DISGRACELAND - Garth Brooks: Earthquakes, Internet Rumors, and Missing Persons

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

Garth Brooks has more albums that have sold over 10 million copies than any other artist in history. He cut one of the biggest record deals in history – bigger than Madonna or Prince, a deal matched at the time only by Michael Jackson. His live shows are just as big, like when he triggered an actual earthquake in Baton Rouge. But it was along Garth Brooks’ seismic tour route that online detectives began to suss out a rumor…a rumor tying together the cities in which Garth Brooks performed and missing persons cases. A rumor that left some people asking, “Where are the bodies, G?”This episode contains themes that may be disturbing to some listeners, including descriptions of domestic violence.To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at www.disgracelandpod.com.To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to a monthly exclusive episode, weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at disgracelandpod.com/membership.Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - GET THE NEWSLETTERFollow Jake and DISGRACELAND:InstagramYouTubeX (formerly Twitter) Facebook Fan GroupTikTok To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. This episode contains content that may be disturbing to some listeners. Please check the show notes for more information. Disgrace Land is a production of Double Elvis. The stories about country megastar, Garth Brooks, are insane. He has more albums that have sold over 10 million copies than any other artist in history. He cut one of the biggest record deals of all time,

bigger than Madonna, bigger than Prince, a deal matched at the time only by Michael Jackson. He triggered an earthquake at a concert in Baton Rouge. His touring route has been scrutinized by online detectives looking to suss out a rumor about missing persons cases, a rumor that alleges people vanish when Garth Brooks stops by to play music. Great music.

Some of the greatest country pop songs of all time. Unlike that loop I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from a Melotron called millions of people now viving, MK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to All About That Bass by Megan Traynor. And why would I play you that specific slice of right junk in the right places cheese could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on November 11, 2000. And that was the day that Garth Brooks joined Facebook with a video so bizarre that it launched a conspiracy theory, one that continues to have ripple effects to this day. On this episode, online videos, conspiracy theories, earthquakes, missing persons, and Garth Brooks.

I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. Country Music Television, Entertainment Tonight, The Today Show. Just a few media outlets that have at one time referred to Garth Brooks as groundbreaking. Others still have called him earth-shattering. Why? Because Garth Brooks is a megastars megastar. He's got more albums that have been certified Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America

than any other artist in history. And Diamond, for those of you keeping score at home, is more than 10 million copies sold per album. Garth has nine albums that have done that. The Beatles only have six. I can go on and on with data and numbers, the world records that Garth Brooks is left in the dust over and over again, but I don't want to get ahead of myself.

My point here is that the words Garth Brooks and earth-shattering are often mentioned in the same sentence. But here's the thing. That's not actually true. Garth Brooks' music, his career. They aren't literally shattering anything. People can love music and anyone can be in awe of the career, but when it comes to shattering the earth to literally breaking the ground that we walk on, it takes more than a shit ton of number one songs.

Garth Brooks couldn't shatter the earth on his own. To do that, he needed the assistance of 100,000 people. April, 2002, Louisiana State University. Garth Brooks was doing what he was born to do, putting on a show. The kind of show that made him the biggest music music. act on the planet some three decades prior. A show that generated Mucho Fomo. Garth sprinting across the raised platform. Garth swinging from a rope, Garth and his bandmaid smashing two guitars together. A Garth Brooks concert was a spectacle, and this particular concert was his first in Baton Rouge in 24

years. Over 102,000 fans, 102,000 fans let him know that they were glad to have him back. and the roar from the crowd was deafening. Garth rode the high of his fans' adoration as he transitioned from one of his oldest hits, much too young to feel this damn old, into a cover of the Oak Ridge Boys, Colin Baton Rouge. The unofficial LSU anthem made the audience go crazy, hundreds of thousands of feet stomping in the stands of Tiger Stadium,

every person in attendance singing along. People with Apple Watches felt their wrist vibrate and then saw the alert. The sound level now at 95 decibels in climbing. As loud as an approaching subway car, loud enough to cause hearing loss if sustained for too long. The ground shook beneath their feet. Inside LSU's nearby geosciences building,

a seismograph began to spike. The machine recorded actual seismic waves in the ground as a direct result of the concert. Seismic waves, as in the kind triggered by volcanic eruptions, explosions, landslides, and avalanches. Garth Brooks and the LSU audience triggered an actual earthquake, scientifically proven by equipment already located on campus. Three months later, in August, in Houston,

the crowd wasn't expecting earthquakes per se. Capacity at NRG Stadium, home of the Houston Texans football team, was only 67,000. But no matter the size of the audience, Garth delivered, and the crowd loved it. They held up handmade signs, hoping theirs would make it to the Jumbotron screen above the stage. Some did make it, like one that read, We Love Garth, so wholesome and so representative of how everyone in that stadium felt at that moment. A camera zoomed in on it, and then the image was up on the Jumbotron.

But within seconds, the person holding the sign dropped it, revealing another sign behind it. This one with a message hastily written in black Sharpie, a message that read, Where are the Bodies, G? The Jumbo Tron camera suddenly flailed around and then quickly cut away, back to a tight shot of Garth. But everyone saw it. 67,000 people, people who are now thinking, what the fuck was that? Where are the bodies, G? Bodies?

What bodies? They had no clue. These obsessive Garth Brooks fans, first in line to buy a ticket. knew every word and every melody to every deep cut, completely unaware of the rumor. It's so easy to turn a blind eye to rumors, to truth even, when you love something. We all do it. The flaws that some of our favorite performers possess we are willing to ignore, separating the art from the artist and all that.

But this particular rumor was sinister to its core. So evil that one simply had no choice but to reckon with the information, the data upon learning about it. Just like we're about to do right now, stick with me here. This isn't simple and this isn't easy, but it's necessary to understand what the sign was trying to communicate.

Back up to the early 1990s, Garth Brooks is on a swift and unprecedented rise to fame. On the rise at the exact same time, the number of missing persons cases in the United States. And this is a simple fact. You can look it up. Plot the graph of Garth Brooks' success alongside the graph of the missing persons epidemic in the country, and you'll see what I'm talking about. By 1997, the number of missing persons peaked, just under 981,000.

This was the same year that Garth was at his most powerful, playing to over a million fans in Central Park, releasing his seventh studio album, a record called Sevens, Seven, as in the Seven Deadly Seventh. sins, the seventh seal. You know, I'm the one, I'm the one, the one they call the seventh son. Missing person cases dropped a bit after this, but they spiked again two years later in 1999. At the very moment, Garth Brooks went full Ziggy Stardust and unleashed his rock and roll alter ego Chris Gaines. Coincidence? You could make the argument. You could also argue that Chris Gaines was some kind of publicity stunt. But Chris Gaines, and we'll get to him later, Gaines is so obviously the quote-unquote dark side of Garth, two halves of the same person,

good and evil. It was all there, out in the open, or so this particular conspiracy theory alleges. Check out the titles to some of the songs Garth covered on a box that he released in 2013. You ain't going nowhere. Don't close your eyes. Act naturally. Hold on, I'm coming. These are the things a predator says to his prey, right before he grabs them and stuffs a chlorophy. form soaked rag against their face and then you can only imagine what happens next. But consider this, people kept turning up missing. Even years later, and many of these missing persons had the same eerie thing in common. They all disappeared when Garth Brooks's tour buses rolled through town. January 2015, Garth Brooks plays Tulsa, Oklahoma. A 74-year-old man

disappears that same night. May 2016, Garth Brooks plays Grand Rapids, Michigan, a guy known only as Gary vanishes from the nearby town of Hamilton just 30 minutes away. February 2017, Garth Brooks plays a week of shows in Edmonton, Alberta. On his night off, you guessed it, another person, gone. Okay, so let's say you've been clocking all these developments in real time, or maybe it's only in hindsight that you realize something's going on. So you start asking that question, where are the bodies, gee? But no matter how much you ask the question, And no matter how many handmade signs you hold up at stadium shows, you get no answer. So you keep digging into the past.

You find an old clip from the TNN show Crook and Chase in 1989, long before Garth Brooks was a household name. Charlie Chase and his Music City mustache asking his guest, Garth, if he ever thought about acting. I'd love to be a bad guy, Garth says. No, Charlie Lass, you don't want to do that. You look like a good guy. Garth just smiles and says, I'd rather kill somebody. That'd be fun.

Then there's an interview Garth gave to the Music City News in 1990 in which he said about his backing band, quote, The band's contract is that if they leave, I have to kill them. And what about the profile of Garth in Rolling Stone magazine in 1993? He's on top of the world, over a hundred million albums sold.

His recording contract allegedly as lucrative as Michael Jackson's, A contract that unbelievably put Madonna's and Prince's Cush deals to shame. Garth's talking about, quote, stomping the other guy's guts out who's in competition with you, unquote, just to get what he wants, which is at number one spot. And then doing whatever it takes to stay there. How does one do this? You're like an athlete, competitive, hungry. Losing is not an option. You get to have drive, determination, and a killer instinct.

Lightning flashed outside and lit up the darkened room. Nice house, newer build. He'd been out late again, unfaithful again. She confronted him when he got home. He didn't want to hear it. He hit her so hard that she went flying over the couch. And as he did, more lightning outside illuminated the whole scene, bright enough for their young daughter to watch from the stairs above.

He looked up and the girl backed against the wall and began to sink like she wasn't there at all. But he held his gaze, eyes dead, mind made up, determined to do what he'd just done to his wife to his child as well. At least that's what the girl was afraid of. He made his move, but his wife moved faster. The gun there in the drawer. Now in her hand, she aimed, she fired. Thunder crackled just beyond the windows and made the gunshot sound louder than it really was. And the girl watched as he was struck down.

This man, her dad. The man playing her daddy. A man who sort of looked like Garth Brooks if Garth Brooks had curly black hair, a tightly groomed beard and glasses. Inverse Garth. Evil Garth. Perhaps Garth's vision of what a bad guy looked like. If he thought about bad guys at all,

which, as we know from that bizarre Crook and Chase interview back in 89, he most certainly did. Two years after that interview, in 1991, Garth did more than think about bad guys. He was a bad guy, at least for a day, playing an abusive husband in the music video for his song, The Thunder Rolls. The first track on his second album, No Fences, released the previous summer. No Fences was huge. It reinvigorated the country music market in America, specifically country pop,

turning on a new generation to a genre which had bottomed out in the previous decade. This might be hard to imagine now, in our current landscape, When last year alone, 36% of the streams on Spotify's top 50 songs in the U.S. were country songs. But just prior to Garth's arrival, country music was in crisis. No fences signaled a sea change. Millions sold. Big singles like The Thunder Rolls, Garth's 6 number one on the country chart. Upon its release, 183 radio stations put the song into rotation,

the most in country chart history at the time. But the Thunder Rolls wasn't a shit-kicking rom. It was no friends in low places. This song was heavy. The video didn't shy away from domestic violence. TN did not do domestic violence or anything remotely controversial for that matter. TNN was not MTV. The Thunder Rolls was immediately taken off the air.

There was one way to get the video back on TN. Garth simply had to tape a disclaimer that would run before the video. something condemning domestic violence in no uncertain terms. But to Garth, a disclaimer, felt like pandering, like he was using controversy to promote a video. He didn't do the disclaimer on principle. His stance struck most as genuine, authentic, and that in turn led to his first major crossover.

First, there were the country music station screening the band video at shopping malls and country music venues. Then Tower Records in Nashville, playing the video on a loop nonstop from 4 to 8 p.m. every day for five days. Next, women's shelters reaching out to Capitol Records, Garth's label, to explain how the video was helping them raise awareness about domestic abuse. And finally, VH1, a cable station that played pop videos, now airing Garth Brooks's country video on the regular.

But Garth Brooks wasn't country, not in the sense that it can find him. He loved George Strait, but he loved Queen's. and kissed just as much. He put rock and roll energy into the music he was making and took country where it had never gone before. Rope in the Wind, his third studio album,

went straight to number one on the Billboard 200. The same week that No Fences was holding the number two spot and his debut was still clinging to the number 10 spot. And it wasn't just stubbornness, determination, and drive

to put Garth Brooks on top. There was something else. Fear. Fear of the man in the video. who was the polar opposite of Garth's squeaky, clean, forward-facing image. Fear of evil, Garth. Fear of the rest of the music industry, of hip-hop and heavy metal. Two genres that Forbes magazine vilified in a 1992 article positioning Garth as a Goody Two- Shoes Messiah here to deliver us from evil.

If you don't live in the inner city, you can't relate to those lyrics, Garth's producer was quoted to say. Those lyrics, referring, of course, to hip-hop, a genre that was created. creatively thriving at the time, but one that was being held back from the mainstream, being denied Garth-level chart dominance by this very line of thinking. Their music bad, our music good. Fear. Fear was the great motivator. Magic Johnson told Garth Brooks this after trying and failing to sink a ball into the corner pocket.

1984. Shooting pool was equal ground for the two superstars, both competitive players at the top of their respective games. Besides, Garth wasn't dumb enough to challenge Magic on half court, and Magic wasn't about to step out on stage. They both sucked at Poole. That wasn't the point. Pool was a chance to dick around prior to the conversation they were taping for a Fox TV special called One-on-One with Magic Johnson. But first, Garth wanted to know what separates an NBA player from everyone else.

Magic was quick to respond. Easy, the thing that pushed the Beatles to try and make better records than the Beach Boys in the 60s. The same thing that pushed magic to jump higher and block harder than Larry Bird in the 80s. Fear. The higher Garth Brooks climbed, the more that fear sank in. Fear that his latest record wasn't going to do as well as the last. Fear that this new mullet on the block, Billy Ray Cyrus, five straight weeks at number one with that achy-breaky bullshit,

was going to send Garth straight to the cutout bins. They humiliated him on air in London. To the Brits, he was a country bumpkin straight out of Hicksford. But in Dublin, he was a god, at least as big as the Pope, setting a new record for the largest audience since his holiness paid a visit some 14 years prior. When he left Ireland, one quarter of all Irish households owned a Garth CD or cassette. The fear was paying off. March 1995, fastest selling artist of all time. Fifty million albums sold in just six years. May 1996. Scratch that. The number is now 60 million.

August 1997, Garthstock, the Central Park concert. A million people shot live for HBO, the cable network's highest rated program of the year. And then, just three months later, in November, Garth Brooks released Sevens, his seventh LP in his fourth to debut at number one on both the mainstream and country album charts. He had the crossover video and the crossover albums in his sevens. and now he just needed a crossover number one single. That would be an all-time high for Garth Brooks, just like another all-time high making history at this very same time.

The number of missing person cases in America, more than 970,000 in total. A daunting number, a number that Garth Brooks may or may not have been aware of. What he was aware of was how his own personality was beginning to split in two, one man on stage and another off it. That man up on stage, that wasn't Troil Garth Brooks, born 1962, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Superstar Garth, G.B., for short, he's a character.

As soon as the house lights go down and he takes those first few steps onto the stage, his heart pounding. That guy, Troil, disappears. Garth does things that Troil would never do. He sees some woman riding the rail down front, screaming your head off, and he reaches down from the stage, his button-up shirt tucked neatly into his jeans, his cowboy hat looming large, and he grabs that woman's hair and yanks as hard as he can. It's physical. It's thrilling. When he talks about moments like these after the fact,

Garth talks about himself in the third person, like he's Jimmy from Seinfeld. Garth got carried away tonight. Garth grabbed the woman's hair. Did you see that? For Garth Brooks, the entertainer, Like all incredible entertainers, it's all about connection. But he didn't have to physically touch every person to knock them on their asses. When my people leave the auditorium, I want them crawling out, he told Rolling Stone. I want them so damn tired, I want their voices gone, I want them to be just like me ringing wet. Just dead. Just dead.

Hey man, he said it, not me. By the late 90s at the top of his game, Garth Brooks was thinking a lot about death. not just about entertaining his fans to death, if only metaphorically. There was the death of his mother, once a country western singer in her own right, gone after a battle with cancer at the age of 70. And there was also the death of a fictional rock star, one that Garth was going to resurrect to make real. And doing so, would give the most popular singer in the world

the one thing he still did not have, a number one hit song on the mainstream pop chart. We'll be right back after this word, word, word, word. 14-year-old Kenny Edmonds wanted nothing more than to meet the singer for his favorite band, the Jackson 5. But Kenny Edmonds was nobody. A young Michael Jackson was one of the biggest stars in the world, even now in 1973, when the band's best years were arguably behind them. Kenny knew the opportunity to meet Michael wasn't going to fall on his lap. He had to create it himself.

So he looked in the local paper and found the name of the show's local promoter, Charles Williams. Then Kenny opened the phone book. So many Charles Williams is listed here in Indianapolis. He picked up the phone and began to call each one. Took a minute, but he got promoter Charles Williams on the line. And Kenny put on a fake voice, the spot-on impression of Jimmy Stewart that he dragged out whenever he wanted to make his friends laugh.

But this was no laughing matter. This was Kenny pretending to be an adult, the journalism teacher at his high school, to be precise, who was now asking promoter Charles Williams If this band coming to town, what was their name, the something five, the Jackson five? That was it. Perhaps one of his journalism students could interview them when their tour arrived here in Indianapolis. Promoter Charles Williams thought this was a terrific idea.

He asked for a number to call the teacher back once he confirmed details. Just call my student directly, came the reply. And then Kenny Edmonds gave the promoter his actual phone number. Opportunity, Ambition. Kenny Edmonds had both in spades. These things landed him a face-to-face interview with Michael Jackson at just 14 years old, and these things were driving him to also make huge R&B hits now, some two decades later, under his better-known professional name, as the writer and producer, Babyface.

Kenny Edmonds, aka Babyface, was behind huge hits for Whitney Houston, Bobby Brown, Boys to Men, TLC. But Babyface's ambition knew no-bounds, no genre. He recognized the potential in a Nashville country song performed by Winona Judd, and he brought that song not to an R&B singer, but to Eric Clapton. Changed the World was a bona fide smash in 1996, thanks to that ambition, thanks to a guy who is still taking chances long after he cold-called the promoter of a Jackson 5 show. His next idea was wilder than a slow-hand co-lap. This was a very big swing, a movie called The Lamb,

about a fictional rock star, dead in the film's first scene. His life, told in flashbacks, as one of his fans tries to prove that he was murdered. The script was being written by the guy who wrote Diehard in The Fugitive, and Babyface was executive producing. But before the movie could be released, a genius-level marketing plan had to be executed. Introduced this fake singer by way of a real album,

an album of the dead rock star's so-called hits, performed by an actual musician pretending to be someone else, the same musician who would then play the dead rock star in the movie. The concept was as bonkers as a guy babyface thought would be perfect for the gig. Garth Brooks. Garth Brooks may have had four records hit the top of the mainstream album chart, but his number one singles were all still on the countryside of the tracks. Becoming Chris Gaines was going to change all of that.

Chris Gaines was everything Garth Brooks allegedly was not. He had dark hair, a soul patch. He wore eyeliner. He was a sex addict who made albums with titles like fornicopia. Garth dropped weight and got into character. He intended to disappear just like all those people who were busy disappearing across America. But Garth Brooks couldn't get lost in Chris Gaines. Not really.

The whole thing looked like a joke. And it was a joke. Garth's country audience didn't get it. The thing was, Garth wasn't laughing. The album, Garth Brooks and The Life of Chris Gaines, did sell 2 million copies, which is nothing to sneeze at, but 2 million was dittily compared to the numbers Garth was used to putting up. The movie was shelves, and Babyface went looking for the next opportunity.

Chris Gaines went back in the ground. Although the experiment didn't get Garth a number one crossover single, it did get him to number five, which is higher than he ever got on the pop charts, and that's saying something. But Chris Gaines ultimately was a first. failure. The ill-conceived plot precipitated Garth's announcement that he was taking a break from the business and considering early retirement. Chris Gaines, it seems, did something Garth Brooks

could never do. He lost. And if he can't beat him, well, you know the rest. Joining Facebook did not come naturally to a guy like Garth Brooks. No, it did not. But in 2014, Garth, his alleged retirement, it was nothing but a memory. He's getting ready to be. at this point to stage a massive three-year comeback tour. So social media makes a lot of sense for Garth Brooks at this point. The 45-second video, Garth Brooks posts to what was his new Facebook page at the time made it official. The video is low quality. It's shot by Garth himself. He's sitting in bed in an empty hotel room. He talks about Facebook as a conversation between himself and the fans, to which he says, I like that. But he doesn't say, I like that in the way. He doesn't say, I like that in the

way you're thinking. He says it like, I don't know, it's fucking creepy, man. His voice drops, it's almost a whisper. Like, he's trying to stay, like, incognito. I like that. He keeps that tone going to as he talks about all the stuff he's going to post on social media. Cool stuff, slick stuff, raw stuff. It's like he's being sexual. It's fucking weird. The way he says everything in this short 45-second video is creepy. It's, it's creepy. It's, it's, it's creepier than I'm able to describe. You have to watch it. There's also this, like, devilish, psychotic gleam in his eye when he's talking. This is the kind of video you're going to watch over and over and over on repeat, okay? Do it after you listen to this podcast. But you're going to do this.

Trust me, because it's that weird and it is that strange. It's the kind of video that makes you want to ask questions, a lot of questions. Questions like, where are the bodies, gee? The bodies, of course, kept disappearing. Buffalo, Wichita, New Orleans, Worcester, all across America, from September of 2014 to December of 2017. Garth's tour buses, they rolled on, and people kept vanishing, sometimes on the day of an actual show and other times on Garth's days off. And long before that sign went up on the Jumbotron at Energy Stadium in Houston,

Internet sleuths were connecting the dots. They started calling out Garth Brooks on social media over the missing persons. They wanted to know where the bodies were. You can go see for yourself. You can scroll through the comments of any random post on Garth Brooks's Instagram page, and you'll see that over the years, a growing community of conspiracy theorists have been out there tuning into the frequency. Leaving comments like, my family cannot rest until you tell us where our grandmother is.

Please, Garth. Or, for God's sake, Garth, the families, the families need closure. or what did you do to Christine? And thanks to the diligent full court press of these people online, we are getting close now. Closer to knowing the whole truth, closer than we've ever been before. The truth about where the bodies are.

Well, I'm going to tell you where the bodies are. 2018, a year Garth Brooks does not tour. A year that missing person reports in the United States plummet to their lowest number in three decades. People are beginning to talk. A dirty little secret is getting out. A secret alleging that Garth Brooks is a serial killer. Thus, explaining why so many people go missing when he's on tour.

But consider this. Exhibit 1. There is no hard evidence connecting Garth Brooks to any people who have disappeared along his tour route. Exhibit 2. Despite the constant barrage of comments on his social media accounts, Garth Brooks has never addressed the rumor. or accusations. He hasn't even acknowledged them.

And you know why? Because he doesn't have to. Because none of this is true. What, you're saying? Okay, there are other comments that have cluttered up Garth Brooks' social media accounts for years, ones that aren't looking for closure for grieving families. These comments are more absurd, yet they pop up over and over again. Things like, touch my camera through the fence, Garth, and I got a DUI, baby, and you bet I'm coming up and

But these sound like the work of trolls, well, they are. This whole thing, this theory that Garth Brooks is some kind of serial killer, it's all a joke. It's not my joke, it's a real joke, it's out there. A straight-faced joke started by comedians. Specifically, Tom Segura, who hosts a podcast with his wife, Christina Pisitsky, called Your Mom's House. And it was on this podcast that Tom Segura talked about watching Garth's now infamous first Facebook video from back in 2014. and then watching a press conference in which Garth gets oddly emotional talking about his upcoming

stadium tour. Tom Segura couldn't believe how strange Garth Brooks was. How weird, bizarre, Segura joked. So weird, so cringy that you could just imagine the hundreds of bodies he had buried under his house. Which, it goes without saying Garth Brooks absolutely does not have bodies buried under his house. That was the whole gag. A gag with incredible legs. And that's the point.

It never stopped. It's still going. Years later, even now as you listen to this podcast episode, Garth's weird little videos keep popping up. Videos in which Garth's eyes go wide and his smile tilts and his voice drops to a creepy whisper. The guy's an easy mark, and the millions of your mom's house fans, Tom Segura fans, go after Garth with the same ambition that Garth went after the music industry in his prime. That guy holding up the sign that read, Where Are the Bodies, G? the one I told you about at the top of the episode, that guy was planted at the show by Tom Segura. That timeline I laid out for you at the top of the show, the one that ties Garth Brooks's milestones and movements

to the fluctuating rate of missing persons cases in America, I got that online too, and shout out to at Barth Grook's on YouTube. Garth Brooks, still, like I said, has not commented. He did, however, block Tom Segura on social media, so perhaps that's comment enough. And at the end of the day, it doesn't get at him. He's too busy continuing to perform at a level that most artists can only dream of. He's setting off fucking earthquakes in Baton Rouge.

And the Baton Rouge show at LSU is part of his stadium tour, the one he got teary-eyed over while talking about it at a press conference. Garth closed out that tour back in the place where he might be loved even more than he was here in the States. In Dublin, Ireland. Five sold-out shows. 400,000 people in total. Gross revenue of 28.6 million for just those shows. On the final date, September 17, 2022, Garth left the audience the way he always wanted to leave them.

Tired, crawling out of the venue. Voice is shot. Just. The crowd shuffled out of Croke Park, the giant football field with a historic soil pitch. They went back to their houses and apartments, many of which had a picture of Garth hanging on the wall. The next morning they woke up, feeling like they'd been hit by a Mack truck in the best possible way. made coffee, made tea, and opened the morning paper. In the pages of that paper, they read about a boy in Kilrain,

some two hours south of Dublin, just 17 years old, disappeared two nights earlier. Meanwhile, Garth Brooks's crew packed up and shipped out. The long tour was over, and the thunder rolled. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelandpod.com.

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