|
Newsweek 3/16/98 The Arts/The World According to Garth:
Sometimes Garth Brooks forgets that he's not onstage. It's nearly an hour after his show at Chicago's Rosemont Horizon arena, but he's still performing. He's tucked away on his tour bus, looking comfortably jockish in dark sweat pants and a football jersey. His gray-flecked hair is cropped close; a half-eaten Pizza Hut pizza sits on a table. His genial, unassuming, sports-lovin', truck-drivin' persona--the key asset in a multimillion-dollar career portfolio that includes 15 No. 1 hits, 67 million albums sold, a touring company, film and video production, publishing and merchandise--is very much in evidence. He refers to news anchor Jane Pauley as "this sweet lady from 'Dateline'." When he hears the highfalutin phrase "avant-garde," he asks, "What's that mean?" And when discussing his phenomenal appeal--last week he dropped by "Oprah," starred in an NBC concert special and hosted the highest-rated episode of "Saturday Night Live" since 1994--he turns bashful as a schoolboy. "Communication is--I'm sorry, I have a hard time talking about this with you 'cause you're a woman," he says. "But communication is the sexiest thing I think there is. I looooove great communication. In a relationship or in concert." When the tape recorder goes off, though, a different person starts to emerge. He talks about the 150-acre homestead he bought for his parents in Oklahoma after the S&L crisis of the '80s, when foreclosed land could be scooped up for a fraction of its value. He discusses share prices on the London Stock Exchange and the optimum conditions for corporate takeovers. It's not unusual for a star of Brooks's magnitude to be packing the business savvy of a Fortune 500 CEO. But Brooks puts an inordinate amount of energy into keeping his off-hours business self hidden from his fans. He treats his enormous wealth--and the brains that achieved it--as guilty secrets. He drives around Nashville in a mud-splattered pickup truck and walks around in tractor coveralls and construction boots. Onstage, he mirrors the '90s concerns of his mostly middle-class, suburbanized audience, singing lifeaffirming songs about families, relationships, jobs and cutting loose after quitting time. Brooks works triple-overtime to make sure he fulfills what his fans want him to be: a kindhearted Christian with solid family values. A Wrangler-clad Middle American with a pizza paunch. A reliable, regular guy. But in Nashville, people don't think of him as a regular guy. Ever since Brooks scored his first No. 1 in 1989 with "If Tomorrow Never Comes," a tearjerk ballad about telling your wife how much you love her, the industry has had a chance to watch him at close range. The more they've seen, the less they've liked. In recent months--with the release of his latest album, "Sevens"--his unpopularity has soared. Spend a week in Nashville, and you'll hear executives use these words to describe him: "monster," "egomaniac," "bully" and "bastard." In Hollywood or on Wall Street these words might practically be compliments, but they seldom rub up against an image as wholesome as Brooks's. Former comanager Pam Lewis, who split from him in 1994 and was involved in a two-year dispute over her settlement, says the disarming thing about him is how charming he is on the outside: "There's a lot of pretense and falseness and veneer. It's insidious." That veneer shields a brand of hardball unlike anything Nashville's ever encountered. Last year Brooks was preparing to release "Sevens" in conjunction with his free concert in New York's Central Park in August. He'd been unhappy with the way his label, Capitol Nashville, marketed his previous album, 1995's "Fresh Horses"; at 4 million copies, it's one of the lowest sellers in his catalog. He wanted the parent company, EMI, to handle promotion out of its New York office. But a shake-up occurred at EMI, and Brooks decided to withhold the album rather than entrust it to the Nashville branch. Negotiations occurred, but Brooks wouldn't budge.Then, on Nov. 4, Capitol's president, Scott Hendricks, a well-respected producer, was fired, along with four other key executives. Pat Quigley, a marketing executive and Brooks ally, was named president. The following day, Brooks announced he would release "Sevens" in time for the holiday retail season. (Since then, Hendricks and the other executives have been on full salary while EMI tries to negotiate the start-up of a sister label, Virgin Nashville, for Hendricks to run.) "I'm very proud of what we as a team were able to accomplish at Capitol Nashville," Hendricks told NEWSWEEK. "I'm sorry Garth was disappointed with the sales of 'Fresh Horses.' All of us would have loved to have seen sales beyond 4 million, particularly after executing a marketing plan that Garth and his associates signed off on." Brooks claims he had nothing to do with the firings. "It's just senseless what happened," he says. But Quigley says Garth felt the old team didn't support him. "He said, 'I don't want to affect anyone else's life, but I want the company to say Garth needs a different person running his business'." When asked if he signed off on the marketing plan for "Fresh Horses," Brooks hedges. "I knew what the plan was for the first four or five weeks, I guess," he says. The subject of "Fresh Horses" is clearly a sensitive one for him. "All I know is that I've got an album that I love, that will never get another life. It's gone. It must become part of catalog, and live and breathe that way. I'm very proud of that child the way it is." At first, the new regime seemed to pay off for Brooks. "Sevens," released on Nov. 25, became the fastest-selling album of the '90s, moving 3.4 million copies in its first five weeks. Brooks, who had been stung by bad publicity when he withheld the album, seemed back on top. But after Christmas, sales dropped off drastically. "Sevens" isn't a bad album--Brooks is too smart to make a bad album. It features punchy Western swing, a juicy ballad or two and a perky Caribbean romp called "Two Pina Coladas." But it's not essential, either, the way early Brooks hits like "Friends in Low Places" and "The Dance" are essential for anyone who cares about country music in the '90s. Unfortunately Quigley had boasted that if he couldn't sell 10 million copies of "Sevens," he wasn't doing his job. Now business wasn't going as planned. Something had to be done. Oprah Winfrey to the rescue. On Feb. 9, Brooks went on "Oprah" and pledged to donate proceeds from "Sevens" to her Angel Network of charities if she'd plug the album on her show every day for a week. Oprah followed through, and Brooks has said he'll donate $500,000. It's a generous gesture. But it's hard not to notice that Brooks's good deed came with a public-relations beneficiary: himself. During the "Oprah" week, sales of "Sevens" tripled. His album bounced from No. 24 to No. 4. Brooks has quietly donated untold sums to charity throughout his career. Why did this gift have to come with plugs attached? The possibility that he might use charity to boost his flagging sales is the kind of thing Nashville really objects to. "It's not unlike what happened to Madonna," says Bruce Feiler, author of "Dreaming Out Loud: Garth Brooks, Wynonna Judd, Wade Hayes, and the Changing Face of Nashville," due in April. "When Madonna first came out, every six months she changed her image, and it was just so fascinating. But after a while she began to be viewed as a media manipulator, and people turned on her. That's almost precisely what happened to Garth. People began to see that every six months there was another media firestorm. And people in Nashville turned on him." Those in Garth's camp profess not to care about the bad will. "I don't think we're pariahs or anything," says Bob Doyle, Garth's comanager. "With success, there's going to be jealousy, that sort of thing." Brooks himself is used to wrangling with the industry. "If the industry is going somewhere that Garth does not feel is right for Garth to go, then Garth has to stand up and say, 'Guys, I can't make that trip with you.' And if they look at me and go, 'I hate you for that,' then that's what you've got to take." Then he adds, "Please, please, please, always separate Nashville from the industry. Nashville is a town that is my home. When 'Fresh Horses' and the Beatles's 'Anthology' came out head to head, Nashville is one of six cities that actually bought more Garth than they did the Beatles." Part of the problem is that Brooks is simply bigger than Nashville. Country music has never seen power and success on his scale. Brooks's peers--at least in terms of sales--aren't Clint Black, Reba McEntire and Trisha Yearwood; they're Michael Jackson, Celine Dion, Elton John. Brooks has used his clout to broker a one-of-a-kind deal that gives him near-absolute control. He owns the rights to his albums, fronts his own money for videos, calls the shots on when he'll release his records, chooses his own singles. The idea that he can pick and choose who runs his label naturally makes executives sweat. Jimmy Bowen, Capitol Nashville's president from 1989 to 1995, puts it this way: "It's like having a gorilla in the chicken pen. Some of the chickens are gonna get stomped on. And the ones that don't are gonna be nervous." Yet Garth can't escape country music. Artistically speaking, he and Nashville are stuck with each other. Pop radio won't play him. Rock fans think he's a watered-down Bob Seger impersonator. Despite "Garth Live From Central Park," you could fire buckshot in a room full of New Yorkers and not hit a single person who could hum one of his tunes. Some artists transcend their genre, but not Garth; his music is too safe, his sensibility too middlebrow. And his sore-winner business practices have been steadily eroding his industry support base. "I'm sure EMI is not drinking champagne over the success of the Garth record," says Tony Brown, president of MCA Nashville. "They've got the biggest record this year, and the biggest mess in Nashville." If Brooks has been so unhappy with Capitol Nashville, why hasn't he just left? The answer is complicated, and it gets to the heart of both his personalities. Back in the '50s, his mother, Colleen, was an aspiring country star signed to--that's right, Capitol. But she gave up her career when she met and married Brooks's father (she had three children from a previous marriage) and moved to Oklahoma to raise the family. Did she regret her choice? "I would," Brooks says, "if I was her." Brooks has spent a good portion of his life trying to atone for that regret. He grew up in Yukon, Okla., a small town on U.S. Route 66. There were six kids altogether, and they didn't have much. "Do you know what S.O.S. is?" Brooks asks. "It's ground hamburger with a kind of milk-white gravy on toast. S--on a shingle. I ate so much of it as a kid." All the children excelled. Garth originally pursued sports. His sister, Betsy Smittle, was the musician; she played guitar, sang, won talent shows. In college, though, Brooks got serious about music. With one semester still to go, he told his mother he wanted to move to Nashville and try to make it as a country singer. "I begged Garth not to go," Colleen says. "I cried. I said, 'I want you to get a real job. That's why we've sent you to college'." Garth postponed his decision, but he wouldn't give up. "When he graduated," Colleen says, "he handed me his tassel, which they had all done. He said, 'Now can I have your blessing to pursue music?' I said, 'No, but I'll pray for you.' I never gave him my blessing. Entertainment was so hard on a woman, I assumed it would be that way for a man." Brooks went on to achieve more than she could have dreamed. His 1990 album "No Fences" sold 13 million copies; "Ropin' the Wind," released the following year, sold 11 million. At one point he had three albums in the top 20. As far as Garth's camp is concerned, he's not just bigger than country, he's bigger than music, period. "We're a brand," says comanager Doyle. "We're a Campbell's soup or Budweiser beer." Capitol president Quigley used to market ski boots, Swatches and Rolling Rock. "Of all the products I've worked with," he says, "Garth is by far the best." But Brooks has had trouble adjusting to his stature. In 1991 he admitted being unfaithful to his wife, Sandy, during his early days on the road. (The couple are still together; they have three daughters.) In 1993 he outed his sister Betsy as a lesbian in a television interview without consulting her. Brooks had a recent single, a pro-tolerance anthem called "We Shall Be Free." Betsy, Brooks's bass player at the time, was shocked when he called to warn her of what he'd done. "It put me in a state of panic," she says. "I thought, 'Oh my God, they're going to blow up the bus or something.' But nothing bad came of it. A lot of good came of it, really. People are a bit more open-minded." In 1996 his conflict over his own success reached a bizarre crescendo when he refused an American Music Award for favorite artist of the year. Somewhere along the way, a very strange tic developed. Brooks started referring to himself in the third person. It was as if he began to separate his inner self from the country-music leader, the record setter, the icon on the video monitors. He separated the man from the product. "It's easier for me to talk about Garth than say I," he says. "Garth is supposedly the biggest-selling solo act in the United States. I can't say I am. That feels egotistical to me, and I hate that feeling. Also, Garth is what you see onstage. Garth is the lighting rig, he's the band and most of all Garth Brooks is the people out there. You gotta admit, the guy would look pretty silly doing all that stuff if no one was reacting. So he's just a reaction of the people." Imagine that: feeling so invisible that you only exist as a reflection of others. You'd better have two personalities. Otherwise, you'd have none. 
Back to the Articles Page
Back to the Anti-Garth Homepage |
