Speaker 1: This episode contains content that may be disturbing to some listeners.
Speaker 1: Please check the show notes for more information. Disgraceland is
Speaker 1: a production of Double Elvis. The stories about country megastar
Speaker 1: Garth Brooks are insane. He has more albums that have
Speaker 1: sold over ten million copies than any other artist in history.
Speaker 1: He cut one of the biggest record deals of all time,
Speaker 1: bigger than Madonna, bigger than Prince, a deal matched at
Speaker 1: the time only by Michael Jackson. He triggered an earthquake
Speaker 1: at a concert in Baton Rouge. His touring route has
Speaker 1: been scrutinized by online detectives looking to suss out a
Speaker 1: rumor about missing persons cases, a rumor that alleges people
Speaker 1: vanish when Garth Brooks stops by to play music, great music,
Speaker 1: some of the greatest country pop songs of all time.
Speaker 1: Unlike that loop. I played a few at the top
Speaker 1: of the show that wasn't great music. That was a
Speaker 1: preset loop from my melotron called millions of People Now
Speaker 1: Vibing MK One. I played you that loop because I
Speaker 1: can't afford the rights to all about that bass by
Speaker 1: Megan Trainer, And why would I play you that specific
Speaker 1: slice of right Junk in the Right Places cheese? Could
Speaker 1: I afford it? Because that was the number one song
Speaker 1: in America on November eleventh, twenty fourteen, And that was
Speaker 1: the day that Garth Brooks joined Facebook with a video
Speaker 1: so bizarre that it launched a conspiracy theory, one that
Speaker 1: continues to have ripple effects to this day. On this episode,
Speaker 1: online videos, conspiracy theories, earthquakes, missing persons in Garth Brooks.
Speaker 1: I'm Jake Brennan and this this disgrace slant country music
Speaker 1: television entertainment tonight, the Today Show. Just a few media
Speaker 1: outlets that have at one time referred to Garth Brooks
Speaker 1: as groundbreaking. Others still have called him earth shattering. Why
Speaker 1: because Garth Brooks is a megastars megastar He's got more
Speaker 1: albums that have been certified Diamond by the Recording Industry
Speaker 1: Association of America than any other artist in history. And Diamond,
Speaker 1: for those of you keeping score at home, is more
Speaker 1: than ten million copies sold per album. Garth has nine
Speaker 1: albums that have done that, The Beatles on six. I
Speaker 1: could go on and on with data numbers, the world
Speaker 1: records that Garth Brooks has left in the dust over
Speaker 1: and over again. But I don't want to get ahead
Speaker 1: of myself. My point here is that the words Garth
Speaker 1: Brooks and earth shattering are often mentioned in the same sentence.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing that's not actually true. Garth Brooks' music,
Speaker 1: his career, they aren't literally shattering anything. People can love music,
Speaker 1: and anyone can be in awe of the career, but
Speaker 1: when it comes to shattering the earth, to literally breaking
Speaker 1: the ground that we walk on, it takes more than
Speaker 1: a shit ton of number one songs. Garth Brooks couldn't
Speaker 1: shatter the earth on his own. To do that, he
Speaker 1: needed the assistance of one hundred thousand people. April twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two, Louisiana State University. Garth Brooks was doing what
Speaker 1: he was born to do, putting on a show, the
Speaker 1: kind of show that made him the biggest musical act
Speaker 1: on the planet some three decades prior, a show that
Speaker 1: generated mucco fomo. Garth sprinting across the raised platform, Garth
Speaker 1: swinging from a rope, Garth and his bandmate smashing two
Speaker 1: guitars together. A Garth Brooks concert was a spectacle, and
Speaker 1: this particular concert was his first in Baton Rouge in
Speaker 1: twenty four years, over one hundred and two thousand fans.
Speaker 1: One hundred and two thousand fans let him know that
Speaker 1: they were glad to have him back, and the roar
Speaker 1: from the crowd was deafening. Garth rode the high of
Speaker 1: his fans adoration as he transitioned from one of his
Speaker 1: oldest hits, much too young to feel this damn old,
Speaker 1: into a cover of the Oakridge Boys colin Baton Rouge.
Speaker 1: The unofficial LSU anthem made the audience go crazy. Hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of feet stomping in the stands of Tiger Stadium,
Speaker 1: every person in attendance singing along. People with Apple watches
Speaker 1: felt their wrist vibrate and then saw the alert. The
Speaker 1: sound level, now at ninety five decipels and climbing as
Speaker 1: loud as an approaching subway car, loud enough to cause
Speaker 1: hearing losses. Sustained for too long, the ground shook beneath
Speaker 1: their feet. Inside LSU's nearby geosciences building, a seismic graph
Speaker 1: began to spike. The machine recorded actual seismic waves in
Speaker 1: the ground as a direct result of the concert. Seismic
Speaker 1: waves as in the kind triggered by volcanic eruptions, explosions, landslides,
Speaker 1: and avalanches. Garth Brooks and the LSU audience triggered an
Speaker 1: actual earthquake, scientifically proven by equipment already located on campus.
Speaker 1: Three months later in August in Houston, the crowd wasn't
Speaker 1: expecting earthquakes per se. Capacity at NRG Stadium, home of
Speaker 1: the Houston Texans football team, was only sixty seven thousand,
Speaker 1: But no matter the size of the audience, Garth delivered
Speaker 1: and the crowd loved it. They held up handmade signs,
Speaker 1: hoping theirs would make it to the JumboTron screen about
Speaker 1: the stage. Some did make it, like one that read
Speaker 1: we love Garth, so wholesome and so representative of how
Speaker 1: everyone in that stadium felt at that moment. A camera
Speaker 1: zoomed in on it, and then the image was up
Speaker 1: on the jumbo tron, But within seconds, the person holding
Speaker 1: the sign dropped it, revealing another sign behind it, this
Speaker 1: one with a message hastily written in black sharpie, a
Speaker 1: message that read, where are the bodies g The JumboTron
Speaker 1: camera suddenly flailed around and then quickly cut away back
Speaker 1: to a tight shot of Garth. But everyone saw it,
Speaker 1: sixty seven thousand people, people who are now thinking, what
Speaker 1: the fuck was that? Where were the bodies? G bodies?
Speaker 1: What bodies? They had no clue. These obsessive Garth Brooks
Speaker 1: fans first and lined by a ticket knew every word
Speaker 1: and every melody to every deep cut, completely unaware of
Speaker 1: the rumor. It's so easy to turn a blind eye
Speaker 1: to rumors, to truth, even when you love something. We
Speaker 1: all do it. The flaws that some of our favorite
Speaker 1: performers possess we are willing to ignore, separating the art
Speaker 1: from the artists and all that. But this particular rumor
Speaker 1: was sinister to its core, so evil that one simply
Speaker 1: had no choice but to reckon with the information the
Speaker 1: data upon learning about it, just like we're about to
Speaker 1: do right now. Stick with me here. This isn't simple,
Speaker 1: and this isn't easy, but it's necessary to understand what
Speaker 1: the sign was trying to communicate. Back up to the
Speaker 1: yearly nineteen nineties, Garth Brooks is on a swift and
Speaker 1: unprecedented rise to fame, on the rise at the exact
Speaker 1: same time the number of missing persons cases in the
Speaker 1: United States. And this is a simple fact. You can
Speaker 1: Look it up. Plot the graph of Garth Brooks's success
Speaker 1: alongside the graph of the missing person's epidemic in the
Speaker 1: country and you'll see what I'm talking about. By nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety seven, the number of missing persons peaked just under
Speaker 1: nine hundred and eighty one thousand. This was the same
Speaker 1: year that Garth was at his most powerful, playing to
Speaker 1: over a million fans in Central Park, releasing his seventh
Speaker 1: studio album, a record called Seven's Seven as in the
Speaker 1: Seven Deadly Sins the Seventh Seal. You know I'm the one.
Speaker 1: I'm the one, the one they call the Seventh Sun.
Speaker 1: Missing person cases dropped a bit after this, but they
Speaker 1: spiked again two years later in nineteen ninety nine, at
Speaker 1: the very moment Garth Brooks went full Ziggy starred us
Speaker 1: and unleashed his rock and roll alter ego, Chris Gaines. Coincidence,
Speaker 1: You can make the argument. You could also argue that
Speaker 1: Chris Gaines was some kind of publicity stunt. But Chris Gaines,
Speaker 1: and we'll get to him later, Chris Gaines is so
Speaker 1: obviously the quote unquote dark side of Garth have the
Speaker 1: same person good and evil. It was all there out
Speaker 1: in the open or so this particular conspiracy theory alleges.
Speaker 1: Check out the titles to some of the songs Garth
Speaker 1: covered on a box that he released in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 1: You ain't going nowhere, don't close your eyes, act naturally,
Speaker 1: hold on, I'm coming. These are the things a predator
Speaker 1: says to his prey right before he grabs them and
Speaker 1: stuffs the chloroform soak rag against their face, and then
Speaker 1: you can only imagine what happens next. But consider this,
Speaker 1: People kept turning up missing even years later, and many
Speaker 1: of these missing persons had the same eerie thing in common.
Speaker 1: They all disappeared when Garth Brooks's tour buses rolled through town.
Speaker 1: January twenty fifteen, Gareth Brooks plays Tulsa, Oklahoma. A seventy
Speaker 1: four year old man disappears. That same night, May twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: Garth Brooks plays Grand Rapids, Michigan. A guy known only
Speaker 1: as Gary vanishes from the near by a town of Hamilton,
Speaker 1: just thirty minutes away. February twenty seventeen, Garth Brooks plays
Speaker 1: a week of shows in Edmonton, Alberta. On his night off,
Speaker 1: you guessed it, another person gone. Okay, so let's say
Speaker 1: you've been clocking all these developments in real time, or
Speaker 1: maybe it's only in hindsight that you realize something's going on.
Speaker 1: So you start asking that question, where are the bodies
Speaker 1: get But no matter how much you ask the question,
Speaker 1: and no matter how many handmade signs you hold up
Speaker 1: at stadium shows, you get no answer. So you keep
Speaker 1: digging into the past. You find an old clip from
Speaker 1: the TNN show Crook and Chase in nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 1: long before Garth Brooks was a household name, Charlie Chase
Speaker 1: and his Music City mustache asking his guests Garth if
Speaker 1: he ever thought about acting. I'd love to be a
Speaker 1: bad guy. Garth says, no, Charlie, Lass, you don't want
Speaker 1: to do that. You look like a good guy. Garth
Speaker 1: just smiles and says, I'd rather kill somebody. That'd be fun.
Speaker 1: Then there's an interview Gareth gave to the Music City
Speaker 1: News in nineteen ninety in which he said about his
Speaker 1: backing band, quote, the band's contract is that if they leave,
Speaker 1: I have to kill them. And what about the profile
Speaker 1: of Gareth and Rolling Stone Magazine nineteen ninety three, He's
Speaker 1: on top of the world. Over one hundred million albums sold.
Speaker 1: His recording contract allegedly as lucrative as Michael Jackson's, a
Speaker 1: contract that unbelievably put Madonna's in Princess Cush Deals to shame.
Speaker 1: Gareth's talking about quote stomping the other guy's guts out,
Speaker 1: who's in competition with you unquote just to get what
Speaker 1: he wants, which is at number one spot, and then
Speaker 1: doing whatever it takes to stay there. How does one
Speaker 1: do this? You're like an athlete, competitive hungry. Losing is
Speaker 1: not an option. You've get to have drive, determination and
Speaker 1: a killer instinct. Lightning flashed outside and lit up the
Speaker 1: darkened room, nice house, new or built. He'd been out,
Speaker 1: laid again, unfaithful again. She confronted him when he got home.
Speaker 1: He didn't want to hear it. He hit her so
Speaker 1: hard that she went flying over the couch, and as
Speaker 1: he did, more lightning outside illuminated the whole scene, bright
Speaker 1: enough for their young daughter to watch from the stairs above.
Speaker 1: He looked up, and the girl backed against the wall
Speaker 1: and began to sink, like she wasn't there at all.
Speaker 1: But he held his gaze, eyes dead mine, made up,
Speaker 1: determined to do what he'd just done to his wife
Speaker 1: to his child as well. At least that's what the
Speaker 1: girl was afraid of. He made his move, but his
Speaker 1: wife moved faster. The gun there in the drawer, now
Speaker 1: in her hand, she aimed. She fired. Thunder crackled just
Speaker 1: beyond the windows and made the gunshot sound louder than
Speaker 1: it really was. And the girl watched as he was
Speaker 1: struck down. This man her daddy. The man playing her daddy,
Speaker 1: a man who sort of looked like Garth Brooks. If
Speaker 1: Garth Brooks had curly black hair, a tightly groomed beard,
Speaker 1: and glasses inverse, Garth Evil Garth, perhaps Garth's vision of
Speaker 1: what a bad guy looked like, if he thought about
Speaker 1: bad guys at all, which, as we know from that
Speaker 1: bizarre Crook and Taste interview back in eighty nine, he
Speaker 1: most certainly did. Two years after that interview, in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety one, Garth did more than think about bad guys.
Speaker 1: He was a bad guy, at least for a day,
Speaker 1: playing an abusive husband in the music video for his
Speaker 1: song The thunder Rolls, the first track on his second album,
Speaker 1: No Fences, released the previous summer. No Offences, was huge.
Speaker 1: It reinvigorated the country music market in America, specifically country pop,
Speaker 1: turning on a new generation to a genre which it
Speaker 1: bottomed out in the previous decade. This might be hard
Speaker 1: to imagine now in our current landscape, when last year alone,
Speaker 1: thirty six percent of the streams on Spotify's Top fifty
Speaker 1: songs in the US were country songs. But just prior
Speaker 1: to Garth's arrival, country music was in crisis. No fences
Speaker 1: signaled a sea change. Millions sold big singles like The
Speaker 1: thunder Rolls, Garth six number one on the Country chart
Speaker 1: upon its release. One hundred and eighty three radio stations
Speaker 1: put the song into rotation, the most in country chart
Speaker 1: history at the time. But The thunder Rolls wasn't a
Speaker 1: shit kicking rock. It was no friends in low places.
Speaker 1: This song was heavy. The video di and shy away
Speaker 1: from domestic violence. TNN did not do domestic violence or
Speaker 1: anything remotely controversial for that matter. TNN was not MTV.
Speaker 1: The thunder Rolls was immediately taken off the air. There
Speaker 1: was one way to get the video back on TNN.
Speaker 1: Garth simply had to tape a disclaimer that would run
Speaker 1: before the video, something condemning domestic violence. That know on
Speaker 1: certain terms. But to Garth, a disclaimer felt like pandering,
Speaker 1: like he was using controversy to promote a video. He
Speaker 1: didn't do the disclaimer on principle. His stance struck most
Speaker 1: as genuine, authentic, and that in turn led to his
Speaker 1: first major crossover. First there were the country music stations
Speaker 1: screening the band video at shopping malls and country music venues.
Speaker 1: Then Tower Records in Nashville playing the video on loop
Speaker 1: NonStop from four to eight pm every day for five days. Next,
Speaker 1: Women's Shelters reaching out to Capitol Records, Garth's label, to
Speaker 1: explain how the is helping them raise awareness about domestic abuse.
Speaker 1: And finally VH one, a cable station that played pop videos,
Speaker 1: now airing Garth Brooks's country video on the regular. But
Speaker 1: Garth Brooks wasn't country, not in the sense that it
Speaker 1: confined him. He loved George Strait, but he loved Queen
Speaker 1: and Kiss just as much. He put rock and roll
Speaker 1: energy into the music he was making and took country
Speaker 1: where it had never gone before. Rope in the Wind,
Speaker 1: his third studio album, went straight to number one on
Speaker 1: the Billboard two hundred the same week that No Offences
Speaker 1: was holding the number two spot, and his debut was
Speaker 1: still clinging to the number ten spot. And it wasn't
Speaker 1: just stubbornness, determination and drive to put Garth Brooks on top.
Speaker 1: There was something else. Fear. Fear of the man in
Speaker 1: the video, who was the polar opposite of Garth's squeaky clean,
Speaker 1: forward facing image. Fear of evil Garth, fear of the
Speaker 1: rest to the music industry of hip hop and heavy metal,
Speaker 1: two genres that Forbes magazine vilified in a nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: two article positioning Garth as a goodie two shoes messiah
Speaker 1: here to deliver us from evil. If you don't live
Speaker 1: in the inner city, you can't relate to those lyrics.
Speaker 1: Garth's producer was quoted as saying, those lyrics referring, of course,
Speaker 1: to hip hop, a genre that was creatively thriving at
Speaker 1: the time, but one that was being held back from
Speaker 1: the mainstream, being denied Garth level chart dominance by this
Speaker 1: very line of thinking. Their music bad our music, good fear,
Speaker 1: plain and simple fear was the great motivator. Magic Johnson
Speaker 1: told Garth Brooks this after trying and failing to sink
Speaker 1: a ball into the corner pocket nineteen ninety four shooting
Speaker 1: Pool was equal ground for the two superstars, both competitive
Speaker 1: players at the top of their respective games. Besides, Garth
Speaker 1: wasn't dumb enough to challenge Magic on a half court,
Speaker 1: and Magic wasn't about to step out on stage. They
Speaker 1: both sucked at pool, and that wasn't the point. Pool
Speaker 1: was a chance to dick around. Prior to the conversation,
Speaker 1: they were taping for a Fox TV special called One
Speaker 1: on One with Magic Johnson. But first Garth wanted to
Speaker 1: know what separates an NBA player from everyone else. Magic
Speaker 1: was quick to respond.
Speaker 2: Easy.
Speaker 1: The thing that pushed the Beatles to try and make
Speaker 1: better records than the Beach Boys in the sixties, the
Speaker 1: same thing that pushed Magic to jump higher and block
Speaker 1: harder than Larry Bird in the eighties. Fear. The higher
Speaker 1: Garth Brooks climbed, the more that fear sank in, fear
Speaker 1: that his latest record wasn't going to do as well
Speaker 1: as the last. Fear that this new mullet on the block,
Speaker 1: Billy Ray Cyrus five straight weeks at number one with
Speaker 1: that Achy breaking bullshit was going to send Garth straight
Speaker 1: to the cutout biz. They humiliated him on air in
Speaker 1: London to the Brits, he was a country bumpkin straight
Speaker 1: out of Hicksville, but in Dublin he was a god,
Speaker 1: at least as big as the Pope, setting a new
Speaker 1: record for the largest audience since His Holiness paid a
Speaker 1: visit some fourteen years prior. When he left Ireland, one
Speaker 1: quarter of all Irish households owned a Garth CD or cassette.
Speaker 1: The fear was paying off. March nineteen ninety five the
Speaker 1: fastest selling artist of all time, fifty million albums sold
Speaker 1: in just six years. May nineteen ninety six, scratch that,
Speaker 1: the number is now sixty million. August nineteen ninety seven,
Speaker 1: Garth stock the Central Park Concert a million people shot
Speaker 1: live for HBO, the cable network's highest rated program of
Speaker 1: the year, and then just three months later in November,
Speaker 1: Garth Brooks released Seven's, his seventh LP in his fourth
Speaker 1: to debut at number one on both the mainstream and
Speaker 1: country album charts. He had the crossover video and the
Speaker 1: crossover albums, and now he just needed a crossover number
Speaker 1: one single That would be an all time high for
Speaker 1: Garth Brooks, just like another all time high making history.
Speaker 1: At this very same time, the number of missing person
Speaker 1: cases in America more than nine hundred and seventy thousand
Speaker 1: in total, a daunting number, a number that Garth Brooks
Speaker 1: may or may not have been aware of. What he
Speaker 1: was aware of was how his own personality was beginning
Speaker 1: to split in two, one man on stage and another off.
Speaker 1: It that man up on stage that wasn't Troyl Garth
Speaker 1: Brooks or in nineteen sixty two Tulsa, Oklahoma superstar Garth
Speaker 1: GB for short. He's a character. As soon as the
Speaker 1: house lights go down and he takes those first few
Speaker 1: steps onto the stage, his heart pounding. That guy Troyle disappears.
Speaker 1: Garth does things that Troyle would never do. He sees
Speaker 1: some woman riding the rail down front, screaming your head off,
Speaker 1: and he reaches down from the stage, his button up
Speaker 1: shirt tucked neatly into his jeans, his cowboy hat looming large,
Speaker 1: and he grabs a woman's hair and yankes as hard
Speaker 1: as he can. It's physical, it's thrilling. When he talks
Speaker 1: about moments like these after the fact, Garth talks about
Speaker 1: himself and the third person like he's Jimmy from Seinfeld.
Speaker 1: Garth got carried away tonight, Garth grabbed the woman's hair.
Speaker 1: Did you see that? For Garth Brooks the entertainer, like
Speaker 1: all incredible entertainers, it's all about connection, but he didn't
Speaker 1: have to physically touch every person to knock them on
Speaker 1: their asses. When my people leave the auditorium, I want
Speaker 1: them crawling out, he told Rolling Stone. I want them
Speaker 1: so damn tired. I want their voices gone. I want
Speaker 1: them to be just like me, ringing wet, just dead,
Speaker 1: just dead, hey man, he said it, not me. By
Speaker 1: the late nineties, at the top of his game, Garth
Speaker 1: Brooks was thinking a lot about death, not just about
Speaker 1: entertaining his fans to death, if only metaphorically. There was
Speaker 1: the death of his mother Wants, a Country Western singer
Speaker 1: in her own right, gone after a battle with Answer
Speaker 1: at the age of seventy, And there was also the
Speaker 1: death of a fictional rock star when that Garth was
Speaker 1: going to resurrect and make real and doing so would
Speaker 1: give the most popular singer in the world the one thing.
Speaker 1: He still did not have a number one hit song
Speaker 1: on the mainstream pop chart. We'll be right back after
Speaker 1: this word word word. Fourteen year old Kenny Edmunds wanted
Speaker 1: nothing more than to meet the singer for his favorite band,
Speaker 1: The Jackson Five, But Kenny Edmonds was nobody, and young
Speaker 1: Michael Jackson was one of the biggest stars in the world.
Speaker 1: Even now in nineteen seventy three, when the band's best
Speaker 1: years were arguably behind them. Kenny knew the opportunity to
Speaker 1: meet Michael wasn't going to fall in his lap. He
Speaker 1: had to create it himself. So he looked in the
Speaker 1: local paper and found the name of the show's local promoter,
Speaker 1: Charles Williams. Then Kenny opened the phone book. So many
Speaker 1: Charles Williams listed here in Indianapolis. He picked up the
Speaker 1: phone and began to call each one. Took a minute,
Speaker 1: but he got promoter Charles Williams on the line, and
Speaker 1: Kenny put on a fake voice, the spot on impression
Speaker 1: of Jimmy Stewart that he dragged out whenever he wanted
Speaker 1: to make his friends laugh. But this was no laughing matter.
Speaker 1: This was Kenny pretending to be an adult the journalism
Speaker 1: teacher at his high school. To be precise, who is
Speaker 1: now asking promoter Charles Williams if this band come into
Speaker 1: town or what was their name? The Something five, the
Speaker 1: Jackson five. I perhaps one of this journalism students could
Speaker 1: interview them when their tour arrived here in Indianapolis. Promoter
Speaker 1: Charles Williams thought this was a terrific idea. He asked
Speaker 1: for a number to call the teacher back once he
Speaker 1: confirmed details. Just call my student directly, came the reply,
Speaker 1: and then Kenny Edmunds gave the promoter his actual phone number. Opportunity, ambition,
Speaker 1: Kenny Edmonds had both in spades. These things landed him
Speaker 1: a face to face interview with Michael Jackson at just
Speaker 1: fourteen years old, and these things were driving him to
Speaker 1: also made huge R and B hits. Now some two
Speaker 1: decades later under his better known professional name as the
Speaker 1: writer and producer Babyface, Kenny Edmund's aka Babyface was behind
Speaker 1: huge hits for Whitney Houston, Bobby Brown, Voice to Men TLC.
Speaker 1: But Babyface's ambition knew no bounds, no genre. He recognized
Speaker 1: the potential in a Nashville country song performed by on
Speaker 1: Nona Judd, and he brought that song not to an
Speaker 1: R and B singer, but to Eric Clapton. Changed the
Speaker 1: World was a bonafide smash in nineteen ninety six thanks
Speaker 1: to that ambition. Thanks to a guy who is still
Speaker 1: taking chances. Long after he co called the promoter of
Speaker 1: a Jackson five show. His next idea was wilder than
Speaker 1: a slow Ham colab. This was a very big swing.
Speaker 1: A movie called The Lamb about a fictional rock star dead.
Speaker 1: In the film's first scene, his life told in flashbacks
Speaker 1: as one of his fans tries to prove that he
Speaker 1: was murdered. The script was being written by the guy
Speaker 1: who wrote Diehard in the Fugitive and Babyface was executive producing.
Speaker 1: But before the movie could be released, a genius level
Speaker 1: marketing plan had to be executed. Introduced this fake singer
Speaker 1: by way of a real album. An album of the
Speaker 1: dead rock star is so called hits performed by an
Speaker 1: actual musician pretending to be someone else, the same musician
Speaker 1: who would then play the dead rock star in the movie.
Speaker 1: The concept was as bonkers as a guy Babyface thought
Speaker 1: would be perfect for the gig, Garth Brooks. Garth Brooks
Speaker 1: may have had four records hit the top mainstream album chart,
Speaker 1: but his number one singles were all still on the
Speaker 1: country side of the tracks. Becoming Chris Gaines was going
Speaker 1: to change all of that. Chris Gaines was everything. Garth
Speaker 1: Brooks allegedly was not. He had dark hair, a soul patch,
Speaker 1: he wore eyeliner. He was a sex addict who made
Speaker 1: albums with titles like Fornacopeia. Garth dropped weight and got
Speaker 1: into character. He intended to disappear, just like all those
Speaker 1: people who were busy disappearing across America. But Garth Brooks
Speaker 1: couldn't get lost, and Chris Gaines not really. The whole
Speaker 1: thing looked like a joke, and it was a joke.
Speaker 1: Garth's country audience didn't get it. The thing was Garth
Speaker 1: wasn't laughing. The album Garth Brooks in the Life of
Speaker 1: Chris Gaines did sell two million copies, which is nothing
Speaker 1: to sneeze at, but two million was dittally compared to
Speaker 1: the numbers Garth was used to putting up. The movie
Speaker 1: was Shells and Babyface went looking for the next opportunity.
Speaker 1: Chris Gaines went back in the ground. Although the experiment
Speaker 1: didn't get Gareth the number one crossover single, it did
Speaker 1: get him to number five, which is higher than he
Speaker 1: ever got on the pop tracks, and that's saying something.
Speaker 1: But Chris Gaines ultimately was a failure. But ill conceived
Speaker 1: plot precipitated garth'snnouncement that he was taking a break from
Speaker 1: the business and considering early retirement. Chris Gains, it seems,
Speaker 1: did something Garth Brooks could never do. He lost and
Speaker 1: if you can't beat him, well, you know the rest.
Speaker 1: Joining Facebook did not come naturally to a guy like
Speaker 1: Garth Brooks. Noah did not. But in twenty fourteen, Garth
Speaker 1: his alleged retirement, it was nothing but a memory. He's
Speaker 1: getting ready at this point to stage a massive three
Speaker 1: year comeback tour. So social media makes a lot of
Speaker 1: sense for Garth Brooks at this point. The forty five
Speaker 1: second video Garth Brooks post to what was his new
Speaker 1: Facebook page at the time made it official. The video
Speaker 1: is low quality. It's shot by Garth himself. He's sitting
Speaker 1: in bed in an empty hotel room and he talks
Speaker 1: about Facebook as a conversation between himself and the fans,
Speaker 1: to which he says, I like that. But he doesn't
Speaker 1: say I like that in the way you thinking. He
Speaker 1: says it like I don't know. It's fucking creepy. Man.
Speaker 1: His voice drops, it's almost a whisper, like he's trying
Speaker 1: to stay like incognito.
Speaker 2: I like that.
Speaker 1: He keeps that tone going too as he talks about
Speaker 1: all the stuff he's gonna post on social media. Cool stuff,
Speaker 1: slick stuff, raw stuff. It's like he's being sexual. It's
Speaker 1: fucking weird. The way he says everything in this short,
Speaker 1: forty five second video is creepy. It's creepier than I'm
Speaker 1: able to describe. You have to watch it. There's also
Speaker 1: this like devilish, psychotic gleam in his eye when he's talking.
Speaker 1: This is the kind of video you're gonna watch over
Speaker 1: and over and over on repeat. Okay, do it after
Speaker 1: you listen to this podcast. But you're gonna do this,
Speaker 1: trust me, because it's that weird and it is that strange.
Speaker 1: It's the kind of video that makes you want to
Speaker 1: ask questions, a lot of questions, questions like where are
Speaker 1: the bodies? Gee? The bodies of course kept disappearing Buffalo, Wichita,
Speaker 1: New Orleans, Worcester, all across America from September of twenty
Speaker 1: fourteen to December of twenty seventeen. Garth's tour buses they
Speaker 1: rolled on and people kept vanishing, sometimes on the day
Speaker 1: of an actual show and other times on Garth's days off.
Speaker 1: Then long before that sign went up on the JumboTron
Speaker 1: at Energy Stadium in Houston, Internet sluice were connecting the dots.
Speaker 1: They started calling out Garth Brooks on social media over
Speaker 1: the missing persons. They wanted to know where the bodies were.
Speaker 1: You can go see for yourself. You can scroll through
Speaker 1: the comments of any random post on Garth Brooks's Instagram
Speaker 1: page and you'll see that. Over the years, a growing
Speaker 1: community of conspiracy theorists have been out there tuning into
Speaker 1: the frequency, leaving comments like my family cannot rest until
Speaker 1: you tell us where our grandmother is, please Garth. Or
Speaker 1: for God's sake, Garth, the families, The families need closure,
Speaker 1: or what did you do to Christine? And thanks to
Speaker 1: the diligent, full court press of these people online, we
Speaker 1: are getting close now, closer to knowing the whole truth,
Speaker 1: closer than we've ever been before. The truth about where
Speaker 1: the bodies are. Well, I'm going to tell.
Speaker 2: You where the bodies are.
Speaker 1: Twenty eighteen a year Garth Brooks does not tour, a
Speaker 1: year that missing person reports in the United States plummet
Speaker 1: to their lowest number in three decades. People are beginning
Speaker 1: to talk. A dirty little secret is getting out a
Speaker 1: secret alleging that Garth Brooks is a serial killer, thus
Speaker 1: explaining why so many people go missing when he's on tour.
Speaker 1: But consider this Exhibit one. There is no hard evidence
Speaker 1: connecting Garth Brooks to any people who have disappeared along
Speaker 1: his tour route. Exhibit too. Despite the constant barrage of
Speaker 1: comments on his social media accounts, Garth Brooks has never
Speaker 1: addressed the rumors or accusations. He hasn't even acknowledged them.
Speaker 1: And you know why because he doesn't have to, because
Speaker 1: none of this is true what you're saying. Okay, there
Speaker 1: are other comments that have cluttered up Garth Brooks's social
Speaker 1: media accounts for years, ones that aren't looking for closure
Speaker 1: for grieving families. These comments are more absurd, yet they
Speaker 1: pop up over and over again, things like touch my
Speaker 1: camera through the fence, Garth, and I got a dui baby,
Speaker 1: and you bet I'm coming up in May. If these
Speaker 1: sound like the work of trolls, well they are. This
Speaker 1: whole thing, this theory that Garth Brooks is some kind
Speaker 1: of serial killer. It's all a joke. It's not my joke.
Speaker 1: It's a real joke. It's out there a straight faced
Speaker 1: joke started by comedians, specifically Tom Sagura, who hosts a
Speaker 1: podcast with his wife Christina Pozitski called Your Mom's House
Speaker 1: And it was. On this podcast, Tom Segura talked about
Speaker 1: watching Garth's now infamous first Facebook video from back in
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen, and then watching a press conference in which
Speaker 1: Garth gets oddly emotional talking about his upcoming stadium tour.
Speaker 1: Tom Seguira couldn't believe how strange Garth Brooks was, how weird, bizarre.
Speaker 1: Segura joked, so weird, so cringey, that you could just
Speaker 1: imagine the hundreds of bodies he had buried under his house,
Speaker 1: which it goes without saying, Garth Brooks absolutely does not
Speaker 1: have bodies buried under his house. That was the whole gag,
Speaker 1: a gag with incredible legs, and that's the point. It
Speaker 1: never stopped. It's still going years later. Even now, as
Speaker 1: you listen to this podcast episode, Garth's weird little videos
Speaker 1: keep popping up, videos in which Garth's eyes go wide
Speaker 1: and his smile tilts and his voice.
Speaker 2: Drops to a creepy whisper.
Speaker 1: The guy's an easy mark in the millions of Your
Speaker 1: Mom's House fans. Tom Segura fans go after Garth with
Speaker 1: the same ambition that Garth went after the music industry
Speaker 1: in his prime. That guy holding up the sign that
Speaker 1: read where are the Body's g the one I told
Speaker 1: you about at the top of the episode. That guy
Speaker 1: was planeted at the show by Tom Segura. That timeline
Speaker 1: I laid out for you at the top of the show,
Speaker 1: the one that ties Garth Brooks's milestones and movements to
Speaker 1: the fluctuating rate of missing persons cases in America. I
Speaker 1: got that online too, and shout out to at Barth
Speaker 1: Brooks on YouTube. Garth Brooks, still, like I said, is
Speaker 1: not commented. He did, however, block Tom Segura on social media,
Speaker 1: so perhaps that's comment enough. And at the end of
Speaker 1: the day it doesn't get at him. He's too busy
Speaker 1: continuing to perform at a level that most artists can
Speaker 1: only dream of. He's setting off fucking earthquakes and Baton
Speaker 1: Rouge and the Baton Rouge show at LSU is part
Speaker 1: of his stadium tour, the one he got teary eyed
Speaker 1: over while talking about it at a press conference. Garth
Speaker 1: closed out that tour back in the place where he
Speaker 1: might be loved even more than he was here in
Speaker 1: the States. In Dublin, Ireland, five sold out shows, four
Speaker 1: hundred thousand people in total gross revenue of twenty eight
Speaker 1: point six million for just those shows. On the final date,
Speaker 1: September seventeenth, twenty twenty two, Garreth left the audience the
Speaker 1: way he always wanted to leave them. Tired, crawling out
Speaker 1: of the venue, voices shot just dead. The crowd shuffled
Speaker 1: out of Croke Park, the giant football field with a
Speaker 1: historic soil pitch. They went back to their houses and apartments,
Speaker 1: many of which had a picture of Garth hanging on
Speaker 1: the wall. The next morning, they woke up feeling like
Speaker 1: they'd been hit by a mack truck in the best
Speaker 1: possible way, made coffee, made tea, and opened the morning paper.
Speaker 1: In the pages of that paper they read about a
Speaker 1: boy in kill Rain, some two hours south of Dublin,
Speaker 1: just seventeen years old, disappeared two nights earlier. Meanwhile, Garth
Speaker 1: Brooks's crew packed up up and shipped down. The long
Speaker 1: tour was over.
Speaker 3: In the thunder Rold, I'm Jake Brennett, and this this disgraceland.
Speaker 1: Disgraceland was created by Yours Truly and is produced in
Speaker 1: partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be
Speaker 1: found on the show notes page at disgracelampod dot com.
Speaker 1: If you're listening as a Disgraceland All Access member, thank
Speaker 1: you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it, and
Speaker 1: if not, you can become a member right now by
Speaker 1: going to disgracelampod dot com Slash Membership. Members can listen
Speaker 1: to every episode of Disgraceland ad free, Plus you'll get
Speaker 1: one brand new exclusive episode every month, weekly unscripted bonus episodes,
Speaker 1: special audio collections, and early access to merchandise and events.
Speaker 1: Visit disgrayslampod dot com Slash Membership for details, rate and
Speaker 1: review the show, and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter,
Speaker 1: and Facebook at disgraceslampod and on YouTube at YouTube dot
Speaker 1: com slash at Disgraceslampod, Rock and Roll Up.
Speaker 2: He the Bed Down Man