www.facebook.com/garthbrooks
If there’s an aesthetic lesson in Garth Brooks’ comeback tour success, it may be that tradition is relative. Before taking an extended hiatus to care for his children, Brooks’ late-’80s through early-’00s run of mainstream country superstardom cast him as an enormously popular, but divisive figure. Fusing ’70s influences of hard rock muscularity and singer-songwriter sensitivity brought new listeners to country music, but left others flummoxed, if not angry, at what he was doing to the genre.
Historical reconsideration and the memories of a fan base that bought more than 130 million albums have made Brooks’ comeback tour a critical and commercial windfall. Friday’s sold-out BMO Harris Bradley Center date positioned Brooks as one of country’s good guys.
Though he’s become an everyman hero whose songs often embody big-hearted emotions, ideas of that size can leave Brooks looking a bit ponderous. Such was the case with the night’s opening song, the technocracy critique title track to his 2014 album, Man Against Machine. With that pick from his latest work out of the way, most of the rest of the evening comprised the cavalcade of hits die-hards had been waiting nearly two decades to hear in person.
Compared to the morass of weak electronic dance/R&B and pop wed to regressive gender politics comprising too much of commercial country radio nowadays, Brooks’ prominent inclusion of steel guitar, fiddle, honky-tonks and rodeos make him sound positively, well, country. Grand stage theatrics and bold production of heyday records abetted to take him to the heights he reached. Still, the man who admitted that he holds an acoustic guitar to hide the gut he’s developed from fast food burgers wrote and picked out many genuinely enduring, affecting numbers.
The two songs he said he most enjoyed performing represent his respect for roots and the way he helped to progress the form. “Calling Baton Rouge” relates romance on the road with a spirited Cajun jauntiness. Conversely, “The Dance” is the kind of stately reflection on pain, joy and mortality that Dan Fogelberg might have given eyeteeth to sing. If some critics blame Brooks for simplifying the emotional content of country lyrics, credit him for recording one of the last great murder ballads in “The Thunder Rolls.” Remakes reflect both his catholicity of taste and reinvention of source material. Taking on Billy Joel’s “Shameless” brings on then-adult contemporary bluster, but mutating Aerosmith’s “The Fever” into adrenalized Western swing approaches genius. And “Friends In Low Places” is as anthemic a class-conscious kiss-off to a snooty significant other as any pop-punk band could manage.
|
|
He toned things down toward the end of his roughly two-hour set with an acoustic medley of bits of songs attendees held up signs requesting him to sing. He almost stumbled on his dramatic U.K. pop crossover “The Red Strokes,” but he made it.
Dueting with her husband and given a four-song set of her own was Brooks’ wife, Trisha Yearwood. She may have bested her other half in use of rural slang for her first hit, “She’s In Love With the Boy” alone. The random scenes from her Food Network cooking show flashing on the screens above the stage, however, cheapened the reminiscence of smart young womanhood in “X’s and O’s.” Another female presence who has written songs tracked by Yearwood and “American Idol” alum Kellie Pickler, Kayrn Rochelle opened with a spirited, if brief unplugged set before she joined the ranks of Brooks’ background singers.
