TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092490/0924440.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6KB | 127 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 92

Country Classicists


Clint Black and Garth Brooks take the old road to Nashville

By JAY COCKS -- Reported by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York


    The cops came to the door. Again. Seems like Houston's
finest were always trying to get in the way of Clint Black's
career.

    Black played bass in his brother's band, and their folks
encouraged them by cooking barbecue in the backyard and
inviting friends over to eat, listen and dance. The boys would
get to going so good that everyone lost track of time, until
the police came calling. "Folks next door, they're
complaining," one cop would say. "Must not have invited them."

    Now that Black has become one of the hottest young men in
country music, everyone's knocking on his door, and there are
no complaints. His debut album, Killin' Time, has been at No.
1 for the past 29 weeks, and his second, Put Yourself in My
Shoes, is due in November. The music is a lot more refined than
his backyard material, and it doesn't come with ribs, but it's
the freshest, pithiest country sound since Randy Travis.

    Or Garth Brooks. As luck would have it, he came along about
the same time. He's the same age as Black, 28, and he hails
from roughly the same background (raised in Yukon, Okla., just
outside Oklahoma City) and the same stretch of musical country.
Black's tunes have a little more sadness in them, maybe more
dimension. Brooks comes on easier, making a direct assault on
the heartstrings, singing in a kind of simonized tenor suitable
for both serenades and bust outs. His debut album, Garth
Brooks, is No. 2, right behind Killin' Time, and has spent
about half a year in the Top Ten. Last month Brooks pulled down
five nominations from the Country Music Association, and Black
landed four. That's a good year's work for both, and good news
for Nashville.

    Black and Brooks, along with such kindred voices as Vince
Gill, Alan Jackson and Travis, are part of a kind of
neoconservative musical move back to country basics. No outlaw
image or firebrand tunes for these folks. They lay down
melodies with a light country swing and a tinge of melancholy.
They sing bedrock sentiments about home and hearth, loneliness
and heartbreak and getting done in by the big time in the big
city. "I consider myself traditional," Black says. "And I'm
new, so if I had to call myself something, it would be `new
traditionalist.'"

    "I have always come in through the back door rather than the
front," Brooks reflects in his soft Oklahoma accent. "It always
seems like I am standing outside of me, watching the whole
thing go down, whatever I am doing." From that vantage point,
Brooks would have caught a good show starring both his main
competition and himself.

    Black worked in construction for a while, plugged away hard
at making a musical name for himself through the boom years in
Houston and the Urban Cowboy vogue of the early '80s, when
every citybilly wanted to wear snakeskin boots and ride a
mechanical bronc. "Hundreds of western-wear stores popped up
around that time," Black observes dryly. "But, musically, I
couldn't hear a lot of difference."

    Black's got a good ear and -- judging from his songs --
short patience for affectation of any kind. His lyrics bear
down sharp but easy, perhaps because he came to country by a
slightly different route. "When I was eight, I started
collecting records," he remembers. "But it was the rock stuff
that my older brothers had exposed me to. Then I got into
Loggins and Messina, Croce, Buffett, Jackson Browne and James
Taylor." He's had a total of one professional guitar lesson,
and all it did was make him impatient. He just kept his eyes
open around his hometown, where "there was always somebody with
a guitar. I learned that with three chords I could transpose
just about any song and play it." Now Black's traveling band
reflects his informal and eclectic approach. "The guys," he
says, "have played every kind of music imaginable, from jazz
fusion to hard country, so we've got room to stretch out."

    Brooks' story goes a little lighter on musicology and a
little heavier on personal drama. Black, who writes or
co-writes most of his tunes, seems to save himself for his
music. Brooks, who co-wrote only three of the cuts on his new
second album, No Fences, is more actor than writer; he knows
how to put some spin on the standard bio. "Not knowin' nothin'
about a lot of stuff, that's me," he says, before launching
into a sketch of his college experience ("I was a javelin
thrower; at least I wore a uniform that said I was"); his early
years with music ("Stunk at everything I did. Music was the one
thing I felt proud of"); his first encounter with Sandy Mahl,
whom he would marry in 1986 (Brooks was a bouncer in a club.
She threw a punch that went through a wall. But "I don't want
anyone to think she's not a lady"); and his hungry times before
breaking through, when he "went to Nashville expecting to see
my name up on water tanks."

    Other performers might talk a little about the bad times and
all the frustrations; Brooks describes a scene that sounds like
Jack Nicholson's famous freak-out in Five Easy Pieces. "Sitting
in the parklot of a damn fire station back in Hendersonville,
Tenn., beating my head as hard as I could because I had
snapped, and Sandy screaming at me to quit. I was crying, she
was crying. I calmed down, and we went back home." Half a year
later, Brooks signed with Capitol Records.

    That's a good country ending for a typical kind of country
story. What Brooks and Black share, along with a winning
penchant for hit making, is a gift for finding something fresh
in the familiar, something timely in the predictable and
timeworn. In uptown kinds of music, that quality is called
soul. Down home, it's just known as country. Pure country.