Alteregomaniac - The Chris Gaines Story

Описание: It took me years to find the Chris Gaines Behind the Music and NBC Special on VHS and put them on the internet. Before I uploaded those videos in 2014, Chris Gaines had been completely scrubbed from the internet. For over a decade the only Chris Gaines video you could find on the internet was an old Daily Show clip of Jon Stewart making fun of it. To get the VH1 Behind the Music I had to find some Garth fan in Texas that just happened to record everything Garth ever did on VHS, the VH1 special only aired once on TV, that's why our copy is pretty low fi. As for the NBC special, I actually got my hands on an official VHS promotional copy.
The Chris Gaines saga has always fascinated me, because its one of the weirdest chapters in popular music history. Its an epic tragedy in which the number one selling solo artist of all time at the peak of his career in 1999 made one of the most bizarre career moves imaginable that would make him a laughing stock and land him in early retirement and self imposed exile. Garth Brooks decided he wanted to have a rock star alter ego, but he didn't want to write any rock songs, he just wanted to write a really detailed fictional bio for his charachter named Chris Gaines, dress like a french mime take off his cowboy hat and put on a wig....confused yet? Keep reading, I've been giving this a lot of thought and I think I can explain:
If you don’t write your own music but have a talent for singing and performing, at some point you might attempt to get creative with the one thing you have control over - your image. Having an alter ego is something you might expect from a female pop star or glam rocker, but it was really unusual when Country super star Garth Brooks created the Chris Gaines persona 1999 at the height of his fame. Perhaps the most peculiar part of the Chris Gaines story is that when it came time to record the album, Garth had other people do the songwriting just like with his country stuff. Garth did however don a wig, an outrageous Prince style wardrobe and wrote an insanely detailed and entirely fictional biography for Chris Gaines. Garth’s fans were seeing a very different and strange new side of Garth. Unlike Johnny Cash or Loretta Lynn, Garth Brooks was playing the character of a country star and now a rock star, he didn’t really have 'friends in low places' - the guy that wrote that song did! (Dwayne Blackwell). When Garth dumbfounded his fans with his Chris Gaines persona he inadvertently tipped his hand and showed his fans that he was just pretending to be a cowboy the same way he was pretending to be a rocker. All of a sudden the black cowboy hat seemed as fake as the black Trent Reznor wig and Garth went into early retirement, a self imposed exile of more that 10 years. It’s only been in the last few years that Garth has started to make his way back in to music, this time as Garth Brooks exclusively, with nearly every mention or video of Chris Gaines scrubbed from the internet. It was such an epic fall from the top selling solo artist of all time to laughing stock and obscurity. The moral of the story is an album has two sides, always turn it over and see who’s writing the music.
-Will Loomis