It was into this hazy malaise that Chris Gaines emerged, widely noticed but generally unattacked (this being the pre-blog age). The big reveal/marketing initiative happened on Saturday Night Live, a program that’s always fun to read about but almost never fun to watch: Brooks hosted the November 13 show with alterego Gaines as the musical guest, as if they were two different, unrelated people. The fact that I was even watching this program clearly suggests (a) the SEC football game on ESPN must have been a blowout and (b) I had a drug problem. There was also a fake VH1 Behind the Music about Chris Gaines, although I never caught that; I think it might have aired during the Iron Bowl. But anyway, all initial logic suggested that this was just an unorthodox way to promote The Lamb, the fictionalized biopic of Gaines’s “life” that was supposed to hit theaters in early 2000 but never actually came into existence. At the time, most people made the same assumption as me. But Garth had his own unique perspective: His concern over the transformation dwelled almost exclusively on its consumer viability.
“So the big question is this,” Brooks said at the time. “If we don’t have the traditional first week, that ‘Garth Brooks week’ that we’ve been so fortunate to have [in the past]—is [the new album] going to be deemed a failure? I’m hoping that Chris gets a chance, like all new artists, gets to come out and then hopefully word of mouth gets around and he starts to pick up and gain speed, and starts to actually live and breathe like artists do.”
On the surface, this statement does not seem strange; it sounds like the normal kind of bullshit major recording stars offer up when they have to give twenty interviews in two days. But it is strange, and not just because Garth is talking about a different person and himself at the same time. It’s strange because Brooks is obsessed with the one thing that he did not need to reinvent himself to achieve—mainstream commercial success. His motive for becoming a different person was to become the person he already was, minus the hat.
Even more than the album itself, the liner notes to In the Life of Chris Gaines (the fake Chris Gaines anthology) indicate a specificity of confusion that’s too abnormal to be insignificant. The opening pages of the CD booklet show a photo of Gaines standing in an industrial kitchen, clad in black; its facing page is a biography of our nonexistent musician, presumably explaining what would have become the narrative thread for The Lamb (had it ever been produced). The biographical details2 are explicit, charming, and stupid in the manner one might expect. But more curious is the emphasis Brooks placed on chronicling the chart success of Gaines’s career: He notes that Gaines’s first imaginary solo album spent “an extraordinary 224 weeks” in the Billboard Top 200 before winning a Grammy. His second imaginary album, the sexually “dark and angry” Fornucopia, debuted at number one and spent eighteen weeks at the top of the charts. His imaginary 1994 album Apostle spent eight imaginary weeks at number one “without any artist promotion.” It’s almost as if Brooks was honestly dreaming of a world where he did not exist, so he felt obligated to create a musician whose career would fill the commercial void left by the disappearances of No Fences and Ropin’ the Wind.
In his imagination, Garth knocked himself out of the Billboard charts with himself.
2B In the Life of Chris Gaines ended up selling two million copies in two months, a relative failure in the musical economy of 1999.3 It got as high as number two on the Billboard charts, but it never had a “Garth Brooks week,” just as its creator feared. And while feared might be too strong a verb, it’s not far off: Garth Brooks really, really cared about record sales. I can’t think of any artist who ever cared about sales more. Which is not to say Brooks was obsessed with money, because that’s totally different—the Rolling Stones care deeply about money, but they don’t give a shit how it’s acquired. If Kiss could make more money farming than playing in a band, Gene Simmons would immediately sign an endorsement contract with John Deere. Jimmy Page is probably counting his money right now, as you read this very sentence. The desire for wealth complicates artistic vocation, but it doesn’t tell us much about the music. What Garth cared about more were statistics. Like a nongambling Pete Rose, Brooks was consumed by the magnitude of his own numbers: With career album sales over 128 million, he is currently the bestselling solo artist of all time. This was not happenstance: At Brooks’s request, some outlets slashed the retail price of his late nineties albums to guarantee massive openingweek sales. “I believe in the Wal-Mart school of business,” Brooks has said. “The less people pay, the more they enjoy it.” After he released a double live album in 1997, Capitol Records put out a press release chronicling his dominance in random U.S. cities: A Media Play in Rockford, Illinois, sold three hundred albums when the album went on sale at midnight. Tower Records in Sacramento sold four hundred copies in two hours. A Sam Goody in California sold out of the CD in two hours. Some outlet called Gallery of Sound in Edwardsville, Pennsylvania, sold a thousand copies on opening day. Brooks has received twenty-four Billboard Music Awards, an honor based solely on quantifiable unit moving. All his concerts sell out (in 2007, he played nine straight “comeback” shows in Kansas City’s Sprint Center, selling 23,750 tickets on every single night). No other nineties artist comes close to his dominance. For ten years, Brooks was twice as popular as U2 and REM combined.
This is interesting for lots of reasons, but particularly for one: Since his semi-retirement in 2000, Brooks has inexplicably evaporated from the public consciousness. His highest-profile moment was covering Don McLean’s “American Pie” at an inaugural ball for president-elect Obama in 2009. Modern country radio rarely plays his music, and he isn’t yet viewed as part of the “classic country” contingent. None of his songs have become standards. I spent a weekend in Nashville and went to half the honky-tonks on Broad Street, and I didn’t hear his music once. He already seems half as famous as Brad Paisley.
So why did this happen? How does someone this beloved not become a legend once he’s absent? It wasn’t like Brooks was a Lou Reed–level jerk, or even a Clint Black–level jerk. He was always magnanimous and respectful toward his principal influences (George Strait and George Jones) and once played five soldout shows in L.A. for charity. Yet the minute he stepped out of the room, nobody cared. And I think the reason this happened is the same reason Brooks tried to become Gaines in ’99: His persona was somehow real and fake at the same time. It was real in the sense that it was not contrived or imaginative—he was just the same normal guy he always was. It was fake in the sense that it was unnaturally straightforward—it’s impossible for a normal person to sell 128 million albums, or even to want to sell 128 million albums. And Brooks seemed to understand that. There was eventually a three-pronged disconnect between (a) who Garth thought he was, (b) who the audience thought Garth was, and (c) how Garth assumed his audience wanted to think of him. So he tried to connect those dots through Chris Gaines, and he failed. But that aborted reinvention tells us more about Brooks than anything else he’s ever done. It exposes the confusing truths that had always been there, lurking unnoticed.
3 In the late 1960s, when three (or at least two) of the four Beatles had started to lose interest in being “the Beatles,” Paul McCartney gave an interview where he mentioned how it would be fun to re-form the Beatles under a different name and to wear masks on tour, thereby allowing the band to perform without the responsibility of being who they were. Supposedly, McCartney was shocked and disappointed when the journalist informed him that everyone would immediately figure out who they were the moment they started singing. The first time I read this story was in the introduction to The Bachman Books, a collection of four Stephen King novels written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. King’s intro is titled “Why I Was Bachman.”
Because King directly mentions McCartney in his essay, one assumes he must have related to Paul’s desire, which would explain why he wrote books with a fake name. But this is not accurate. McCartney—seemingly unaware of how distinctive his preexisting identity was—wanted to play music wi
thout hassle and cultural meaning. He wanted an artistic life with less pressure, where the only thing that mattered was his own experience. King—keenly aware of how his preexisting persona was impacting his work’s perception—wanted to see if his success was based on authentic skill or established celebrity (at one point in “Why I Was Bachman,” he begrudgingly notes that the book Thinner sold 28,000 copies when published under the Bachman moniker but 280,000 when rereleased as a King title). He wanted an artistic life with more pressure, where the only thing that mattered was how audiences consumed the literal content.
Now, I’m certain Brooks did not make In the Life of Chris Gaines because he thought it would be easier; he probably did more promotion for this album than any other.4 But is it possible that Gaines was his version of Bachman? The transformation wasn’t masked and anonymous, but it provided an opportunity to test the actual parameters of his enormity. He was easily the biggest artist in the country-western idiom, but critics (of course) still questioned his realness; if he were able to sell eight million albums in the more judgmental, less forgiving world of rock, all those prior criticisms would be moot. Realness would no longer matter—the sound of his voice would transcend everything. If he could sell records as Chris Gaines, it would mean he could sell records as anybody. It would prove he was great (or at least that he had established a certain kind of greatness). But this is the problem with finding oneself through the numerical calculation of one’s commercial achievement: It only makes sense the first time it happens. After that, it keeps perpetuating itself, over and over and over again. It starts to seem like it isn’t based on anything. So maybe the only way to make it feel real is to do something that doesn’t succeed, just to demonstrate that the work itself actually played a role in whatever made you good in the first place.
2C In 2008, hyper-Christian DirecTV advocate Beyoncé Knowles released I Am … Sasha Fierce. This record is principally remembered for the song “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” arguably the first song overtly marketed toward urban bachelorette parties. The original hook of the album, however, was the concept of Knowles becoming “Sasha Fierce,” a character Entertainment Weekly described as her “sensual, aggressive alter-ego.” During an appearance on Oprah, Beyoncé described Sasha Fierce in the same way; in fact, I believe she used the same exact words. The whole time she spoke with Winfrey, Beyoncé appeared to be working off a script, once misspeaking in a manner that made it obvious she’d rehearsed the entire conversation. I don’t know who came up with the Sasha Fierce concept, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t God. Beyoncé claims Ms. Fierce was invented during the making of “Crazy in Love” in 2003, but the whole thing seemed so unnatural and out of character that the only explanation can be strategy. Somewhere along the line, somebody important came to the conclusion that there is a segment of Knowles’s audience who likes to imagine that Beyoncé’s secret personality is erotic and confrontational and street. Someone concluded that making this personality into a product would expand the brand (and maybe it did). But as an artistic creation, Sasha Fierce did not work. It only excites those who desperately want to be fooled. When Sasha covered Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” in concert, it was far more entertaining than provocative. It did not make her personality more complex; mostly, it reminded people that Beyoncé doesn’t really have any personality at all. She loves Christ, she loves her husband, she sings reasonably well, and she’s beautiful. That’s the whole package. Becoming a different person only served to make that all the more obvious, because it seemed like she was trying to guess what a cool person might act like.
It was the same for Garth. His self-portrait of Chris Gaines—a sullen, post-Nevermind alt rocker who aspired to compete against bands like Cake and Marcy Playground—resembles an attempt at sarcasm by the FBI’s witness protection program. His decision to grow a soul patch pretty much said it all: In the ten-thousand-year history of facial hair, no one has ever looked nonidiotic with a soul patch. In fact, the zenith of the soul patch’s legacy was Matt Dillon in Singles; Dillon grew a soul patch specifically because he was portraying an alt rock d-bag. Gaines’s hair is likewise confused; it’s styled in that severe, midlength manner all the hair metal dudes adopted after grunge convinced them to record their version of Superunknown. He’s dressed completely in black from the neck down, except when he wears a black-and-white leotard. But still. He does not look like a rock ’n’ roll machine. He looks like somebody who should be trying to assassinate Castro for Gerald Ford. And unlike Sasha Fierce, I suspect the look for Chris Gaines was totally Garth’s vision—an amalgamation of all the signifiers of modern rock, tied together by his desire to be liked by both (a) the kind of person who typically disliked him and (b) the kind of person who would like him no matter what he did. As it turns out, there were exactly two million consumers in that second category. But it was the jerks in that first category who mattered more, and they knew he was guessing all along. This, oddly, is the one musical situation where authenticity does matter: If you want to adopt an unnatural persona, that persona needs to be an extension of the person you secretly feel like. You have to be “authentically pretending.” You have to be the only person who could have become the character you embody. This is why Ziggy Stardust never seemed like a Halloween costume. It’s also why Chris Gaines felt like marketing, even if that hadn’t been the intention. He was crazy, but he wasn’t singularly crazy. He wasn’t crazy enough.
4 What will always remain unclear, of course, is what would have happened if Chris Gaines had made a song that people legitimately loved. In the Life of Chris Gaines technically gave Brooks the biggest pop single of his career (“Lost in You,” which was evidently supposed to sound a little like an upbeat incarnation of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car”), but virtually no one remembers that this track even exists. Brooks wrote none of the material on In the Life of Chris Gaines; the majority of it was penned by two ex-members of the Christian rock group White Heat. It was produced by Don Was, a Grammy award winner who’s best known for being the white dude with dreadlocks who produced the worst Stones albums of all time, walked the dinosaur, and generally talks like he’s full of shit. Several of the songs were tied to the nonexistent movie The Lamb: “Maybe” was pegged as a tribute to Gaines’s fictional dead friend Tommy, supposedly a huge Fab Four fan (the melody falls somewhere between late-era Beatles and lazy-era Oasis, and one of the lyrics is “Even though the bird has flown”). What’s disappointing about In the Life of Chris Gaines is that it’s supposed to be a creative overview of Gaines’s entire fake life, but the songs all sound like they come from the same period (the “earliest” track, something called “My Love Tells Me So,” does not resemble anything that could have been popular in 1985, even in a Coke commercial). The goal of every song on In the Life of Chris Gaines was to become the male equivalent of Sheryl Crowe’s “All I Wanna Do”—an accessible single that nobody would necessarily love but that most people would offhandedly like (and that could thereby inhabit AOR stations and drive album sales for ten to eighteen months). What he wanted was a quiet smash, and he did not get it.
But let’s assume that he did.
Let’s pretend some song off In the Life of Chris Gaines resonated with rock audiences the way “The Thunder Rolls” had resonated with country listeners. Let’s say his new success mirrored his old success. Let’s say he guessed right. What would have happened? It’s a difficult reality to imagine, especially since Brooks no longer talks about this period of his career. When cross-dressing gutter punk David Johansen turned himself into Buster Poindexter and became a hundred times more famous than he was as a member of the “important” New York Dolls, the initial assumption was that the new alter ego was the person he actually wanted to be. As it turns out, the only part Johansen liked was the money (he would eventually tell National Public Radio that the 1987 song “Hot Hot Hot” had become the bane of his existence). But I think Garth would have felt differently. I don’t think he would have ever comple
tely returned to himself. If large numbers of consumers had wanted a new Chris Gaines record every two or three years, he would have kept making them; if they had adored Gaines more than Garth, he would not have felt sad. He might have preferred it—it would have made more sense to him. Authenticity was never really the catalyst here, for him or anyone else. Despite all the weirdness and craven promotion, In the Life of Chris Gaines was not an indulgent vanity project. It was the opposite. A vanity project is something you do for yourself. In the Life of Chris Gaines was done exclusively for other people, which is why no one noticed.
“The Best Response”
The best response to being caught in an illicit homosexual relationship after spending much of your political career pushing antigay legislation and campaigning on a family values platform.
“I will concede that I am more confused than the average person. I’ve spent my entire life denying who I truly was. But my motive for that denial was political, even before I was a politician. I always believed that I could serve the greater good by advancing myself into a position of power, and—in order to make that a reality—the compromise I made was to attack the social mores that were extensions of everything I feared about myself. I felt extremely guilty for doing this, and I felt as though I deserved to be punished. My religious upbringing dictated retribution. So by publicly criticizing the gay community, I felt like I was silently punishing myself. Now, I was totally aware that this was hypocritical, and that hypocrisy consumed me. It was all I ever thought about. It became so pervasive within my consciousness that I found myself acting upon my own suppressed desires. I became romantically involved with someone of my own gender, completely aware that this could destroy me politically. That was part of the attraction. Sadly, I enjoyed feeling self-destructive. When that relationship became more intense, I began to accept that I was gay. And that’s why I kept pushing for laws that hurt the gay community. Political duplicity was the only way I could confront my own personal demons. I deeply apologize for hurting other people, but the only person I was trying to hurt was myself.