Garth Brooks is six hours late for his 9 a.m. interview.
He signed autographs until 2:30 a.m. the night before for a sellout rodeo crowd of 4,000 at Jacksonville, Texas-after doing the same thing until 4:10 a.m. the previous evening for another sellout throng of 3,000 in Dallas. Then from Jacksonville, he bused home through the rain to Nashville, where he arrived less than an hour ago.
His manner by now has returned to the usual, sometimes-somber quietude so different from his reputed flamboyance onstage. Traditional country music`s newest superstar of the moment is unquestionably Clint Black, but Brooks-scheduled to perform with Holly Dunn at Star Plaza Theatre in Merrillville, Ind., next Sunday -is more and more widely being hailed as its most exciting new stage performer.
Why? he is asked. What makes him so different up there? Doesn`t he just emulate Country Music Association Entertainer of the Year George Strait and traditionalists of yore by merely standing there and singing?
”I`m a huge fan of George Strait, and I can see how a woman could watch him stand there and sing for eight hours if he wanted to,” the Oklahoma-born ex-honkytonk bouncer softly replies. ”Because he looks and sings great. Me, I`ve been called the chubby choirboy, and I`m losing my hair, so I can`t get away with that.
”We throw guitars and scream at the audience, run out into the crowd, suddenly disappear offstage and appear somewhere standing on someone`s table, kick beer bottles off tables, throw water at each other onstage and just have fun. From the very first time, we`ve had a huddle before each thing to get fired up-you know: high fives, knock each other out. We just can`t wait to get out there.”
The realization he isn`t an Adonis isn`t what caused his frantic performance antics though.
He says that, ”from the very first day,” another and very different Brooks has taken over in front of a crowd. This one is overjoyed with disbelief that he`s actually getting to make his living doing the thing he enjoys most; that he`s hearing his songs on radio (where his last one, ”The Dance,” was country music`s No. 1 single three consecutive weeks); and that growing numbers of people know his name.
Can he help it if it just keeps getting more unbelievable?
”First, you were the underdog, and it didn`t much matter what you`d do;
people were nice to you,” he recalls. ”But now we`re on a level where we have to go into a lot of places and turn around a crowd that maybe doesn`t like you because you wear a hat. Or thinks, `Well, this guy`s just a shadow of Clint Black.`
”So you go out there and start working and see `em start to shift, and by the end of the show you`re looking around, and your guitar player`s screaming at you from 10 feet away and you can only see his mouth moving; you can`t hear nothin` except this crowd. That`s when your heart gets to pumping so hard you take your guitar and throw it as hard as you can across the stage, and the crowd goes nuts.
”Then you do something else to make `em go nuts, and it starts passing back and forth, and you get more fired up than the crowd does. Then it gets into just total mania until finally it gets like . . . like sex: such a frustration and a big buildup and then it just finally blows out, the show`s over, and you`re sitting back on the bus going, `Holy cow! What just happened?`
”It`s great. I wouldn`t trade it for the world.”
Growing numbers of country fans are feeling the same way about Brooks. Yet another in the herd of Nashville`s young and traditional-oriented so-called ”hat acts,” he, however, possesses a lot of traits that single him out.
For one thing, he`s a singer-songwriter who combines brains and brawn, holding a degree in advertising that he got while on an athletic scholarship at Oklahoma State. An oilfields product who says he has worked at everything from driving a tractor to selling shoes, he`s patriotic enough to love John Wayne and hate flag-burning, but also open-minded enough to admire the more revolutionary Rev. Martin Luther King and Pres. John F. Kennedy. God-fearing, he also sometimes gets a little profane.
The uncommon intensity characterizing his stage shows also seems to animate his burly body and burn in his dark eyes. It`s there, too, in his music, able to coax tears from electrocutionists and guffaws from a mourners` bench. It makes his brand-new single, ”Friends In Low Places,” one of the funnier and more powerful songs of working-class rage in Nashville memory, and his soon-to-be-released second album, ”No Fences,” a tour de force of awesome proportions.
His first album, ”Garth Brooks,” has earned ”gold” status by selling more than 500,000 (whereas Black`s first one, ”Killin` Time,” has sold more than 1 million), but its rise featured more of Brooks` departures from the norm. How many other Nashville performers would have given film footage of a competitor, the late Keith Whitley, a prominent and even reverent place in one of his own music videos, which Brooks did in his video of ”The Dance”?
Then there`s the seeming preoccupation with death and ban apparent honesty so thoroughgoing it can get a little uncomfortable. In discussing the prospective pitfalls for a married male performer on the road, for example, he remarks that no matter how beguiling some of the females are who eye him from the audiences and then talk to him in the autograph lines, ”there`s a line that you can go up to, and it`s called the edge.
”And a married man cannot dance on the edge, because sooner or later he`s going to fall. So you gotta keep the edge away from you, and when it comes in sight, you really get scared.
”You gotta keep remembering that at home you have stability and a love for eternity, someone that`s believed in you from the start and cares enough about you to kill you, cares enough to fight and argue in this day when it`s so easy to just say, `Let`s go downtown and sign the papers and go our separate ways.` ”
He and his wife Sandy, whom he met while bouncing in a nightclub in Oklahoma, have been married four years, and he says that in that time they have endured ”more problems than I think the average relationship will ever go through,” thanks to the incessant separations forced on them by this new profession he`s doing so well at.
With obvious emotion and admiration, he remarks that it ”takes a different breed to be an entertainer`s spouse: If the shoe was on the other foot, I`d probably have left her a long time ago.”
He even appears to be utterly honest about Clint Black, the genial young competitor who-armed with a high-powered manager and more muscular record company-busted out of the chute at top speed last year and went on to capture an armful of his industry`s awards while Brooks was moving slower, enduring among other things a radical change of administration at Capitol Records.
Heck, Brooks seems to be honest even to Black.
”I told him at the last award shows we were at, I said, `When you came out, I hated your guts, probably simply because I was envious,` ” he recalls. ”I said, `But I`ve grown to love you and what you stand for. I know it sounds corny, but if for some reason I`m not around, you take care of country music just the way you`ve been doing.`
”I don`t think he`ll stray (from the traditionalist path),” Brooks goes on. ”Even though some people may not think he has worked for what he has gotten, I think he has-because I`ve seen him out there, night after endless night, until his voice is gone. If I was in his shoes, I wouldn`t have been able to handle (the fast rise) he`s had. He`s a good man, and he has always been very nice to me.”
But-unless, as he told Black, he for some reason is ”not around”
(there`s that death thing)-don`t expect Brooks to let Black`s front-running of the field go unchallenged. To the contrary. The intensity that so obviously electrifies his personality also bespeaks a fiery competitive spirit that won him athletic letters in track and field at Oklahoma State a few years ago.
He indicates he figures Black has won a battle, not the war.
