Michael Ochs Archivesīowie was the king of all pop chameleons, morphing from the flame-haired Aladdin Sane - a spin on “A Lad Insane” - to the clean-cut Thin White Duke with the greatest of ease. David Bowie aka Ziggy Stardust David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust in 1973. Here are five artists who took their transformations to the next level, and whose invented characters commanded nearly as much attention as the stars themselves. “It’s kind of like when I do a movie, becoming a character,” Beyoncé told Oprah. At times, Gaines seems to make sly winks at the listener-the liner notes claim the hit single, “Lost in You,” was commissioned for an faux-apocalyptic romance film called REVELATIONS-but they only serve to blur the boundary between the project’s satire and sincerity.Secrets of The Weeknd’s face: From bloody horror to ‘surgery’ shockerįor some, that has meant creating an alter ego, whether it’s Eminem’s dark Slim Shady, Beyoncé’s ferocious Sasha Fierce or Mariah Carey‘s liberated Mimi. Throughout the 13 songs, Brooks stretches his signature baritone into a scratchy falsetto, experimenting in funk, treacly jam tracks, and, on one especially earnest single (his first “protest” anthem), an ill-conceived attempt at rap. The Life of Chris Gaines isn’t hard rock or even alt-rock, so much as straight-faced, pop-ish crooning. The accompanying album doesn’t fit the mockumentary. “Clearly, this guy got run over by the crazy truck,” Rob Sheffield wrote in Rolling Stone, “and I’m talking all eighteen wheels.” The fans had a point. “There was a chainsaw.”īut when the episode and album dropped, few fans thought Brooks was joking. In one of the less explicable scenes, a friend remembers walking in on Gaines packing a chainsaw into his bag. (One shows Gaines in a hospital room, flanked by two nurses, acting out a close approximation of Spinal Tap’s Smell the Glove in another, he poses in a top hat over an animated pair of B-cups).
ALTER EGO BAND WEB SITE MOVIE
“It’s the best part of being a musician.” The movie undercuts Gaines’ inept critiques of corporate music culture with absurdist touches, like his run of increasingly unhinged album covers. Taken alone, the mockumentary is a pitch-perfect riff on rockist self-seriousness: a haphazard montage of soap opera interviews, exaggerated hints at Gaines’ daddy issues, and regular asides about how much he loves sex. “Chris Gaines’ music took him to the top of the charts,” a voice-over drones in the opening credits, “then his manager took him to the cleaners.” (“He was a rocker who liked fast cars and even faster women.”) The 40-minute feature tracks Gaines’ extremely detailed fictional biography, from his origins in Brisbane, Australia through his imperiled music career, hit by cartoonish tragedy, debilitating sex addiction, and the textbook greed of industry executives. The character’s cult following stems mostly from the mockumentary, a parody of VH1’s Behind the Music series, with a Billy Joel cameo and the pithy one-liners of an ’80s movie trailer. When I called his publicist to request an interview, she declined: “Garth doesn’t talk about Chris Gaines anymore.”īut on the eve of Gaines’ 20th anniversary, it’s worth revisiting-in the past two decades, the project has transformed from industry embarrassment to hilarious artifact of CD-boom-era excesses. These days, the album doesn’t appear in Brooks’ anthology or on his website. The Lamb was never released, Brooks returned to country, and Gaines slunk into ’90s pop-rock obscurity. Club, Stephen Thompson called the record “corny schmaltz” and “flaccid would-be funk.” Entertainment Weekly’s David Browne gave Gaines a new name: “Wimp Bizcuit.” Meager sales and critical ridicule killed the project. “The massively popular country icon is confronting some serious identity issues,” critic David Wild wrote in Rolling Stone. It sold just 2 million copies-a spectacular bust for an artist who had garnered more than 95 million sales-so bad, his label offered retailers a rebate on each copy sold. To promote the film, Brooks starred in a VH1 mockumentary about Gaines and released a magnificently average, faux-greatest hits record: Garth Brooks Presents.The Life of Chris Gaines.
Brooks was set to star in a mystery-thriller called The Lamb, with a script from Die Hard screenwriter Jeb Stuart, about a dead rock star and his obsessed fan, hell-bent on proving foul play. In the autumn of 1999, the approach of the millennium inspired a wave of rebirth: dissatisfied fortysomethings shed marriages and jobs cultists made for the woods armed with bowie knives and Campbell’s soup and Garth Brooks-the Recording Industry Association of America’s bestselling solo artist of all time-grew a soul patch, donned a black wig, and re-emerged as “Chris Gaines,” brooding, sex-addicted alt-rocker.
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