A Garth fan said that this article made Garth's leading man seem less like a puppet, and I agree.  It makes him seem more like a man out to destroy country music....or at least turn it into rap. Oh, and Patsi, please don't try to tell me the magazine isn't reliable because YOU aren't reporting for it.  To me, that's a plus.

 NASHVILLE NEMESIS
 WILL CAPITOL'S CHIEF SAVE THE GENRE OR KILL IT?
 
 By Jack Hurst, Tribune Country Music Writer.
 
NASHVILLE
   The least-liked man in Nashville occupies a cluttered office on West End Avenue, a couple of miles from Music Row. In it he tries to reassure fellow record executives he isn't out to kill country music.  New Jersey-born and New York-trained Pat Quigley, the lately installed president-CEO of the Nashville office of Capitol Records, preaches that time already has done that.
      "If you don't think country radio is in trouble look up `idiot' in the dictionary, because your picture must be in there," he says.  "The farm that we sing about in country music dried up. It's (now) owned by  Archer Daniels Midland Corp. and has a $4 million computer-driven irrigation system. Country music doesn't relate to young people. Country radio tells you their audience is 25 to 54, so you've got to be 25 to say you even listen to country music, (and) really (the average is more like) 35. The 18 to 24 segment of Arbitron in country music is the fastest-declining group in America."
        To save itself from Arbitron ratings that have gone on a diet since Nashville's fat Thanksgivings of the early '90s (sliding from a historic high 13.3 share of the overall market in the fall of 1992 to a decade-low 9.8 in the most recent Airplay Monitor/Arbitron survey), Quigley asserts that the
Tennessee capital's country music establishment could have an 18 share if it took revolutionary steps that include:
   - Plowing a lot of their shrunken profits back into the business via
advertising.
   - Buying spots for country music on network television AND on country radio.
   - Giving country radio "big names" to boost its profile, even if that means
inviting people like once-supreme pop stars Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger, whose music has always had country sensibilities, to join the Nashville country community.
   - Abandon fluffy happy-time positivism in favor of songs that reflect life
as it really is on the brink of the 21st Century.

   Quigley, 48, graduated from Montclair State College in New Jersey with a degree in political science and business administration, then completed  postgraduate studies in organizational development at Stephens Institute, also in the Garden State.

   He started out selling skis for Salomon USA in 1975 and saw sales in his territory zoom within three years. Then he moved to another ski company, Marker International, with even greater success.
  
Incessantly moving on and up, he hawked St. Pauli Girl beer, Omega watches and Rolling Rock beer. In 1993 he joined the New York office of Capitol, where Garth Brooks was stunning the world with unprecedented sales for a country artist.
  
Quigley is regarded by many as an industry-hopping loose cannon who will have moved on to other challenges while his product price-cutting and
high-dollar advertising reap financial chaos for the Nashville industry.

   His detractors love to cite his widely reported suggestion to subordinates that Capitol country artist John Berry (Who Has Since Left the label-Jane) record a duet with MCA's classic country female, Patsy Cline. Told that MCA, which owns the Cline master recordings,  would never sanction such a project, Quigley is reported to have asked why
Capitol didn't just call Cline. Because, he was informed, she has been dead 35 years.

   Obviously more preoccupied with the present and future rather than the past, Quigley talks about how country music, instead of being just a glorified niche sound whose prevailing sociological root base is the Appalachian South, must become reflective of the whole country, diversifying itself with more non-Southern artists and grappling with life on the streets and suburban soccer fields of All America.
  
Oddly, Quigley's musical views can sometimes sound like an exhortation to return to country's traditional mission, which latter-day mainstream radio has perverted into the purveying of persistently "positive" pap.

   For all its long-derided songs about boozing, marital infidelity and the
mobile-home lifestyle, the country of yesteryear was directed toward depicting the real lives of its constituents. Johnny Cash memorably said it was the autobiography of America's common people, and the best of it -- from Hank Williams' "Cold, Cold Heart" to Garth Brooks' "The Dance" -- has been everybody's.

   Quigley probably never heard the Cash quote, but one of his points seems to be that the children or grandchildren of the people who headed into town after the death of the family farm are now part of Generation X.
 
 "Our studies show that kids who listen to rap would migrate to country if the quality of the music improved -- I mean the quality of the lyrics in
relation to their lives. Country radio (programmers) can either keep falling in Arbitron or they can embrace their fans, who say, `Just give me music that's relevant. I saw a war on CNN in four days. Did you guys miss it? The world changed. Stop talking about the family farm. It's gone.' "

Copyright Chicago Tribune
 
 Great Article, no?  Wouldn't country just be wonderful if it was more like rap?  And screw those farmers, we don't need them!  Everyone knows food comes from the grocery store.

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Disclaimer:
The OPINIONS expressed on this Web site are MINE!!!! They are not expressed out of any personal vendettas I might have against Garth Brooks.  I am not now, nor have I ever been employed by Garth Brooks. I simply believe him to be a greedy, arrogant, and untruthful being. Which is why I have this site.  To express the aforementioned beliefs. Everything mentioned on this site has been stated by Garth at one time or the other, either in person or through an interview. I was a Garth Fan Once-I would not have believed this stuff if Garth had not qualified it with his own words!