This is weird: ever heard of Chris Gaines? In 1999 American superstar Garth Brooks created an alter ego for himself in order to have a parallel career to his pop-country one. He claimed he created the character for a film he had written and was to star in called The Lamb. The bizarre thing is, well, look at the guy! Your supposed-to-be-cool alter ego is a cheeseball emo rocker dude? What the fuck? Brooks created a fictional back-story for Gaines, complete with 6 different record covers. He played SNL as Gaines and released the one and only Gaines record as a “pre-soundtrack” to the film. A god-awful single from the record actually charted on the pop top 40 charts. But when the film never materialized the public got a little weirded out and, as Wikipedia puts it “the majority of the American public was either totally bewildered or completely unreceptive to the idea of Garth Brooks as anything but a pop-country singer.” Brooks didn’t really get famous until his forties and after becoming the highest selling solo act of ALL TIME he probably felt he could do anything- even become a shitty rock singer. I guess Chris Gaines was just a byproduct of a mans ego gone haywire.
2 comments:
Garth Brooks had I believe written the movie script for "The Lamb" Paramount picked it up and they were interested in him doing the music for it. He told them he only does Country/Western and they along with Don Was and Baby Face (I could be wrong on the second one) convinced him to do the record. They thought it would be a good way to introduce the character.
After the album only sold 3 million and the off reception the movie was put on hiatus and never materialized. My guess is Brooks probably felt embarrassed over the thing.
The album was actually pretty good imo and I thought it was a cool project at the time. People just never "got" the idea of Chris Gaines and thought Garth was going through a mid life crisis. This was not the case, he originally had no plans to do the music or play the character until they came to him.
interesting. thanks for that info.
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