Country Rocks

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Aging rock 'n' rollers have been quietly defecting to country for years. But since 1990 the process has accelerated sharply. "Elvis Presley was the first time I saw this kind of reaction," says Jimmy Bowen, whose Nashville-based Liberty Records distributes Brooks. "Then I saw it again with the Beatles. And now I see it with Garth Brooks. When you turn on millions of people in a short period of time, that's called a phenomenon."

Brooks has yet to prove he has the imagination of John Lennon, much less the death-defying charisma of Elvis, but he has broken all of Nashville's sales records. Until his 1991 Ropin' the Wind, no country album had ever entered Billboard's pop chart at No. 1. Since his recording debut a short three years ago, Brooks has moved more albums with more velocity than anyone else in the history of Nashville: when the figures for Ropin' are added to those for Garth Brooks and No Fences, his first and second releases, he has sold more than 16 million records.

Even without Brooks, the country sound has upset the cosmopolitan assumptions of Los Angeles and New York City, which said drawl-and-twang music would never acquire a mass audience. Country music was, after all, the sort of rube industry that made a vamp out of the cowboy by putting him in rhinestones and that churned out corn pone-ography like TV's Hee Haw, the show where banjo pickers and celebrity fiddlers would pop out of a field to joke about henpecked husbands and lazy cousins. Worse, the last time country flashed across the national consciousness, it was propelled by the 1980 movie Urban Cowboy, starring a mechanical bull and John Travolta. The crowd that had infested discos was suddenly squeezing into tight-fitting jeans and into pseudo-kicker saloons from Cambridge to Beverly Hills. Five years later, the boots were tucked away next to the platform shoes, and the New York Times was declaring that country music might soon be "as dated as the ukulele."

This time the boom is different. "A connection is really being made between the audience and the music," says Bill Ivey, director of the Country Music Foundation. "In the '70s and '80s, with the excesses of the sexual revolution and the excesses of an out-of-control speculative economy, everybody lived as though they could have it all today and all tomorrow. Now, with the collapse of the savings and loans, the specter of AIDS, and a weak economy in which anybody who has a job considers himself lucky, I think everybody realizes we are going to have to live like grownups. Country music is definitely music for grownups."