Garth Brooks’ remarkable rise on Las Vegas stages
He made his Las Vegas debut at the same place Frank Sinatra did, a place that now exists only in memory banks and newspaper archives.
On Thursday, Jan. 17, 1991, Garth Brooks played his first show locally at the Desert Inn, kicking off a five-night, 10-gig stint at the hotel-casino where the Chairman of the Board made his inaugural Vegas performance 40 years earlier, in September 1951.
The DI is long gone, blasted to bits in 2004 to make way for Wynn Las Vegas. But its legacy lives on in Brooks, who returns to town for his biggest show yet on Saturday at Allegiant Stadium.
Before selling 65,000 tickets in 75 minutes to his upcoming concert, Brooks began his Vegas run much less auspiciously: in a 650-seat showroom.
The 28-year-old singer was already a burgeoning star then, his blockbuster sophomore album, “No Fences,” out for just four months and already double platinum — it would sell over 17 million copies. Still, in a conversation that seems rather quaint in hindsight, Brooks worried about his longevity in a chat with the Review-Journal.
“The competition level is severely high right now,” he told former RJ reporter Mike Weatherford in an interview before the shows.
Thirty years later, those concerns register as just a tad unwarranted.
Brooks has since become one of music’s biggest stars ever, regardless of genre, becoming the all-time top-selling solo artist, having moved more than 150 million records since his self-titled 1989 debut.
Along the way, Las Vegas has played an interesting role in Brooks’ career, which he readily acknowledges.
“Some things happen in your life you can never explain. Vegas has always been one of them for me,” Brooks told the crowd during the first of six shows at T-Mobile Arena in June 2016, according to a Weatherford review.
With Brooks coming back to town Saturday, let’s take a look back at his unique concert history in Las Vegas:
Thomas &Mack Center, Aug. 16-18, 1993; Aug. 13-16, 1998
He grew up on Kiss more than Kenny Rogers.
And so when Brooks exploded to stardom in the early ’90s, he brought a guitar-smashing arena-rock bluster to country music, changing the way it was presented onstage, directly influencing the raucous, amps-to-11 gigs of modern-day descendants like Kenny Chesney and Jason Aldean.
Brooks debuted his sweat-slicked, big-room production locally at the Thomas &Mack Center.
“Since it’s our first night here, let’s lay down some ground rules,” Brooks told the crowd during the opening show of his August 1993 run at the Thomas &Mack, captured in an RJ recap of the concert. “The rules are simple: We came here to raise some hell and have a good time.”
Five years later, Brooks returned to the T&M, selling out the first of four shows in a then-record 52 minutes and moving 72,000 tickets overall in a single day.
The concerts were recorded for potential use on Brooks’ 1998 “Double Live” album as well as taped for an NBC TV special, which aired that November.
The tour continued to underscore Brooks’ gene-splicing of rock ’n’ roll and country, with covers ranging from Aerosmith (“Fever”) to the Oak Ridge Boys (“Callin’ Baton Rouge”) to Bob Dylan (“Make You Feel My Love”).
The trek also featured Brooks’ future wife, Trisha Yearwood, who joined him onstage for a pair of duets nightly, one of which, a take on Patricia Conroy’s “Wild as the Wind,” was accompanied by a pair of local choirs.
The tour would end three months later, with Brooks “retiring” from the music business in 2002 to spend more time raising his daughters.
It’d be nine years before he took the stage again for multi-show performances. He’d do so in Vegas.
‘Garth at Wynn’ residency, December 2009 -January 2014
Pickups, dirt roads, dancing in linear formations, sore hearts, livers that are sorer still — country music is predicated upon many things. But, ultimately, it all comes down to storytelling. That’s what defines the genre, and Brooks has often said that he was drawn to country for its lyrics, its homespun narratives.
And so when he decamped to Vegas for a stripped-down, acoustic, one-man show in 2009, it was the ideal vehicle for Brooks to unplug, swap the bombast of the arena for the intimacy of a theater and essentially tell his autobiography in song.
Funny, self-effacing and hammier than Porky Pig’s hindquarters, Brooks knocked down the wall between artist and audience, interacting with the crowd, carrying himself more like a dude at the bar telling you about his upbringing over a Budweiser than a country superstar flying back to his native Oklahoma on a private jet provided by Steve Wynn after a weekend in town.
Brooks’ show regularly spanned 40-plus tunes, as he brought the soundtrack of his life to life, a sort of in-the-flesh mixtape spanning Harry Nilsson, Simon &Garfunkel, Bob Seger, George Jones, David Allan Coe and plenty more. It was a crowd-pleasing primer on what made Garth, Garth.
The residency concluded in January 2014 after six legs and 187 performances, a true only-in-Vegas experience in which you didn’t even have to be a fan of Brooks’ music to be a fan of the show he put on.
T-Mobile Arena, June 24-July 4, 2016
Vegas recharged Brooks’ batteries like an iPhone plugged into a nuclear reactor.
And so when his Wynn residency concluded, he hit the road in a major way. Brooks’ first tour in 13 years ended as the biggest country music trek ever, grossing over $364 million on a whopping 390 shows.
It hit Vegas in the summer of 2016 for a half-dozen shows, culminating in a July 4 blowout.
The two-hour production was a victory lap of sorts for Brooks, the set list focused largely on the “old stuff” — i.e., hits bigger than Godzilla’s cowboy boots.
At least one vestige of his Vegas residency remained: at one point in the show, Brooks sought out fans in the crowd holding signs for deeper album cuts and then played them acoustically, like he did during his stint at Wynn.
The outing paved the way for Brooks’ current “The Garth Brooks Stadium Tour,” his first all-stadium trek, which launched in St. Louis in March 2019.
After being sidelined by the pandemic in 2020, the tour resumes at Allegiant Stadium.
From showroom to stadium, so Garth Brooks has gone in Las Vegas.
Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter and @jbracelin76 on Instagram