PARTY ON, GARTH

Brooks circles back to Oklahoma as three-year comeback tour winds down

Four years ago on a July day just outside Oklahoma City proper, Garth Brooks got a glimpse of something bright and bold.

“I think I saw God that day,” he said with a laugh as he recalled Toby Keith’s 2013 Oklahoma Twister Relief Concert almost 18 months later. “I was kinda hot, it was like 120 degrees down there, and I started spinning. And I thought, ‘Oh please, just not here in front of everybody,’ you know. But that was fun.”

Apart from a possible heat-induced divine vision, the music megastar also caught a peek of a future just as dazzling as the Oklahoma summer sun when he played for a raucous, record-setting crowd at the University of Oklahoma’s Gaylord Family — Oklahoma Memorial Stadium in Norman.

A year after the blockbuster benefit concert, Brooks, who was born in Tulsa and grew up in Yukon, confirmed that his comeback officially had begun and would include new music and a three-year tour.

“They sang like an arena show. Getting a stadium to sing like an arena is impossible. They sang like it was arena. … That gave me great confidence to go, ‘Hey, maybe we can tour again,’ “the Oklahoma native recalled two years ago at a Tulsa news conference.

Although “The Garth Brooks World Tour with Trisha Yearwood” officially started in the Chicago area in autumn 2014, in a way it will come full circle this Oklahoma summer when the Country Music Hall of Famer returns to his home state to play four shows in two days July 14-15, this time in the airconditioned comfort of Chesapeake Energy Arena.

“Now you get to come home, and that’s what it’s all about. And the truth is, now the pressure is kind of on,” Brooks said in a Facebook Live video a few days after OKC tickets went on sale.

“I think the people you want to mean most to in your life are the people where you’re from. You want your buddies from high school to be proud of you; you want them to go, ‘Hey, I know that guy.’”

Second chances

As the former Owasso resident winds down his North American comeback trek, the OKC shows will mark the last Oklahoma appearance on the world tour, according to a news release.

Brooks, 55, played Tulsa’s BOK Center in January 2015, early in his threeyear tour, which marked the end of 13 years in semiretirement while he raised his three daughters. Tulsa was just the ninth city on the tour, but Brooks already had played about 50 shows because of the record-setting demand for tickets. His 2014 album “Man Against Machine,” his first studio collection since 2001, already had gone platinum, but he said at his Tulsa presser that making a comeback was still scary.

“But the whole thing is ‘What do you want to do in the second half of your career, if you’re lucky enough for God and people to give you a second half?’ And for me, I want to make everything in the ‘90s look small. We all laugh; it’s what we do. Then you look at the tour, 120 percent (of the ticket sales) so far of what we did in the ‘90s. That makes you feel good. Is it because the people, hopefully, that you went to see then are coming back to see you —and now they’re bringing their kids with them? … That’s what you’re hoping,” Brooks said back in 2015.

“The crowds feel very different on this tour compared to the ‘90s, and I’m gonna blame it on karaoke I think. I really will. I think we’re less inhibited . ... I mean, used to (be) Ireland had the patent on you start a song, you can’t hear yourself the rest of the song, they’re gonna finish it. But now, everywhere on this tour … the first two words of the song and then they just take it over. It makes my job easy, so it’s really cool.”

Broken records

In two and a half years, Brooks’ tour has sold more than 5.5 million tickets, ranking it among the biggest tours in the world.

The Oklahoma State University alum announced each city on his three-year tour individually, starting with one show. As in OKC, the number of performances for each stop has rapidly expanded based on the demand for tickets, with Brooks breaking many venue, city and even state ticket sales records, along with shattering several personal bests.

As the comeback has continued, Brooks has released another studio album, 2016’s “Gunslinger,” and a Christmas duets album with his wife, Yearwood, inked an exclusive streaming deal with Amazon Music, and won an unprecedented fifth career Entertainer of the Year trophy at the Country Music Association Awards. With fans settling into the idea that the “Friends in Low Places” hitmaker isn’t going to do another sudden disappearing act, the ticket sales milestones have become a bit less mind-boggling. Instead of playing 11 sold-out shows in the Chicago area or seven in Tulsa at the start of the tour, these days he’s packing in three to five concerts per city.

So, the clamor only has diminished by Garth Brooks standards, meaning it’s still jaw-dropping. In 57 minutes on a Friday morning last month, the top-selling solo recording artist in U.S. history sold more than 50,000 tickets for four Oklahoma City dates.

“This is the record for the biggest concert onsale the arena’s ever had,” said Tim Linville, director of sales and marketing for the 15-year-old Chesapeake Energy Arena. “And no one here —no artist — has ever played four shows together before. So we’re really excited. This is really cool.”

Since he had played the 2013 Twister Relief Concert in Norman, Brooks next week is playing his first Oklahoma City shows in 20 years. He’ll return after smashing his previous OKC ticket sales record set July 3-5, 1997, when the country music superstar sold 42,844 tickets at the Myriad

Winding down

Brooks said he hopes about 55,000 fans ultimately will join him at The Peake, where he will play at 7 and 10:30 p.m. July 14 and 3 and 7:30 p.m. July 15.

“Our job is to give everything we’ve got to that first crowd, find what else we can give to the second crowd,” he said in Tulsa.

Because of his superpower, OKC fans can expect to hear Brooks perform his signature smashes in concert, even though the Songwriters Hall of Famer has released two new albums in less than three years.

“One big interview in my life, a lady asked me what my superpower was, and I said, ‘I think I’m the guy next door. I think that’s my superpower, I think I’m just like everybody else,’ “he said. “When I go to a concert, and I do, when I pay my money, and I do, when I stand in my seat, and I do, I don’t come there to hear their new album. I go there to hear the old stuff. That’s what I’m there for . ... So, we bring all of our old stuff.”

As his three-year tour winds down, it will be interesting to see where Brooks’ comeback goes from here. After OKC, he has four July shows planned in the Los Angeles area at The Forum, plus the sold-out inaugural concert Oct. 12 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the new home of the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons. The country superstar has proved a formidable draw overseas, as well as in the United States, so it’s likely that his world tour will truly become a global journey in the coming months.

Wherever he goes next, Brooks has reiterated the meaning he finds in playing his home-state.

“The nerves are on to be the best you can be coming up in Oklahoma City,” he said on Facebook Live. “I know it’s stupid. I don’t know why, because that’s probably where you should relax the most. But for me, I think it’s the most pressure, just wanting to mean something to those people that mean so, so much to me.”