Busy Brooks doing 'Double' duty
Tuesday, November 17, 1998. USA Today

NASHVILLE If all goes according to plan, Garth Brooks will sell more copies of his Garth Double Live Nov. 17 than any other performer's album has sold in an entire week.

And why couldn't he? His three-year world tour, which ends this weekend in College Station, Texas, has drawn more than 5 million people, selling out 350 dates — each of them in a single day. Should just a fifth of those fans buy themselves a two-disc, 25-song souvenir of the tour, they'll make Pearl Jam's first-week record for selling 970,000 copies of Vs. a distant memory.

If they do break the record, it'll be because Brooks has turned the release of his album into an event on the scale of his multiple-night concert runs.

"I never thought Garth could go out and compete head-to-head with the Eagles," says Brooks, the native Oklahoman whose marketing acumen and ability to communicate on a grand scale have made him the best-selling, top-drawing musical performer of the '90s. "He never could compete head-to-head with anybody who's a great player or great singer. But I will put (Garth concerts) against anybody. When those people show up, they're like a 12th man in football."

To make sure those people show this time, Brooks will broadcast a live concert Nov. 17 exclusively to some 2,400 Wal-Mart stores. Wednesday, he'll perform on three separate live NBC specials — to air at 8 p.m. in the Eastern, Mountain and Pacific time zones (viewers in the Central time zone get the Eastern show at 7 p.m.).

Wal-Mart executives told Brooks they believed the chain alone could sell a million copies of Double Live in the first day of its release with the aid of the concert.

"I said, 'Shoot, I've got no problem with that,' " says Brooks, adding that he'll be shocked if Wal-Mart succeeds. However, notes Capitol Nashville president Pat Quigley, "They did a million units of Titanic its first day."

Most of the performances on Garth Double Live come from Brooks' current tour, though recordings of If Tomorrow Never Comes and Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old) date from the 1991 Dallas concert at Reunion Arena that also became his first NBC TV special. The album contains three previously unreleased songs, including the single It's Your Song and a new duet with tour opening act Trisha Yearwood. A handful of songs begin with studio intros that segue into live performances, a technique Brooks admired on Jackson Browne's 1977 album, Running on Empty.

The album's most distinctive feature, however, is the sometimes-overwhelming sound of Brooks' audience, always cheering, usually singing along.

To instill an extra sense of urgency in potential buyers, Brooks will release Garth Double Live with seven sets of covers and liner notes — six CD packages and one for cassette, a different one for each million units being shipped. The first million CDs are stamped with a first-edition foil mark. Other packages commemorate his world tour and various past performances.

"What this allows people to do is pick the album they want in the packaging they desire," Brooks says. "Then, if somebody wants to collect all of them, I can't say that's my fault. They know what it costs, and they can make that decision."

Cynics have said the packaging is a ploy to artificially inflate Brooks' sales. But Brooks and Quigley both state their intent is to give consumers a choice — think shoes that come in multiple colors — while giving them an incentive to buy the album sooner, rather than later. They successfully tried a similar strategy last year with Sevens, releasing 777,777 first-edition copies.

The massive shipment of Garth Double Live puts Brooks' much-hyped goal of 100 million total record sales within easy reach. Brooks currently has sold 82 million albums, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Capitol had hoped to ship 8.5 million copies of the album this week, but production limitations kept it to 7 million — still the largest initial shipment for any album.

Since each disc in Garth Double Live counts as an individual unit to the RIAA, Brooks should reach 96 million by year's end — perhaps more, as his back catalog continues to sell — putting him only slightly behind the Beatles' record 103 million units.

"If you were a betting man, a hundred million by the millennium is a good bet on Garth Brooks," says Quigley.

Brooks plans to work next year on several projects, including soundtracks for a feature film and a TV film, plus a duet album with Yearwood.

If and when he tours again, Brooks says, he'll probably move up to stadiums — "but do a stadium (in a way) that's never been done before, do it in a way that the seats aren't as far away as they seem."

Then again, maybe he'll just play baseball instead.

"I don't really know where that came from," Brooks says, responding to reports that he'll play in the San Diego Padres organization next season.

More likely, he simply hasn't worked out the details yet. "If it happens, we'll do some kind of release on it; if it doesn't, I'll continue to go, 'I don't really know where that came from,' " he says.

Brooks took batting practice with several major-league teams this summer and says he'd like to play baseball next season "for the right reasons. And the right reasons would have to be charity for children.

"I'm not saying it's something I ever could have succeeded in, or not succeeded in. But the timeline on my body and my playing is something that I can't make the investment in that I've made in music. So it would have to be for serious charity for children."