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Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia
Friends in Low Places, Part 2
00:38:37
Brooks took on chart competitors from Guns n’ Roses to Madonna to Mariah Carey and bested them all … until he tried taking on the Beatles.
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You're listening ad free on Amazon Music. Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate Magazine about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris Melanfy, chart analyst, pop critic and writer of Slate's why Is this Song Number One Series. On our last episode, I gave a brief history of late 20th century country music crossover on the pop charts, including how the film Urban Cowboy spawned a boom for such artists as Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton and Eddie Rabbit, which was followed by a mid-80s bust that saw country's presence on the pop charts greatly diminished. And I talked about how the rising star Garth Brooks, helped by new SoundScan technology on the Billboard charts, staged a comeback for country in the early 90s. Garth took on Guns N Roses, Madonna and Mariah Carey on the charts and won what would happen when he took on the Beatles? Garth Brooks had let two years go by without a new studio album, an unprecedented gap for him. In interviews, he said he needed the break to tend to his family and shore up his marriage. When he finally began recording a new album in 1995, it had the makings of another smash. She's Every Woman, a James Taylor like ballad, was issued several months ahead of Garth's next album, and it soared to no. 1 on Hot Country Singles in just seven weeks, a sign Brooks had stayed away long enough to be missed and could pick up where he'd left off. But he was also trying out new styles. In addition to his early love for acoustic soft rock, Brooks also loved his share of flashy 70s hard rock, from Aerosmith to Queen. Having already turned a Billy Joel song into a country smash, Brooks began exploring other rock songs he could countrify you'll.
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Be a hard loving woman baby till you find your bed.
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The year before, in 1994, Brooks had contributed a song to a tribute album called Kiss My Ass. Classic Kiss re grooved. He turned Hard Luck Woman, a 1976 track from Kiss's Rock and Roll over album, into an acoustic style rave up. With the members of Kiss backing him up, the song was only a modest hit, but his Hard Luck Woman cracked the lower rungs of the adult contemporary chart and even the mainstream pop radio chart. Flush with that modest success, Brooks tried his hand at adapting a newer rock so. Fever was from Aerosmith's 1993 album Get a Grip in Brooks's Hands. Retitled the Fever, aerosmith's song became a rodeo rock anthem as the album took shape over the summer of 1995, Brooks and his label, Capitol Nashville, announced the album's title Fresh Horses and its release date three days before Thanksgiving 1995. Most years dropping a new Garth Brooks album the week of Black Friday might have been a great idea if the Capitol label didn't have an even bigger priority act coming out that very week. The wait is over. The Beatles anthology tonight at 9, 8 Central on Abedelc. Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were reuniting for a multi part TV documentary called the Beatles Anthology. Plus, the TV documentary would be accompanied by three double CD releases of old Beatles rarities also called Anthology, and two of them would feature new Beatles songs built out of old John Lennon demos. Some at the EMI Capitol conglomerate were reportedly leery of Brooks issuing his next album the same week as the Beatles. When questioned about the move, Garth said he knew what he signed up for. I think we're in a no lose situation, brooks told one reporter. If we get pounded, it's by the Beatles and everyone's expecting us to get pounded anyway. And if for some reason we hold our own, it's going to make country music make Garth Brooks look stronger. So we'll see. The fact was, as Capital's top selling current artist and a guy who referred to himself in both the third person and the royal we, Brooks was big enough to call the shots even against Capitol's all time biggest band. Brooks even threw in a couple of million dollars of his own money to buy TV advertising time, setting up Fresh Horses. The week before the album arrived, Capital serviced radio stations with Garth's version of Aerosmith's the Fever and it began climbing the country truck. But then. More than 27 million Americans tuned in for the first part of the Beatles Anthology on ABC and the debut of Free as a Bird. Though reviews for this new Beatles track were lukewarm at best, a sizable percentage of viewers felt they had to own this song. As a result, in its first week, Anthology 1 by the Beatles sold more than 850,000 copies, which was then a one week record for a two disc set. And Garth Brooks. That same week, Fresh horses opened to 480,000, one of his best sales weeks ever. But it was a distant number two to the Beatles, Garth's first studio album to fall short of the number one spot in the Soundscan era. Making matters worse, his Aerosmith cover was shaping up as a flop. Fans didn't seem to know what to make of the Fever. It wasn't rock enough to get airplay at rock stations, but it didn't connect with country listeners either. The Fever peaked at number 23 on Hot Country Singles Brooks first promoted single to fall short of the country top 20. Now, some perspective here. Fresh Horses still sold millions of copies, about 3 million in its first six months and eventually 7 million. Moreover, the album continued to generate hits. A few months after the Fever flopped, the more traditional country ballad the Beaches of Cheyenne brought Brooks back to number one.
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They said she just went crazy screaming out his name. She ran out into the ocean.
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But Garth took the underperformance of Fresh Horses and the muted fan response hard. By the spring of 1996, he was telling Robert Hilburn of the LA Times, we'll have to take a serious look at where we are in our career. If the record and ticket sales don't tell me that I'm stirring things up or changing people's lives, then I think it's time for me to hang it up. That same LA Times article pointed out that just seven years into his career, Brooks total US album sales were the highest for any solo act in Recording Industry association of America history, second only to the Beatles. Still, the dejected Brooks would take another two year break from recording. But with or without Garth on the scene, country crossover was only getting bigger. Shania Twain from Timmons, Ontario, Canada, broke in 1995 and 96 as the Queen of country pop crossover. The arena rock dynamics that Garth Brooks brought to country music Shania Twain pumped up to stadium size. A lot of that had to do with her producer, co songwriter and then husband, Robert John Mutt Lang. He made all of Shania's singles sound like 80s arena rock, not unlike the hair metal bands Mutt had produced a decade earlier. Like Def Leppard. Shania and Mutt packed her albums even deeper with hits than Garth did. And they all banged. Twain's 1995 breakthrough The Woman in Me, rode the Billboard 200 album chart for over two years, went diamond and spun off eight country hits. Team Shania was supersizing the Garth Brooks model. Not all mid-90s country stars had Shania and Mutts jumbotron ambitions, but many of the biggest hits, even those that were sticking to core country audiences, had the flavor of mass appeal pop. The top country song of 1996 by Multi Platinum duo Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn was My Maria Brooks and Dunn's soaring cover of a 1973 top 10 pop hit by B.W. stevenson. As for Garth Brooks, he didn't do much recording in 1996. In fact, after the singles from Fresh Horses had run their course, Brooks was mostly off the country singles chart for the better part of a year. It wasn't until the late summer of 1997 that Brooks made his chart return, and then only in a duet. But it was with a very special.
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Duet partner in another Zara I'm afraid that I Can't See.
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Trisha Yearwood had been riding the country charts alongside Garth Brooks for virtually all of the 1990s. They met in Nashville at the end of the 80s when she sang backup for Garth's debut album. He introduced her to a producer who helped get her signed and Garth even invited her to open his concerts. Thanks in part to Brooks mentorship, Yearwood launched her career with a chart topper, the 1991 no. 1 smash she's in Love with the Boy. By the summer of 97, Trisha Yearwood had racked up a dozen top 10 country hits, including four number ones she was do for a greatest hits album and she recorded three new tracks for the collection. One of those was In Another's Eyes, a duet with Garth Brooks, who had to date remained a platonic friend of hers. The track would eventually reach number two two on Hot Country Singles, bringing Brooks back to the chart for the first time in months. And the relationship would eventually become more than platonic. Five years later, after Yearwood and Brooks had each divorced their respective spouses, they began dating. And three years after that, they would marry.
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Every time I look, I'm seeing you.
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Less than two weeks before the Trisha Yearwood duet was officially released in the first week of August 1997, Garth Brooks reintroduced himself to the music world in much grander fashion.
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New York invited me. The Big Apple invites you. You don't turn them down. We're gonna come here and have fun.
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She was the one that I wanted for all time.
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The biggest myth Brooks longed to shatter about his audience was that they were all based in rural areas of the American heartland. Brooks had seen his album sales numbers and he knew that cities like New York made up a not insignificant share. He also knew if he held a major New York City show that fans from across the country would make the trip. So on August 7, 1997, Brooks and his band fulfilled a dream to play a free show at New York's Central Park, a concert televised live on hbo. Brooks's team set up the largest stage the North Meadow had ever seen, and so many of his fans caravanned into the city that week that the gig was jokingly dubbed Garth Stock. Central park had already hosted some legendary mega concerts by Paul Simon, Simond and Garfunkel.
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Like a bridge over Travel, Water and Diana Ross.
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And Brooks reportedly outdrew them all. Central park attendance figures are notoriously inexact. New York City was expecting only about 300,000 attendees, but the night of the gig, crowd estimates in the North Meadow were at a minimum of 750,000. A later estimate by the fire department put the crowd size at just shy of a million. Whatever the actual figure, the show was generally agreed to be the park's largest concert ever. Among the guests Brooks welcomed to his historic show was native New Yorker Billy Joel, writer of the song Brooks turned into a hit, Shameless. Joel not only performed a pair of his own songs, including New York State of Mind, he also played piano and sang on Garth's hit Ain't Goin Down Till the Sun Comes Up. Feeling the love once again and having satisfied himself that he could still set improbable records, Garth Brooks was ready to release his long delayed seventh album, simply titled Seventh. Garth had been holding back the album for months in a dispute with his label over promotional plans. He didn't want Sevens to meet the same tepid greeting as fresh horses. As a result, the CD didn't arrive in stores until late November, more than three months after the Central park concert. If anything, the delay only appeared to stoke fans pent up demand. Sevens opened to nearly 900,000 in its first week, the biggest debut by a country album to date. One week later, the album's first single, a jaunty good time western swing ditty called Long Neck Bottle, hit number one on hot country singles, getting there in just five. By the time the album's second single, Two Pina Coladas, reached number one in the spring of 1998, The7's album was well past quintuple platinum on its way to eventual sales of 10 million. The rumor within the music industry now that Brooks was inching ever higher on the roster of all time album sellers was that he was aiming to topple the RIAA's king of sales, the Beatles. What's quirky about the RIAA's certification rules for gold and platinum albums is that double albums are counted twice. So a title like the Beatles White Album, for example, their only studio double album, is certified by the RIAA at 24 times Platinum for 12 million in sales, even though the White Album has sold only about as many copies as the 12 times Platinum and Abbey Road. Garth Brooks knew how this RIAA math worked, and so he began putting out a lot more multi disc sets. In the spring of 1998, he reissued his first six albums as a box set called the Limited Series, featuring new bonus tracks on each disc, one of those bonus tracks was a cover of Bob Dylan's to make youe Feel My Love, a song also recorded by everyone from Billy Joel to Adele. Brooks's version of the song topped Hot country singles in August 1998.
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Storms are raging on a rolling sea down the highway of regret.
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But Garth had an easy, even slicker card up his sleeve. For the holiday season of 98, he would put out his first live album and make that album a double disc set. It was a valid move. Brooks had been a top concert draw for nearly a decade, featuring pyrotechnics uncommon to a country show and sellout crowds at a scale only previously seen among rock acts.
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I spent last night in the arms of a girl in Louisiana.
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He called the double CD set Double Live. And there was one more sales feat Brooks wanted to pull off. The first album to debut to a million in sales in its first week, Team Garth pulled every trick in the book, including sale pricing the two disc set at six single CD prices and getting one major account to report nine days of sales for the week, including two weekends instead of the usual seven. By hook or by crook, Double Live debuted to 1.085 million in week one, the biggest week to date of any album in SoundScan history.
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It was yours song that made me.
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Sing.
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It was your voice that gave me we.
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Just one single was promoted to radio stations from Double Live, a new track called it's yous Song. It did respectably on Hot Country Songs, reaching number nine, but that wasn't its most interesting chart performance. It's yous Song was also Garth's first track to ever reach the Billboard Hot 100, where it peaked at number 62. How exactly did this minor live cut become Garth Brooks first ever Hot 100 hit nearly a decade into his career? It had nothing to do with the song. It had to do with Billboard's chart rules. As I explained in our Great War against the Single episode, after eight years of the music industry pulling away from issuing retail singles, Billboard finally caved. They changed Hot 100 rules to allow radio only songs to appear on the chart for the first time. This rule went into effect on the Hot 100 in December 1998. So, for example, 1998 radio smashes that had gone unreleased at retailers and were invisible on the Hot 100, like the goo Goo Doll song Iris, Suddenly materialized on the chart. Of course, for his entire career, Garth Brooks had never issued his radio hits as retail singles. And so not a single one of them. Not the Dance, Not Friends in low places, not even Shameless had appeared on the Hot 100. Now, his songs were going to make that chart, whether Brooks wanted them there or not.
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It was your voice that gave me wings.
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Which explains the sudden appearance by Garth's it's yous Song on the Hot 100 in the closing weeks of 1998, and its peak of number 62 affirmed what Brooks must have known all along. With only country radio playing his songs, they would rarely make the upper reaches of the pop chart. As long as most of pop radio in the late 90s sounded like this, Garth's hits would look diminished by comparison. That is, unless Brooks tried to record contemporary pop music himself. Chart policy cannot by itself explain what Garth Brooks tried in 1999, a move that is still more than two decades later, the strangest thing he ever attempted. Becoming someone else. Before we close the story of Garth Brooks, we have to talk about Chris Gaines. Garth Brooks had been toying for a couple of years with starring in a movie. He had even reportedly turned down a couple of potential roles in movies like like Twister and Saving Private Ryan. Brooks wanted to conceive his first film role himself. He had an idea for a thriller biopic of a fictional rock star with floppy hair and a goatee named Chris Gaines. The film would be called the Lamb, and Brooks got the film greenlit at Paramount Pictures. As part of the campaign for the film, Brooks Brooks recorded what he called a pre soundtrack, kind of like a Broadway concept album of himself as Chris Gaines. The music would be everything but country, some light R and B, some rock, mostly pop. And because it was supposed to be a compilation of songs by a musician who had existed for years, he even wanted to call the album Chris Gaines Greatest Hits. Instead, in the late summer of 1999, the CD was issued for real, as Garth Brooks Presents in the Life of Chris Gaines. Fans got their first sampling of this product project with the single Lost in youn, officially credited to Chris Gaines. Although Billboard charted it as Garth Brooks as Chris Gaines, for the first time in the career of the actual Garth Brooks, he issued the song as a retail single on both cassette and cd. And thanks to Garth's Pre sold profile, the single opened strongly, debuting on the Hot 100 alternative, all the way up at number five. Not bad for a first top 40 hit. Here's the thing. It was also the only top 40 hit for both Chris Gaines and Garth Brooks. The song never caught on at Radio Video, and Lost in youn fell out of the top 10 in just two weeks. The top 40 in seven weeks. No other Gaines singles made the Hot 100. Still, the promotional campaign for Chris Gaines was already in motion. Garth made an appearance on the Today show and he taped an episode of VH1's behind the Music that purported to tell the life story. Of course, Chris Gaines. He even maintained this dual identity as a host and musical guest on Saturday Night Live.
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Hey everybody, I'm Garth Brooks and I get to host Saturday Night Live this weekend. My musical guest gonna be Chris Gaines. Now of course I wanted to play the music, but Mango wanted Chris.
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The SNL episode was well received. The album was not. In the Life of Chris Gaines debuted on the Billboard 200 at number two, but it was down to number 16 within two weeks. Fans were bewildered by the CD booklet's photos of an unrecognizable Garth Brooks in various poses as Chris Gaines throughout Gaines career in tights or a bowler hat. Retailers were reportedly shipped more than 3 million copies of in the Life of Chris Gaines, but at least a million of them them went unsold. One track from the Gaines album, it Don't Matter to the sun, sounded country enough that it peaked on Hot Country Singles at a decent number 24. And then Chris Gaines was never heard from again. Although Lost in youn remains Garth's only top 40 pop hit to this day, Garth never would star in the Lamb. The movie was shelved a little over a year later. The Chris Gaines experiment was a bold gambit to spread Garth's wings beyond country music. But maybe by the late 90s, it just wasn't necessary. By 1998 and 99, Shania Twain was proving over and over again that it was possible to get hit songs on both country radio and top 40 radio. The hottest new group in country, the Dixie Chicks, now known as the Chicks, were topping the Billboard 200 with albums filled with capital C, country songs that were nonetheless widely embraced by pop fans. And in 2001 Country act, the Nashville based Lone Star, even topped the Hot 100 with their ballad Amazed. It was the first country song to top the big pop chart since Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton's Islands in the stream 17 years earlier.
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I don't know how you do what you do I'm so in love with you it just keeps.
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All of these chart feats would have been unimaginable without the breakthroughs achieved earlier by Garth Brooks. Sensing his time as a consistent chart topper might soon be over before he went into a self imposed retirement from recording, Brooks wanted to take one more ride as his old self.
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This for a baby.
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In 2001, Brooks released Scarecrow, the final studio album of his long imperial period. The Chris Gaines project had tested the limits of that imperiality, and by the way, the Gaines CD did still manage to go double platinum. But Scarecrow proved Garth as Garth was still a dream draw. The album opened in late November 2001 to sales of 466,000 copies, comparable to the openers of Garth's albums from a half decade earlier. Scarecrow eventually went quintuple platinum and generated six top 40 country hits, including the top five hit Wrapped up in youn.
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How do I love you? Well, don't you know I love you Bound as deep as any love can.
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Grow, Garth Brooks then settled down with Trisha Yearwood for a long hiatus from recording. Together they raised his three daughters from his previous marriage. Brooks would occasionally record one off tracks for various hits and rarities, compliments such as his 2005 three hit Good Ride Cowboy. And his 2007 smash more than a Memory, which achieved the unprecedented feat of debuting at number one on the Hot Country Songs chart, a sign his audience was as devoted as ever. Even with Brooks largely absent, he cast a long shadow over the country hitmakers of the 21st century who scored hits reinventing Garth's combination of melodic pop sensibilities and unabashed country twang all acknowledged his influence, whether it was Kenny Chesney, Keith urban. Or American Idol winner and country crossover superstar Carrie Underwood. Brooks got back in the game in 2013, releasing a box set sold exclusively at Walmart called Blame it all on My Roots that briefly topped the Billboard 200, and he returned to recording albums in 2014, still determined to do things his way. Even at the peak of digital music, Brooks refused to sell his albums on itunes or stream them on Spotify. So as part of the release of his 2014 album Man Against Machine, Brooks launched his own digital music service, which he called Ghost Tunes. It lasted three years before Brooks signed a digital exclusivity deal with Amazon. As recently as three years ago, Brooks was still topping the country charts. His single Ask Me How I Know topped the country airplay chart in December 2017. And just one month ago, during the COVID 19 lockdown, Brooks announced that the first single from his next album, Fun, would be a duet with his wife, Trisha Yearwood, a cover of the Lady Gaga Bradley Cooper song Shallow that he and Yearwood performed on Good Morning America. Brooks has been keeping busy. Even during the pandemic, he held an online concert that was broadcast to 300 Drive in theaters across North America. Industry observers called it one of the most ingenious ways to circumvent the limits on live performance in this terrible year for the music business. Leave it to Garth Brooks to figure out a new way to connect with his audience. He'll probably be one of the first ones back on stage when we all come out of lockdown. If that tomorrow ever comes. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Hit Parade. Our show was written, edited and narrated by Chris Melanfi. That's me. My producer for this episode was Ben Benjamin Frisch, and we also had help from Rosemary Belson. Special thanks to Stephen Thomas Erlewine and Emily Hanson for invaluable research support on this episode. Thanks also to frequent Garth Brooks interviewer Melinda Newman, who is our special guest on a new episode of Hit Parade, the Bridge, available exclusively to Slate plus members. In that Bridge episode episode, Melinda and I talk about how Brooks changed the way country music crossed over with a larger audience. To sign up for Slate plus and hear that show and all of our shows the day they're released, visit slate.com hitparadeplus June Thomas is the senior Managing Producer and Gabriel Roth the Editorial Director of Slate Podcasts. Check out their roster of shows@slate.com podcasts. You can subscribe to Hit Parade wherever you get your podcasts, in addition to finding it in the Slate Culture feed. If you're subscribing on Apple Podcasts, please rate and review us while you're there. It helps other listeners find the show. Thanks for listening and I look forward to leading the Hit Parade back your way. Until then, keep on marching on the.
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Bunch of Chris Melanthe Gonna be enough to list if tomorrow never comes.
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Tell.
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That someone that you love Just what you're thinking of if tomorrow never comes.