Garth Brooks... in the Life of Chris Gaines

Here's a first. What I have here is a soundtrack and promotional TV special... for a movie that was never made.

In 1999, Garth Brooks ditched his cowboy hat, donned a wig, grew a soul patch and took on a fictional R&B rock star persona. While this was hardly a new concept (Sgt. Pepper, Ziggy Stardust, etc.), what made it unique was that Garth was slated to play this character, Chris Gaines, in a then-upcoming fictional biopic called THE LAMB. The album was boasted as a "pre-soundtrack," some footage of the young Chris was shot, VH1 ran an episode of "Behind the Music" on Gaines and Garth appeared both as himself and as Chris (never hinting that they were one and the same) on an episode of "SNL." An elaborate background was established for Gaines (an '80s teen boy-band pop idol who was disfigured in a car accident, underwent extensive plastic surgery and came back looking like Garth), and it looked like the pieces were falling into place. THE LAMB had the potential to be a fascinating film... but things quickly fell apart.

The entire project was mishandled, starting with the early release of the "soundtrack" (and the inclusion of "It Don't Matter to the Sun," which should have been saved for a Garth disc). I think the idea was that they'd try to generate early buzz but it backfired -- they should have held off until the movie was nearly complete, so it would have been clear exactly what he was doing. The single "Lost in You" topped the pop charts, and the album debuted at #2, but sales quickly dropped off. Rock fans weren't quick to embrace Garth, and his country fans felt alienated -- many thought he'd completely lost his mind! The initial shipment of CDs were supposed to be limited edition hologram discs, but a screwup saw the standard discs being issued to many parts of the country first -- it was a nearly month later before the hologram discs were stocked. The music video for "Lost In You" got miniscule airplay (except in Target stores, where it played in continuous rotation), and for years I had no idea that a follow-up music video was released for "Right Now." It soon became apparent that the film wasn't going to get made and the Chris Gaines website vanished prematurely. Two years later, Allison Krauss re-orchestrated and re-recorded the Beatles-ish Chris Gaines tune "Maybe" and had a monstrous hit with it.

Right before the album dropped, NBC ran their obligatory tie-in TV special to promote it. The show featured Garth in an intimate concert setting singing many of the songs from the album, as well as commenting on the project and upcoming film. Every other TV special that Garth had ever had was rerun later that season and received a quick video release. GARTH BROOKS IN... THE LIFE OF CHRIS GAINES remains the exception. I can only presume there was some embarrassment that the project didn't go through as planned. Shouldn't be -- there's some great performances and a lot of interesting information on the film that never was.

In the years since, Chris Gaines has become the butt of many jokes, perhaps most notably on an episode of "Family Guy" (though the album doesn't include the hidden bonus track that Stewie refers to). Can't quite figure out why the disc was so poorly received. It's not even cited in the discography on his official site.

LINKS:

The Internet Movie Database

Wikipedia