Dreaming Out Loud

by Bruce Feiler

  By the time his platoon of “g-trucks” arrived in downtown Atlanta, Garth Brooks’s once meteoric career seemed to be in total free fall. The new album on which he had pinned so many hopes, Fresh Horses, had failed to keep pace with his previous releases. Though it had sold 3 million copies in its first three months, it had failed to hold the top position on even the country album charts—a far cry from several years earlier when he held that position for well over a year. Instead, by early March, he was down to a mere 15,000 units a week on the SoundScan chart that once had signaled his rise to prominence and that just a year earlier had calculated his weekly sales at ten times that amount. To add to his troubles, Garth had been roundly pilloried—then ridiculed—for his actions at the American Music Awards. At the Grammy Awards several weeks later, Vince Gill walked to the podium after winning an award for Song of the Year and announced that, unlike Garth, he planned to accept his trophy. At the Nashville Music Awards, a good barometer of industry attitudes, host Gerry House, a prominent DJ, declared that if anyone offered him an award, he wouldn’t be fool enough leave it behind.

  Then, to add to the growing perception that he was losing his flawless touch, the video Garth released for “The Change” consisted entirely of footage of rescue workers at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing. As a native son of the region, Garth had intended the video to pay tribute to the valor of the rescue workers. Instead, it was widely viewed, particularly in Oklahoma, as exploiting the tragedy for his own financial gain. Irate viewers deluged CMT with requests to pull the video. Garth worsened the situation by trying to strong-arm his label into sending a CD of the song to every radio station in America—not just country—and asking them to play it at 9:02 CST on the anniversary of the bombing. When the label refused, saying he’d be mocked for his Jesus complex, Garth took out a full-page ad in Billboard on his own letterhead inviting radio stations to telephone his office and coordinate a tribute. Faced with such stubbornness by the still reigning if weakened king of the genre, CMT and hundreds of radio stations did honor his request, though the following week many stations quietly dropped the song from their playlists, making “The Change” the second single from Fresh Horses to die a premature death. “Spend any time in Nashville and it’s clear that Brooks just baffles the hell out of the local music industry,” Melinda Newman, his friend and confidante, wrote in Billboard. “People speculate on everything: ‘How does he handle his fame so well?’ ‘Why doesn’t he just go ahead and quit while he’s at the top?’ ‘Why does he insist on controlling every facet of his career?’ ‘Why on earth does he keep talking about being forgotten?’”

  The start of Garth’s new world tour, if nothing else, was giving him a reason to stop worrying—or, at least, getting him out of the house for a while. But even when the show started setting records (80,000 tickets in Atlanta in two and a half hours, more than Elvis; 88,000 tickets in Washington, D.C., a venue record; 60,000 tickets in Miami, the most since the Grateful Dead), Garth began fearing that deep inside he might even be losing enthusiasm for the one thing he’d always enjoyed most in his career: his performances. After two years of waiting, tonight he would find out.

  Once the back doors of the Omni were opened, the crew went to work. The forklift driver, nicknamed “Grumpy Old Man,” started removing giant cases of equipment. A team of riggers—“Go-Go,” “Charlie,” and “The Abomination”—sidled up the twin aluminum ramps and began rolling out silver fiberglass boxes. As soon as the boxes hit the ground, a new crew of workers took over from the first and shepherded the equipment—banded lights, grid motors, spansets, ratchets—onto the floor of the auditorium. The floor was covered in a patchwork of thick cardboard panels that sat directly on top of the ice hockey rink.

  Within minutes, the entire crew was working. A few men arranged the portable silver cases along one side of the floor. A few more carried the first of the light trusses—giant rectangular scaffolding structures—and put them on the cardboard floor. Occasionally one would shout or burst into song. A few tripped over a stray cord or patch of exposed ice (“Hey, Mack, get some tape over here before somebody kills hisself…”). A steady chorus of loud metallic clanks accompanied the scene. But mostly everyone did his job with quiet determination and a few commands from the small team of roadies who traveled full-time with the show.

  “Opening a tour like this is a major deal,” explained Debbie Diana, a thirty-something lighting specialist who, along with other members of the Atlanta crew, was making ten dollars an hour for her work, with no guarantee that she would even get to see the show. “We look forward to it. We don’t know what the stage is going to look like. In six hours, though, we’ll see.”

  “Is there something special about this particular show?” I asked.

  “Well, since Garth started touring a couple of years ago, most country acts are as large, if not larger, than the rock tours going out. Five years ago, country was not like this, with lots of vari-lights and sophisticated equipment. Garth came along and was so influenced by rock ‘n’ roll that he did country with rock production. I’ve heard that in this new show there’s movable parts up in the truss, with motors and stuff. They’ve got forty-two motors—that’s a lot. They’re moving something up in the sky. We’ll have to wait and…ooh, look,” she cooed, “a giant mirrored ball. I think we have our first clue.”

  By the end of the first hour, the shape of the rigging was beginning to unfold. The eight-foot trusses were laid out in a giant octagon, with a smaller octagon truss inside it, connected with four-foot-long crossbars as spokes. The whole rigging looked like a giant oven burner, roughly twenty-five feet in diameter, that in time would be raised to the ceiling of the building and used to suspend the lights. This rigging would be the first thing constructed, followed by the speakers, and ultimately by the stage itself, which would rise from the floor and spread its wings from one side of the arena to the other.

  At 4:45 A.M. a team of men who had found their way to the ceiling began lowering strands of one-inch garden chain to the floor. One by one, the chains were hooked to the motors that had been affixed to the various joints of the double octagon. As the chains were being attached, the rest of the crew worked furiously. Two men set about attaching strobes to the giant truss. Several more strung bundles of cable around the perimeter. And one lone man with a pair of black jeans that sagged, plumberlike, down his backside had the all-important job of affixing two F-100 Performance Smoke Generators, a machine about the size of a portable vacuum cleaner that contained a heater, a pump, and a tiny fan, into which water and mineral oil were poured and out of which spurted artificial fog. “The ones on the floor go pretty much all the time,” he explained. “The ones up in the air we just give a blast every now and then and they produce just fine.”

  With the rig now pieced together, the pace seemed to quicken. At a quarter after five, one of the riggers started the computer that would run the lights. Minutes later, one of the electricians arrived with a silkscreen frame and a bucket of purple paint, which he used to paint Garth’s signature g on both ends of each light rack. And just before six, the first rack of several dozen lights was bolted to the rig. “There are five hundred pars, or fixed lights,” the head electrician explained. “Another hundred and fifty varis, or moving lights. All together, about a thousand.”

  “Any particular color scheme?” I asked.

  “The truth is, there are so many moving lights. Everything changes color, changes focus, changes position. It’s pretty much the case where your imagination is the only limit.”

  By half past six, the rig was ready to be raised, but production manager John McBride, who had met his wife Martina when she opened for Garth, decided to hold the ascension until seven, when Mark McEwen would be doing the national weather report for “CBS This Morning” live from the Omni floor. Jolly, friendly, almost giddy in his early morning element, Mark positioned himself at the edge of the floor, and, at precisely 7:01, received his cue from New York: “I wonder if
I might quote a Garth Brooks song,” he said, “‘I’m much too young to look this damn old…’” He chuckled at his happy TV pun. “So here we are, getting it all together. Garth is going to open his first tour in two years right here at the Omni tonight. We’ll be talking to Garth later on this morning, but shall we take a look at the weather…” Mark was not two words into his speech when McBride gave the word and the giant rig, with cables dangling and lights shivering, slowly began climbing to the sky. A burst of applause went up from the crew. Mark himself glanced briefly at the creation. And fifty feet away, to no one’s particular notice, a bleary-faced man with sleep in his eyes walked underneath the giant metal door, past the last truck waiting to be unloaded, and gave a simple, satisfied salute to the stage.

  “Okay, folks, here we go.”

  It was a little past 7:30 A.M. when Garth ambled into the backstage holding room. He had changed clothes in his dressing room, then lumbered across the hall to where the rest of us were waiting: his two publicists, his brother, and the makeup lady who had been hired for the day by CBS. He was not in a good mood.

  “I knew I never should have touched it,” he said to no one in particular. He greeted everyone with hugs and shakes, then plopped down in the chair. “It’ll probably be a year now before I’m normal again. I wanted to surprise my wife. And look what happened…”

  He removed his black GARTH BROOKS WORLD TOUR baseball cap. His hair, normally graying and thin, was a vivid peanut butter color—a little bit darker on the top, a little bit orange around his ears.

  “Oh…? No…” The makeup lady was fumbling. “It doesn’t look…bad,” she finally said. She was lying.

  “I cut it as close to my head,” Garth said, not buying it for a second. “You get out in the sunlight and this thing takes off like it’s on fire.”

  “Who did it for you?” the makeup lady asked.

  “Somebody who does Sandy’s hair. When she finished, she said, ‘Oh, my God. It’s red…!’ And to think, Sandy loved the gray.”

  “And what was wrong with that?” she said.

  “I don’t know. Ten-year anniversary. I look at those wedding pictures. Sandy looks the same. I thought I would try to do something. That week she was gone, I thought I would surprise her. And now look…”

  With his makeup applied, Garth stepped outside to examine the rigging. Immediately his executive instincts took over. “You got your ratchet up?” he asked one of the workers. “How ’bout those plugs?” It was that side of Garth, his Barnum-esque showmanship combined with his Bailey-like business savvy, that had forever changed the dynamics of country stage shows. In the early years of Nashville, country artists rarely traveled outside the South. Performers would play the Opry on the weekend, then drive to small-scale venues within a day’s commute of Music Row. In time promoters began packaging Opry legends and taking them on the road, like the tour with Minnie Pearl that played Carnegie Hall in 1947. By the late 1960s, country music had grown to a level where some name performers—like Johnny Cash—could begin to venture into larger arenas, but for the most part country artists were unable to compete with pop artists. All that began to change in the late 1970s with the emergence of country as a mass-appeal music. Though most country artists still made the bulk of their money playing state fairs and annual rattlesnake jamborees, a handful of stars—Kenny Rogers, John Denver, the Oak Ridge Boys—were beginning to show real clout in drawing fans to arenas. Unlike outdoor festivals, which are known as “soft tickets” since fans get the added lure of the fair or the carnival, arena sales are considered “hard tickets” since all you get is the concert.

  One reason fans had long been reluctant to see country artists in concert is that they didn’t do much onstage. For generations, country singers were simply that: singers. They stood in front of a microphone and sang. While rock shows had been remade in the 1970s by everyone from the Rolling Stones to Kiss, country artists were content to plant their feet, lower their hats, and drip their tears into their proverbial beer. More than anyone else, Garth Brooks recognized this disparity and set about designing a show that would mix the best of the arena acts he remembered seeing as a child with the country acts he so desperately wanted to emulate. Simply put, he yanked country into the age of the arena.

  “Originally I was scared to move around too much onstage,” Garth told me, “I remember one night in 1989 we were opening for Chris LeDoux, this real cowboy, and I told my guys that we would have to curtail what we normally did onstage because we didn’t want to overwhelm the people. We went out there and put on this nice, quiet, gentlemanly show. Then all of sudden Chris LeDoux comes out. They turn out the lights and—boom!—he comes catapulting over this hay bale and lands in the middle of the stage. I said, ‘Geez! Look at that!’ From then on, I started understanding that whatever the audience does out there, I can do back to them, and they’ll send it back to me ten times bigger.”

  Within a year, Garth had moved from being an opening act to headlining his own gigs, and he quickly began adding more elaborate stunts to his act: catapulting from trapdoors, swinging from ropes, even dangling from ladders he had suspended from the rigging. As with so many other areas of his career, he managed to combine pop pyrotechnics with country sincerity. Following the lead of Madonna and Michael Jackson, for example, he employed a headset microphone, but in his case he suspended it from the brim of his hat (“What people don’t realize,” Garth told me, “is that the hat actually blocks out the light and makes it easier to see the fans.”) More importantly, Garth realized that these theatrics would work even better on television. In 1992, he began what would become a series of televised specials on NBC—in effect, hour-long commercials—that brought his stage show to millions of fans who never had to leave their living rooms. Having successfully moved from “soft ticket” to “hard ticket,” he then rewrote the rules even further by moving to no ticket: All you had to do was sit at home and watch. Instead of diminishing sales, though, the exposure made Garth’s show a must-see. Not just in the South, but in cities from Miami to Seattle to San Diego, and, beginning in 1994, abroad: Australia, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland, England, and Scotland. It was that tour, his most recent, which was foremost in Garth’s mind that morning in Atlanta.

  “To me, this isn’t the first day at all,” Garth said when I asked him if he had any opening day rituals. He was wearing a black jumpsuit and, to cover his errant hair dye, a black baseball cap from the current tour. The makeup had removed most of the weariness from his face. A few drops of Visine had eliminated most of the puffiness from his eyes. “As soon as I got in the dressing room,” he continued, “the same thing was happening as in Aberdeen, Scotland. There’s no hot water, no food. It’s freezing. I got in there and felt that cold water and thought, ‘This ain’t the first day, it’s just the next day.’”

  The only thing this was the first day for, he said, was the stage and the show. And even the show was similar to the past, though without many of the pyrotechnics he had used in his television specials.

  “You’ve got to remember,” Garth said, “if you’ve seen us on TV, you haven’t seen us live. TV is what Schwarzenegger does. You do things you don’t do elsewhere. You burn things. You toss cymbals. You fly. We did that once. It was in Dallas, at Texas Stadium, and it cost us 1.7 million dollars to film three nights. We couldn’t afford to do that every night. I wouldn’t want to do it every night.”

  In fact, they almost didn’t get a chance to do it at all. That famous show in Dallas, taped and broadcast as the second of Garth’s NBC specials, proved almost deadly. In his typical shoot-for-the-rafters style, Garth decided he wanted to fly above the audience. In order to pull it off, though, his tour managers were forced to come up with an elaborate rigging that stretched from the floor of Texas Stadium to the roof. On paper, the scheme worked fine, but no one had tested it. Several days before the taping, while his team was installing the equipment, the rigging buckled. “Everybody panicked,” Garth said. “
When the thing started snapping, people started jumping. I had friends who were up on it, and they had never been so scared in their lives. There were seventeen we took to the hospital.” But still he had a show to do. “So I made this speech to my guys,” Garth continued. “I said, ‘Look, I’ve got to go down there and clean it off. Nobody here has to go.’ There was this big box of hard hats sitting there. I grabbed one and started going down to the stage. And I turned around, man, and here comes just this trail of those white hard hats, following right down. I see my wife with a hard hat. My crew. It was a good day. Of course it was a bad day—but it was a good day, too.”

  Garth had that dreamy look in his eyes again—the one he develops when he starts talking about certain moments in his career. It was that part of him that often made him seem on the verge of falling into a trance.

  “So as I was saying…” He returned to the present. “I’m not sure different is the thing. People come to a concert like this to have fun. They come to forget, they come to scream as loud as they want, they come just to sit and watch. Whatever they want to do. That’s what we do. We’ll play the old stuff. We’ll do some of the old gags. We keep a ladder hanging down in case we want to run around on it. We keep the pit cables down in case we want to swing on those. And we’ll see what the people like.”