COVER STORY : Coming Down to Earth : Garth Brooks has a history of stratospheric sales, and has the country music world in the palm of his hand. So what would make him consider quitting?

At some point this summer, Garth Brooks will sell his 60 millionth album, leaving him second only to the Beatles in total U.S. album sales. What’s equally remarkable, he will have sold all those albums--an estimated $725 million worth--in less than seven years.

But sales aren’t the statistic on the minds of two members of the Capitol Nashville Records sales team as they stand patiently on a recent afternoon in a conference room at Kmart’s international headquarters in suburban Troy, Mich.

John Rose and Bill Kennedy are reminiscing about the time Brooks spent 12 hours signing autographs at Fan Fair, the annual Nashville festival that lets country music lovers rub elbows with their favorite stars.

“He just wouldn’t stop until everyone in line had an autograph,” Rose recalls. “He didn’t even take time to eat or go to the restroom. He just kept signing.”

Rose mentions Fan Fair because Brooks is now nearing his second hour of signing photos for Kmart employees.

Kmart executives offered to cut off the autograph session, but Brooks wanted no part of it. The private jet that would take him and the Capitol aides back to Nashville would just have to wait.

It’s easy to be cynical about this glad-handing, but there’s something more pushing Brooks this afternoon than simply cementing fan support.

The 34-year-old Oklahoma native has been away from concerts for 18 months, and his latest album, “Fresh Horses,” hasn’t caught fire the way his earlier ones did. While it has sold an estimated 2.6 million copies, as measured by SoundScan, it fell out of the pop Top 10 after just seven weeks and is stuck at No. 5 on the country charts.

Brooks is counting on his new tour--which begins March 13 in Atlanta--to help jump-start sales, but he’s been shaken by the relatively tepid response to the album. As the fans continue to stream into the conference room, one senses that Brooks is looking for reassurance.

“I’m hoping the tour will make a difference, but if it doesn’t we’ll have to take a serious look at where we are in our career,” he says in a quiet moment, away from the fans. “If the record and ticket sales don’t tell me that I’m stirring things up or changing people’s lives, then I think it’s time for me to hang it up.”

Hang it up?

Many artists have vowed through the years to quit if they lose their love for music, but Brooks may be unique in suggesting he would let declining sales be the determining factor.

“I have respect for those artists who keep making music their entire life, but I don’t want to ride that downside of the bell curve,” he says. “You want to be remembered at your best. You don’t want to be a trivia question on some cheesy game show in 20 years and see the [contestant] get it wrong.”

*

It’s the day before the Kmart visit as Brooks straps on the seat belt in the rear of the seven-passenger Hawker jet that is taxiing down the runway in Nashville.

He’s headed on this bitter-cold day for Minneapolis to lunch with some of the sales staff for the Target retail chain and to dine with representatives of the Musicland stores. He’ll go to Detroit the following morning for the Kmart meeting before returning home to his 400-acre ranch, where he’s lived for almost five years with his wife, Sandy, and their daughters, Taylor, 3, and August Anna, 1.

As the jet climbs above Nashville, Brooks looms over the city, just as he towers over the country music industry itself. About 20% of all the country albums sold in the United States during the last six years have carried his name.

“I think he came along at a time when a lot of music fans were looking for something new,” says Bill Ivey, director of the Country Music Foundation in Nashville. “They grew up on rock ‘n’ roll, but they couldn’t relate to grunge and rap, so they wanted something of their own--and they found Garth.”

It helped that Brooks shared some of the sensibilities of the pop audience. Like most of the new crop of singers in Nashville, Brooks didn’t grow up on a diet of just country. He loved George Strait and Merle Haggard, but he was also touched by such singer-songwriters as Dan Fogelberg and James Taylor and was thrilled by the excitement of rock bands like Queen.

From the start, Brooks dazzled crowds with a variety of manic maneuvers, from smashing guitars onstage to swinging on a rope above the audience. Yet he also touched fans emotionally with love songs (“Unanswered Prayers”) and underdog, blue-collar tales (“Friends in Low Places”).

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Brooks’ climb is that he is still seen by much of his audience as an underdog himself. “One of us” is a term applied to Brooks by several of the fans at the Kmart headquarters.

The singer reinforces that image when he says--as he does repeatedly--that his singing and songwriting talents don’t come close to those of the greats of pop and country. He is a star, he suggests, only because the members of the audience see themselves in him. In that way, his success is their success.

“I think most people realize that I’m just a bum who got lucky,” he says on the plane. “I believe that the one gift I have been granted is that I am the common dude. I truly think that what I believe in the majority of the people believe in as well--not because I believe in it but because we share the belief.”

*

The rewards for those 60 million records--and 3 million concert tickets--are enormous. Brooks’ wealth is in the $100-million-plus range, reports Nashville Business magazine. He sits on the board of directors of Speer Communication Ltd., a cable TV company owned by the son of Home Shopping Network founder Roy Speer, and he heads a movie production company and a management company.

Not everyone in Nashville is celebrating. Given his enormous success, a Brooks backlash was inevitable.

No one speaks on the record, fearing to cross country’s reigning superstar. But whispering is widespread among industry insiders. One of the most frequent digs is that Brooks’ success is because of marketing--that he’s a better strategist than singer or songwriter.

Why, some ask, is everything a crisis with Brooks?

He warned his fans five years ago that he would retire if he couldn’t find a way to combine a career and his family life (he solved the problem by taking his family on the road with him). Now he’s saying he might quit the business if sales decline.

Some here even dismissed as a publicity stunt Brooks’ declining to accept the favorite entertainer statue at this year’s American Music Awards because, he said, he thought Hootie & the Blowfish deserved it. His critics say it was just a way to capture headlines (which it did).

When Brooks decided to form his own management company after his management team of Bob Doyle and Pam Lewis got into a bitter legal dispute last year, the common wisdom among the anti-Brooks faction in town was that it was proof that success had gone to his head, that he was out of control.

Brooks acknowledges that he feels the pressures of his high-paced career and has heard the whispers around town.

“Sure, I wonder sometimes if I’m not trying to do too much,” he says. “But it has always been tough. Going from nowhere to platinum with the first album was like being hit by a tidal wave.

“And I used to try to calm myself by saying things will eventually get easier. But it doesn’t. Everything becomes tougher, from finding new songs to--well, you name it.”

On the issue of management, he says: “I didn’t have a choice. There were two people who managed me from the beginning--and they can’t manage me, because their company no longer exists. So what do I do? My problem is that with anybody I go to now, I’m never going to go to bed at night convinced that they’re not here because the money’s good. That wasn’t the case before. Bob Doyle mortgaged his house [when we started together].”

But Brooks has lots of supporters.

They don’t all claim to understand the complex, often contradictory sides of this man, who can be intensely competitive yet disarmingly unassuming. But they respect what he has accomplished.

Tony Brown, president of MCA Records Nashville, was part of the company’s management team that once turned Brooks down for a contract. But Brown later was quick to pick up on the singer’s potential. When asked by a magazine early in Brooks’ career to name who was going to be the biggest country star of the ‘90s, he named Brooks.

“The thing I remember about him [from the audition] was the intensity in his eyes--the drive,” Brown says now. “He’s got that magnetic quality that country music needed to step up to a higher level of popularity.”

As all traces of Nashville fade in the distance below, Brooks smiles when the question of his drive is brought up.

“It’s true, you know,” he says. “I like the struggle, the fight. . . . I’m way too intense for most people. I don’t think it’s a fault. I don’t think who you are from the day you are born is a fault.”

*

A light snow is falling as the Hawker jet touches down in Minneapolis. Rather than have limos waiting, Brooks and his party are met by two rental vans, which they’ll drive to the Target headquarters downtown.

But first, Brooks--who looks like he’s ready for a ski trip in his nylon jacket and warmup pants--steps into an airport dressing room to change into a black western shirt and jeans. He also trades in his baseball cap for the de rigueur cowboy hat.

At the Target offices, Brooks is greeted by a team of music merchandise buyers. After some small talk, he enters a conference room and chats alone with the staff.

“I do want to express my thanks to them for all they’ve done for me,” Brooks says afterward in the van on the way to the hotel. “But the most important thing for me is the feedback. The good thing about this level of retail is that most of the people are around for a while. They’re the same people I met when I started my career. So you get real feedback. These folks aren’t scared or intimidated by me. That’s what I like.”

If that sounds like a marketing major talking, Brooks is quick to reject the notion that he’s a master strategist. Besides, he says, he didn’t major in marketing at Oklahoma State University--as frequently stated in the press. He majored in advertising, and the idea wasn’t to help him someday sell his music. He says he took advertising classes because he thought he could use his music someday to make a living writing jingles.

“I’m given a lot of credit for being a lot smarter than I am,” he says when asked if he saw a country and rock merger as the future of country music. “The reason my music evolved the way it did was I was just following my own passions.”

As a teenager in the Oklahoma City suburb of Yukon, he loved the spectacle of Queen and other rock bands and was disappointed when his country heroes didn’t convey the same energy. He first saw signs of the mix in two performers: Dwight Yoakam and, especially, Chris LeDoux.

“LeDoux came out onstage with all this energy and these bright lights, and the crowd was on the ceiling, just going nuts,” Brooks recalls. “I looked at my band right there and said, ‘There it is. There’s our show.’ It told me country music and a wild show can go together. From that point, it was just a matter of having the guts to do it myself.”

It’s nearly midnight by the time Brooks is finished meeting with the Musicland team at the hotel and heads for his room. He looks tired as he sags in a stuffed chair.

Brooks may talk about being a couch potato when he’s home off tour, but he is anything but casual when it comes to talking about his career. He seems on guard during interviews, much like a politician who is wary of the media.

He listens closely to questions, as if looking for hidden meanings. He also listens closely to his answers, frequently rephrasing them if he thinks he hasn’t made his point.

On this night, he’s trying to make sense of his most radical suggestion--the idea of letting sales tell you when it is time to walk away from the music business. After half an hour, you start suspecting that he’s still trying to understand it himself.

“If someone says I’m only saying that because of ego, I’m not sure they’re wrong,” Brooks says at one point. “I’m not sure why I feel this way. . . . But when you stop connecting with people, maybe you are in the wrong field. Maybe that’s what God’s trying to tell you. Maybe it’s time to go concentrate on films for a while.

“You’ve got to be in tune with what you do. It has nothing to do with being spoiled or a bad loser. It’s just that I only have a limited time on this Earth, and my gig is to relate to people.”

If Brooks ever does step away from the record business when sales eventually decline, one option is movies. He is interested in acting but more so in making films. His company, Red Strokes Entertainment, has a production deal with Fox Family Films, a division of 20th Century Fox. Lisa Sanderson, his producing partner at the company, says Red Strokes has five projects (as producer) in various stages of development, ranging from a Christmas-style family film to a family animation film to a “thriller.”

“To Kill a Mockingbird” is typical of the films Brooks loves. He so admires the character of Atticus Finch, the idealistic lawyer played by Gregory Peck, that he and Sandy--who is expecting the couple’s third child in August--are considering Atticus as a name in case they have a son.

Among other Brooks favorites: “Field of Dreams” (“Thank God, there are still crazy people in the world who believe in the impossible dream,” he says) and “Forrest Gump” (“I wanted to stand up and hug everybody in the theater when it was over. I just loved it”).

He doesn’t mention “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” but they too fit the Brooks mold. Each is the story of an ordinary man put into extraordinary circumstances.

As he struggles in the early-morning hours with questions about his own future, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine Brooks seeing himself in those same terms.

What a difference a day makes.

All the fatigue and insecurity seem gone the next day as Brooks signs autographs at the Kmart offices. There are 3,500 workers in the building, and it looks as if Brooks won’t be satisfied until he has met them all.

Joe Mansfield, a record industry marketing consultant who is accompanying Brooks on the trip, smiles as he watches the scene. He has known Brooks since 1989 and scoffs at the talk that Brooks is over his head.

“When those big royalty checks start coming in, it can screw anyone up,” Mansfield says, away from the singer. “But I’ve known him since he came to Capitol, and the guy is the same. He may have tons of money, but he’s still down-to-earth.

“A lot of stars would want some fancy spread in the plane on the ride home, but you know what’s going to be waiting on Garth’s seat? A big bag of Taco Bell--and he’s going to love it.”

Near the end of the marathon session, a Kmart telephone operator rushes into the room, carrying what she describes as an urgent message for the singer.

A local radio station has been playing Brooks’ music all day, and the deejay is offering $100 to anyone who can get Brooks to phone the station. Later, on the jet, he calls the deejay and identifies the Kmart operator as the one who deserves the money.

In another two days, Brooks will learn that tickets for his March 13 concert at the Omni arena in Atlanta sold so fast that four other shows were put on sale--and they too sold out in 2 1/2 hours. That’s the most shows anyone had sold out at the 16,000-seat arena since the name on the marquee was Elvis Presley.

But Brooks’ spirits are already soaring as he slips into his rear seat on the Hawker jet.

“We all have our ups and downs,” he says, picking up the bag from Taco Bell. “I might have been real insecure last night, but today, I’m like Superman again. I feel there’s nothing I can’t do.

“You’ve got to remember that I’m the last guy who wants to see it over for Garth Brooks. But it’s not up to me. When the people are through with me, then it’s over. There’s nothing I can do to make it last one day longer. Maybe that’s why I have all that energy onstage. Maybe I’m just trying to make sure there’s one more day.”

*

Hear Garth Brooks

* To hear excerpts from the album “Fresh Horses,” call TimesLine at 808-8463 and press *5717.

* After listening to this preview, you can check out other current releases by pressing *4280 .

In the 805 area code, call (818) 808-8463.