Brooks is not averse to feuding with his corporate bosses. Jimmy Bowen, a former Capitol Nashville president, left the label in 1994 after numerous clashes with his flagship artist. Bowen's replacement, Scott Hendricks--another exec with whom Brooks had strained relations--fared little better. When Brooks' first album under the Hendricks regime, 1995's Fresh Horses, sold a relatively mortal 3.6 million copies (a smash by anyone else's standards), he wrangled a deal in which his future marketing would be handled by the New York offices of EMI. But just as he was about to turn in Sevens last summer, EMI shuttered its Manhattan shop and terminated some of Brooks' favored-player execs. Rather than put the project back into the hands of the Nashville team, Brooks took his ball and went home.
It was the one-man strike heard round the music world. Sevens had been set to come out in conjunction with Brooks' Aug. 7 Central Park concert, which drew hundreds of thousands of Stetsons to NYC and delivered a record number of viewers to HBO. (Brooks invited his hero Billy Joel to join him on stage.) That kind of pull in a city that no longer has a single country radio station should have been a moment of unsullied triumph. Yet much of the media attention focused on what was essentially a giant release party without a release.
Months went by as Brooks maintained he'd rather the album never came out than see it poorly marketed. EMI, meanwhile, long rumored to be on the sales block, watched much-counted-on hits from Janet Jackson and the Rolling Stones nosedive out of the top 20. Someone was bound to blink before the Christmas buying rush got under way, and it wasn't going to be the singer with the intense blue eyes capable of boring holes in the back rows of any arena.
The only surprise was how long it took the label to capitulate. Just before EMI Recorded Music president Ken Berry flew out in October to meet Brooks during a series of Chicago shows, the singer publicly stated that he and the company were still ''a million miles apart,'' chiding that Berry ''runs the world [and is] so busy that we're on a checklist somewhere.'' Within days, though, a deal was reached. The specific terms are perhaps known only to Brooks, Berry, and EMI CEO Jim Fifield--the latter two aren't talking, and Brooks repeatedly refused to comment on exactly what went down. ''He exercised an option that he had in his last contract, which was not to turn a record in until the company was set up the way he wanted it to be set up,'' says one of the execs who subsequently exited the label. ''That's every artist's fantasy, right? What's going on here is very similar to what happened with free agency in professional athletics; it's like if somebody signed a deal with Michael Jordan for $42 million and then didn't make sure the contract said he had to show up for the game. But no owner wants to be the one who says 'I let Michael Jordan go.'''
Brooks has maintained he never demanded Hendricks' removal as a condition for releasing Sevens--a contention that one source friendly with Hendricks calls ''an outright lie.'' Either way, two days after Brooks proclaimed that Sevens would see the light of day, EMI announced that Hendricks was out and would be replaced by marketing whiz Pat Quigley; several executives considered loyal to Hendricks were put on paid leave.
