Dreaming Out Loud

by Bruce Feiler

  In addition, since two of the songs he had a hand in writing, “Old Enough to Know Better” and “I’m Still Dancin’ with You,” went to number one, he earned a percentage of the roughly $150,000 that usually accrues through airplay to a chart-topping song. In Wade’s case, after his publisher and his performance rights group took their cut and after he paid back the advance his publisher had been giving him over the previous several years, his songwriting royalties from his number one records were close to $70,000. So far, Billboard’s Debut Artist of the Year had netted $100,000, and that’s before his manager took 15 percent off the top, bringing Wade’s total closer to $85,000.

  The final major source of income for Wade was touring. As a new artist, Wade Hayes spent almost 250 days a year on the road, playing close to 150 dates. Traditionally, it was the road that has provided Nashville artists with most of their income, up to 80 percent in many cases. For baby acts, with minimal airplay, a night at a small club earns them as little as $1,500. An artist with a hit record, like Wade the night I saw him in Richmond, Virginia, earns closer to $5,000. Two hit records could earn an artist a coveted slot on one of the half dozen or so major shows coming out of Nashville every year that are headlined by a superstar: Vince Gill, Reba McEntire, George Strait. Though playing on one of these tours gets a young artist exposure, it pays little more than $7,500 a night. As a practical matter, this rarely covers expenses: $700 a day to rent a bus; $2,000 a day for his band. Add to that the costs of equipment managers, sound engineers, merchandisers, and daily living expenses, and in a year on the road, Wade Hayes grossed almost $1 million, but netted almost nothing. If anything, he ate into his songwriting kitty. At year’s end, with a gold album, two number one songs, and a slot on one of the biggest-grossing tours of the season, Wade Hayes earned a grand total of $75,000—not bad for a former construction worker, but still far below the norm for most pop stars (in their prime, Kiss could spend that in a weekend), not to mention NBA players or Hollywood actors. “Sure, it’s not that much,” Wade’s manager said when we discussed this grim equation. “But Wade’s happy. It’s more money than he’s ever made.”

  As stark as this financial picture was for a young artist like Wade Hayes, if he could make it through the start-up years and gain a degree of stardom, the financial rewards could be staggering. No artist in Nashville history proved that more than Garth Brooks.

  From the beginning, Garth Brooks did one predominant thing for country music: He brought the rhythms of pop culture squarely into Nashville. While the short-term impact of this influx of energy and excitement was beneficial for everyone: greater sales, more media exposure, and higher numbers all around (Bob Titley told me he believed Brooks & Dunn were boosted immeasurably by their being placed after Garth Brooks in the alphabetical bins at retail); the long-term impact proved devastating: higher expectations, more fickle audiences, and greater financial pressures for all. Just as Garth embodied the upside of this change, to Music Row, he also came to represent the opposite. As one veteran publicist put it to me: “After Garth Brooks, there was no such thing as a pleasant meeting with a manager, a pleasant meeting with a label, or a pleasant meeting with an artist. Everybody wanted to have the world—and to have it now.”

  For Music Row, this split attitude toward Garth (Was he the galloping hero saving the town or the evil mogul bringing big-city ways?) was made even juicier by Garth’s ongoing shootout with his label head and principal rival in Nashville: Jimmy Bowen. For most of the 1990s, the battle between Garth and Bowen (even friends referred to him by his last name) was the preeminent soap opera of country music and, because of Garth’s outspokenness and Bowen’s long list of enemies, the source of probably half the gossip on Music Row at any time. Bowen was a burly bear of a man with a grizzly voice, a foreboding beard, and a Greek fisherman’s cap perpetually on his head. He was also a relentless self-promoter who was renowned for starting rumors about himself on the golf course in the morning just to see what form they’d take by the time they reached him in the office that afternoon. By December 1989, when he swept into Capitol Records (he eventually changed the name to Liberty to emphasize its independence), Bowen had been a dominant force in Nashville for two decades, having run five other labels—including MCA twice—and having revived the careers of everyone from Waylon Jennings to the Bellamy Brothers to Reba McEntire. He’d also terminated the careers of many other artists by imposing a strict bottom line. “I think Jimmy Bowen is the single most insensitive person in Nashville,” producer George Massenburg told one profiler. “He came along at a time when the town was ripe to pillage, and he pillaged what was left. He did increase the recording activity; anyone will warrant that. But he’s wrecked the music. He’s turned it into a commodity.”

  Bowen certainly understood the financial potential of music. Born in Santa Rita, New Mexico, in 1937, James Albert Bowen first entered the music business as a bass player and singer in a college country band, even visiting Nashville with the idea of becoming a country artist. When his band switched to pop, Bowen briefly became a teen idol. Abandoning his singing career, he eventually gravitated to L.A., landing a job as a record executive and producer. He revived Dean Martin’s career with a string of hits, including “Everybody Loves Somebody,” and went on to produce some Sinatra sensations, including “Strangers in the Night.” Disillusioned with Los Angeles, he drifted back toward Nashville in the mid-1970s and reacquainted himself with Music Row. In 1978, Bowen became general manager of MCA, then moved quickly to Elektra/Asylum, where in four years he moved the label from a $2 million deficit to an $8 million profit. In 1985, he returned to MCA, where sales tripled under his leadership. When he arrived at Capitol in 1989, Garth Brooks had just had his first number one song.

  At first Bowen and Garth seemed perfect for each other. For starters, they both understood marketing. “When I got to Capitol Nashville, Garth was just having his first big hit,” Bowen told me in his breezy, though sometimes self-serving way. “But when I went out into the country to our distribution branches, they said to me, ‘You know, we could sell a lot more of that Brooks kid if he had a lot more marketing and advertising dollars.’” Left with little budget, Bowen hit on a solution: He raised the cost of the record by a dollar and gave the retailers the margin for advertising. “That wasn’t brain surgery,” Bowen said, “that was good business.” Next, both men understood the importance of generating controversy. “I remember calling up Bowen during the whole Thunder Rolls’ flap,” Garth told me, referring to the controversy over his video, “and he said, ‘Do you realize how good this is going to be for you?’ Of course, he was right.”

  In time, though, the relationship soured. In December 1990, after sales of his first two records had topped 3 million units, Garth Brooks did what every successful artist does: He set out to renegotiate his contract. Because the basic record contract is so one-sided—the label assumes the risk, but also, if the record succeeds, reaps most of the benefit—artists frequently rewrite their deals as soon as they achieve star status. In this case, Bowen agreed that Garth deserved a higher royalty rate and offered him 15 percent, plus a few other long-term incentives. Garth, the budding businessman, was so pleased that he purchased a full-page ad in Billboard that showed him reading the new agreement: WHOA…!!! WHAT A CONTRACT! CAPITOL NASHVILLE, YOU ARE AN ANSWERED PRAYER, I LOVE YOU. At the time “Unanswered Prayers” was at number one, and forever after—though he would later regret it—Garth had guaranteed that his financial affairs would be a matter of public record and at the forefront of his public persona.

  The following year, when his sales continued to climb, Garth wanted to renegotiate again. In most renegotiations, the basic outlines of the deal don’t change. The label retains control of the masters (the original recordings), as well as the production schedule of the albums; only the royalty rate grows. Also, the label usually agrees to shell out more money for marketing and pay a sizable advance. Garth, though, wanted more. “I want the Michael Jackson deal
,” he told Bowen, referring to Jackson’s deal with Sony in which the artist gets close to 30 percent of the royalties. Also, he wanted to own his masters, and he wanted to dictate the production schedule of his albums. And he wanted a guaranteed payment every year in the millions of dollars. In effect, he wanted to own his records and basically lend them to Capitol Nashville to distribute for him. The negotiations, which Garth headed personally, lasted for well over a year. Ultimately, faced with the potential ruination of his company and no money left to develop other artists, Bowen turned Garth down. “You don’t deserve the Michael Jackson deal,” Bowen told him, pointing out that Garth hadn’t been a worldwide superstar for thirty years. “This turned Garth stone-cold,” Bowen told me. “He was seething. Fortunately he was at the office, so he couldn’t explode.”

  What he did do was go over Bowen’s head, first to Joe Smith in New York, then to James Fifield in London. In January 1993, a new deal was reached. The initial news was shocking. Bowen, quoted in USA Today, said the agreement was probably bigger than Madonna’s $60 million contract and Prince’s $100 million contract. By the time the agreement arrived in Nashville, where it was stored in a top secret black loose-leaf notebook that only a handful of people have ever seen, it became clear that its value was even higher. According to several people who have seen it, the deal works basically like this: Garth’s records are owned by a company he controls called Pearl Records, Inc. (named for Minnie Pearl). These records are then licensed to Capitol Nashville, which must distribute them on a schedule he determines. Capitol pays for the artwork, which Garth then owns. Capitol, in turn, pays for all marketing and promotion costs. After these costs are deducted, Garth earns upward of 58 percent of the net profit, bringing his take from every album to above $3.00. In addition, in an even rarer move, these terms were retroactive to day one of his career, covering each of the 30 million albums already sold. Finally, in an unprecedented step for Nashville, Garth earns his share of this agreement in annual payments of close to $5 million.

  As Bowen would say, it doesn’t take “brain surgery” to total up these numbers. Based on album sales alone, Garth Brooks earned close to $150 million in the first eight years of his career. Add to that mechanicals for all the songs he’s written, performance royalties, merchandising, and concert tickets, and Garth’s gross revenue for the “Gone Country” era was close to $300 million. “Are you ready?” Garth claimed with utter seriousness when I asked him about this figure. “Even I don’t know how much money I make. I don’t have a clue because money has never been that important to me.” “Then why drive such hard bargains?” I asked him. “Why spend so much time negotiating business deals?” Garth seemed pained by this question, then replied, “What hard bargain? I just do what I think is fair.” (As for the deal itself, Garth, citing a confidentiality agreement, refused to discuss its details. He did say he thought it was justified, considering he was responsible for 90 percent of Capitol’s profits and 60 percent of EMI’s profits in North America. “I think everybody on this Row deserves that deal. It’s a fair artist deal: If you go up and hit so many, you get so much. It’s that simple.”)

  To be sure, any artist’s desire to maximize his or her profits is understandable and, given the record industry’s track record of bilking artists, even commendable. But Garth’s aggressiveness did come at a cost. First, it created a chill between Garth and Bowen, the most effective marketing tandem in Nashville history. As Bowen put it in his 1997 autobiography: “Garth was turning into a control freak, wrapped up in details his people should have been handling. His explosive success and new fame—he externalized it as ‘the GB thing’—had distracted him. I sensed a dark, almost self-destructive aura around him.” Further, Garth’s deal undercut the label around him. “Most artists think they’re not getting enough,” Bowen told me. “I can understand that. When I was an artist, I thought I was getting screwed bad. But there is a point where it can get lopsided the other way. An artist can make a deal that’s so good that you weaken the company behind you, and then you’ve hurt yourself.” The larger problem, Bowen felt, was that the deal was dominating Garth’s life. “You know what the biggest damage of that deal was?” Bowen said to me. “The year and a half he took to negotiate it personally. His music suffered. In forty years in this business, I never saw an artist as involved with the contracts, the deals, as Garth. I think he just loves it. Either that or he trusts absolutely no one.”

  Certainly trust was a factor. As Garth said to Bowen at one testy moment in their relationship: “Trust is on a bus down the road a few hundred miles, but it ain’t got here yet.” Also, as Garth said to me, he watched in horror as superstar after superstar, including his friend Billy Joel, get ripped off by advisers. But the true nature of the conflict had to do with sales. By 1993, Garth’s sales started to dip. From 9 million units in 1991 and 17 million in 1992, he slumped to 5 million in 1993 and the same in 1994. Garth could have blamed his fans for this decline. He could have blamed himself—for making controversial statements or inferior music. Or he could have blamed Bowen. Garth chose the latter, specifically focusing on Bowen’s inability to retain Joe Mansfield, the marketing head who had spearheaded Garth’s rise. Though Bowen re-hired Mansfield as an adviser, Garth remained upset. “Where Bowen and I got the furthest away from each other was over the letting go of Joe Mansfield,” Garth told me. “That was probably the beginning of the end. As an employer, the reason Bowen gave me for letting Mansfield go was very acceptable, but my whole fight was: ‘Bowen, you’ve got four hundred other acts to go to, but this is my one shot, so I’ve got to do it my way.’”

  Initially Bowen was prepared to accept the blame, if only to relieve pressure from his star artist. “I never met an artist in my life who’s going to take the blame for failure,” he told me. “It’s the nature of them. And if you’re working with a bigmouth like me, I’m the obvious one to blame.” But gradually the goodwill faded. “I can give you fifteen reasons why his sales dropped,” Bowen said, “but he can only give you one: me.” The first of Bowen’s reasons was Garth’s mouth. “Garth was the most perfect artist that ever came along,” he said. “Then he started doing talk shows, and when you have an opinion, you make enemies as well as believers.” Next, his freshness began to fade. In 1994, Bowen did a study that determined that Garth had a core audience of 3.5 million people who would buy whatever he released. New audiences, however, were tuning him out. Finally, as critics noted and as Bowen believed, the new music was simply not as good. “His later albums weren’t as strong because he spent so much time negotiating his record deal, plus the book deal, plus the movie deal, plus, plus. He’s a brilliant kid, but he was just so busy.” Unlike Elvis or the Beatles, Bowen said, who both turned to drugs, “Garth’s drug was power, which can be worse.”

  By 1994, Garth and Bowen were openly feuding. “By then, I didn’t feel it was my label,” Garth told me. “I didn’t set foot in the building for two years.” That fall Garth went to visit Bowen at his 9,100-square-foot home on Franklin Road, which Don Cook later bought for $1.875 million. The two got into a sharp disagreement, at which point Garth threatened to get him fired. “We went through this whole thing,” Bowen said. “And Garth said he and his people had decided that since his records didn’t sell fifteen million anymore, there had to be a scapegoat, and I was it.” As Bowen knew, such posturing is not unusual. “What was unusual was that you had a thousand-pound bear doing it.” Bowen calmed Garth down, and eventually Garth went back to his office. Ninety minutes later, he returned. “I went to my people and they don’t buy any of it,” Garth said. “They want me to go to war with the label. And when I say ‘my people,’” Garth added, “that means me too.” Bowen was startled. “If a song publisher and an accountant know more about the record business than I do,” he said, “then listen to them. These are the choices you have to make in life. But I’d be very careful about taking advice from people that want you to go to war when they have nothing to lose and you do.” “
Yessir,” Garth said, “that’s a good thought. But I gotta tell ya, I agree with them.”

  When I asked Garth about this story, he said simply, “So what? Going to war with my label? I do that ten times a year. I mean, that’s what artists and labels do because they’re in it for the money and we’re in it for the music.”

  In the months that followed, though, Garth, by all accounts, took his war even farther: He instituted an underground “dump Bowen” campaign—first to Charles Koppelman, the new head of CEMA in New York, then to James Fifield in London, and eventually to Fifield’s boss, Sir Colin Southgate. Eventually Koppelman summoned Bowen to New York and chastised him about his expense account, particularly his habit of playing golf every morning. “Your problem isn’t golf,” Bowen told him. “It’s Garth.” The three sides had reached an impasse. Would EMI fire Bowen, as Garth wanted the company to do? Would Garth go to another label, as EMI feared? The answer will never be known because in the summer of 1994, Jimmy Bowen paid a visit to the Mayo Clinic, where he was diagnosed with lymphoma. Bowen decided to bail out. “At that point,” Bowen told me, “I said, ‘Okay, that will do, thank you very much.’ I didn’t need to be between the corporate thing in New York, which I always hated, and an artist that big and powerful. That alone can kill you.” In December 1994, Jimmy Bowen resigned from Liberty Records.