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Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.7 KB | 168 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 67

COVER STORIES

Friends in Low Places


Garth Brooks, average guy, pleasant singer and hokey holy terror
as a performer, is the surprising new face of pop

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


    Every night is Funny Night.

    Here is this unlikely new country superstar, with his
acetylene eyes and chipmunk cheeks, stalking the concert stage,
acting up, acting crazy, climbing the rigging and blitzing the
crowd with bravura. He's part Jolson and part Jagger, pulling
stunts that smack more of the Fillmore than the Opry, and the
audience hollers for him, feasts on him, lets itself go nuts
with him. Nicely nuts. Mannerly nuts. Country nuts.

    Here it is, almost a quarter-century later, and Garth
Brooks, 30, is still the star of Funny Night, a family ritual
from his childhood in Yukon (pop. 21,400), the Oklahoma City
suburb where young Troyal Garth Brooks would knock himself out
trying to outshine his sister and four brothers. Only difference
now is that the venue's gotten bigger, and the stakes higher.
Dramatically higher. Today this guy with the excess longitude
under the chin is the new face of pop music, 1992.

    Damn. Or hot damn, depending on your tolerance for
show-biz artifice and nonspontaneous combustion. Brooks is a
pretty fair songwriter and a hokey holy terror of a performer.
He has a solid, pleasant voice -- short on character and totally
short-changed on funk -- and he's possessed of a mean weather
eye for the prevailing winds of showbiz. He went to Oklahoma
State University on a partial athletic scholarship ("Athletics
always kept me in school") and majored in advertising and
marketing. That background, competitive and commercially
calculated, gave him a cool edge when he was ready to make his
assault on Nashville. "Stunk at everything I did," he claims.
"Music was the one thing I felt proud of."

    Country ran in his family. His mom, Colleen Carroll
Brooks, was a '50s-era singer who performed with Red Foley on
Ozark Jubilee. When he married his sweetheart Sandy Mahl in
1986, he confesses, "it was the last thing I wanted to do. I
hated being tied down." But it was Mahl who kept his hope alive
when he wanted to quit Nashville for a while, look for a
regular job back home in Oklahoma and maybe try the music
business again later. "I'm not makin' this trip every year," she
told him. "Either we're diggin' in, or we're goin' home for
good." They dug in, and six months later Brooks signed with
Capitol Records. "I am so thankful to God and Sandy," Brooks
says. "It turned out real well for me."

    What has given Brooks his edge is serendipity, and a keen
sense of timing. "I really admire him," says Reba McEntire. "He
has great instincts, and he is great at marketing." Brooks'
inspiration was to kick loose, not at the conventions of the
music so much as at the constraints governing performance. His
music has enough rock echo to catch the ear of anyone fleeing
rap or dance synth on the radio, but it's not aggressive or
demanding. It certainly isn't haunting -- you'll have to search
far afield from Brooks before you glimpse the ghost of Hank
Williams -- but it is insinuating. Even when it's tackling a
fairly serious subject like domestic violence, as in The Thunder
Rolls, it sounds . . . well, nice. Maybe not entirely
appropriate, but it sure goes down smooth.


    Growing up, Brooks idolized country sapmasters like Dan
Fogelberg, but not for him the doe-eyed, achingly sincere
delivery of that stereotypical singer-songwriter. Brooks
pulverizes his songs in performance, putting each one across as
if it were Born to Run. He has the brass of Billy Joel but a
sweetness of temper that keeps him on the south side of
overbearing. All that, and a beaver felt Stetson (size 7 5/8)
that makes him look dorky. Deliberately, one assumes.

    Brooks manufactures a kind of hydrogenated country music
-- pop and branch water -- that has a message and no menace,
just as his live shows have the trappings of rock without
rock's edge of danger or (as in the case of Bruce Springsteen)
its all-out emotional engagement. He's a country performer not
only for country folk who want a kick, but for city slickers
who don't want to stray too far from the superficial trappings
of rock. He's new and familiar at the same time. And at the
right time.

    The new country heat has made it easier for some other
voices, too, to break through. There is Clint Black, who is less
showy than Brooks but pithier, kind of like a whistle-clean
Merle Haggard. His 1989 hit single, A Better Man, was a true
heartrender, a no-nonsense male confessional, and suggests that
his new album, due in September, will be worth the wait. There
are the Kentucky Headhunters, described by their rhythm
guitarist Richard Young as "the scariest things in country
music." The KenHeads blend whimsy, old-time picking and some
refried hippie riffs with the dynamism of a rock band from some
Ozark Olympus.

    There is Travis Tritt, whose early affection for the
Allman Brothers and the Eagles can be heard in the lush
melancholy of his tunes and such spiky go-to-hell anthems as
Here's a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares). And there are Carlene
Carter and Rosanne Cash, two of country's most valuable and
idiosyncratic talents. Cash has an intellectual rowdiness -- cut
with an adult dose of rock -- that makes most of this new group
sound like Sunday choristers. Carter (part of the legendary
Carter family) is a kind of roots rebel and hard to pin down,
but last year's I Fell in Love was her breakthrough hit --
Sylvia Plath at the honky-tonk.

    There are any number of voices singing behind and slightly
to the left of Brooks, and plenty of impressionable ears
waiting to hear, including many who are wandering over from the
scorched earth of hard rock and many who are tuning in from the
realms of pop. George Ward, assistant director of the Texas
State Historical Association, cautions purists about the
"romantic tendency to look at country as having been purer in
the past, and less commercial. That is misleading, because it
was commercial from the start." True enough. But never before
has country been so pop-specific and so savvy about the
mainstream.

    Never mind the artifice. Never mind that Tritt calls his
songs "country music with a rock-'n'-roll attitude," or that Ken
Kragin, one of the country's key managers, calls Brooks "to some
extent a George Strait clone . . . kind of a cheerleader running
around onstage, whipping up enthusiasm." Forget all that and
remember Willie Nelson's observation: "It doesn't matter to a
real music fan whether the guy has on a hat or not. The real
talent, when it gets an audience, will show through."

    And keep a little perspective, too, borrowed from the
wonderful Emmylou Harris, who was mixing country and rock under
the influence of Gram Parsons while Brooks was still mooning
over his Fogelberg LPs. She likes all these upstarts just fine
but reminds us that "they're good -- not better. Not better than
Merle Haggard or George Jones."

    Measured by the standard of Willie and Merle, of George
and Hank, of the Carter family and Johnny Cash, Brooks really
does seem to be what he says he is, "a pretty average guy," and
doubtless it will take time, hard traveling and a lot more music
to make him better than average. But there are detonations all
over the country field today, and Brooks has already lit more
than his share of fuses. Considering the albums he's sold,
considering the audiences he's reached, and touched, and
enlarged, there is nothing average about his accomplishments.
Or even his hat size.