The first CD review I published in City Pages was no masterpiece of criticism. Still not bad for a beginner (if you can call someone who published a zine for six years a beginner). (And no, I will not be publishing excerpts of ye olde Useful Noise zine here.) The defensiveness was a bit of a pose for the benefit of my imagined alt-weekly audience—I’d been all-in on Garth for years. These were different times.
Of the four pieces collected here, the last feels like the best articulation of my thoughts and feelings about Mr. Brooks. Somehow it’s easier to relax and take a superstar as he comes once his glory days are behind him.
Sure wish that Geocities account I mention was still around.
Review of Garth Brooks’s Sevens, City Pages, February 18, 1998
I never trusted Garth Brooks. How could I? In 1991, I was young and eager to cast pigeon-holier-than-thou sociological aspersions. New Country provided a reluctantly maturing fortyish demographic with a well-groomed-yet-shitkickin' alternative to Nirvana or N.W.A. Who better to fill this niche than an advertising major whose idea of rock & roll was Billy Joel slathered in cornball arena glop? Whose conception of down-home soul was James Taylor with a constricted larynx? Whose biggest political action was a crusade against the sale of used CDs? No, I never trusted Garth Brooks. In fact, for a couple years, I never even listened to him.
And then… I did. Anticipating glossy boogie or feigned sincerity, I heard Brooks endowing cherished common places with contemporary relevance, calling pride and distanced cool cowardly evasions of unbridled emotional commitment. Listening for Glenn Frey, I heard Bruce Springsteen. Just as Bruce amplified the romantic promise of “Be My Baby” into momentary, defiant redemption, Garth reclaimed the candor smothered beneath the '70s confessional set's laid-back solipsism. In doing so, he re-energized a stadium-scaled ritual of self-realization without caving into self-pity. Country has always assumed that the stuff of everyday life—infidelity, heartbreak, and, yep, true love--could serve as perfect stuffing for Sophoclean story-songs. Brooks labored to prove that maxim. And he aimed to prove it all night.
Having ridden Buddy Holly's giddy hiccup of sexual anticipation into middle age, Brooks, in his latest issue, acknowledges the lingering adolescent insecurity fueling this desire. Whether anguishing over a potential extramarital affair or admitting that his wife's love terrifies him, Brooks always colors his passion with intimations of inadequacy. This tension between fear and determination even justifies his affinity for self-reliant platitudes like “Do What You Gotta Do.” And any guy who hears “a tape of my failures playing inside my head” every night needs all the reassurance he can muster.
But it's vocal timing that revitalizes Brooks's not-so-mellow dramas. On “I Don't Have To Wonder,” Garth calmly summons the nerve to attend his ex's wedding as a light piano and fiddle buttress his resolve. But fear and a mournful pedal-steel lick strand him in his pickup outside the church. As the bride emerges to confirm his fears, a piano flourish halts his rising voice in a shocked choke. Only after chucking his diamond ring into a nearby river does he approach full-throated growl. But, just as we begin to sense release, a plaintive guitar delays the chorus. By now, “less time than it takes a tear to fall” could be a subdivided second or an increment of infinity. At the crescendo, Brooks cries, “I don't have to wonder anymore!” with a sudden, cathartic realization of his loss. He momentarily sustains his intensity at a lower pitch. Then he repeats the line softly, with equal parts resignation and relief.
Those who equate authenticity with stylistic purity, or take jaded disinterest for maturity, should distrust Garth Brooks. But I trust his audience's response to his assertion that emotional risk-taking can buoy heroic triumph. Alt-country clubbers weary of Tupelonesome fatalism disguised as traditional wisdom should at least sample Garth's The Hits to gauge how empathetic they find his quotidian grandeur. They might even be able to buy it used.
“Blood on the Plow,” Village Voice, January 22, 2002
Be forewarned: After a No. 1 debut and respectable five-week dalliance at No. 3, Garth Brooks’s latest album recently plummeted out of the Billboard top 20. We Garth fans watch such chart movement with warranted trepidation—the sight of our spoiled hero agonizing in the throes of commercial desperation is gruesome and piteous indeed. When Sevens took a similar plunge in ’98, Brooks began siphoning funds from other Capitol acts’ promo budgets, spewing out cynically redundant limited editions and live recordings, and performing the Michael Jordan “I’m in—I’m out” retirement shuffle. Oh, yeah, then he dressed up like a sitcom caricature of Trent Reznor and crafted a “dark” side project that sulked along like a compilation of wilted Bread outtakes. Bet the dude wishes he had a band to break up so he could launch a reunion tour.
For us faithful, awaiting Garth’s public pronouncements over the years has been like taking a petulant toddler to Mass—you smile in denial and cringe with anticipation of the embarrassment to come. (A truly obsessive “I Hate Garth” page at www.geocities.com/ Nashville/Opry/5156/index.html covers all his sins.) But, thankfully, for Scarecrow, Brooks has largely kept his lips zipped. The biggest stink came when he refused to perform Scarecrow‘s duet with George Jones, “Beer Run,” at the CMAs with said legend. According to Garth, it’s just not right to hoot and holler about crossing county lines for a drink, not with September 11 so fresh in our memories. If he has nothing more to say about the WTC (save a small printed tribute in the CD booklet and some murmurs about the need for prayer in schools), consider yourselves lucky.
Both singers have been put to better use than spelling out “B, double-E, double-R you in?” But they’ve each saddled up deader horses, and there’s a homely pleasure in the sound of two naturals trotting along so casually. Brooks’s anticipatory hiccups ain’t as classic as Jones’s bottomed-out dips, but they sure sound as idiosyncratic and effortless. And if George realized that Garth’s closing ad lib—“All right, but I’m drivin’ “—was a playful swipe at the Possum’s much publicized ’99 DWI, good for them both.
If nothing else, Garth remains a great novelty artist. “Big Money” is an ode to cowardice that advises layabout schemers to be nice to relatives with risky jobs so as to secure a mention in their wills. And the racy “Squeeze Me In,” in which Brooks phones ultrabusy career girl Trisha Yearwood at work and she faxes him back, is yummy yuppie foreplay at its most conspicuously consumptive. Even the hit is a lightweight treasure. “Wrapped Up in You” cuts against a gentle lope with a harmonica and fiddle OutKast could groove to, though even Andre isn’t a committed enough cornball to get away with “How do I love you, let me count the ways/There ain’t no number high enough to end this phrase.”
As if hell-bent on rewarding brand loyalty, however, Brooks does himself in by recycling his typical subjects. After all, what’s a Garth Brooks album without meteorological melodrama (“The Storm” rolls out the thunder once more), live-your-life platitudes (“Pushing Up Daisies”), and yet another rodeo rocker (“Rodeo or Mexico”)? By the time he closes off by boarding a very similar “ship out on the ocean” to the one launched a decade back in “The River,” you want to file a class action suit against the clod for infringing his own copyright. Nor does it help that he belts out the bombastic chorus as if he’s auditioning for Diane Warren. I know, he’s always sung from his gut. But, man, have you seen his gut lately?
Given Garth’s tendency to foot-in-mouthiness, the way Scarecrow skirts around the issue of a certain well-publicized D-I-V-O-R-C-E is hardly surprising. But the way the album studiously avoids discussion of either fidelity or infidelity may protesteth too little. True, “Why Ain’t I Running,” which caresses Brooks in a bath of ’70s AOR pedal steel as he decides not to hit the road, is a slap in the face to everything Eagles outlawism stands for—Garth’s lover can own him, stone him, maybe even be a friend of his. But the only time anyone comes within a zipper’s breadth of fucking someone else’s spouse is on the hapless “Rodeo or Mexico,” which finds Garth vacillating between the delights of a dusky-skinned señorita and bolting off to rope the wind. (Her knife-wielding husband simplifies the decision for him. Great.)
And so, as Garth Brooks slouches into lame-duck superstardom, he seems to be seeking shelter in competent irrelevance. Once, he sang as though going on that first date after your divorce or not giving in to adulterous temptation was more courageous as stumping for the Confederacy or bitching drunkenly about city folk. But now he’s holding back. The album, says Garth, was named for the Wizard of Oz straw man, who “thinks with his heart.” Well, then how about some fire? Coasting on the safest record of a career he claims is over, Garth Brooks does seem something like a hollow man, a stuffed man, retiring in every sense of the word. If so, this is the way his career ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.
“Garth Brooks at Target Center, 11/6/14,” City Pages, 11/7/14
You might say Garth Brooks is a crowd-pleaser. You might also say Michael Jackson was a good dancer and Beatles songs are catchy.
Garth—to call him "Brooks" is as fussy and mannered as referring to "Presley"— has the sales figures to deserve mention alongside those other superduperstars, of course. But he's earned their company because he's channeled his drive to satisfy huge audiences into performances masterful enough to transform "crowd-pleasing" from a backhanded critic's compliment to a form of artistry in itself.
Detractors call Garth's gift of convincing an arenaful of admirers that he exists solely for their delight "pandering," because an attempt at seduction always seems pathetic when you rebuff it.
But his decade-plus of hits is as thrilling as any pop star's, and at the first of his eleven Target Center shows (and his first Minneapolis performance since he stopped touring in 1998) we got to hear just about all of them in about two hours, because you don't get to be Garth Brooks by disappointing your fans. (That's how you get to be Chris Gaines.)
The show started with a bit of schtick as winning as it was ridiculous. The green digital "g" that had been spinning on the video screen onstage glitched and fizzled, replaced by a red skull and crossbones and a scary robot voice, then a clock counting down the remaining minute before Garth's appearance. First a larger-than-life silhouette was visible; then he shot up from below, a pudgy everyman in black hat, untucked denim shirt and relaxed fit jeans, to sing the song we'd all been waiting to hear: "Man Against Machine."
Well, ha, OK. On the real side, no one's going to clamor for the title track to Garth's upcoming album on his next comeback. But you don't get to be Garth Brooks by refusing to promote your new product. And as the song climaxed with Garth and his musicians performing furiously to stave off a descending lighting rig, the spectacle was so engaging we all forgot that we didn't really want to hear this song, which name checks John Henry but is probably about Garth's struggle to find a way to sell his back catalog digitally without giving iTunes a cut. (You don't get to be Garth Brooks by abandoning your revenue streams.) As though to calm any fears, he immediately kicked into "Rodeo" next, and responded to the crowd's excitement by shouting "You remember the old songs!" in feigned amazement. Oh, Garth.
Like all great arena-rock shows, except more so, a Garth Brooks concert sounds hokier when described after the fact than it feels at the time. It's like hearing a transcription of last night's pillow talk read aloud over breakfast the next morning. Did we really respond so eagerly to that manipulative banter, the way he gnawed the caps off water bottles that he then tossed into the crowd, the Gene Simmons-y screech of "yeah" between songs? Yes. Yes. Yes. And we'd do it again for the next ten shows if we could.
Rather than whooping the crowd up, Garth pretended to try to contain it, offering to soothe us with ballads lest we wear ourselves out too soon. "I've seen more Garth Brooks shows than anyone in here," he warned. "People, you're starting out way too fast." And each promise of a slower number was met with a speedier rocker, climaxing with the galloping "Ain't Going Down (Til the Sun Comes Up)," a breakneck romp about the joys of all-night teenage fucking.
In Garth Brooks' world, you see, love never doesn't include hot sex. So the domestic swinger "Two of a Kind, Workin' on a Full House" is literally baby-making music (the old folks in the crowd were just plain adorable during that one), and the distracted driver of "Callin' Baton Rouge" recalls an almost unimaginably good time in bed.
Of course, Garth confronted the danger of indulging in (what I wish he wouldn't call) passion (even though I understand why he does) last night as well. After all these years, "The Thunder Rolls" combines the foreboding of "Riders on the Storm" with the garishness of a Lifetime Original Movie (and if you think that's an insult you need more, er, passion in your life), while "Papa Loved Mama," which ends with with pa's truck embedded in the hourly-rate motel occupied by ma and her latest friend, turns adultery into a killer joke.
Physically, of course, Brooks is more schlubby sitcom hubby than king of the boudoir, a fact he acknowledged with winning self-deprecation—early on he claimed to be 137 years old, later he claimed his acoustic guitar wasn't even amplified, that he just used it to hide his gut. He's actually 52 and ... well, not every middle-aged man looks like Dwight Yoakam in jeans. But if Garth's once-cherubic face has taken on a potatoish Ned Beatty quality, his blue eyes remain Peter O'Toole-level startling. And regardless he retains a true star's ability to bask in his fans' admiration in the way that only encourages more (and louder) admiration.
The only other new song Garth performed, "People Loving People" is one of those anthems about love-and-only-love having the power to save the world that incredibly rich and successful people find so persuasive and profound, with a weird diss of Aristotle, who has the misfortune of rhyming with "bottom of the bottle." But his other introspective ballads soared, with much vocal support from the crowd. "The River" still redeems its inspirational cubicle-poster verse ("I'll never reach my destination / If I never try") by suggesting palpable emotional rewards, and "Unanswered Prayers" remains a be-careful-what-you-wish-for tale even an atheist can get behind.
One nice thing about being married to Trisha Yearwood is you get to call her out mid-set to play a handful of her own tunes and just chill out toward the back of the stage with your guitar. Yearwood, in plaid slacks and an ever-so-slightly yet noticeably frayed jean jacket, joined her husband onstage for the big ballad "In Another's Eyes," introduced "How Do I Live" as "a beautiful song from the movie Con Air," reminded us how feminist she was for '90s Nashville with the career woman anthem "XX's and OO's (An American Girl)" and managed to not be entirely upstaged by a KissCam during "She's in Love With the Boy."
Garth returned with "Shameless," a song that so fully embodies his ethos that Billy Joel could have written for him specifically, then continued to steam things up with "Callin' Baton Rouge" (see above). Ever the tease, he paused a 19K-person sing-along to "Friends in Low Places," his masterpiece of class resentment, by threatening not to withhold the third verse, then relented and allowed us to shout a climactic "kiss my ass" at the uppity dame whose soiree we were all crashing. And for a finale, of course, "The Dance," a wise and candid acknowledgement of the importance of heartbreak.
Garth didn't have too many big hits left for the encore, but for "The Fever," an Aerosmith cover, the gyroscope-like cage in which his drummer was encased rose up from the state and rotated, and the keyboard players' separate platforms elevated as well. The night's previous deficit of pyrotechnics was corrected during "Standing Outside the Fire." And a man who evidently felt pretty damn good for his age, sweat-stained mugging aside, closed with "Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)." Garth took a while to exit the stage, flaunting the true showman's ultimate gift by convincing a satisfied crowd that nonetheless wanted more that he leaves us reluctantly, that he would stay with us all night, pleasing us, if only he could.
“Garth Brooks, Country's Horniest Superstar, Hosts a 70K-Fan Sing-Alongs at U.S. Bank Stadium,” City Pages, May 4, 2019
A football stadium might not be the best place to see Garth Brooks perform but it's for sure the most appropriate.
Brooks's career is one of quantifiable superlatives, the big-bigger-biggest and the more-most-all. This has inspired some annoying business decisions—his willingness to endlessly repackage and resell his material in a quest to surpass the Beatles' sales records, his decision to start his own streaming service so Apple and Spotify couldn't get a cut, a bizarre mid-'90s crusade to outlaw the used-CD market. But that appetite for commercial triumph is, for better or worse, inseparable from the go-for-broke, heart-on-his-denim-sleeve emotional thrust of Brooks' songs—and from the live Garth Brooks experience, which is about performing to as many Garth fans as humanly possible.
For the first of two nights at U.S. Bank Stadium on Friday, Garth gathered more of those faithful in the same place at the same time than ever before in Minnesota: About 70,000 filled the sold-out pigskin shed, and just as many will be there tonight. (Last time in town, in 2014, he filed more than 200,000 ticketholders in and out of Target Center over the course of an 11-show stand.) And the usual concert boasts about going all night and playing every song you wanted to hear—the indoor stadium meant no noise curfew, Garth reminded us—weren't wholly empty. In all, he ran through nearly 30 songs, including a mostly request-driven seven-song encore, in a two-and-a-quarter-hour set.
As always, Brooks lauded us with the sort of flattery that paradoxically feels more sincere as it balloons in grandiosity. "You're gonna wear my big ass out tonight," he said at one point, and when he hauled on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's "Fishin' in the Dark," which has been a between-inning MLB staple for years now, he congratulated the audience's familiarity with country music as lavishly as if they'd recognized an obscure Ernest Tubb B-side.
"Fishin' in the Dark" is also a great song, and the thing about Brooks, who made his name by seeming to flaunt an over-the-top lowbrow tastelessness, is how good his taste actually is. He has an A&R man's ear for the well-crafted country song. (Or had—every knockout he played dated back at least to the first Clinton Administration.) "Papa Loves Mama," which captures the entire doomed history of a marriage in two 12-line verses and a chorus, deserves to be in a damn anthology of best American short stories. And that taste extends to his musical settings. The image-establishing hit "Friends in Low Places" is one the best arranged country songs of the late 20th century, featuring an economically perfect pair of fiddle licks even a casual admirer could hum right now.
And of course, Garth remains our horniest country superstar. Where most of the all-hat, big-talking purty bros who act like they want to rhymes-with-truck you actually sound like they'd pass out from tequila overload while you're still unbuckling their belt, 57-year-old Garth remains eternally DTF. He's a master of innuendo, from "we really fit together if you know what I'm talkin' about" on "Two of a Kind, Workin' on a Full House" to the title of the auctioneer-paced romp "Ain't Goin' Down (Till the Sun Comes Up)" to the way he stretches out the last word of the phrase "mama loved men" on "Papa Loved Mama" to imply just how many, how much, and how often she loved them.
Garth brought out his photographer, a fellow named Spencer from Lakeville, Minnesota (cue huge cheers), and offered to take his picture for a change, then apologized. "Sorry man, these pictures are gonna suck." He ran across the front of the stage slapping hands. He carefully sprinkled an entire bag of M&Ms into the crowd where a lesser showman would have just tossed out the whole load at once. He acknowledged as many of the handwritten signs in the crowd as he could, and I haven't seen that many since the "Subterranean Homesick Blues" video. There was a sign celebrating his fiddle player, a sign (successfully) requesting his tolerance anthem "We Shall Be Free," a sign indicating a marriage proposal that prompted him to serenade the newly affianced with "Make You Feel My Love," a song that he, Adele, and Bob Dylan (its writer) have all striven in vain over the years to make sound like the standard it was surely written to be.
Brooks performed much of the encore's requests solo and acoustically, digging into the past for "Learning to Live Again" (a terrifyingly accurate song about how much dating sucks as an adult), playing "Ireland" for some Irish fans, and sharing an a cappella bit of "The Change" when he didn't think he could pull it off on guitar. Then he closed with a pair of covers: a suitably randy choice of Bob Seger's "Night Moves" and the unfortunate "American Pie," which I'm sure he picked for the same reason he brought someone onstage earlier to sing "Happy Birthday" to her—because everyone would know the words. There's only one human being who loves sing-alongs more than a Garth Brooks fan, and that's the famous guy who kept leading those sing-alongs from the stage last night.
But the showstopper of the night was, as always, "Friends in Low Places." (It occurred to me, while watching, how funny it is to imagine the hoity-toits he's harassing actually being intimidated by Garth Effing Brooks. I mean, what's he gonna do? Pump his fist, let out a little yowl, and barf in the floral arrangement?) Brooks could play "Friends in Low Places" for an hour and the crowd would hang with him for every chorus. Or—and I can't believe he hasn't thought of this—he could run through it 16 times in a row and top Travis Scott's record-holding 15 consecutive "Goosebumps" performances. Clearly no one has told Garth there's a world record at stake or else he'd have done it already.