he noted, “Mansfield was a friend.” Scott, by contrast, was a neophyte. “He’s a super-sweet guy,” Garth said, “who just—and he’ll be the first one to tell you—doesn’t want anything to do with the business side of music.” At Garth’s first meeting with the new team, he expressed his disappointment to their faces. “I don’t believe in you guys,” he said. “And from what I understand, you’re not very good.” (As to why he felt the need to make such a remark, Garth told me: “If I’m going to become a partner, I owed it to them to say what I thought, then they could sit there and go ‘Oh, we can take his mouth.’”)

  Following that dreadful introduction, relations between
Garth and Capitol actually improved. After not setting foot in the building for two years, Garth, before the release of Fresh Horses, began showing up for regular Thursday afternoon meetings. “I was so happy that I brought my baby—my new album—back here, away from New York to be marketed here,” he told me. Almost immediately, though, Garth began flexing his muscles. He chose his singles without consultation. He demanded a $5 million marketing budget. He insisted on shipping 6 million records, even though none of his previous records had sold that quickly. Over objections, Garth got what he wished. Where Capitol did voice concern, however, was the release date of the record. To capitalize on the start of the Christmas season, Garth wanted to release the album on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, the same date EMI, Capitol’s parent, was releasing the first Beatles Anthology album. Capitol was concerned.

  “We were sitting in my office,” Walt Wilson told me, “and I said, ‘Garth, you know the Beatles are going to have an ABC special, and the company’s going to spend about fifty million dollars promoting the hell out of the album. Everybody thinks the Beatles are going to kick your ass, including people in the company.’” Garth got up and started pacing, eventually demanding that Walt get Charles Koppelman, the head of EMI, on the phone. “Whatever you want to do is okay with us,” Koppelman told Garth. Once again, Garth started pacing. “His whole thing,” Walt recalled, “his whole drive in life is that he wants to outsell the Beatles. So this was a head-to-head challenge with his particular dream. And he wanted it. He wanted it bad.” Finally, after several minutes, Garth spoke. “Let’s go for it,” he said. The result: The Beatles Anthology set sold 900,000 units in its first week in stores; Fresh Horses sold 480,000. The media declared the Beatles champion. Within weeks, further weakened by poor reviews and faltering singles, millions of unsold Garth Brooks albums were shipped back to Capitol Nashville.

  Following the collapse of Fresh Horses, relations between Capitol and Garth returned to the chill of the Bowen Cold War. Again, Garth could have spread responsibility around. He could have blamed the fans. “I never blame the fans,” he told me. He could have blamed the music. “The music’s fine,” he told me. “It’s there.” Or he could have blamed the label. Garth chose that option. “When you’ve got six records that average [8.5 million], and you’ve got one record that comes in very short of that, then you’ve got to sit there and go, ‘Is it the music?’ or ‘Is it the first album that this company took over and ran with?’” The label, he told me, even admitted that it withdrew marketing support for the album. “Has my label sat down across from me at the table and apologized for dropping the ball on Fresh Horses? Yes, they have. Am I out there fighting an uphill battle with the record? Yes, I am. Am I out there doing it because I know the record is worthy of it? Yes I am.” Scott Hendricks, faced with such bombast, smiled politely and said he was honored that Garth Brooks was on his label.

  Garth was in no mood for politeness, though. By spring, he began putting out the word that he planned to get Scott and Walt fired. (Walt eventually was fired, which raised the inevitable question: Did Garth have a hand it? “Let’s just say that it didn’t work out,” Garth told me.) Inside the label, meanwhile, Garth was even more aggressive. He ignored deadlines, pushed frantic staffers to the limit, and, when faced with pleas of exhaustion, sent lawyers slogging through his contract to back him up. As one executive put it to me: “Dealing with any artist of that stature is difficult, and when you have to deal with him on every little stinking problem, it’s unusual; it’s bizarre.” Plus, Capitol believed Garth had spies in the building. “He was very paranoid,” one executive, afraid to speak on the record, told me, “scared that he was going to get ripped off, that somebody was going to take advantage of him. When you’re working with an artist, you want to embrace your artist. But if you have an artist that threatens you and continually reminds you that he can get rid of you and just has this constant feeling that it’s a conspiracy against him, how can you deal with him?”

  Eventually Garth shocked Capitol Records—and Nashville in general—by going public with his feud. “The Nashville’s office handling of Fresh Horses pisses me off,” he told Billboard in a story that was so unprecedented in the tight-knit community of country music, it was reported the following day on page one of The Tennessean. “The label gave up on the album after it had sold 2.3 million records. They called it a dead album.” In the future, he noted, all Garth Brooks marketing would be handled by EMI’s offices in New York. This new posture pointed up the change that Garth had undergone: He believed he had outgrown Nashville’s ability to help him. “Maybe Garth needs a David Geffen,” Walt speculated, referring to the legendary czar of the L.A. music scene, “somebody that he can idolize and compare himself to. ‘I’m the biggest selling-artist in North America, therefore I want to deal with David Geffen; he’s a billionaire.’ I had the feeling that Garth respected that kind of power and wasn’t getting it anywhere in the EMI system.”

  This fascination with power, Walt believed, helped explain Garth’s desire to be associated with Nike, still a nagging goal of his. “It was the power that Nike represented for him,” Walt said. “There were multimillion-dollar deals coming in from major, major companies: Coke, Pepsi, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Kellogg’s. And he didn’t want to deal with them. Of course, when you’re sitting on several hundred million dollars in the bank, you can basically do whatever you want. He has that freedom and he uses it.” Ultimately, this cavalier attitude turned off the people whose job it was to help him. “Remember,” Walt said, “we not only had that problem, but Bowen had that problem as well, which is Garth’s whole career. So I’m not sure that it was our personality or the personality of Bowen, as much as it was the personality of Garth.”

  That personality led to a third major source of Garth’s decline, a breakdown within his own camp. One of the central reasons Garth was so successful was that from the start of his career he seemed to solve one of the testiest dilemmas facing any artist: He surrounded himself with a top-notch team. As Pam Lewis, his comanager, described it to me: “Garth made me believe in his dream so convincingly that I wanted to take it to the world. If you had told me after the first year that he was the Second Messiah, I would have believed you. He was so magical. He was such a great coach. He was such a great people motivator—of his band, of his staff, of my staff. People loved him.”

  Slowly, perhaps inevitably, that team began to crumble. Some, like Allen Reynolds, his producer, remained on board; while others—Pam Lewis, his comanager; Bud Schaetzle, who directed his early specials; even his sister, who was in his band—left for one reason or another. Pam Lewis, in particular, was deeply wounded by her experience with Garth. Even after settling her legal dispute with Bob Doyle (who later returned to managing Garth), Pam felt great sadness for her former client and friend. “I think he’s feeling like, ‘What did I do this for?’” she told me. “‘Is this all there is?’ I can remember having a very poignant conversation with him. He had just turned thirty and was really depressed. He said, ‘What happens when you’re thirty years old and you’ve reached every goal you’ve ever set for yourself?’ I said, ‘The first thing you do is get on your hands and knees and you thank God for the incredible blessings that you’ve received. Then you find new goals.’”

  Garth, she said, had always been so driven, so insecure, that he hadn’t planned on achieving success and thus had no plan to enjoy it when it arrived. After all, she noted, what’s so bad about selling 4 million records (which is what Fresh Horses sold in its first year). Most artists, even Garth Brooks in his early years, would have been thrilled. “It doesn’t have to end this way,” Pam said. “There are choices. I don’t think it’s this way for Vince Gill. I don’t think it’s this way for Alan Jackson. I don’t think it’s this way for a lot of rock stars you can name. It’s only this way because he has chosen to be the tragic hero. There’s no introspection. He’s blaming everybody but himself. And when you start blaming, you divide; when you start div
iding, you isolate; when you start isolating, you get fearful, paranoid, and angry. Frankly it’s heartbreaking to me because there’s something I love about him very much.”

  What was most painful about these observations—coupled with Garth’s own expressions of doubt in recent months and his mother’s comment to me in Atlanta (“Son, you’re there. Be happy and enjoy it…”)—is that they all seemed to agree on one central point: Garth had achieved the goals he had set for himself; he had become an icon. “He is that symbol,” Pam Lewis agreed. “But you can’t hold on to that. There’s no peace in it. It’s shallow. It’s trite. It isn’t real. That’s the crux of the problem. It’s a hoax. It’s all a hoax. He’s a talented man, but his image is a meaningless hoax that’s been perpetuated on the American people.” Look at his eyes, she added. “They are the eyes of an angry man.”

  She told me a story to illustrate her point. At the height of the post-SoundScan bonanza, Garth presented both Pam and Bob, his managers, with Jaguar automobiles as gifts. For Pam, who had dreamed of having only three things in her life—a Jaguar, a Grammy, and a brick farmhouse—all of which she got because of her association with Garth, the moment should have been a culmination. “At the time there was the big fanfare,” she remembered, “there was this big party, and I thought to myself, ‘You know, what I really want is to sit down and have a really good talk with him.’ Honestly, that would have meant so much more to me than the car. I loved the car. I was very happy driving it. But it was so empty. It was a press thing. It made him look really generous. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but that was my immediate reaction. It was like a kid who never gets any attention, so his dad keeps buying him stuff. ‘Don’t buy me any presents,’ I wanted to say. ‘Just listen to me. Can’t we just sit down and talk?’”