Garth Brooks: Friends In Low Places

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.