In Some Locales, Only Great The Outdoors Is Big Enough To Contain Garth Brooks
Garth Brooks is finding out there are problems with being big.
His show is now too large for a lot of the smaller cities which laid some of the firmest foundations for his megastardom.
“We can’t deny that we have lost West Texas, for one, because none of the venues (there) can hold the production that we have,” he says. “We have lost Fort Smith and Little Rock and Tulsa, again because the venues can’t hold the weight of the ceiling.”
For that reason, Brooks wants to go into those places, while bypassing their venues, finding a way to do those cities some other way. He is currently formulating a plan:
“We want to do what we call an outdoor run where we take a four-poster system and just set up outdoors, either in baseball parks or fields, anywhere, and get out to these people and bring the music back to where we haven’t brought it in four years.”
Such cities will, however, have to stand in line. They aren’t likely to be in the 77-city North American campaign he is launching in March, which is expected to extend through the first of ‘97, he says. Rather, he says he expects this domestic “outdoor run” to follow a four-month European swing that will end by summer of ‘97.
Another domestic tour will begin immediately after the European jaunt and go to “at least 46 cities,” he says.
“It’s going to take a lot of planning.”
Montgomery does live video
John Michael Montgomery recently did a live-concert performance video of his new single, “Cowboy Love,” during a Southwestern touring swing.
Why? Well, Montgomery says, because you never can tell:
“I’ve got this big concert out on tour now, with the lights and the giant video screens and everything. I just wanted to do this video on this song because we kick off the show with it, and we throw some effects and stuff in there.
“Since that’s the new single, I wanted to get that on film and just make how we do this song in concert a video to show the people out there what we’re doing. We’ve been drawing exceptionally big crowds, and I don’t know how long I’m going to be doing that, so I wanted to get it on videotape.”
Krauss live lots of fun
New country fans of bluegrass queen Alison Krauss (who now also wears the crown of country queen, too, since she was named the Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in October) will find in her live show a lot of humor that counterpoints excellently with her highly serious music.
She and her band, Union Station, have a lot of fun onstage, but they say the merriment varies from show to show.
“We sit down and write all that stupid stuff out,” Krauss says with heavy irony, meaning they do nothing of the sort.
“Woody Allen writes our material,” claims banjoist Ron Block in the same vein.
“A lot of times I’m standing there talking and I’ll have no idea what I’m saying,” confides mandolinist Adam Steffey, who handles much of the band’s song-introduction duties. “I’m thinking, ‘Now after this song we’re going to do that one,’ but the whole time my mouth is running. The next thing I know I’ve said something and somebody’ll kick off the song. I’ll back up and be playing, and Barry (Bales, Union Station’s stand-up bass whiz) will lean over and say something like, ‘Did you mean to say that?’ and I’ll say, ‘What did I say?”’
Block says he was in the band two years before he realized that he was tuning his banjo while waiting for Steffey to stop talking - while Steffey was trying to continue talking until Block stopped tuning, figuring Block wasn’t ready to begin the next number.
Strait goes round
Erv Woolsey, the long-time manager of long-time star George Strait, explains how Strait’s concert sellout figures keep going up even when he’s playing venues he has sold out previously:
“He’s been playing in-the-round (totally surrounded by the audience) a lot lately, and that way you can get a few more people in.”
Top new woman: Clark
Speaking of Strait, his 1996 show will be opened by the hottest new traditional-oriented female act to arrive on the scene since Patty Loveless: Terri Clark.
Recently named Billboard Magazine’s “Top New Female Country Artist of 1995,” Clark - whose initial single, “Better Things to Do,” reached No. 2 on the national hit charts - impressed Strait by receiving standing ovations in a few appearances with his show this year.
She begins her opener role for him Jan. 18 on a Strait campaign that is estimated to comprise 50 to 60 dates. On her own, she will be doing club and fair dates as well.
“George Strait has always been one of my heroes,” Clark says. “It’s an honor to go out on tour with someone who is both a living legend and one of the most exciting artists out there today.”
Tractor plows old ground
Steve Ripley of The Tractors acknowledges that his band is different from most of those out there on the country scene today, but he takes pains to note that that doesn’t mean he doesn’t like the other stuff.
To the contrary:
“I like virtually all of it,” he says. “I love Shania Twain’s record (the album “The Woman in Me”). I started to say I wouldn’t buy it, because I don’t buy much, but I’d have to say we bought it. My wife really liked it when it first came out. She bought it and made me listen to it before it ever hit the airwaves, so my family bought it.”
A Tulsa guitarist, singer and songwriter who has found stardom in the company of some long-toothed peers, Ripley says he tends to just love records, period, and these include both the currently popular ones as well as ones by people who aren’t as popular as they used to be.