My Evening With Garth

Full disclosure: I’m from New York City. Garth Brooks was never particularly popular in my (old) neck of the woods. I do remember the whole Chris Gaines SNL fiasco, and I also remember being shocked when I saw the man in the black cowboy hat on the cover of the Rolling Stone back in 1993. But other than that, my Garth Brooks exposure has been practically nil.

Not so if you grew up in the South. Brooks was, and remains, part of the collective fabric down here, his music a staple at high school dances and honky tonks, football games and karaoke bars. When I heard that Brooks, the once and future mega-star, was playing nine shows in Nashville to raise money for flood relief, I knew I had to see what all the fuss was about. Incidentally, I moved to town on May 1st, the day of the floods. It seemed so arbitrary how some people’s homes, such as mine, were unaffected, while a few streets down, others had had their houses, and most of their possessions, devastated. You didn’t hear much about it in the national news, and many have put it out of their minds. But not Garth. Garth still cares.

It’s a rainy Tuesday night, a bit after 9 p.m., and Nashville has seemingly exploded. What’s going on? All along Broadway, the streets are mobbed with concert goers, an entire arena’s worth, waiting to get in to see the show. There are two two-hour shows scheduled tonight, the first one starting at 7 pm, but Garth has gone long, someone says. We’ll just have to wait.

It looks like a riot waiting to happen, although this is probably not the crowd for that, so I decide to take a stroll around town and wait it out. I end up in a gift shop, a bit removed from the madness, where I browse the Nashville-related merchandise looking for holiday presents. Look at that, a vintage music city ashtray, and it’s only three dollars. How reasonable! The woman at the counter tells me that it’s been a hard year. A few months before the flooding, which brought the river to her doorstep, the pipes in the street had burst, disrupting business. Garth has been a big help, she says, for all the local merchants. He even came in to the store earlier, and shook her hand. You’re gonna love the show, she tells me. It’s fantastic.

9:45, and the streets have magically cleared. Everyone’s inside. In an effort to raise the maximum amount of money, no tickets have been given to the press, so I end up getting a seat behind the stage, a good distance up, where it’s nice and cozy. As in, we’re all in each other’s laps. The show begins when the band comes out, and Brooks appears out of nowhere riding a hydraulic lift, singing the opening lines to “Rodeo.”

His eyes are cold and restless
His wounds have almost healed
And she’d give half of Texas
Just to change the way he feels
She knows his love’s in Tulsa
She knows he’s gonna go
Well it ain’t no woman flesh and blood
It’s that damned old rodeo

The allure of the rodeo has brought this old bull rider back, the song seems to be saying. Hold on for the ride of your life. Everyone is standing, even in the cheap seats. Also, everyone is losing their shit.

“Hello, Music City!” cries the pope of Nashville, soaking up the kind of adoration once reserved for Elvis Presley. “If you can’t tell by now, my voice is completely shot! But I don’t care. Heck, you guys always sang more than I do!” He urges the crowd to sing along, which they do, for every single song. But Brooks voice isn’t actually shot. In fact, it’s in amazingly good shape for a guy who just wrapped up his sixth concert in five days. How does he do it? Where does he get the energy? Maybe, like his very first hit says, he’s much too young to be this damn old. Or maybe it’s the fact that Brooks is primarily a performer, as opposed to a songwriter, allowing him to sing the same set each time out, while remaining fully invested in the material. It’s less about his personal feelings, and more about ours.

“I travel thousands of miles to hear you guys sing,” he says, then leads the crowd through a solo acoustic “Unanswered Prayers.” There’s a lot of positive energy in the air. People are probably getting engaged left and right. “Will you marry me?” “We’re already married.” “Let’s get married again!” Fans are line dancing in their seats, hoisting beers aloft. A college-aged couple in front of me, who’ve spent the evening singing into each others faces, start violently acting out the lyrics to “The Thunder Rolls.”

During “We Shall Be Free,” images of the volunteer state in action, fighting the flood, appear on the jumbo screen. Later, there’s confetti guns, a salute to the troops, and an appearance by the wifey, Trisha Yearwood, who joins her husband to sing “In Another’s Eyes,” a duet worthy of Beauty and the Beast. After each song or so, Brooks tends to the crowd’s energy like a diligent gardner. “Come on, people!” he says in mock (or perhaps it’s sincere) disbelief. “It’s a week night! You keep this up, we’re gonna go all night!”

By the time the second encore comes around, I’m tapped out. “Brooks and done,” as a colleague of mine once said. I make my way back to my car, to better beat the deluge. But I’m sure glad that I went, just as I’m sure glad that I bought a ticket.