Garth Brooks is No. 1 again with ‘Anthology’ book-music hybrid

Who knew that Garth Brooks almost missed his chance to record “Friends in Low Places,” the DeWayne Blackwell-Earl “Bud” Lee song that became one of his biggest early hits, and helped cement his status as one of country’s bright new stars of the 1990s?

Certainly not Garth Brooks.

The country music superstar discovered this while working on the first edition of his projected five-volume autobiographical “Anthology” book-music project.

“I got to learn a lot,” Brooks said by phone recently from his home in Nashville, talking shortly after wrapping up his 2017 tour. The trek ranks as one of the top-selling North American tours of the year.

The thrust of “Garth Brooks: The Anthology, Part 1 — The First Five Years,” which consists of a 240-page book and five CDs spotlighting tracks Brooks released from 1989-1993, is the stories behind those songs and how they impacted his career. Those tales, as he noted, are not just his own recollections but those of “everybody who played every note on every song.”

For “Friends in Low Places,” what Brooks belatedly realized was that the song had been making the rounds in Nashville. This was happening even as Brooks was using it, with great success, night after night in his concerts. Yet Brooks hadn’t yet recorded the tune.

Singer Mark Chesnutt even recorded a version and was set to release it as a single — that is, until word got back to Brooks’ camp. It was only after Brooks promised the writers he would release it as the first single from his next album that he received permission to record it.

That’s among the surprises Brooks discovered as he worked up a book that’s part autobiography, part dispassionate biography.

“People approach you all the time — they’ve approached Trisha [Yearwood, the singer who is Brooks’ wife] — to write an autobiography,” he said. “But the truth is only what you remember it to be. I could write a book and show it to [manager] Bob Doyle, and he’d say, ‘Half that stuff didn’t happen that way.’ Me and him have a different view of what happened. So doing an autobiography never appealed to me.”

What eventually hooked Brooks into revisiting his extraordinary career was the idea of working with a writer, in this case, musician-turned-author Warren Zanes, the former singer, songwriter and guitarist in the roots band Del Fuegos. Zanes wrote “Petty, The Biography,” a well-received 2015 work on rocker Tom Petty.

Zanes conducted interviews with Doyle, Brooks’ longtime producer Allen Reynolds and various musicians and songwriters who helped Brooks become the biggest pop star on the planet in the 1990s.

Their myriad recollections are woven together in the book with archival photos, more than 200 of which had never been published. The CDs also bring together released versions of his songs with previously unreleased demo versions and numerous “day-write” recordings — versions he captured on the day songs were written. Thus, listeners can track the evolution of various signature numbers.

And at least one of the photos came as another surprise to the man whose face and name are on the front cover.

“There’s a photo on one page [Page 83] of about 40 of us on the steps of a building, and no one could figure out where the picture was taken,” he said. During the collaboration, “Someone goes, ‘Wait a minute, there’s so-and-so, and so-and-so who died.’ Pretty soon we started narrowing down the time when it could have been taken.

“We finally realized: They’re all the people who sang on ‘Friends in Low Places.’ The strange thing about it is that cameras are never allowed at Jack’s Tracks [the recording studio where Brooks recorded it],” he said. “So for that picture to be taken at that moment, it had to come from one of the guitar players. I’m so glad somebody got that shot.”

As has been the case with so many things Brooks’ touches, “Anthology” has quickly turned to gold, ranking as the top-selling nonfiction book on Bookscan’s latest sales report. It’s also No. 1 this week on Billboard’s Country Album chart.

Additionally, “Ask Me How I Know,” from last year’s “Gunslinger” album, just hit No. 1 on Billboard’s country airplay chart, returning Brooks, at age 55, to the hyper-competitive radio airwaves that he dominated three decades ago, before he stepped away to focus on raising his three daughters.

He and Yearwood returned to the road in 2014 and have been touring almost constantly since then.

Beyond the statistical feedback he’s getting on “Anthology,” Brooks sounded genuinely pleased by fans’ reactions.

“I’m not saying this just to sell the thing, but honestly, I’ve never gotten more compliments on anything I’ve ever done,” he said. “People love it, they love the weight of it, they love what’s inside it. The odd thing is we didn’t know if we had a book with music in it or music with a book.

“The big box retailers don’t know what to do with it. They’re doing their best to figure out where to put it. It’s a new packaging deal, and they don’t know whether to stock it in the book section or the music section.”

The man who majored in marketing at Oklahoma State University before becoming a country superstar, and who went back to OSU during his professional hiatus to complete his MBA degree, offered a quintessential Brooks solution: “I said, ‘Why don’t you just put it in both?’ ”

randy.lewis@latimes.com

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