Friends In Low Places

By JAY COCKS

Every night is Funny Night.

Here is this unlikely new country superstar, with his acetylene eyes and chipmunk cheeks, stalking the concert stage, acting up, acting crazy, climbing the rigging and blitzing the crowd with bravura. He's part Jolson and part Jagger, pulling stunts that smack more of the Fillmore than the Opry, and the audience hollers for him, feasts on him, lets itself go nuts with him. Nicely nuts. Mannerly nuts. Country nuts.

Here it is, almost a quarter-century later, and Garth Brooks, 30, is still the star of Funny Night, a family ritual from his childhood in Yukon (pop. 21,400), the Oklahoma City suburb where young Troyal Garth Brooks would knock himself out trying to outshine his sister and four brothers. Only difference now is that the venue's gotten bigger, and the stakes higher. Dramatically higher. Today this guy with the excess longitude under the chin is the new face of pop music, 1992.

Damn. Or hot damn, depending on your tolerance for show-biz artifice and nonspontaneous combustion. Brooks is a pretty fair songwriter and a hokey holy terror of a performer. He has a solid, pleasant voice -- short on character and totally short-changed on funk -- and he's possessed of a mean weather eye for the prevailing winds of showbiz. He went to Oklahoma State University on a partial athletic scholarship ("Athletics always kept me in school") and majored in advertising and marketing. That background, competitive and commercially calculated, gave him a cool edge when he was ready to make his assault on Nashville. "Stunk at everything I did," he claims. "Music was the one thing I felt proud of."

Country ran in his family. His mom, Colleen Carroll Brooks, was a '50s-era singer who performed with Red Foley on Ozark Jubilee. When he married his sweetheart Sandy Mahl in 1986, he confesses, "it was the last thing I wanted to do. I hated being tied down." But it was Mahl who kept his hope alive when he wanted to quit Nashville for a while, look for a regular job back home in Oklahoma and maybe try the music business again later. "I'm not makin' this trip every year," she told him. "Either we're diggin' in, or we're goin' home for good." They dug in, and six months later Brooks signed with Capitol Records. "I am so thankful to God and Sandy," Brooks says. "It turned out real well for me."

What has given Brooks his edge is serendipity, and a keen sense of timing. "I really admire him," says Reba McEntire. "He has great instincts, and he is great at marketing." Brooks' inspiration was to kick loose, not at the conventions of the music so much as at the constraints governing performance. His music has enough rock echo to catch the ear of anyone fleeing rap or dance synth on the radio, but it's not aggressive or demanding. It certainly isn't haunting -- you'll have to search far afield from Brooks before you glimpse the ghost of Hank Williams -- but it is insinuating. Even when it's tackling a fairly serious subject like domestic violence, as in The Thunder Rolls, it sounds . . . well, nice. Maybe not entirely appropriate, but it sure goes down smooth.

Growing up, Brooks idolized country sapmasters like Dan Fogelberg, but not for him the doe-eyed, achingly sincere delivery of that stereotypical singer- songwriter. Brooks pulverizes his songs in performance, putting each one across as if it were Born to Run. He has the brass of Billy Joel but a sweetness of temper that keeps him on the south side of overbearing. All that, and a beaver felt Stetson (size 7 5/8) that makes him look dorky. Deliberately, one assumes.

Brooks manufactures a kind of hydrogenated country music -- pop and branch water -- that has a message and no menace, just as his live shows have the trappings of rock without rock's edge of danger or (as in the case of Bruce Springsteen) its all-out emotional engagement. He's a country performer not only for country folk who want a kick, but for city slickers who don't want to stray too far from the superficial trappings of rock. He's new and familiar at the same time. And at the right time.

The new country heat has made it easier for some other voices, too, to break through. There is Clint Black, who is less showy than Brooks but pithier, kind of like a whistle-clean Merle Haggard. His 1989 hit single, A Better Man, was a true heartrender, a no-nonsense male confessional, and suggests that his new album, due in September, will be worth the wait. There are the Kentucky Headhunters, described by their rhythm guitarist Richard Young as "the scariest things in country music." The KenHeads blend whimsy, old-time picking and some refried hippie riffs with the dynamism of a rock band from some Ozark Olympus.

There is Travis Tritt, whose early affection for the Allman Brothers and the Eagles can be heard in the lush melancholy of his tunes and such spiky go-to- hell anthems as Here's a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares). And there are Carlene Carter and Rosanne Cash, two of country's most valuable and idiosyncratic talents. Cash has an intellectual rowdiness -- cut with an adult dose of rock -- that makes most of this new group sound like Sunday choristers. Carter (part of the legendary Carter family) is a kind of roots rebel and hard to pin down, but last year's I Fell in Love was her breakthrough hit -- Sylvia Plath at the honky-tonk.

There are any number of voices singing behind and slightly to the left of Brooks, and plenty of impressionable ears waiting to hear, including many who are wandering over from the scorched earth of hard rock and many who are tuning in from the realms of pop. George Ward, assistant director of the Texas State Historical Association, cautions purists about the "romantic tendency to look at country as having been purer in the past, and less commercial. That is misleading, because it was commercial from the start." True enough. But never before has country been so pop-specific and so savvy about the mainstream.

Never mind the artifice. Never mind that Tritt calls his songs "country music with a rock-'n'-roll attitude," or that Ken Kragin, one of the country's key managers, calls Brooks "to some extent a George Strait clone . . . kind of a cheerleader running around onstage, whipping up enthusiasm." Forget all that and remember Willie Nelson's observation: "It doesn't matter to a real music fan whether the guy has on a hat or not. The real talent, when it gets an audience, will show through."

And keep a little perspective, too, borrowed from the wonderful Emmylou | Harris, who was mixing country and rock under the influence of Gram Parsons while Brooks was still mooning over his Fogelberg LPs. She likes all these upstarts just fine but reminds us that "they're good -- not better. Not better than Merle Haggard or George Jones."

Measured by the standard of Willie and Merle, of George and Hank, of the Carter family and Johnny Cash, Brooks really does seem to be what he says he is, "a pretty average guy," and doubtless it will take time, hard traveling and a lot more music to make him better than average. But there are detonations all over the country field today, and Brooks has already lit more than his share of fuses. Considering the albums he's sold, considering the audiences he's reached, and touched, and enlarged, there is nothing average about his accomplishments. Or even his hat size.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York