Don't be fooled by Garth Brooks's flag-waving - country singer - Interview

Interview, March, 1994 by Peter Galvin

To see Garth Brooks in concert is to love him. Whether you're a country music fan or not, you can't help but be won over by the warmth and sincerity his stage persona. Obviously, some of Brooks's charisma has translated onto disc: since releasing his self-titled debut CD in 1989, the singer more than thirty million albums. In May, NBC will air Brooks's second prime-time special, an in-concert program filmed over four sold-out nights at the 65,000-seat Texas Stadium in Irving last September. Credited with revitalizing country music and new respectability within the music business at large, Brooks has also caught some flak away from the good-old-boy mainstream and singing songs that deal with such "taboo" subject as wife beating and homosexuality. A very patient, extremely friendly Brooks sat and talked with me in New York about such disparate topics as his admiration for the rock group Kiss and his fervent patriotism.

PETER GALVIN: I used to be a big Kiss fan, and I know that you were, too. You contributed a song to the upcoming Kiss tribute album. How did that come about?

GARTH BROOKS: The guys in Kiss had read in an article that they were very influential to me as a teenager. So they flew to L.A. to see a show of mine. After the show I came backstage. Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons were there. I reached out to shake Paul's hand, and he didn't say, " Hi, nice to meet you." He just said: "I see it. I see it in your show. I see it in your clothes. I'm flattered. " Man, I was beaming. My whole chest was out. I was like, "Wow, thank you." And the great thing, too, about Paul Stanley standing there with Gene Simmons is that these guys are not small people. They're huge. In real life Paul and Gene are well over six feet. They're bigger than life.

PG: Did you get to choose the song you wanted to do for them?

GB: No, they chose it for me. It's called "Hard Luck Woman." I kept telling them I really wanted to do "Detroit Rock City" or "God of Thunder," or something like that.

PG: At least they didn't ask you to sing "Christine Sixteen."

GB: [laughs] Right! [sings] "Chris-tine...!"

PG: I want to talk a little about the rounding the song "We Shall Be Free" on your album The Chase [1992]. You took a lot of flak from some homophobic fans who had a problem with the line "We shall be free ... when we're free to - "

GB: [starts singing the line]" . . . love anyone we choose."

PG: Right. Seldom do popular songs and films have anything in them that gay people can directly relate to, and, whether it was intentional or not, I think you probably connected with a lot of gays and lesbians because of that line. What is your own personal experience with gay people? I know that your older sister Betsy, who plays bass in your band, is gay.

GB: I'm trying to think about when I was growing up - I'm talking mid-'70s. It wasn't a period when people talked about being gay. I mean, we're still in a period when people don't talk about it that much. You also got to remember, man, growing up, I thought that everything was fine in my life. I could have been in the middle of a war all I wouldn't have seen it because I had everything fixed on my dream, and I was running as fast as I could. But where the gay issue has hit me the most is my sister. I've lived with that forever. And the thing is, the longer you live with it, the more you realize that it's just another form of people loving one another, so it doesn't become something special to you, something that's extreme or odd to you. But the line from that song isn't so much about people dealing with "it" as it is about people dealing with themselves. In that song I was talking about relationships between all kinds of people - interracial stuff, Jewish people with people from other forms of religion. But all the reviews focused in on gay. It's like, hey, imagine anything and its opposite coming together. Or anything that seems the opposite of how life has been, coming together. It's all about love.

PG: The negative stereotype of a country music fan is of an ignorant, beer-swilling redneck. Obviously, there are many country fans who don't fit into that category. I'm one of them, although I do like beer. [GB laughs] But I think it was interesting to have that "we shall be free" lyric in a country song because it shows that country music isn't only for people who fit that stereotype.

GB: Sure. But if you're wondering if we have the same fans now as we did before "We Shall Be Free" came out, I think the answer is no. We gained some fans that never knew our music, and we lost some fans that followed us very closely. My thing is, the longer I'm around, the more I'm going to reveal to people what I am. I have never been ashamed of what I am. I wasn't ashamed of singing "Friends in Low Places"; that's where I came from. But I'm also proud of "We Shall Be Free." In fact, in that song, the line I really thought I'd catch the biggest flak for was "When we all can worship from our own kind of pew. . . . " Nobody said jack about that.