Dreaming Out Loud

by Bruce Feiler

  By a little after 4 P.M., the stage was nearing completion as Garth returned to the coliseum for a preshow run-through. Eschewing the stairs, he scampered up the stage as if it was a jungle gym and started prancing from one side to the other. “Look at this baby!” After all the attention paid to the lights, the stage itself was clearly the dominant part of this creation. The heaping piles of steel and metal that earlier had looked like pots and pans had been transformed in the previous twelve hours into a giant elevated stage the size of half a basketball court. Unlike most stages, with their bundles of sound monitors and towering ramps, this construction, which cost $300,000, was surprisingly flat. All the bells and whistles had been suspended underneath the rostrum, along with a series of scrims, trapdoors, and assorted platforms that would come rising out of the floor with a simple glance from Garth (and the press of a button underneath).

  To add to this futuristic feel, the stage itself was made of corrugated mesh, like a high-tech freezer shelf. “It’s an ample mesh,” Garth explained. “Stretched. We’ve taken the regular mesh and stretched it even further. Then we went and put the monitors underneath it. We had fifty-something monitors last time on a stage that was seventy percent of this size. This year we have thirty monitors, but we cover more ground.”

  At the center of this massive plateau—and clearly its focal point—was a giant Plexiglas capsule about the size of the Apollo command module that contained the fifteen-piece drum set. Made with half-inch Plexiglas designed for use in 747s and christened the “U.S. Hope” by Garth, the capsule was mounted on a giant hydraulic piston that gave it the ability to rise periscopelike into the air and spin itself around like a giant robotic ventriloquist’s dummy gone horribly out of control. “Houston, we have a problem: The drum set is leading a coup.” To accent this galactic theme, the capsule had been decorated with a single decal of the American flag that Garth had received from NASA, along with some navy blue spacesuits for the crew to wear. “There are all sorts of names for the capsule,” said drummer Tommy Johnson, “the ‘egg,’ the ‘drum dome.’ I prefer ‘boy in the bubble.’”

  Garth liked the “boy in the bubble” for different reasons. From a practical point of view, the bubble, by preventing the drums from bleeding into other instruments, allowed him to record each show on a forty-eight-track recorder for use in a “live” album later. From a showman’s point of view, the bubble gave him a toy to play with in his own private playground.

  “So what kind of soles do you have on those shoes?” Garth asked.

  “Rubber,” I said cautiously. After months of hanging around him, I had learned to be wary of such outbursts.

  “Then go ahead, run up there,” he said. For a second, I thought he was talking about one of the risers that had been raised from the floor. But before I had a chance to decide, he wiped the bottom of his Nike hightops and darted up the bubble in three rapid-fire steps. I followed (though, unlike him, I had to balance myself so I wouldn’t fall off). “Now you can see what I’ve been talking about,” Garth said. Indeed, from atop the pod, the view of the stage was stunning. The cold layer of cardboard on the coliseum floor had grown into a glacier of technology. The stage itself—cool, flat, accented with bursts of artificial fog—seemed like something out of a sci-fi opera. The fiddle player was warming up in one corner. A soundman was testing the board in another. With musicians popping in and out of trapdoors, the whole scene began to feel like an audience participatory game of “Chutes and Ladders.”

  “There’s two things I would say about this stage,” Garth said. “It’s smart, and it’s flexible. First of all, the money we’ll save because we don’t have seat kills”—those seats in the front several rows that usually go unsold because they have obstructed views—“will pay for this stage in its first month alone. Then the whole front section can be removed when we go to Europe, since their venues are smaller. We’re just really proud of it.”

  Proud is an understatement. Earlier, Garth had introduced me to the head of his film crew, whom he had flown in from Ireland to record the show. I asked him the difference between a Garth show and a U2 show, since he had worked with both. He didn’t hesitate. “The amount of time Garth spends thinking about it,” the man said. “He’s obsessed with it.”

  Indeed. “I hope this show tonight will be the worst one we give all year,” Garth said, “but that it will still be a pretty good show. What I hope most is that people walk out of here saying, ‘I came here four years ago for seventeen bucks. I had the time of my life. I screamed. I laughed. And I came here again tonight for seventeen bucks. I had the time of my life. I screamed. I laughed.’”

  What Garth was most worried about, though, was perception. “One of the big questions that will be in everyone’s mind when they sit down here is: ‘Has he forgotten country music?’” Garth said. “That’s why the second song out of the holster is ‘Two of a Kind.’ We want to tell them we’re still country. We want to make sure these people sit there and go, ‘All right, it’s the same guy I knew.’ And then they’re open to new stuff. But if you just bomb them with stuff, they say, ‘Ah, well, he’s forgotten.’”

  Though his show was only a few hours away, Garth could not escape the central worry that had consumed him for so long—what did the audience think of him, did they still like him, would they still enjoy his show? Even given the notorious insecurity of artists, it would be hard to imagine Mick Jagger, say, or Elvis, or the Beatles giving in to such anxiety about whether the public thought they were too pop, too rock, too crossover, too successful. Yet despite Nashville’s leap into the American mainstream (or maybe because of it), country artists, more than those in any other genre, are obsessed with this definitional question. For Garth, it was a near-religion. “Our message is this,” he had said at a preshow press conference. “We are not country music. We are a part of country music. We represent the best we can what we feel our brand of country music is. And we take that all over the world with us.”

  What he didn’t say at the press conference was that having spread that message as far as it could go, he now doubted his own fitness to be its chief evangelist.

  “You want to know the thing that scares me most?” he asked me. “It’s pretty heavy.” He squatted on top of the drum capsule and slid down to the stage floor. “What scares me most has to do with Katharine Hepburn. She made a wonderful speech about ‘it’ in one of her movies. She said, There’s just a thing that some women have, and if you’ve got it, it doesn’t matter what you don’t have. And if you don’t have it—no matter what else you’ve got—it’s not enough.’ That’s what I’m worried about. I’m worried about getting on top of that piano and going, ‘Where is he? Is GB going to show up or not?’ And I’ll know as soon as I jump off the piano and hit the grating. That’s my biggest fear. Sitting on the farm for two years going, ‘Is it still there?’”

  By just before showtime, that fear had become almost palpable. A funereal hush had come over everyone backstage. The only person the least bit upbeat was Garth’s mother, Colleen, who had just driven in with her husband Troyal on the bus Garth bought them for Christmas.

  “The only thing I’m worried about tonight is some of his antics,” she said. A sprightly woman in a purple jumpsuit and freshly upswept Martha Washington white hair (actually, she could have passed for Hazel), she looked like the biggest bettor—and the one with the saltiest tongue—at the local ladies’ auxiliary bridge club. “He always runs up that drum thing in tennis shoes. He’s going up there with ropers tonight. He could slip. Or fall. If he does, his finger will go through that stage. That stage is like razors.”

  Colleen had her own opinions about why her son, the one she claimed to be her spitting image (“He’s bullheaded like his father. Other than that, I see nothing but his mother…”), continued to be so insecure.

  “All males are weak,” she said. “It doesn’t make any difference who they are. It takes Jesus Christ, or a woman, or a parent to make them realize that they�
��re not. I think all males truly want to be a hero. What Garth wants to be is what he thinks every man should be: a person of complete strength, a man of his own mind. I think he’ll be perfectly happy with himself when he knows he is a good man.”

  “And is he there yet?” I asked her.

  “I think he is so close. But I think he doesn’t feel it yet. When I talk to him I say, ‘I’m so proud of you. You’re such a good man.’ And this means all the world to him. What Garth needs to do is stop and say, ‘It’s not what I’ve done, but who I am,’ and realize he can only do so much. I don’t care who you are—John Wayne or anyone—life only offers you a certain level. Garth’s reached it. He just doesn’t realize it yet. If I could give him any advice, it would be: ‘Son, you’re there. Be happy and enjoy it.’”

  At 8:45, Garth emerged from his dressing room. To ease his surreptitious entrance underneath the stage, he was wearing a navy blue NASA jumpsuit over his traditional cowboy garb. On his shoulder, he balanced his black plastic hatbox. Ten minutes later, the hatbox was empty and the mammoth light rig, which had been lowered from the ceiling to cover the stage, started rising in a cloud of artificial smoke. After several minutes, a white grand piano rose up from the stage. At the keys was a man in a white tuxedo and a white cowboy hat. It was a perfect tableau of Garth’s last video, “The Red Strokes,” and it elicited an explosion of flashbulbs. But the scene was artificial. Minutes later, the real Garth Brooks, looking like a postage stamp in red, white, and blue, emerged hydraulically from inside the fake piano, sang the line he had written especially for this moment, “Oh, I said a little prayer tonight / Before I came onstage…” and opened his arms to the crowd.

  FOURTEEN

  THE MONEY

  By early summer, Wynonna finally acted on the plan she had been formulating since spring. For the first time in her career, she outlined a course of action, marched through it on schedule, and slowly began to wrench control of her often uncontrollable life. First, in the final week of June, Wynonna gave birth to her second child, Pauline Grace, at Baptist Hospital in Nashville. (That evening, in a sadly emblematic gesture, her mother, sister, husband, and son all attended the red-carpet opening of Planet Hollywood downtown, where Naomi said of her daughter’s delivery: “It was like pulling a watermelon through a nostril”) The following week, Wynonna dropped her publicist, Paula Batson. Then she split with her manager, John Unger. And finally she prepared herself for the biggest decision of the year: What label would release her next album? Though each of these choices was—or would be—made as amicably as possible (a far cry from a similar round of bloodletting several years earlier, most of which ended up in court), collectively they brought Wynonna into step with the cutting edge of country music—the bottom line. And, for the first time in her life, she finally seemed ready to confront what had long been the first rule of Music Row: Music is more than a gift from God; it’s also a source of money.

  Or at least it can be.

  Since the arrival of Ralph Peer to record Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family in Bristol, Tennessee, in August, 1927, country music has always been a self-consciously commercial enterprise. Particularly in Nashville, the lyrics or instrumentation may have changed to reflect the times, but the essence of what constitutes country music has changed surprisingly little: Country is music that chronicles the country and music that the country will buy. If anything, the second half of that equation is more important than the first. More than artists, executives, or even critics, it’s consumers who have always decided what constitutes country music. This is the Faustian bargain that Music Row has agreed to: It doesn’t matter what music anyone in Nashville might like; if the country doesn’t like it, Nashville will change. “Think about this as a definition of country music,” Bill Ivey, the director of the Country Music Foundation, wrote in an essay. “A country record is any record a radio station that calls itself ‘country’ will play and any record that a consumer who considers himself a ‘country fan’ will buy.” That’s it, he said of this grimly mercantile vision—no fiddles, no steel guitars, no high lonesome harmonies, no rhinestone suits required. Also, he might have added, no artistic vision. Chet Atkins, Ivey mentioned, when asked to define the Nashville Sound, put his right hand in his pants pocket and gently jingled the change. “That,” Chet said, “is the Nashville Sound.”

  This preoccupation with making money only heightened in the 1990s as Music Row faced a new reality that rapidly transformed Nashville, as well as the South in general: the arrival of international corporations into a once regional subculture. Perhaps the chief mark of the “Gone Country” era was not that country music became popular around the United States, but that it became a vital profit center for corporations all over the globe. MCA Nashville, which is based on Music Row, reports to MCA Entertainment Group, which is based in Los Angeles, which in turn reports to Seagram, which is based in Toronto. Capitol Nashville reports to CEMA in New York, which in turn reports to Thorn International in London. Sony is based in Japan; BMG in Germany; PolyGram in Holland.

  Far from merely being a technicality, this change has completely altered the nature of country music. “What has changed is that people don’t care about the music anymore,” one former senior executive for both MCA and Capitol told me. “All they care about is money. EMI is a financial company, controlling a record company, telling each and every level of that record company: ‘Okay, how many dollars are you going to give us this month?’ Well, how can anybody project the future of the record industry?” What Nashville offers up is blind guesses. “We have to project by month, by quarter, by year what artists are going to sell. Of course nobody has the answers to that. But then we’re asked, ‘How come this artist didn’t hit that number?’ ‘Because it’s music,’ we say, ‘not shoes.’ Then they respond, ‘Then you have to stop spending on that artist.’” Artist development, once the watchword of the industry, is the first to go. “If we think an artist is moving in the right direction, but a single’s just not there, it doesn’t matter. The patience is gone.”

  This patience was tested to an even greater degree as more and more corporations witnessed Nashville’s boom and swept into town to grab a piece of the action. Though the income the industry generated increased by threefold, it was nowhere near large enough to accommodate the fivefold increase in product being released. As a result, a disastrous scenario was set into motion: The more the industry expanded, the less money most people made. As manager Bob Titley put it to me: “The increase in income drew more companies into the community, which in turn increased competition. The increase in competition drove up marketing costs, which in turn lowered profit margins. The lower profit margins led to increased pressure from headquarters, which in turn made the entire industry more cold-blooded.” Put more bluntly, as Debi Fleischer complained to me one afternoon in her office, “It’s just no fun anymore.”

  What was “no fun” for executives, though, was downright perilous for artists, most of whom get only one shot at stardom. For them, the new financial equation led to an almost impossible challenge: Concern yourself too little with the business aspects of your career and risk financial disaster; concern yourself too much with business and risk artistic distraction, even collapse.

  What is perhaps most surprising for new artists in Nashville, even ones like Wade Hayes who experience out-of-the-gate success, is how little money they actually make. In country music, there are basically five ways for artists to make money: records, performances, merchandise, songwriting, and, if they get successful enough, endorsements. Though records are the most visible part of the equation, they usually account for the least amount of money. When Wade signed a deal with Sony Records in 1993, he agreed, as part of the standard new artist contract, to give them the option to record seven albums, plus a greatest hits package. In return, they agreed to release at least one of these albums and to advance him money for the album, his wardrobe, and various other expenses. This advance money adds up fast—an average of
$50,000 for legal costs; $200,000 for recording costs; $10,000 for a Manuel-style wardrobe; $5,000 for a cosmetic makeover; $30,000 for the cost of half a video; and the black hole, as much $3,000 a day for tour support to keep the artist on the road. As a result, the day his debut album was released in January 1995, Wade was effectively in debt to Sony Records for around $350,000. Though he would be under no obligation to pay back this money if the album stiffed, he still could not start making money until this advance was “recouped” by his label.

  That recouping was done through royalties. The standard royalty rate for a new artist is 12 percent of the wholesale price of a record, with a third of that going to the producer. Most labels in Nashville sell their records to wholesalers for a base price of $10.30 for a compact disc (roughly three quarters of country sales are on CDs; one quarter on cassettes; vinyl records are manufactured rarely). With various discounts, the actual base price of a CD ends up around $8.00, which means the standard artist royalty per CD totals around 99 cents—again with 33 cents of that going to the producer. For cassettes, the total figure is closer to 66 cents. (For the roughly one quarter of country sales that are made by record clubs, that figure is closer to half the retail royalty.) The net result of all these calculations is nothing short of devastating In its first year of release, Old Enough to Know Better was certified as a gold album, meaning it had shipped—though not necessarily sold—500,000 units for a gross of approximately $4 million for Sony Records. Of that, Wade Hayes, the bestselling debut artist in Nashville that year, earned less than $200,000, leaving him still $150,000 in the red to Sony.

  For Wade, this situation was made slightly less bleak by the fact that he, unlike many of his contemporaries, was also a songwriter. Songwriters make money through four principal avenues: record sales, radio airplay, television and film licensing, and, if they’re successful, long-term residuals. Every song on every album sold, regardless of discounts, earns what’s known as a “mechanical” royalty rate of 6.95 cents, which is shared between the writers and their publishers. On Old Enough to Know Better, Wade was a cowriter on three of the ten songs, meaning he earned an additional 5.2125 cents on each album sold as a writer (actually, as a writer-artist, he was entitled to only 75 percent of that figure), and an additional 2.5 cents on each album sold as part of his copublishing arrangement, bringing his total mechanical royalty off the album to roughly $30,000. Since mechanical royalties, like songwriting royalties, are kept separate from album royalties, Wade got to keep this money.