Garth Brooks is “either the dumbest s.o.b. I’ve ever seen or the smartest,” Liberty Records boss Jimmy Bowen said recently.
The remark, made to Brooks, was prompted by the Liberty superstar’s controversial public opposition to the widespread sale of used compact discs, a stance that aroused a furor among retailers responsible for selling his albums. Noting that Brooks got “killed” on the used-CD issue, Bowen perceptively went on to note that although Brooks lost the battle, he won a war:
“There’s nobody on earth who doesn’t know you’ve got a new album out.”
“I looked at him,” Brooks remembers, “and kind of snickered-although that (calling attention to the new album) was never the deal at all.”
After six months of hibernation, the megahullabaloo has broken out again, possibly with more force than ever. With a half-year off to catch his breath and evade collapse from overwork, Brooks now looks eager once more to try to push his incredible popularity past its limits.
He has just finished filling the 65,000 seats of Texas Stadium in Dallas three times on successive nights for the filming of a live NBC-TV special to be broadcast next spring. At press time Wednesday evening, he was attempting to win his third consecutive Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year award. He is reported to be close to signing a Hollywood movie contract, and the brand-new album to which Jimmy Bowen referred, “In Pieces,” already has sold a million copies in the three weeks it has been on the street.
Despite the long layoff, he is ranked as the ninth highest-earning entertainment figure of 1993. He is booking sold-out multi-night stands in the largest coliseums around the nation and is scheduled for three evenings at the Rosemont Horizon beginning Thursday.
“In Sacramento, we saw 62,000 people,” Brooks says of the new tour. “In Vegas we saw 51,000. We just put the Fargo (N.D.) Dome on sale, 40,000 seats, and we got two nights out of it-and they’re talking about a third night because they got 385,000 calls.”
Three hundred eighty-five thousand?
“Yeah! I’m thinking either somebody was worrying the hell out of redial or there’s some people there wanting to come to the show.
“Whew!” he says. “People have not forgotten, man, and to be given six months off and come back and not be forgotten is the neatest gift people have ever given me. To totally shut down TV and everything for six months and come back like you never left … what a sweet, sweet gift.”
And a sweet, sweet testament to Brooks’ bombastic drive and understated intelligence. A man who always seems to give fans something different from the last time they saw him, from guitar-smashing to rope-swinging to who-knows-what’s-next, he returned to them this time having, as he says, re-established his “hunger”-in more ways than one. Thanks to a rigorous diet, he is 50 pounds smaller than his former self.
The planning behind his unprecedented Nashville career is a subject that Brooks seems reluctant to address, but “No comment” isn’t in his vocabulary. Asked about the marketing training he received at Oklahoma State University and its role in the awesome commercial aspects of his stardom, he says, “That has been a big kind of myth, and I don’t know if it’s from our (his publicists’) side or what. But I never majored in marketing. I got an advertising degree, and I flunked (an entry-level) marketing course three years in a row. Marketing just never was my bag.”
Elementary marketing, he means.
“I was taking 4000- and 5000-level marketing courses while I was flunking the first one,” he adds. “They got past the rules and into `Marketing, What Is It?’ What I learned was that the most important thing you can do is sell your next product, not the one you’re selling now. …
“Anybody can go out there and have something new that has an impact and then dies. The thing you want to do is keep the impact up. For instance, if you’re selling T-shirts, you hopefully give people a T-shirt of such good quality and such good printed design that they’re looking for the next one to come out.
“It’s the same way with albums.”
Brooks’ new album is a typical collection of his untypical material. It contains the stampede-paced new single “Ain’t Goin’ Down (‘Til the Sun Comes Up),” a wild song of youthful rebellion. There is “Stand Outside the Fire,” a quintessential Brooks-philosophy song about the necessity, if you’re really going to live, of getting burned by life instead of just observing it.
There is the gritty, sad and unforgettable “Cowboy Song”; “The Red Strokes,” a very non-mainstream thing about the colors of emotion; the scaldingly Cajun-tempoed “Callin’ Baton Rouge”; and a celebration of blue-collar opinion titled “The American Honkytonk Bar Association.”
What is his message to youth in “Ain’t Goin’ Down,” whose young female protagonist (already grounded “until you’re dead” for her last escapade) runs off with her lover? At the end of the song, Brooks acknowledges that the disobedience in the story “bothered” him.
“I’m a guy who’s still confused about life,” he says. “I’ve got this wild side, where I really want to rip things up, and I’ve got this side that’s aimed at manners and being polite and following the rules. I’m a mixed-up guy, but I can only be me, and the inner turmoil inside me spills out on these records.”
To a question as to the nature of the murder in “The Night Will Only Know,” Brooks discloses his cannier side, how second-nature the element of surprise constantly looms in his market strategy.
“No one will know (how the murder was committed) ’til they see the video,” he says. “It’s something that no one is thinking about when they hear it, but when the video comes out, you’ll see.” Meanwhile, the May-scheduled NBC special, his second, is so “full of gags and stunts,” he says, that it will “have to be edited in a nice way” to let the music retain its dominance over “spectacle.”
So where can he go from there?
“It’s a dead-end run if you keep trying to become more and more explosive, because pretty soon you’re just going to have to blow yourself up to top yourself,” he says. “I think my turn now is to become differently explosive, not just wilder and wilder. After this special, what I want to do for the next one is do `This is Garth, too,’ and do an unplugged, acoustic version, the songwriter version. Brooks indicates his next year’s album may be one of under-noticed songs from his first five packages. He says he would like to re-record them in the “unplugged, acoustic” motif.
In the matter of movies, he purports to be less interested in starring in them than creating them but “I’m sure in signing with a movie company they probably expect” on-camera work, as well.
The popularity on which a budding movie career must initially be based will receive a critical re-measurement by the sales of the current album.
“No Fences” sold 10 million copies, followed by “Ropin’ the Wind” with 9 million and “The Chase,” which sold 6 million.
“Now if this (new) one is less than that after its run of a year or so, I think we’ve got a pattern going of pretty much heading out the door.
“But if this one beats the last one, then maybe we can establish a pattern of people just taking them for what they are, so they don’t have to be more or less than the previous one. That would take a lot of pressure off.
“You go from underdog to favorite to underdog again,” he explains. “The second underdog thing happens when people say you can’t keep it up, when they say, `Hey, man, watch what I’m going to do to you. I’m gonna tear your new album up so bad in this review that no one’s gonna buy it.’
“You’re standing there with people taking shots at you, but the cool thing is, there are people sticking up for you-and the people sticking up for us seem to be the people out in those seats at the concerts.
“Other than God himself, I can’t think of anybody I’d rather have on my side.”
