Garth Brooks brought in more than $90 million in the last 12 months. Not bad. Country music isn’t so much about hardscrabble life and strumming washboards anymore, and it hasn’t been for many years. To paraphrase the old David Allan Coe classic, the perfect country and western song does not have to include “trains, trucks, mama, prison, and getting drunk.”
There may still be some of those elements, but many of country music’s more successful acts today border on good-time pop or rock (and in some cases, have completely crossed over a la Taylor Swift). Many are also blessed with good looks and attractive physiques — not a common trait of the classic country singers.
So in this new era of country, who tops the field as the highest-paid country musician? It’s one of the classic artists coming out of semi-retirement. Here is the list of the top-grossing country musicians as compiled by Forbes magazine.
1. Garth Brooks – Brooks (pictured above) pulled in $90 million over the past twelve-month period, not only topping the 2015 list but also topping the all-time list for a country music artist or group in a single year. He and his wife Trisha Yearwood, a powerful country act in her own right, have teamed up to tour the U.S. and packed arenas wherever they go. Brooks’ more traditional country has a broad appeal that can bring in younger fans as well as their parents.
2. Toby Keith – Keith raked in $53 million in the past year, good enough for second place on the list. His popular songs like “Red Solo Cup” bring him closer to pop than Brooks, but he also has some interesting tangents, including the classic “tribute” to Willie Nelson “I’ll Never Smoke Weed With Willie Again,” and the powerful “American Soldier,” written “for all the times I get to meet the troops on these USO tours.” His entrepreneurial efforts include the Show Dog label, Wild Shot mescal, and a large endorsement deal with Ford.
3. Jason Aldean – Aldean is in third place with a $42.5 million take. Aldean’s brand of country can be classified as country rock, and his live shows include pyrotechnics that are worthy of some of classic rock’s finest showmen. His music has overseas appeal, given his success with concerts in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Sweden. Make no mistake — Aldean can and does fill up many arenas in the U.S. as well. On the entrepreneurial side, he’s taken part ownership in Jay-Z’s Tidal streaming service.
4. Luke Bryan – Bryan squeaked into fourth place with $42.5 million. Buoyed by songs like “Roller Coaster” and “I See You,” he has a definite crossover appeal. Aside from his musical success, Bryan has lucrative deals with Miller Lite and the outdoorsman/sportsman outlet Cabela’s.
5. Kenny Chesney – Chesney made it into the top five by bringing in $42 million. His stadium tour has been extremely lucrative, and his endorsements from Corona beer and Costa sunglasses fit his style perfectly — as does Blue Chair Bay Rum, his own brand. Chesney is teaming up with Aldean for ten shows throughout the rest of 2015, so get the cash registers ready.
Tim McGraw and Florida-Georgia Line are not far behind in earnings — but where are the women on the list? With Taylor Swift reclassified out of country, we find the highest-earning female in ninth place. Miranda Lambert is there with $28.5 million, ironically tied with her soon-to-be-ex-husband Blake Shelton.
If you’ve never considered country music before, give some of these acts a try. They are gaining a much broader appeal, and after a listen, you might discover why.
http://time.com/money/4010342/country-musicians-highest-paid/?xid=yahoo_money
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JUDAS PRIEST’S ROB HALFORD REFLECTS ON 25th ANNIVERSARY OF SUBLIMINAL MESSAGE LAWSUIT
One of the strangest yet most well-known court cases blaming a band for a fan’s suicide concluded 25 years ago, on Aug. 24, 1990. On trial was the British heavy metal band Judas Priest, who released the album Stained Class in 1978. That record came out several years before the group broke internationally with British Steel, yet in legal circles Stained Class remains far more significant, since it spawned the precedent-setting case Vance vs. Judas Priest. After a court battle that lasted more than six weeks, the band emerged victorious.
“It was crazy for us, because we were a British metal band being taken to trial in a country that we loved so dearly over an incident that we thought was preposterous,” frontman Rob Halford tells Yahoo Music. “And we had to go through the motions of this month-long trial. It was absolutely ridiculous. It really was. We love our fans. We would never put anything in our music with the intent of harming them.”
Here’s the background story: On Dec. 23, 1985, after repeatedly listening to Stained Class, Sparks, Nevada residents James Vance, 20, and Raymond Belknap, 18, made a pact to kill themselves. The youths, who had a long history of violent behavior as well as drug and alcohol abuse, grabbed a 12-gauge, sawed-off shotgun and entered the nearby courtyard of the Community First Church of God. Belknap held the gun under his chin and pulled the trigger, dying instantly. Then Vance picked up the weapon, which was slippery with his friend’s blood. He reloaded it, placed the barrel under his chin, and fired. The exploding shell shattered the lower portion of his face, but did not kill him. Four months after attempting suicide, the severely disfigured young man wrote his mother a letter, which read in part, “I believe that alcohol and heavy metal music, such as Judas Priest, led us or even mesmerized us into believing that the answer to life was death.”
Vance’s mother immediately contacted several lawyers to see if she had a case. Since the First Amendment of the Constitution protects free speech, and would therefore render inadmissible any claims that Judas Priest’s lyrics caused Belknap and Vance’s suicidal acts, attorneys looked for a back door. They examined Stained Class forwards and backwards – literally. When they played the record backwards they decided “Better by You, Better Than Me,” a cover of a song by the English hard rock band Spooky Tooth, contained subliminal messages, including the phase “do it,” which “mesmerized” Belknap and Vance into trying to kill themselves.
During a pre-trial hearing, Justice Jerry Whitehead ruled that “non-decipherable sounds below the conscious threshold of awareness” are not protected by the First Amendment. Almost five years after the tragedy, the members of Judas Priest were subpoenaed to appear for a hearing in Washoe County Court House in Reno, Nevada.
“As we got off the tour bus, we were told that we were going to be subpoenaed by the local police department and that we didn’t have to say anything,” recalls Halford. “We just had to take the envelope that was handed to each of us and carry on walking into the gig. We walked in single-file and the sheriff came up and said to each of us, ‘You’re served.’ That’s when the official legal process kicked in.”
Vance’s mother Phyllis sued the band and CBS Records for $6.2 million. Her suit alleged that the backwards messages in “Better by You, Better Than Me” were responsible for her son and Belknap’s suicide pact, and that the record company shared the blame, since Stained Class was a “defective product” that attacked the listener’s subconscious and compelled them to commit acts against their will. Before the trial, Judas Priest insisted that there were no subliminal messages on the song, but Phyllis Vance refused to drop the case. With the court date pending, Judas Priest were given an option of having the trial heard by a jury or a single judge and opted for the latter. On July 6, the case began and Judas Priest entered the Nevada courtroom.
Originally, James Vance was scheduled to take the stand against one of his favorite bands. However, on Nov. 29, 1988 he died from a methadone overdose during a stay at the psychiatric unit of the Washoe Medical Center. Still, the prosecution felt it had enough evidence to win the case. Judas Priest thought the whole experience was surreal and Kafkaesque.
“It was just like being in a movie,” Halford says. “It didn’t seem real. The opening accusations by the prosecution started off with some guy going, ‘Your honor, the whole point of this is to receive justice and we will be screaming for vengeance and standing by the sad wings of destiny as we will ram it down.’ We just looked at each other going, ‘Oh my God, the prosecution is starting their accusations using our album titles in their argument!’ We were just stunned.”
To win the case, the prosecution would have had to prove that an inaudible message was willfully hidden in the recording, that the message was subliminal, and that it clearly caused Vance and Belknap to shoot themselves. During the case, Vance’s attorneys relied on expert witnesses in the field of subliminal persuasion, including researcher Howard Shevrin and author Dr. Wilson Key. Some who were present felt that Key, who wrote four books about subliminal advertising, damaged his credibility by stating in his opening argument by insisting subliminal messages could be found “on Ritz crackers, the Sistine Chapel, Sears catalogues, and the NBC evening news.”
The case became stranger as it progressed. Members of Priest have said that between sessions some of lawyers asked the members of the band for autographs to give to friends and family members. In addition, while Halford was on the stand, he was asked to sing an a cappella version of “Better by You, Better Than Me,” as performed on the album.
The expert witness for the defense was Anthony Pellicano, who had previously analyzed the Watergate tapes and the video of the Kennedy assassination. Pellicano testified that he backwards passage that sounds like the phrase “do it” was a fluke caused by the combination of Halford exhaling after a vocal line, coupled with the noise of an effects-laden guitar.
Halford says the turning point in the case came when the he took the stand and played various backwards passages from Stained Class that the band members scrutinized, using their imaginations in an effort to detect anything that sounded like a sentence. After finding a handful, including, “I-I-I asked her for a peppermint/I-I-I asked for her to get one,” “Hey ma, my chair’s broken,” and “Help me keep a job,” they played them for the judge, advising him what to listen for before they played the backwards passages.
“We wanted to prove to the judge that these sounds and ideas can be manufactured in the mind more than anything else,” Halford says. “If you can drop a seed of what something might be, then you can convince your brain that that’s exactly the sound or the phrase that you’re listening to. And as we played those passages back, you could see the judge’s mannerism change on the spot. He realized that the phrase [‘do it’] was there as trick of the mind more than anything else. And I think he realized you can take anything from anybody and play it backwards and create these imaginary phrases and sentences. Everything seemed to change that day.”
In the end, Judge Whitehall ruled that Vance and Belknap were predisposed towards self-destructive behavior long before they heard Stained Class, and that even if the album contained backward masking, there wasn’t enough evidence to prove that the messages in and of themselves were enough to cause the young adults to kill themselves.
“The scientific research presented does not establish that subliminal stimuli, even if perceived, may precipitate conduct of this magnitude,” Whitehead said. “The strongest evidence presented at the trial showed [that subliminal messages would cause] no behavioral effects [on an individual] other than anxiety, distress, or tension.”
Judas Priest won the case, but the victory wasn’t as overwhelming as defenders of the First Amendment might have hoped. Judge Whitehead may have ruled that Judas Priest and CBS Records played no role in the suicide pact between Vance and Belknap, but stated that the Stained Class contained subliminal messages, even if the messages were mere audio anomalies. In addition, it cost the band approximately $250,000 in legal costs and the judge ordered CBS to pay $40,000 to the prosecution, since the label did not provide master tapes of Stained Class to Vance’s lawyers.
In 1992, director David Van Taylor released Dream Deceivers, a documentary about the story of Vance and Belknap and the lawsuit that followed, which features interviews conducted with Vance before his death.
“Going to court is still a strong memory, because at the heart of it for us was a great sadness that these young guys who were hardcore Priest and metal fans had lost their lives through a combination of drugs and alcohol,” Halford says. “And we’ll have to live with that for our whole lives. But the state of mind that they were in had nothing to do with Priest and nothing to do with the music. They were in an unfortunate state mentally at the time that they did what they did.
“If you look through the history of these situations whether it’s us, Ozzy Osbourne, Randy Blythe [of Lamb of God], or any of the other artists that have been taken to court in the past with these crazy accusations that we are somehow responsible for these incidents, not one has been thoroughly convinced or proven,” Halford continues. “There are always these mitigating circumstances that lead to these kinds of tragedies, but there are people that continue to blame metal music, which is really quite sad, because I’ve always felt that our music helps people escape the difficulties in their lives.”
[Article includes video of Rob Halford singing in court.]
Jon Wiederhorn, Writer | Yahoo Music
https://www.yahoo.com/music/one-of-the-strangest-yet-most-well-known-court-127465861446.html