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Other times…not so much.

Perhaps the most noticeable recent example of this involved one of the top-selling recording artists of the nineties.

Garth Brooks was a country - and - western phenomenon with crossover appeal, with album sales dwarfing the competition across the country.

Garth was bigger than Johnny Cash, John Denver, and Loretta Lynn all rolled into one. But he wanted to try something different.

Enter Chris Gaines, or rather, enter Garth Brooks as Chris Gaines, a fictional Australian rocker bedecked in Goth gear and makeup from the cosmetologist who designed the look for Brandon Lee in The Crow, with a sound produced by pop mogul Babyface and Don Was (formerly of new wave group Was/Was Not). He would be Garth’s alter ego, master a new sound, and attract a new audience. He would even appear as a musical guest on Saturday Night Live, as if Chris Gaines and Garth Brooks were not the same person.

The result — the worst-selling Garth Brooks album in a decade, a record that turned off new fans as well as old.

Garth Brooks is a tremendous talent in his field, but he was as good a rocker as he was a baseball player…and that is yet another story worthy of this volume.

You Executed All the What?

One of the classic cartoon jokes is the character sawing off the tree limb he is standing on. This is less funny when the leader of a major nation does just about the same thing to his entire country.

RUSSIA, 1937–1942

Bill Fawcett

Brutal despots who kill large numbers of their own people are rarely well remembered. Few today have a warm spot for Caligula or Vlad the Impaler. Perhaps one of the worst of these throughout all of history was Joseph Stalin. He was heartless, paranoid, and disloyal to an extreme. But not only wasn’t he a nice guy, it can be easily seen that he was also a rather lousy dictator. Even Idi Amin had some followers left when he fled Africa. Soviet Russia literally named their new social policy in the 1950S de-Stalinization. Why? Because strangely enough, though Stalin held power for several decades in Russia, as a national leader he was often grossly incompetent, or at least incredibly shortsighted and perhaps personally a coward.

Okay, so you run Russia with an iron hand. The members of the politburo are all your appointees. Last year, when your close friend and heir apparent, Kirov, disagreed with you on a matter of foreign policy, you had him assassinated. Then you blamed the assassination on your few political opponents left in the Communist Party and had them killed as well. Now you stand unchallenged as head of the government and the party. You control the economy, the farms, the factories and the secret police (NKVD).

The only other entity in all Russia with any power at all is the Red Army. The officers of the army are generals who have stood by for years and followed your orders without question. The ones who had questions normally finished asking them to a firing squad. This is the Red Army, which is also the only defense against the growing power of a Nazi-led Germany.

So they have not shown any tendency to involve themselves in party politics or challenge you as dictator. And, having alienated every possible ally because they are capitalists, you need the Red Army. Even so, they could be a threat, so…too bad.

In June of 1937 the eight top officers of the Red Army were accused of plotting a coup against “the Party,” which meant Stalin. All eight were quickly convicted and executed. These executions, though, caused unrest in the ranks of the other officers. It certainly would not put them at ease or make them feel secure. At the very least, being a good paranoid, Stalin realized that he had just created several openings for ambitious men — the very sort of officers that might challenge him in later years. But no worry, he just eliminated them too. In fact, he simply made the criteria for execution any real sign of competence, initiative, or any other trait that would make someone