In 1999 Garth Brooks, the biggest music star of the 90s, took one of the biggest gambles of his life. Or he lost his mind, depending on point of view. Brooks was to become Chris Gaines, an Australian-American rock star who sprang - and this is truly interesting - from the mind of Brooks himself, who seemingly made up Gaines' back story, life details and major parts of the story for the film The Lamb that was going to present the life story - succes, tragedy, sex drugs & rock'n'roll - of the enigmatic Gaines. The Lamb,backed by Paramount Pictures and scheduled to come out in 2000, would have been scripted by Jeb Stuart, screenwriter for Die Hard and the big screen version of The Fugitive. The accompanying album was going to be produced by Babyface. What could possibly go wrong on Brooks' march towards world domination via the pop charts and Hollywood?
Well, a lot, really. Though, to be fair, you can't accuse Brooks of half-assing it. He slimmed down considerably for his new alter ego, losing about 40 pounds, and grew out a soul patch - hey, it was the 90s! - to better incorporate Chris Gaines. Alas, it was (almost) for nothing. It certainly didn't help that the wig, dark mascara and pouting faces not only didn't make Brooks look like a brooding alt rock star, they made him look like Ben Stiller's Derek Zoolander had walked into the music business. On top of that, the whole concept and presentation - failed makeover and all - was more interesting than the music itself. Most of it is plodding adult contemporary rock with mild r&b undercurrents here and there that could have been monster hits only in Brooks' megalomaniacal imagination.
Brooks is both playing it safe with this music and taking a risk with his whole outrageous and plain weird alter ego, meaning that the Chris Gaines experiment falls in between all possible target groups, is incoherent and finally satisfied no one. It also meant that the concept of these real songs as a companion to a fake career fall apart. Whoever wrote Chris Gaines' liner notes talks about their fake boy band's song being the demo instead of the fancy big money studio version, but the song never sounds like a demo, much less a cheaply assembled one. When he talks about songs coming from "a very dark and angy album", why do none of those sound dark or angry in the slightes? Everything sounds here exactly like what it is: a middle-aged music star trying out his hand at expensively made, trussed-up AC pop-rock. If Garth Brooks had really commmitted to the concept, he could have really had something here. If he had, say, really gone for an 80s instrumentation on the tracks supposed to come from that era, or tried out his version of alternative rock or grunge on the supposedly early 90s recordings. But the Brookster couldn't bring himself to do it, which means that the fake liner notes and the music are often at odds with each other.
Brooks' insistence that this was just an experiment, a little swerve due to the upcoming movie, and not 'the real Garth Brooks' was a bit of a cop-out, a way to protect himself from sell-out accusations. He even went so far in an interview as to suggest that it was Paramount who pushed him into the whole Chris Gaines thing, when that whole deal was 100% the brainchild of the Brookster. And what a weird, warped child it was, the packaging showing already the unwieldiness of the project. The album, identified on the label as "The Pre-Soundtrack To The Film The Lamb" had a front cover and booklet preseting it as the Greatest Hits of Chris Gaines. But since retailers and consumers would have been confused at equal measures, on the back page of the booklet was the same cover, but with the title Garth Brooks In...The Life Of Chris Gaines, which was also the title on the spine and the official title of the album, which was finally usedas the cover. Akward, dude, akward. Much as some of the content pertaining to his alter ego's fictious back story and imagined discography. Not only did they hire a young model to play young Chris Gaines but also some, uh, swimwear models for the 'sexy' artwork of Gaines' albums. No doubt Brooks approved these, so this is where in the hidden space of a booklet and a fictitious character, he let his freak flag fly. Fornucopia, anyone?
I said up there that the music is, unfortunately, the least interesting part of the whole Chris Gaines fiasco, as it's for long stretches a snooze, but there are some good things on here: "That's The Way I Remember It" with its shuffling drum loop rhythm, warm piano and guitars is a very nice number, and beautifully sung by Brooks. The same is probably true for "Lost In You", the single from the album that crazily enough made in in the Top 5, yet is a song that nobody remembers. It is, for certain, a contender for least-remembered Top 5 song of all time. I'm not a huge fan of the song, it's too slow and falsetto singing is rarely a favorite of the house. The title of "Snow In July" sounds like a Prince song, and goes for a Prince feel (and in the fake liner notes it says that the media dubbed him 'The New Prince', yeah, sure Jan Garth), while the most Brokks ever gets to rocking on this disc is the Wallflowers-soundalike "Unsigned Letter".
When the album came out and Brooks was now ready to conquer the pop world after having dominated country music for almost the entire decade beforehand - the album came and went as a huge disappointment, if not outright fiasco. That's obviously a weird thing to say about an album that went all the way to number 2 and made double Platinum. That's of course how crazy the 90s were for Brooks, this would be huge for any other artist, but Brooks was collecting Diamond certifications at the time, so the return was hugely underwhelming. Within weeks, stores were starting to sell their overstock of the album at discount prices.
In The Life Of Chris Gaines was also a huge disaster for Capitol Records, who had gone along with the plan and really put the money behind it. The album itself supposedly cost an astonishing five million dollars to produce, and to really sell the Garth-as-fictitious-rock-star thing they allocated a frankly astonishing 15 milion dollar advertising campaign budget. that included a fake VH1: Behind The Music special. Meaning they sunk more than 20 million dollar in an album that confounded the public, crept to hugely underperforming sales, killed The Lamb and any other related projects deader than Dillinger and was relatively quickly deleted from distribution. Evenmoreso, as, with a sort of Stalinist fervor, Brooks tried to eliminate any traces of poor ol' Chris Gaines: The album isn't part of his official discography on his website, it's scrubbed (or almost scrubbed) like all his music from You Tube and of course it's not available digitally. Garth Brooks would very much for you to forget that Chris Gaines ever existed. But who could foget those bangs, that pout, that eyeliner..?
In 1999, as if karma was out to spite the most succcessful musician on earth, things went from very weird and reasonably bad to undeniably weird and undeniably worse, as Brooks' long and strange months-long Halloween of course ended in the only way it could...weirdly. He brought out a Christmas album, Garth Brooks & The Magic Of Christmas that was also a companion piece to another media adventure - in this case a TV special called Call Me Claus - and, as with the whole Chris Gaines fiasco, things didn't go as planned. The November release date had already been locked in, while Brooks was still trying to get the Gaines thing back on track, and to add insult to injury finally the special wasn't finished in time and pushed back an entire year, leaving that album stranded without the multimedia tie-in Brooks had counted on. So he went from a pre-sooundtrack to a movie that would never exist to a (pre-) soundtrack to a film that would only come out a year later. Hey, how're things goin' there, bud? Oh, also: it has one of the weirdest, most ill-fitting covers of all time. Just look at that thing:
What the fuck is Brooks celebrating here? Is it Christmas or the coming of the antichrist? What's with the spooky night sky? Or with the black outfit and sucked-in cheeks? Is this Chris Gaines who has bodysnatched poor unsuspecting Brooks? Why does he look menacingly into the camera and seems to have a soul-trapping crystal ball of the damned in his hands? Which part of this cover screams 'Christmas' to you? Well, it truly is a Christmas album for the whole family...if it is the Manson family we're talking about. Sheez, Garth. What. The. Fuck. No wonder decades later someone invented the 'Garth is a serial killer' meme.
Anyhow, you can tell that despite the music being probably the weak link of the whole enterprise, I am strangely fascinated by this whole weird-ass saga. This is what happens when a music multi-millionaire gets weird. It didn't work, but damn, if it isn't an interesting story. And so now I told this story. And you will get at least a teaser of what Brooks' weird Gaines adventure sounded like. I wouldn't want to bore you with the whole thing, so I compiled a six-track EP version, The Way I Remember It, with pretty much all the worthwhile Gaines tracks: The aforementioned "That's The Way I Remember It", "Lost In You", "Snow In July" and "Unsigned Letter", plus the singalong "Main Street" and the r'n'b-rock-ish "Diggin' For Gold". These songs will not change your life, but they show that underneath all the layers and layers of bullshit, there might have even been some salvegeable music in the Chris Gaines project, if Brooks had played it straight.
But then again, he would have deprived us of one of the strangest and most curious (and overexpesnive) footnotes in music history. He might not see it that way, now or ever, but it turns out that his biggest failure was also possibly the most interesting - not to mention deliciously wacky - thing he ever did. And for that, Troyal Garth Brooks, we salute you!
Hear what Chris Gaines was all about
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