Garth Brooks wasn't a huge country music fan growing up, reportedly preferring the soft-rocking of Don McLean, Dan Fogelberg, and James Taylor as a youngster. The music from Fogelberg and Taylor is often tolerable with a few great songs in the catalogs of each.
McLean, on the other hand is an unmitigated disaster. I've written before of the treacle called, "American Pie," which is wholly unlistenable, especially the "long" version.
After Brooks moved to Nashville from Oklahoma, he released the eponymous Garth Brooks in 1989. The first single, by Garth and co-writer, Randy Taylor, "Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)" introduced many folks to the work of the "Singing Cowboy," Chris LeDoux, for the first time. Meanwhile, the track became a top 10 country hit. Great start for Garth out of the gate.
LeDoux, a powerhouse "western" artist in his own right—though in a super-tight niche within the record industry itself—was surprised when he heard himself name-checked on the radio. Ultimately, LeDoux and Brooks became friends and collaborated on a duet, "Whatcha Gonna Do with a Cowboy," on the 1992 LeDoux album of the same name, the single reaching as high as No. 7 on the Hot Country charts.
Brooks and LeDoux remained friends, though their musical stylings were not all too similar. After LeDoux's untimely demise from complications of bile duct cancer in 2005, Brooks released a tribute single called "Good Ride Cowboy." Wonderful tribute to a wonderful man.
However, Brooks early rise to superstardom was due to his "crossover" appeal. While hard to dismiss Brooks as a "country music" artist—giant cowboy hat and all—the stylings of Fogelberg, Taylor, Billy Joel, Queen, and the arena rock motif of KISS were peppered throughout his work.
Honestly, though, I loved the first three albums that Brooks put out. Things started going a little sideways for me and my relationship with Garth's music, however, with his next few releases.
A Christmas album, released in time for the yuletide of 1992, was middling at best.
Then, starting with The Chase (also 1992) is where there became a real divergence on my end. The opening number (and the album's first single) was the preachy "We Shall Be Free."
There was also a Patsy Cline cover, "Walkin' After Midnight," that was decent. "Dixie Chicken," a cover of Little Feat's signature song, was also fun.
"Night Rider's Lament," an old cowboy tune that never matched the authenticity Chris LeDoux provided in an earlier version, was also okay. I didn't like much of the rest of the album, but I played it a lot. Garth Brooks-Superstar!, after all.
In Pieces came next, late summer of 1993. The album cover, echoing the two-toned The Chase cover in some respects, was indeed a red (and black checkered) flag, yet it still debuted at No. 1 on both the Billboard 200 and Top Country Albums charts.
The most enjoyable single was "Callin' Baton Rouge," a re-imagining of a bluegrass tune that the New Grass Revival took to #37 in 1987. Brooks took his single to #2, releasing it 11 months after the album itself dropped. Likely a testament to the gravitas of Brooks within the music scene at the time.
To record the song, Brooks invited several members of New Grass Revival to the studio. Most, if not all, accepted, even though the group had broken up in 1989. Perhaps the most famous of the bluegrass pickers was banjoist—virtuoso, really—Béla Fleck, who played the instrument behind Brooks.
The song is great, and thanks to its exposure, it created a new avenue for music fans to explore the alt-bluegrass/alt-country genre that New Grass Revival helped to pioneer.
Nevertheless, I stopped buying Garth Brooks albums after this one. At the time, it was nothing personal. Matter of fact, my introduction to Brooks opened up an entirely new catalog of country music that I never explored before, predominantly in the form of Chris LeDoux, who for the bulk of the decade was my favorite artist…bar-none.
In the days prior to the Internet, we had to make our own minds up about the things we were supposed to like or not. At least it seemed that way.
Oddly, around this time, I also came across a fellow by the name of Kinky Friedman, who was a fringe star on the country music scene in the 1970s. I now have a couple Friedman albums, and to say his work is "niche" is a giant understatement. He's great, however.
I read his books, though, before I ever listened to his music.
As for Friedman’s music, some songs are quite enjoyable, while others are forgettable. One of my favorite covers that Friedman did is "Lover Please," a song popularized by Arthur Alexander in the 1960s. We wrote about Alexander last week.
The novels of this humorist, country music performer, and one-time Texas gubernatorial candidate came on my radar, I believe, in part due to Friedman's relationship with another one of my musical heroes, Willie Nelson.
In the book series, the fictionalized Kinky is a private detective living in New York City. Some of the ire of the Jameson Whiskey-swilling Friedman narrator is occasionally directed at Garth Brooks. Hilarity ensues.
In a 1993 interview with Texas Monthly, plugging his latest novel Elvis, Jesus, and Coca-Cola, Friedman had some things to say about the "new country stars" of the day, specifically Brooks.
"These new country stars seem to pop out of the recording studio devoid of emotional heritage. They're big stars in a week. I'm sure Garth Brooks is a very nice guy, but the people who go to see him could have just as easily been at Disneyland and would have liked it just as much. I've taken to calling him the anti-Hank. Actually I blame Alabama [the band] for the demise of country: They crossed over, everyone followed them, and no one came back."
The sentiment is real and not altogether untrue. However Kinky is known to have opinions from which he won't budge.
(“Kinky” was a sobriquet given to him as a child that originally described his hair. In 1998, Friedman called his coif "a Lyle Lovett starter kit.")
Previously, I've called this early-Brooks era the best of the "country-pop" genre, some of Garth's work notwithstanding. Of course, there were terrible songs that were played incessantly. It's the nature of the radio and music in general.
Yet today, one rarely hears Garth Brooks on country radio, aside from the occasional karaoke barn-burner, "Friends in Low Places." I have several theories, not one of which is fully fleshed-out as to why that is.
Even more strange to me is that the New Grass Revival version of "Callin' Baton Rouge" is now considered by many as the authentic version. The "emotional heritage" is strong in this alt-bluegrass interpretation. It's also just a great song...written by a genius songwriter who was a genre-crossing shapeshifter when it came to his music.
Dennis Linde. We've been writing about him for several days now and we've created a resource page for you to check out. Currently, it has a short bio of Dennis and a few of his most famous country music songs.
We plan on building that page up, Buttercup. Stay tuned…
As always,
Brian
P.S.— The smash single, "Build Me Up Buttercup" by the Foundations, on first glance, has zero to do with Dennis Linde, as it was written by Mike d'Abo and Tony Macaulay.
However, as with most of the Linde catalog, there is certainly a tangent or two in there that can be explored. Pull on a string hard enough and a story will emerge. But not today.
There is a fun fact, however: Mike d'Abo is the father of Olivia d'Abo, who American audiences likely remember as the hippie sister of Fred Savage's Kevin Arnold in the first four seasons of the ABC "dramedy" The Wonder Years.
