Country Rocks

By PRISCILLA PAINTON

It was a time of new prosperity in the U.S.A.

And all the fortunate offsprings never had to pay

We had sympathy for the devil and the Rolling Stones

Till we got a little older

And found Haggard and Jones

A generation screaming for more room

Kids of the baby boom

-- Bellamy Brothers, 1986

Baby boomers have gone through a strange musical journey. For a time, rock music was their essential cultural touchstone, a vein of deep feeling that seemed to flow through nearly every one of them. If the oldest boomers grew up on early Stones and the youngest arrived just in time to catch Van Halen, at least they possessed a lingua franca.

Then along came advances in studio technology and radio-station niche marketing. Leading-edge music is now subdivided into such abstruse and sharply segregated categories as Christian Rap, Acid Jazz and Grunge Rock, and it can be created, almost untouched by human hands, with something called a Musical Instrument Digital Interface. The two major currents of pop today have much to do with attitude and little to do with musicality: heavy metal speaks to priapic barbarism, and rap is so belligerent that for some it verges on antimusic.

So who's topping the charts? Well, how about a balding Oklahoma country singer whose idols include James Taylor and John Wayne, who prances across stage like a cross between Mick Jagger and Ferris Bueller, swinging from rope ladders and smashing his guitar, and who brings 40-year-olds to tears with his existential hymns about accepting life's incidental malice? Rock may be moribund, but Garth Brooks sure is thriving.

By their sheer demographic weight, the nation's 76 million baby boomers continue to determine America's musical preferences. And what America currently prefers is country. Brooks now outsells Michael Jackson and Guns 'N Roses, country radio is trumping Top 40, and Nashville is churning out new stars so fast that Randy Travis' six years in the limelight qualify him as an elder statesman.

Significantly, country has achieved its new luster without abandoning its heritage: a heritage so stubbornly rooted in storytelling and simple melody that it has never quite left behind the farm in Poor Valley, Va., where a moody lumberman named A.P. Carter and his clan picked up guitars seven decades ago and invented the Carter Scratch. The new wave of country singers is dominated by artists who have succeeded largely on their own terms, consolidating an eclectic mix of contemporary sounds with old-fashioned catches in the throat, tinkles of the mandolin, sugary sobs and vertiginous swoops of pedal steel guitar. This generation's performers are the first bred on both rock and country who are consciously choosing Nashville, as Vince Gill did when he turned down a chance to join the rock group Dire Straits in favor of continuing his country career.

If the baby boomers have discovered country, however, it is not just out of nostalgia. They have looked across the musical landscape and found a cast of artists who are very much like themselves. Today's hot country stars, Garth Brooks foremost among them, are more likely to be college graduates with IRAs than dropouts with prison records. They put Mercedes and Volvos in their videos and refer to wine and cafes as much as beer and honky-tonks. They worry about keeping in shape and, in an era of middle-class constriction, about keeping ahead. The women sing about their heartbreaks, but they also rejoice in their sexual independence and ponder their opportunities. Both genders extol the virtues of marital longevity.

Gill, for one, looks as if he stepped out of an L.L. Bean catalog, and he loves golf so much that he lives on a course outside Nashville. Cleve Francis, one of the few black country singers signed to a major label since Charley Pride in the '60s, is a 46-year-old cardiologist from the suburbs of Washington. Mary-Chapin Carpenter has a degree in American civilization from Brown University; she drew the idea for her highly successful When Halley Came to Jackson, about the appearance of Halley's comet in Mississippi, from a line in the memoirs of Eudora Welty. K.T. Oslin once made a living as a Broadway chorus girl, and when she turned to country in her mid-40s, it was to sing about such nonbucolic topics as older women sleeping with younger men. Even the down-home Reba McEntire, who spent her youth on her father's ranch and on the rodeo circuit, went on to college, where she studied classical violin and piano and "analyzed Mozart every which way."

But more than any other country headliner, Brooks encapsulates most of the / complexities of the baby boomers. He was raised in an Oklahoma City suburb, where he listened to Kiss and Queen, and graduated from Oklahoma State, where he was a middling jock and an advertising major. He hides his receding hairline under his Stetson, and once said, "I'd rather be like Schwarzenegger -- perfect teeth, perfect body, full head of hair." He can be a pop nostalgist who croons old Billy Joel songs, a country nostalgist who traces his lineage to the backwoodsy George Jones, or a rock nostalgist who remembers what the back and forth between a jumping-jack-flash performer and his audience is supposed to be like. "Like great sex," he says, "where you get wild and frenzied, then turn that around quick to something gentle, tender and slow, and then get wild and crazy again and just keep doing that over and over until one of you drops dead."

His essence, above all, is in a ballad like The Dance, a palliative for a generation that has begun to lick old wounds as it approaches middle age. "I could have missed the pain," he sings. "But I'd of had to miss the dance." The video of The Dance shows images of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the song's autumnal, retrospective tone is what seems to touch millions of listeners. Says Sue Thayer, 43, a machine-shop secretary from Grayling, Mich., and a convert to country music from rock: "It's about love affairs gone bad, and death -- the finality of relationships."

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."

Lest there be any lingering doubt, grownups, or at least people over 35, buy more records than teenagers do. They account for 29% of the units sold, compared with 18% for the 15-to-19 age group, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Until last year, the effect of that purchasing power was disguised by the sketchy oral reports drawn from record stores canvassed for the Billboard pop charts. But last year the charts began relying on SoundScan, a firm that compiles computerized bar-code information from cash registers. On the May 25 pop chart, the first based on the SoundScan data, 15 more country albums showed up in the Top 200. In 1984 the country category showed only eight gold (500,000 sales), four platinum (1 million sales) and seven multiplatinum (multimillion sales) albums; last year an astonishing 24 country albums went gold, 21 went platinum, and eight went multiplatinum.

But the story is not just in the sales. Wynonna and Naomi Judd's pay-per- view TV special in January drew more viewers than did similar specials by the Rolling Stones and New Kids on the Block. In a year when the income from the top 10 rock or pop tours declined 32%, country acts increased their revenues 40%. The recently published autobiography of Ralph Emery, Nashville's answer to Johnny Carson, who is the host of Nashville Now, a live show on the Nashville Network (TNN), has been on best-seller lists for 17 weeks. In just two years, the magazine Country America has doubled its circulation to almost 1 million. Even the arbiters of hipness have begun paying attention: both Spin magazine and Michael Ovitz's Creative Artists Agency have new outposts in Nashville. And Saturday Night Live this month featured Brooks as its musical guest.

Above all, country is reaching deeper than ever into the lives of Americans. Since 1980 the number of country radio stations has gone from 1,534 to about 2,500 nationwide. By one measure, country has become the nation's second most popular radio format, after adult contemporary. Country stations rank in first place in 45 of the top 100 radio markets, including Buffalo, Kansas City and Orlando. Without much fanfare, discos that used to play Top 40 tunes have been converting into country music clubs, where cowboy wannabes pull up in Hondas to dance the Slappin' Leather, the Tush Push or the Texas two-step.

But perhaps the most obvious sign that country has achieved a mainstream acceptability is its new and high profile on prime-time television. First came CBS's Country Music Association Awards last October, which unexpectedly landed in the Nielsen Top 10. Then NBC got into the act: it launched a weekly prime- time variety show called Hot Country Nights and in January aired the special This Is Garth Brooks, which helped push the network to its highest Friday-night ratings in more than two years.

Television in fact has worked a revolution in the dissemination of the Nashville sound. The Nashville Network, which serves as an almost round-the- clock showcase for country music performers and their videos, has in nine years gone from 7 million subscribers to 54.5 million. On the strength of this success, TNN's owner, Gaylord Entertainment Co., formed a partnership last January with Group W Satellite Communications to acquire Country Music Television, a service with an ambition to do with country music what MTV did with pop and rock. In just 14 months its subscriptions have jumped 31%, to 15.7 million households.

The small screen quickly dispelled some further myths about country. "The image that people had of a country performer was Porter Wagoner -- a guy in his 60s who wears spangles and a highly tailored cowboy outfit," says Lloyd Werner, who heads sales and marketing for Group W. "But country fans discovered that country performers looked just like them." And cable executives discovered what they had already suspected -- that, in Werner's words, "a country music fan is not over 60 and does not wear bib overalls, drink Lone Star beer from a long-stemmed bottle and drive a 20-year-old pickup with a shotgun rack in the back."

Actually, the country music lover long ago abandoned the Southern holler for the middle-class suburbia of satellite dishes that politicians like to call the heartland. (Appropriately, the cornfield on the set of Hee Haw was recently transformed into a mall.) Republicans have understood this ever since Richard Nixon became the first President to visit the Grand Ole Opry in 1974. George Bush campaigned with country music stars Loretta Lynn and Peggy Sue, and made a pilgrimage to Nashville last year for the Country Music Association Awards. In many ways, the voters Bush was after are those who make up the majority of TNN's audience: 32% have an income over $40,000, and 13% make more than $50,000. They are in their 30s and early 40s, own their home, have one new car and one old one that they work on themselves, and when they travel, it is by car to places like Walt Disney World.

Country is also benefiting from the determined eclecticism of the twentysomething generation. At a Nashville concert by country hunk Alan Jackson, Brandi Byrd, 19, arrived with her hair teased into a punk sculpture, wearing a replica of an artfully threadbare Aerosmith outfit. At home she puts her Jackson and Brooks tapes alongside the work of groups like Whitesnake, Poison and Motley Crue. Says Julie Hall, a 23-year-old clerk at TNN: "I'm just as likely to buy the Black Crowes as I am to buy a Travis Tritt tape. I like good music. I don't care what it is."

But country's message makes the music belong, first and foremost, to the baby boomers now coping with being in their 40s. Twenty-year-olds, says record executive Bowen, "are having their first romance, and we're talking about the third divorce over here." If rock is about feral impulses, country is about spiritual nourishment. Cultural critic Camille Paglia, who has celebrated the Dionysian power of rock music in her writings, believes the genre suffered an identity crisis as it moved further from the rural immediacy of folk and blues and lost its restless, questing spirit. "In rock you're getting middle-class suburban kids who have no experience of anything except what they hear on the radio," she says. "Country music speaks emotional truth. Rock has drifted from it." Says Paul Shaffer, David Letterman's bandleader: "Country is soul music for white people, and people always return to soul music, because that's where the feeling is."

If, as in Shaffer's description, country's appeal has something to do with race, it is because pop has rarely been as racially polarized as it is in the era of rap. Country fans, who, like their stars, tend to be white, are not shy about describing their music as the musical equivalent of the urban escapism known as white flight. "Thank God for rap," says Bowen. "Every morning when they play that stuff, people come running to us." Says Ralph Emery: "Rap music speaks only to black issues, and has turned a lot of white people off."

But much more than race is involved in country's success. At the end of a decade marked by lip-synching scandals and Material Girlhood, Americans are reclaiming their right to sentimentality, civility and a little bit of cellulite on the dance floor. Take, for example, some patrons of the Golden Nugget, a night spot in Buffalo's flourishing country-and-western scene. "In a disco, if you're not a size 3, forget it," says Heidi Fisher, 28. "They're into spandex heaven. And your hair has to be out to here with hair spray. I only wear spandex in a dark gym. Here it's more relaxed and I can be myself. And if someone bumps into you they're more likely to say, 'Excuse me.' " Danny Beal, a 27-year-old dairy farmer from nearby Darien, says, "It's the only place I can be in public and show my feelings." And now that promiscuity is out, says Gary Marcinkowski, 25, who owns a Buffalo-area painting business, the atmosphere in a country bar offers another advantage: "It's less of a pickup scene."

Country music seems right on time for the abstinent '90s. Randy Travis' first hit single, On the One Hand, set the tone in 1985, in an ambivalent lament that "on the one hand, I count the reasons/ I could stay with you/ . . . But on the other hand/ There's a golden band/ To remind me of someone/ Who would not understand." Today the title song of Mike Reid's album Turning + for Home is a tribute to his baby daughter; George Strait is praising the immutability of paternal love in Love Without End, Amen; Alan Jackson is chanting to his wife that I'd Love You All Over Again.

Marriage counseling is in, and so is staying sober. The barfly characters who cried in their beer in classic country songs have been displaced by yuppified drinkers who, in the words of a Reid song, are content to be sitting on their porch and "sippin' some wine/ from my coffee cup." That is, if they're drinking at all. In the video Travis Tritt made last year for The Whiskey Ain't Workin', the character he plays pointedly refuses to drown his sorrows in alcohol.

The women of country music used to wait for their wayward husbands to come home, or stand by them even when they didn't. But to country music's postfeminist performers, both scenarios seem a waste of time. The middle-aged women in K.T. Oslin's work are busy warning their lovers that they are chronically fickle, are having careers while their ex-husbands have custody of the child, or are just plain contemplating the legacy of their past revolts. "Oh we've burned our bras and we've burned our dinners/ And we've burned our candles at both ends," is her bittersweet assessment in 80's Ladies. Meanwhile, Trisha Yearwood sings about a woman with such a sense of autonomy that she demands men "who will cry on my shoulder" but won't "follow me around." And in the new video for the song Is There Life Out There? Reba McEntire refuses to let a too early marriage be an occasion for whining: she goes back to college and gets a degree.

"Things don't always work out all right in country songs," says Kevin Phillips, author of the 1990 book The Politics of the Rich and Poor. "What a perfect backdrop for a recession that is undercutting the American Dream." Clint Black's One More Payment is a classic hard-times complaint about the rent, the banker at the door, and a roof that is crumbling. But the current country songs also hurl Molotov cocktails at the upper classes and the system that favors them. Brooks succeeded last year in making a national barroom anthem out of Friends in Low Places, which turned an abandoned lover's revenge into an act of social protest. "Blame it all on my roots," he sang. "I showed up in boots/ And ruined your black-tie affair."

Country's appeal is not a function of the leading economic indicators, however. It draws its power mostly from people like Jyne Kubas, 52, an Alan Jackson fan who is not embarrassed to say she still hurts from her divorce 10 years ago. " 'Cowboys don't die and heroes don't cry,' " she says, repeating the sardonic opening lines of Jackson's song Here in the Real World. "He says life is not like the movies. I used to tell people he took a phrase out of my life." For Kubas, as for many of the nation's still growing ranks of country fans, the songs are precious musical absolutions, forgiving them for the vanities they cherished and lost, and gently nudging them through middle age.

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/Buffalo $