Singer Entertains U.S. Troops Overseas
Lari White’s holiday trip to entertain troops in Italy, Bosnia, Turkey and Germany gave the singer a taste of the gratitude of service personnel and a lesson in the unpredictability of military travel plans.
White left Nashville on a military C-141 aircraft bound for Aviano Air Base in Italy, where on her second day in the country she reportedly entertained more than 1,500 servicemen and their wives and families. During the performance she invited children in the audience onstage with her to sing Christmas carols and, afterward, signed autographs for two hours.
Then it was on to Bosnia, where press agent Lisa Gladfelter Bell says White found the weather to be 35 and snowy. She was gratified to find that one week earlier the troops had begun moving from tents into primitive heated buildings.
After doing an ABC Radio Network satellite broadcast to several U.S. country radio stations in the company of servicemen from each of the cities whose stations participated, White got unsettling news. Her band, her opening acts and her management, who were to join her on her second day in Bosnia, had their flight canceled by a technical problem.
White then resourcefully did some military-style recruiting, grabbing two musicians from the Air Force band and a keyboardist right out of the Air Force ranks. With just a one-hour rehearsal, they went on before an audience of hundreds on Thanksgiving Day and did well enough that White spent another two hours signing autographs.
She ultimately went on to Turkey and was reunited with her band for a well-received performance there and another at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Since the plane scheduled to bring White’s entourage into Bosnia was also the one scheduled to remove her from that war-torn nation, she found herself whiling away an extra day in Bosnia.
“It was a very special Thanksgiving,” she was quoted by Bell afterward. “I’ve realized a whole new world of freedoms and comforts to be thankful for after having seen the service men and women in Bosnia living without them.”
Garth mostly live on ‘Live’
Garth Brooks’ “Double Live” album, which so far is his industry’s sales story of the season, is an intricate mix of live-concert and studio-recorded material, and Brooks says, with a laugh, that he and producer Allen Reynolds arrived at that approach because “we knew with Garth as the lead singer we were going to need a lot of studio work.”
More seriously, he says most of the studio material appears either at the beginning or the end of the tracks because it was nearly impossible to coordinate in the studio a duplication of the inevitably inconsistent energy surges of Brooks’ unpredictable stage style.
“What I found out was, even as much as I tried to concentrate, my adrenalin was running so hard that my rhythm would go up and down, so you couldn’t come in and add anything to it (at that point),” the singer says.
“So, like, ‘The River’ starts in the studio with a little four-piece, and then an 80-piece string section behind it, and then coming off the first chorus, where it says ‘Till the river runs dry’ and the band enters. That’s when we immediately go into the arena, and you can hear the crowd move in, and it gives you goose bumps.
“And then, like when ‘The Beaches of Cheyenne’ ends, when it ends out of the arena you can hear the ocean coming in (via studio recording), and then as you sit and listen to the ocean waves you can hear a guitar start, and this guy starts singing, ‘I was watching the news/I was blue as a goose/When this fellow came on TV.’ And he does the whole first verse of ‘(Two) Pina Coladas’ on a beach. And then when the chorus kicks in we’re right back in the stadium.”
Brooks says that on one song alone there were crowd segments from four different cities, but he doesn’t say which ones.
“The less I give them hints where they’re from, hopefully the more people will take it as their album,” he says.
Through the first two weeks, nearly 1.75 million copies of it had been bought, according to Capitol Records.