Corky Goes Country: The Dallas Years 1992-1995

At age 36, I got my first full-time job as a writer, yee-haw!

Garth Brooks 1993

Wee Willie Keeler of the Baltimore Orioles, famously said in 1897 that the key to getting on base was to “hit it where they ain’t,” an adage which guided my freelance writing career as well. Whenever an editor called to ask “do you have any interest in…”, I politely let them finish before I said yes. During my years in Chicago (’88-’91), I wrote a lot about the new country music coming out of Nashville when everybody else was fixed on Grunge n’ Roses.

“Garth is great, Garth is good, thank you Garth for this food… and the big house on Franklin Road.” That was the Nashville prayer of the ‘90s after their Mr. Brooks took country music to the top of the Billboard album sales chart in 1990 with the 17-times platinum No Fences. By the end of the decade he’d outsold the Beatles, and led a host of “hat acts” and glitter gals to the promised land. Newspapers and magazines were scrambling to cover the phenomenon, but staff writers were mostly clueless participants in a Reba/Dwight derby to see whose last name would be misspelled the most times (“Yoakum” edged out “McIntyre”). I didn’t care for most of the era’s easy listening country, which I called “grain elevator music,” but there were plenty of Nashville credibility acts to write about: Randy Travis, Rosanne Cash, the Mavericks, the O’Kanes, Patty Loveless, John Anderson, Kentucky Headhunters, etc. I did a big feature in Spin on Nanci Griffith and Lyle Lovett, k.d. lang for American Way, and a cover story on Rodney Crowell for the Houston Post.

Those clips got me a job as the first-ever fulltime country music critic for the Dallas Morning News in January 1992. The Dallas-Fort Worth market, which included southern Oklahoma, distributed more than 20% of all country albums sold in the U.S., so the DMN started looking for someone to cover it. They had just swallowed the Dallas Times Herald and were on an expansion tear.

They first approached Don McLeese at the Statesman, who also wrote a country music column for Rolling Stone. But 200 miles was too far from Butch Hancock, so he said he wasn’t interested and recommended me. The previous year I replaced McLeese as the de facto music critic for the Sun-Times, making as much as $600 a week, which was a pretty good gig for a freelance writer, but also a bargain for the paper. The S-T was a union shop and when they finally noticed all the work I was doing, the guild told the paper’s brass to either hire me fulltime or knock me down to one or two articles a month. The S-T took that union shit seriously, like, one day when I went to make a copy and was told only union members could use the office equipment, including xerox machines! The main editor Mark Nadler called me in to tell me about the union’s edict, but the books were closed on new hires. Be patient, he advised. I was going to be the top candidate when the music critic job was filled, but they didn’t know when that would be. Meanwhile, a young, female reporter on staff who dressed rock ‘n’ roll, was elevated to cover the pop music beat best she could.

In the midst of this dicking around, I got the call from Mark Weinberg, the executive features editor of the DMN, asking me to come down asap to interview. My girlfriend Erica’s sister was a professor at Northwestern who used to talk at business seminars, with a specialty of how to negotiate for yourself. She coached me for about 20 minutes, and stressed one point: don’t accept an offer right away. Give yourself a night to think it over. Even if you’re sure you want the job. And don’t be afraid to ask for more. “If you’re too eager to take whatever they offer, that’s how they’re always gonna treat you,” she said. Erica also had some advice: order a beer at lunch if everybody else does, so they don’t think you’re an alcoholic. She knew how miserable I was with the Sun-Times situation, so she was supportive. We had been drifting apart anyway.

I met with Weinberg and Tom Kessler, the arts editor, and they took me out to lunch at the Palm, a fancy place, where I had a BLT. (Erica’s sister, who’d seen me at dinner, advised against ordering anything that required utensils.) It went well- I really wanted to work there- but I still had to meet with the bigwigs, Ralph Langer and Bob Mong. I had two nervous hours to kill so I walked a couple blocks over to Dealey Plaza, which looks smaller in real life, like everything that’s been photographed to death, except Shaquille O’Neal. I went to the Sixth Floor Museum, unprepared for how somber and contemplative it would make me feel. To be at that spot where Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, snuffed so much potential, and caused so much heartbreak, made me brave for some strange reason. No matter how the interview goes, I thought as I walked back to the Belo building, I would survive.

I aced the afternoon tire-kicking and completely forgot my tutorial on negotiating. “We’d like you to come work for us,” Weinberg said. “How does $45,000 a year sound?” That was $10,000 more than I was prepared to settle for, so I accepted the job right then. To start in three weeks. The Sun-Times was pissed about not having the chance to match the offer, especially after Bill Wyman wrote about it in his Chicago Reader column. “The 36-year-old Corcoran, a struggling free-lancer for more than ten years, shook his head, marveling at a world that offered him either no job or two,” Wyman wrote in Feb. ’92. “He voted with his feet, and went to Dallas.” About four months after I left, the Sun-Times hired Jim DeRogatis, who worked out pretty damn well, though R. Kelly would disagree.

The main reason I took the job at the Morning News was because being the country music critic in Dallas seemed more interesting than doing the rock critic thing in Chicago. I did hate the pretentious courtesy titles- the DMN trying to be the NYT. Willie was Mr. Nelson, while Boxcar Willie was Mr. Willie.

I loved living in the 312, but Chicago never felt like home. I never even got a weed guy, having to go to the Exedus II reggae bar on Clark Street to score dime bags, like some dumbass tourist.

After three and a half years away, I couldn’t wait to be back in Texas. I drove almost 16 hours straight, seeing Dallas from a white cargo van as the sun was coming up. My mind kept me going, as I thought about the kind of country music critic I wanted to be. I had tricked the DMN with clips of all these cool country acts, but I was relatively new to the genre, and not really up on the chart toppers besides Garthfield. The best way to beat imposter syndrome is to just be yourself. At heart, I was a roast comic with stagefright.

I’ve never felt qualified to be one of those authoritative scribes who see their opinion as sacred. Slap me if I ever take the role of music critic seriously. My philosophy was simple: I’d rather be wrong than boring. I was gonna have some fun with this new breed of hayseeds.

Me and one of my favorites. Hank William Sr.’s sister Irene Smith lived in Dallas and set me up to meet her nephew after I raved about his “Lone Wolf” LP.

On the month I arrived, the Morning News unveiled plans for a daily “Overnight” page, filled with reviews of shows the night before. We were all equipped with special laptops that (theoretically) allowed us to file from anywhere, even our seats at the concert. The nightly deadline would be 10:30 p.m. There was almost a mutiny when this was all laid out in a meeting. “Ten thirty?!” the veteran critics kept repeating. “We’d have to review just the first half of the show!”

That was fine by me. Who wants to sit through an entire concert by Confederate Railroad? I loved writing reviews on deadline because you showed up to the job with equipment- a manly exercise in an otherwise “sissy” occupation. (At newspapers, the features and arts section was often referred to as “the women’s pages”). My process would start the morning of the show, as I wrote descriptions of that night’s headliner while listening to their records and reading their bio. During the concert, I’d scribble some jokes in my notebook, like “John Conlee’s previous occupation as a mortician prepared him for the audience’s lack of enthusiasm.” Once I had the lead worked out in my head, and with an hour before deadline, I’d head back to the venue’s office, or a table on the concourse, and write the review. After filing, I’d usually go back for the encores, then call in one or two last sentences to the copy editor so it looked, to readers, that I’d seen the whole show.

Once I came up with an opening line like, “Look out! The homecoming queen’s got a mike!,” for a Ronna Reeves review, the rest was all white gravy. Randy Travis’s stage posture was seemingly inspired by men’s underwear ads in the Sears catalogue, was another icebreaker I just ran with. “Alan Jackson has the personality of a billy club in a floral arrangement.” The stranger, the bitchier, the better. Yeah, my writing voice was gay.

I had detractors. “More fan mail for Michael Cockroach,” the sassy clerk/receptionist LaWanda would say, as she plopped a stack of hate-filled letters on my desk. Turns out you can’t be fans of both George Strait and an anti-critic style that borders on performance art. My bosses at the DMN only called me on the carpet once, when a copy editor changed “dreck” to “trash”- the redneck n-word- and riled up the entire townships of Garland and Mesquite. The editor was soon looking up at the undercarriage of a passing motor coach- sorry about that- as I kept up the critical onslaught.

Diamond Rio “resembled the men’s room line at a Toto concert, and “after tonight’s Sawyer Brown show, which found band members running around like Keystone Kowboys, the audience should file a class action suit against whoever invented cordless mics.” A show by a one-hit hillbilly, “had more eye-bulging than a Don Knotts film festival,” while Billy Ray Cyrus, “looks like Mel Gibson with a ferret crawling up the back of his neck.” Mary Chapin-Carpenter was “Mary Blatant-Carpetbagger,” and Brooks and Dunn were, simply, “Loggins and Oates.”

Note the “Garth Bars” used to hang much of his staging. They stayed up after the shows, forever altering the overhead shots before Cowboys games.

It wasn’t all fun and death threats. I had to prove my reporter chops in September 1993 when Garth Brooks made country music history by selling out 65,000-capacity Texas Stadium three nights in a row. Those 195,000 tickets were snapped up in hours, not days, many by scalpers who had to eat it because supply equaled demand. To be filmed for an NBC special, the production promised to rival the biggest rock tours, with breathtaking special effects. But a few days before the shows, the stage roof, which housed most of the bells and whistles, folded like an upside-down taco, barely missing stagehands. A stern Brooks held a impromptu press conference in the stadium parking lot and I was the one asking tough questions, and pressing him when he was being evasive. That was so unlike me, but I put the job above everything, even pathological shyness.

Having to deal with Garth’s publicists (i.e. Garth) was a total pain. There would be no review tickets- we’d have to watch the show from the press box- and absolutely no photos! This was the biggest live event in country music history, and we couldn’t send a photographer? Unacceptable! My bosses had me going back to Pam Doyle over and over, but she wouldn’t budge. No photos!

We were told that Mr. Brooks wanted the first image seen to be on the TV screen. “He wants his shirt to be a surprise.” Here’s a video from Texas Stadium, which doesn’t show all the fights happening in the upper decks. Playing to the TV cameras, Garth didn’t use Jumbotrons, which could be distracting, and the folks way back got bored, so they gave new meaning to “nosebleed seats.”

You don’t fuck with the Morning News in Dallas. The sixth-largest paper in the country was in the midst of a love affair with Jerry Jones, whose Cowboys opened ‘93 with a Super Bowl rout of Buffalo. Feeding Jones’s ego, the DMN assigned a photo essay that would follow Jerry around on this historic night. The photographer ended up shooting the show from Jones’ skybox suite, and we had a color shot of Garth and his fucking shirt on the front page the next day. We even had Garth flying above the crowd on wires hung from the stadium trusses, ruining the big surprise finale for the next two nights.

Besides the circle of flames for “Standing Outside the Fire” (duh), the flyover was the only special effect that worked. Garth had teased that the crowd should bring umbrellas, but instead of rain during “The Thunder Rolls” the overhead rig merely trickled. “Spinal Hat,” I wrote in my notebook. That was my headline, but instead the desk went with “Woodschlock!”

1993 was quite a year for me, as Mr. Wyman printed in an update:

Former Sun-Times music free-lancer Michael Corcoran, now a writer on country ensconced at the Dallas Morning News, married art dealer Victoria Gaumer February 14, ten days after their first date. The impulsive but talented Corcoran, who slipped through the Sun-Times’s fingers last year, regularly riles Dallasites with his disrespectful treatment of C and W sacred cows and pulls stunts like reviewing an Ice Cube concert under his “country music critic” byline. Nevertheless the paper seems to love him: It sent him to LA for a week to write a Super Bowl diary in January and just nominated him for a Pulitzer. The happy couple will attend SXSW and then honeymoon in Rome.

Well, at least I had one good year in Dallas.