All over Ireland, fans of Garth Brooks are line-dancing around their kitchens with very heavy hearts. In October, country music's biggest superstar looked out across Nashville and announced his plans to retire in 2001 - just one more album, he said, and then the hat will hang forever on the rack. I don't quite believe it myself, but for the sake of the story, we'll take him at his word.
The possible end of Garth Brooks would be a severe blow to his many devotees. They love him deeply: they've bought at least 100 million albums worldwide and made him one of the most successful acts ever. In Ireland, the faithful packed out Croke Park for three nights in a row just to get a rub of the Brooks relic - so whether you like him or not, he's certainly a phenomenon. Like Disney. Like Pokemon.
But like most phenomena, it's all a mystery to me. Yes, the scale of the thing is impressive, but to non-believers he is the Anti-Hank and a total reversal of what country music is supposed to be about. In fact, many would argue he's not country at all - no more than a very cleverly marketed pop star who, very deliberately, wears that hat. He is, they argue, an ultra-commercial version of the American dream. Put simply, he is Corporate American Man.
In his resignation address, even Brooks himself seemed prepared to admit it. After the usual nice things about spending time with his children, he looked out from under his hat and remarked that he wasn't "somebody that we could really come to appreciate, like Billy Joel or James Taylor, and know that their stuff was timeless". I'm not entirely sure what he meant by that, but perhaps he was suggesting his music didn't really have very much of worth to offer after all? Maybe not.
To begin to understand the extraordinary appeal of Garth Brooks, it's worth examining where he came from, and how someone could possibly emerge with such dominance from within a music which began as backwoods rural American folk. When the different kinds of music of the Appalachian Mountains were first mixed up and commercialised in the mid-19th century for use in travelling minstrel, medicine and tent shows, the business was already under way. Vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley developed from that, with singers, fiddlers and banjo players appearing all over the place. By the 1920s, it was apparent there would be a serious market for this kind of music, and the businessmen moved in. As performers were sought out and recorded, the music changed to suit the new circumstances, and acts such as the Carter Family emerged both on radio and disc. Then, in the post-war years, Bill Monroe came along with bluegrass and Hank Williams arrived as the first great star of what they were calling Honky Tonk. Pretty soon, these wonderful songs were being covered in mainstream pop and, some would argue, that was the end of that.
Hillbilly/honky-tonk/country music, whatever you want to call it, became a fullscale commercial enterprise with the greenbacks jealously horded in Nashville, Tennessee. The grip of the Grand Ole Opry kept everybody in control, and when Roy Acuff and Fred Rose began to employ songwriters to write songs for the country market, the industry as we know it today took root. Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins ran the main studios, and together they created what became known as the Nashville sound - and it was a long, long way from Hank. In fact, by the middle of the 1960s, there wasn't much difference between country and mainstream pop.
In the 1980s, there were efforts to get back to basics when acts such as Dwight Yoakam, Randy Travis, Lyle Lovett and K.D. Lang rode into town - but none of them would ever be as big as the Anti-Hank who was waiting in someone's office. The New Country crowd tried hard, but for all their good intentions, the mediocre waters rose further again in a torrent of hats, square jaws, perfect teeth and big hair. CMTV revealed new acts as plastic and as lame as the Countrypolitan they had briefly threatened, and out of this airbrushed hell came Garth Brooks - number one in the country and the pop charts - and, wouldn't you know it, the biggest act in Ireland.
The outlaws of country became even more so - Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash now inhabited an entirely different world. And even though the ghost of Gram Parsons hung around to guide the likes of Emmylou, Wilco, Son Volt, Will Oldham and Gillian Welch, they were all destined to remain in the cult section.
The Anti-Hank ruled Nashville, and everything else was measured by what he did. He sold so many records that the corporate men simply forgot the rest. Garth was their man, their gold-mine, their golden goose, and nothing else mattered.
And so the onstage Brooks began to smash guitars like Jimi Hendrix, run up and down gangways like Mick Jagger and fly through the air like David Lee Roth. It was clear from the start that he had more in common with his old favourites, Kiss and Boston, than with country music, but nobody much seemed to notice - he was wearing a hat so he must be a country act. Of course, the image-conscious Brooks was cute enough never to take it off. And cute is the very word - not cute as in pretty but cute as in shrewd. His training in business now seemed as vital as his ability to hold a tune. He understood perfectly that country music, as we know it, had its cowboy boots planted firmly in hard commerce and had, after all, been invented by the record companies themselves.
That's why Johnny Cash is a legend and Garth Brooks has sold over 100 million records. Quiet simply, nobody could do it better than Brooks. There is no argument. Brooks is quite brilliant at it. He manages to be new, old, predictable, sentimental, wild, home-loving, honky-tonk and heavy metal all at the same time - a very saleable mix in the American (or Irish) heartland.
The songs are chosen with scientific precision to touch as many of the right people as possible, and that is very good business indeed. For a large portion of the country crowd, he sounds enough like George Jones to keep him wholesome, and for the rock fans, the circus has plenty of guitars, smoke bombs and running around. What it all amounts to however is another question entirely. And so the Brooks phenomenon is about to slip away.
Or is he? There's an album coming out in 2001, possibly a separate duet album with Trisha Yearwood, a soundtrack and who knows what else. The plan, he says, is to take care of his children and write screenplays, but I'd put real money on it that he won't stray very far. He is, after all, corporate country's biggest act, and they'll not let him go lightly. And Nashville's city limits are very well guarded indeed.