Producer Allen Reynolds, supervisor of the recording of three Garth Brooks albums that to date have sold more than 17 million, fields an impertinent yet insistent question:
Is he rich?
”I`ve always been rich,” the softspoken Reynolds counters after a moment, in obvious discomfort.
”I never cared if I got rich or not. I just wanted to make my living in the music business. If you get to do work you value, you`re rich, and I always thought if I got to do that, I`d probably make a living.”
After another silent second, he suddenly laughs and, in an awed-sounding whisper, grants that the Brooks royalties have constituted considerably more than a living.
”It is,” he says with a wondering shake of his head, ”like winning the lottery.”
One of Nashville`s most gifted behind-the-scenes architects of stardom, Reynolds has long since earned this windfall. He also has been hot before. Previous to becoming the producer behind Brooks, he played similarly pivotal roles in the development of two other distinctive country stars in the early
`70s-Don Williams and Crystal Gayle-and then developed Kathy Mattea in the late `80s.
He says, though, that his current megastar possesses certain powers he hasn`t encountered before.
”He has an unusually retentive mind,” he says of Brooks.
”I was talking to an interior decorator recently who has done some work in my office and has also done a little work with Garth. She told me she took him by her house to show him some things and discuss something. She said they weren`t there but a couple of minutes, and later she was astonished when he started telling her what she had on her mantel and on her table and so on. She said it was as if he had taken a photo of the place with his mind.
”That has been my experience with him, too. So many artists, you have to remember a lot of things for them, and remind them, and be patient and sort of prep them to get them back into where you were when you left off with them the last time. You don`t have to do that with Garth. He remembers. At the same time, he`s also way ahead. He`s thinking 1993 and `94.”
Reynolds and Brooks came together just after Brooks had been signed by Capitol Records. One of his managers, song publisher Bob Doyle, called Reynolds and the three of them got together and talked. Then, as is usual with him, Reynolds suggested they do a little recording to see how it went.
”The songs we cut that first time included (the subsequent hits) `Much Too Young To Feel This Damn Old,` `If Tomorrow Never Comes` and `Not Counting You,` ” Reynolds recalls.
”We communicated well and had a good time, and I think both Garth and I felt good about it. So we just went on from there.”
A primary Reynolds production tenet is never to do the same thing twice, no matter how successful a particular record might be.
That tactic, so different from the herd mentality with which popular music is rife, makes for enduring stardoms rather than flashes-in-the-pan, and it may reflect Reynolds` roots. They lie not in Nashville but in the diverse musical melting pot of Memphis.
Born near Little Rock, Ark., the son of flower merchants, he was reared mostly in Memphis, where he remembers loving not only country music but also rhythm and blues, white and black gospel and, on local Sun Records, early rock `n` roll. He first wanted to become a star and even made a few records, but soon gravitated toward behind-the-scenes work, writing a song called ”Five O`Clock World” that became a hit for The Vogues.
”That song was written straight out of my life,” he recalls. ”I had graduated from Rhodes College in Memphis and was working for First Tennessee Bank during the daytime-first in marketing, then in real estate and finally as a branch manager.
”I was at the bank when (Dr. Martin Luther) King was killed down there, and musically the town was never the same afterward. The connections between black and white musicians that had been loving and happy in my experience hit the rocks.”
His longtime friendship with singer-songwriter Dickey Lee (”the first human being I ever knew who wrote songs”) led him to an association with eccentric production genius Jack Clement, whom Reynolds followed to Beaumont, Tex., and then, in 1970, to Nashville.
Around 1971, he took an all-but-unknown ex-member of the Pozo Seco Singers, recorded songs that had been turned down by established stars all over Nashville, and recorded one of Nashville history`s more memorable albums- thanks to such songs as ”Amanda,” ”I Recall A Gypsy Woman” and ”The Shelter of Your Eyes.” The album put Don Williams on the road to stardom.
Soon afterward, Reynolds took country queen Loretta Lynn`s baby sister, Crystal Gayle, and helped her develop a cooler, more urban country style that thrust her out of her sister`s shadow and into a limelight all her own. At least two songs Reynolds himself wrote, ”Wrong Road Again” and ”Waitin` For the Times to Get Better,” became important hits in her rise.
After an unusually long, almost 10-year association, he and Gayle ceased working together in the early `80s, Reynolds says, and he ”went through a period of diminished activity” that coincided with Nashville`s largely plastic post-Urban Cowboy Era, when accountants supplanted music people in the executive chairs of many record companies.
”I became very unhappy with the business,” he recalls. ”I was making music and then trying to plug it into (record) people who had never written a song, never sung, never performed, never been in a studio, and had no experience-but had all the arrogance in the world. It was miserable.
”I got to the point about 1984 when I decided I didn`t want to produce anymore unless it was not for a major label. I wanted to work with
(independents) Flying Fish, Sugar Hill, Rounder, that kind of thing. I was going to go back to songwriting and sell this place. And I almost did. Thank goodness, the deal fell through.”
Another new wanna-be, Kathy Mattea, showed up on his doorstep. Acoustic-minded and folk-oriented, Mattea would not have seemed to most people to have the potential to become a country mainstreamer, but several years of work with Reynolds made her a two-time Female Vocalist of the Year.
This year Mattea is giving their association a temporary breather, making her next album with Judds producer Brent Maher, but Reynolds says their labors together played a major part in curing him of his malaise.
”Working with her was really nourishing to me. It helped me get interested again and come out of the funk I had let myself slip into. She`s a good friend. I wouldn`t take anything for having met her.”
Although Reynolds obviously has played large roles in the development of stars, he is gentlemanly and retiring about the claiming of credit-as he is about everything else. He did, he says, nudge Brooks toward recording the sensitive ”The Dance,” which Brooks had found, but confesses he himself
”might not have” chosen the rowdy and even more important ”Friends In Low Places,” on which Brooks was dead set.
Currently, Reynolds` full-fledged clients are Brooks and Williams, and he also is coproducing Emmylou Harris with Richard Bennett and Hal Ketchum with Jim Rooney. The day of the interview, he and engineer Mark Miller were mixing Brooks` first Christmas album, which, because of some refreshingly new material, promises to be a much more memorable than most such seasonal efforts.
Reynolds and Brooks also have recorded three songs for Brooks` next regular album, about which Reynolds is mum. Asked if Brooks again can come up with something as explosively different as his previous packages, Reynolds shrugs.
”If you do each album so that it feels like a good complete show, one that would flow and be of high quality and wouldn`t lose the audience, you know you`re going to have some songs like `Friends in Low Places` that rise like rockets,” he says.
”But you don`t plan a `Don`t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue` or a `Where`ve You Been.` You just keep your standards high, and they come along when they do.”
