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                                                                                MUSIC, Page 62

COVER STORIES

Country Rocks The Boomers


Buoyed by fresh converts and embraced by a whole generation
facing the realities of middle age, the new Nashville sound
captures the mainstream with a nourishing mix of tradition,
down-home showmanship and up-to-date songs for grownups

By PRISCILLA PAINTON -- With reporting by Georgia Harbison/Buffalo


    It was a time of new prosperity in the U.S.A.
    And all the fortunate offsprings never had to pay
    We had sympathy for the devil and the Rolling Stones
    Till we got a little older
    And found Haggard and Jones
    A generation screaming for more room
    Kids of the baby boom

    -- Bellamy Brothers, 1986


    Baby boomers have gone through a strange musical journey.
For a time, rock music was their essential cultural touchstone, a
vein of deep feeling that seemed to flow through nearly every
one of them. If the oldest boomers grew up on early Stones and
the youngest arrived just in time to catch Van Halen, at least
they possessed a lingua franca.

    Then along came advances in studio technology and
radio-station niche marketing. Leading-edge music is now
subdivided into such abstruse and sharply segregated categories
as Christian Rap, Acid Jazz and Grunge Rock, and it can be
created, almost untouched by human hands, with something called
a Musical Instrument Digital Interface. The two major currents
of pop today have much to do with attitude and little to do with
musicality: heavy metal speaks to priapic barbarism, and rap is
so belligerent that for some it verges on antimusic.

    So who's topping the charts? Well, how about a balding
Oklahoma country singer whose idols include James Taylor and
John Wayne, who prances across stage like a cross between Mick
Jagger and Ferris Bueller, swinging from rope ladders and
smashing his guitar, and who brings 40-year-olds to tears with
his existential hymns about accepting life's incidental malice?
Rock may be moribund, but Garth Brooks sure is thriving.

    By their sheer demographic weight, the nation's 76 million
baby boomers continue to determine America's musical
preferences. And what America currently prefers is country.
Brooks now outsells Michael Jackson and Guns 'N Roses, country
radio is trumping Top 40, and Nashville is churning out new
stars so fast that Randy Travis' six years in the limelight
qualify him as an elder statesman.

    Significantly, country has achieved its new luster without
abandoning its heritage: a heritage so stubbornly rooted in
storytelling and simple melody that it has never quite left
behind the farm in Poor Valley, Va., where a moody lumberman
named A.P. Carter and his clan picked up guitars seven decades
ago and invented the Carter Scratch. The new wave of country
singers is dominated by artists who have succeeded largely on
their own terms, consolidating an eclectic mix of contemporary
sounds with old-fashioned catches in the throat, tinkles of the
mandolin, sugary sobs and vertiginous swoops of pedal steel
guitar. This generation's performers are the first bred on both
rock and country who are consciously choosing Nashville, as
Vince Gill did when he turned down a chance to join the rock
group Dire Straits in favor of continuing his country career.

    If the baby boomers have discovered country, however, it
is not just out of nostalgia. They have looked across the
musical landscape and found a cast of artists who are very much
like themselves. Today's hot country stars, Garth Brooks
foremost among them, are more likely to be college graduates
with IRAs than dropouts with prison records. They put Mercedes
and Volvos in their videos and refer to wine and cafes as much
as beer and honky-tonks. They worry about keeping in shape and,
in an era of middle-class constriction, about keeping ahead. The
women sing about their heartbreaks, but they also rejoice in
their sexual independence and ponder their opportunities. Both
genders extol the virtues of marital longevity.

    Gill, for one, looks as if he stepped out of an L.L. Bean
catalog, and he loves golf so much that he lives on a course
outside Nashville. Cleve Francis, one of the few black country
singers signed to a major label since Charley Pride in the '60s,
is a 46-year-old cardiologist from the suburbs of Washington.
Mary-Chapin Carpenter has a degree in American civilization from
Brown University; she drew the idea for her highly successful
When Halley Came to Jackson, about the appearance of Halley's
comet in Mississippi, from a line in the memoirs of Eudora
Welty. K.T. Oslin once made a living as a Broadway chorus girl,
and when she turned to country in her mid-40s, it was to sing
about such nonbucolic topics as older women sleeping with
younger men. Even the down-home Reba McEntire, who spent her
youth on her father's ranch and on the rodeo circuit, went on
to college, where she studied classical violin and piano and
"analyzed Mozart every which way."

    But more than any other country headliner, Brooks
encapsulates most of the complexities of the baby boomers. He
was raised in an Oklahoma City suburb, where he listened to Kiss
and Queen, and graduated from Oklahoma State, where he was a
middling jock and an advertising major. He hides his receding
hairline under his Stetson, and once said, "I'd rather be like
Schwarzenegger -- perfect teeth, perfect body, full head of
hair." He can be a pop nostalgist who croons old Billy Joel
songs, a country nostalgist who traces his lineage to the
backwoodsy George Jones, or a rock nostalgist who remembers what
the back and forth between a jumping-jack-flash performer and
his audience is supposed to be like. "Like great sex," he says,
"where you get wild and frenzied, then turn that around quick
to something gentle, tender and slow, and then get wild and
crazy again and just keep doing that over and over until one of
you drops dead."

    His essence, above all, is in a ballad like The Dance, a
palliative for a generation that has begun to lick old wounds
as it approaches middle age. "I could have missed the pain," he
sings. "But I'd of had to miss the dance." The video of The
Dance shows images of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King,
and the song's autumnal, retrospective tone is what seems to
touch millions of listeners. Says Sue Thayer, 43, a machine-shop
secretary from Grayling, Mich., and a convert to country music
from rock: "It's about love affairs gone bad, and death -- the
finality of relationships."

    Aging rock 'n' rollers have been quietly defecting to
country for years. But since 1990 the process has accelerated
sharply. "Elvis Presley was the first time I saw this kind of
reaction," says Jimmy Bowen, whose Nashville-based Liberty
Records distributes Brooks. "Then I saw it again with the
Beatles. And now I see it with Garth Brooks. When you turn on
millions of people in a short period of time, that's called a
phenomenon."

    Brooks has yet to prove he has the imagination of John
Lennon, much less the death-defying charisma of Elvis, but he
has broken all of Nashville's sales records. Until his 1991
Ropin' the Wind, no country album had ever entered Billboard's
pop chart at No. 1. Since his recording debut a short three
years ago, Brooks has moved more albums with more velocity than
anyone else in the history of Nashville: when the figures for
Ropin' are added to those for Garth Brooks and No Fences, his
first and second releases, he has sold more than 16 million
records.

    Even without Brooks, the country sound has upset the
cosmopolitan assumptions of Los Angeles and New York City, which
said drawl-and-twang music would never acquire a mass audience.
Country music was, after all, the sort of rube industry that
made a vamp out of the cowboy by putting him in rhinestones and
that churned out corn pone-ography like TV's Hee Haw, the show
where banjo pickers and celebrity fiddlers would pop out of a
field to joke about henpecked husbands and lazy cousins. Worse,
the last time country flashed across the national consciousness,
it was propelled by the 1980 movie Urban Cowboy, starring a
mechanical bull and John Travolta. The crowd that had infested
discos was suddenly squeezing into tight-fitting jeans and into
pseudo-kicker saloons from Cambridge to Beverly Hills. Five
years later, the boots were tucked away next to the platform
shoes, and the New York Times was declaring that country music
might soon be "as dated as the ukulele."

    This time the boom is different. "A connection is really
being made between the audience and the music," says Bill Ivey,
director of the Country Music Foundation. "In the '70s and '80s,
with the excesses of the sexual revolution and the excesses of
an out-of-control speculative economy, everybody lived as
though they could have it all today and all tomorrow. Now, with
the collapse of the savings and loans, the specter of AIDS, and a
weak economy in which anybody who has a job considers himself
lucky, I think everybody realizes we are going to have to live
like grownups. Country music is definitely music for grownups."

    Lest there be any lingering doubt, grownups, or at least
people over 35, buy more records than teenagers do. They account
for 29% of the units sold, compared with 18% for the 15-to-19
age group, according to the Recording Industry Association of
America. Until last year, the effect of that purchasing power
was disguised by the sketchy oral reports drawn from record
stores canvassed for the Billboard pop charts. But last year the
charts began relying on SoundScan, a firm that compiles
computerized bar-code information from cash registers. On the
May 25 pop chart, the first based on the SoundScan data, 15 more
country albums showed up in the Top 200. In 1984 the country
category showed only eight gold (500,000 sales), four platinum
(1 million sales) and seven multiplatinum (multimillion sales)
albums; last year an astonishing 24 country albums went gold,
21 went platinum, and eight went multiplatinum.

    But the story is not just in the sales. Wynonna and Naomi
Judd's pay-per-view TV special in January drew more viewers than
did similar specials by the Rolling Stones and New Kids on the
Block. In a year when the income from the top 10 rock or pop
tours declined 32%, country acts increased their revenues 40%.
The recently published autobiography of Ralph Emery,
Nashville's answer to Johnny Carson, who is the host of
Nashville Now, a live show on the Nashville Network (TNN), has
been on best-seller lists for 17 weeks. In just two years, the
magazine Country America has doubled its circulation to almost
1 million. Even the arbiters of hipness have begun paying
attention: both Spin magazine and Michael Ovitz's Creative
Artists Agency have new outposts in Nashville. And Saturday
Night Live this month featured Brooks as its musical guest.

    Above all, country is reaching deeper than ever into the
lives of Americans. Since 1980 the number of country radio
stations has gone from 1,534 to about 2,500 nationwide. By one
measure, country has become the nation's second most popular
radio format, after adult contemporary. Country stations rank
in first place in 45 of the top 100 radio markets, including
Buffalo, Kansas City and Orlando. Without much fanfare, discos
that used to play Top 40 tunes have been converting into country
music clubs, where cowboy wannabes pull up in Hondas to dance
the Slappin' Leather, the Tush Push or the Texas two-step.

    But perhaps the most obvious sign that country has
achieved a mainstream acceptability is its new and high profile
on prime-time television. First came CBS's Country Music
Association Awards last October, which unexpectedly landed in
the Nielsen Top 10. Then NBC got into the act: it launched a
weekly prime-time variety show called Hot Country Nights and in
January aired the special This Is Garth Brooks, which helped
push the network to its highest Friday-night ratings in more
than two years.

    Television in fact has worked a revolution in the
dissemination of the Nashville sound. The Nashville Network,
which serves as an almost round-the-clock showcase for country
music performers and their videos, has in nine years gone from
7 million subscribers to 54.5 million. On the strength of this
success, TNN's owner, Gaylord Entertainment Co., formed a
partnership last January with Group W Satellite Communications
to acquire Country Music Television, a service with an ambition
to do with country music what MTV did with pop and rock. In just
14 months its subscriptions have jumped 31%, to 15.7 million
households.

    The small screen quickly dispelled some further myths
about country. "The image that people had of a country performer
was Porter Wagoner -- a guy in his 60s who wears spangles and
a highly tailored cowboy outfit," says Lloyd Werner, who heads
sales and marketing for Group W. "But country fans discovered
that country performers looked just like them." And cable
executives discovered what they had already suspected -- that,
in Werner's words, "a country music fan is not over 60 and does
not wear bib overalls, drink Lone Star beer from a long-stemmed
bottle and drive a 20-year-old pickup with a shotgun rack in the
back."

    Actually, the country music lover long ago abandoned the
Southern holler for the middle-class suburbia of satellite
dishes that politicians like to call the heartland.
(Appropriately, the cornfield on the set of Hee Haw was recently
transformed into a mall.) Republicans have understood this ever
since Richard Nixon became the first President to visit the
Grand Ole Opry in 1974. George Bush campaigned with country
music stars Loretta Lynn and Peggy Sue, and made a pilgrimage
to Nashville last year for the Country Music Association Awards.
In many ways, the voters Bush was after are those who make up
the majority of TNN's audience: 32% have an income over $40,000,
and 13% make more than $50,000. They are in their 30s and early
40s, own their home, have one new car and one old one that they
work on themselves, and when they travel, it is by car to
places like Walt Disney World.

    Country is also benefiting from the determined eclecticism
of the twenty something generation. At a Nashville concert by
country hunk Alan Jackson, Brandi Byrd, 19, arrived with her
hair teased into a punk sculpture, wearing a replica of an
artfully threadbare Aero smith outfit. At home she puts her
Jackson and Brooks tapes alongside the work of groups like
Whitesnake, Poison and Motley Crue. Says Julie Hall, a
23-year-old clerk at TNN: "I'm just as likely to buy the Black
Crowes as I am to buy a Travis Tritt tape. I like good music.
I don't care what it is."

    But country's message makes the music belong, first and
foremost, to the baby boomers now coping with being in their
40s. Twenty-year-olds, says record executive Bowen, "are having
their first romance, and we're talking about the third divorce
over here." If rock is about feral impulses, country is about
spiritual nourishment. Cultural critic Camille Paglia, who has
celebrated the Dionysian power of rock music in her writings,
believes the genre suffered an identity crisis as it moved
further from the rural immediacy of folk and blues and lost its
restless, questing spirit. "In rock you're getting middle-class
suburban kids who have no experience of anything except what
they hear on the radio," she says. "Country music speaks
emotional truth. Rock has drifted from it." Says Paul Shaffer,
David Letterman's bandleader: "Country is soul music for white
people, and people always return to soul music, because that's
where the feeling is."

    If, as in Shaffer's description, country's appeal has
something to do with race, it is because pop has rarely been as
racially polarized as it is in the era of rap. Country fans,
who, like their stars, tend to be white, are not shy about
describing their music as the musical equivalent of the urban
escapism known as white flight. "Thank God for rap," says Bowen.
"Every morning when they play that stuff, people come running
to us." Says Ralph Emery: "Rap music speaks only to black
issues, and has turned a lot of white people off."

    But much more than race is involved in country's success.
At the end of a decade marked by lip-synching scandals and
Material Girlhood, Americans are reclaiming their right to
sentimentality, civility and a little bit of cellulite on the
dance floor. Take, for example, some patrons of the Golden
Nugget, a night spot in Buffalo's flourishing
country-and-western scene. "In a disco, if you're not a size 3,
forget it," says Heidi Fisher, 28. "They're into spandex heaven.
And your hair has to be out to here with hair spray. I only wear
spandex in a dark gym. Here it's more relaxed and I can be
myself. And if someone bumps into you they're more likely to
say, `Excuse me.' " Danny Beal, a 27-year-old dairy farmer from
nearby Darien, says, "It's the only place I can be in public and
show my feelings." And now that promiscuity is out, says Gary
Marcinkowski, 25, who owns a Buffalo-area painting business, the
atmosphere in a country bar offers another advantage: "It's less
of a pickup scene."

    Country music seems right on time for the abstinent '90s.
Randy Travis' first hit single, On the One Hand, set the tone
in 1985, in an ambivalent lament that "on the one hand, I count
the reasons/ I could stay with you/ . . . But on the other hand/
There's a golden band/ To remind me of someone/ Who would not
understand." Today the title song of Mike Reid's album Turning
for Home is a tribute to his baby daughter; George Strait is
praising the immutability of paternal love in Love Without End,
Amen; Alan Jackson is chanting to his wife that I'd Love You All
Over Again.

    Marriage counseling is in, and so is staying sober. The
barfly characters who cried in their beer in classic country
songs have been displaced by yuppified drinkers who, in the
words of a Reid song, are content to be sitting on their porch
and "sippin' some wine/ from my coffee cup." That is, if
they're drinking at all. In the video Travis Tritt made last
year for The Whiskey Ain't Workin', the character he plays
pointedly refuses to drown his sorrows in alcohol.

    The women of country music used to wait for their wayward
husbands to come home, or stand by them even when they didn't.
But to country music's postfeminist performers, both scenarios
seem a waste of time. The middle-aged women in K.T. Oslin's
work are busy warning their lovers that they are chronically
fickle, are having careers while their ex-husbands have custody
of the child, or are just plain contemplating the legacy of
their past revolts. "Oh we've burned our bras and we've burned
our dinners/ And we've burned our candles at both ends," is her
bittersweet assessment in 80's Ladies. Meanwhile, Trisha
Yearwood sings about a woman with such a sense of autonomy that
she demands men "who will cry on my shoulder" but won't "follow
me around." And in the new video for the song Is There Life Out
There? Reba McEntire refuses to let a too early marriage be an
occasion for whining: she goes back to college and gets a
degree.

    "Things don't always work out all right in country songs,"
says Kevin Phillips, author of the 1990 book The Politics of
the Rich and Poor. "What a perfect backdrop for a recession
that is undercutting the American Dream." Clint Black's One
More Payment is a classic hard-times complaint about the rent,
the banker at the door, and a roof that is crumbling. But the
current country songs also hurl Molotov cocktails at the upper
classes and the system that favors them. Brooks succeeded last
year in making a national barroom anthem out of Friends in Low
Places, which turned an abandoned lover's revenge into an act
of social protest. "Blame it all on my roots," he sang. "I
showed up in boots/ And ruined your black-tie affair."

    Country's appeal is not a function of the leading economic
indicators, however. It draws its power mostly from people like
Jyne Kubas, 52, an Alan Jackson fan who is not embarrassed to
say she still hurts from her divorce 10 years ago. " `Cowboys
don't die and heroes don't cry,' " she says, repeating the
sardonic opening lines of Jackson's song Here in the Real World.
"He says life is not like the movies. I used to tell people he
took a phrase out of my life." For Kubas, as for many of the
nation's still growing ranks of country fans, the songs are
precious musical absolutions, forgiving them for the vanities
they cherished and lost, and gently nudging them through middle
age.