Country Music - General & Miscellaneous, Country Music - Contemporary, Singers - Biography, Country & Folk Musicians - Biography
Log in to track your reading progress.
Overview
In this absorbing memoir, Matt O'Meilia, a drummer in Brooks's band in the mid-1980s, chronicles for the first time the period in the country singer's career before he moved to Nashville and began his rapid ascent to superstardom. The band, Sante Fe, began its life in Stillwater, Oklahoma, in 1986, only to dissolve in Nashville a year and a half later. O'Meilia evokes in vivid detail the delirious highs and glum lows in the life of the group, offering profiles of band members and other figures who influenced the course of Brooks's career. From the first, Brooks's ambition far exceeded that of his band members. Talented, shrewd, and doggedly persistent, Brooks made the most of every opportunity that came his way. The profile of one popular music singer's self-education written by one of the few people who witnessed the process firsthand, Garth Brooks: The Road out of Sante Fe is also the story of any would-be star who must pay his dues to make the dream of fame come true.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
As O'Meilia admits in his introduction, "[T]his isn't a book about how I knew Garth Brooks better than anyone else." The truth is, this book is not exactly about Garth Brooks at all. The country music superstar certainly is a central figure, but it's O'Meilia himself who is the protagonist. From March 1986 through January 1987, O'Meilia played drums in a Stillwater, Oklahoma band called Santa Fe; Brooks sang lead vocals and played rhythm guitar. This charming memoir chronicles that period of their lives, a time when Brooks seems somehow to have already been living in his famous future and waiting for his fate to unfold. O'Meilia is disarmingly modest: he considers himself lucky to have known a man so smiled upon by fortune as Brooks has been. Of his own history, the drummer recalls with some disgust his cowardice, his seven years in college and the day he made rude hand gestures during a Santa Fe photo shoot. The book often reads like a volume from the larger work on O'Meilia's life, with the then-unknown Brooks serving merely the ten-month foil. O'Meilia describes his brush with greatness with real grace and skill.Publishers Weekly -
As O'Meilia admits in his introduction, "[T]his isn't a book about how I knew Garth Brooks better than anyone else." The truth is, this book is not exactly about Garth Brooks at all. The country music superstar certainly is a central figure, but it's O'Meilia himself who is the protagonist. From March 1986 through January 1987, O'Meilia played drums in a Stillwater, Oklahoma band called Santa Fe; Brooks sang lead vocals and played rhythm guitar. This charming memoir chronicles that period of their lives, a time when Brooks seems somehow to have already been living in his famous future and waiting for his fate to unfold. O'Meilia is disarmingly modest: he considers himself lucky to have known a man so smiled upon by fortune as Brooks has been. Of his own history, the drummer recalls with some disgust his cowardice, his seven years in college and the day he made rude hand gestures during a Santa Fe photo shoot. The book often reads like a volume from the larger work on O'Meilia's life, with the then-unknown Brooks serving merely the ten-month foil. O'Meilia describes his brush with greatness with real grace and skill. (Apr.)Book Details
Published
April 1, 1997
Publisher
Norman, Okla. : University of Oklahoma Press, c1997.
Pages
202
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780806129075