Country Slicker

As a kid, Brooks says, he ''ran from responsibility.'' But he won a track scholarship to Oklahoma State, where he threw the javelin, majored in advertising (a background that, he says, helps him now to craft video images that match his music), and first learned guitar. He traces the onset of his delayed maturity to the unlikely night in 1984 when he met Sandy. Working as a bouncer in a Stillwater, Okla., nightclub, he helped her remove her fist from a wall she'd smashed throwing a punch at a jealous rival. ''Just wanted to scare her,'' Sandy explains. ''I meant to hit the wall.'' Before they got married in 1986, Brooks had been, as Sandy says, ''a ladies' man, different women all the time.'' And after his debut album broke big, he acted the part of a star: ''Play every night, party every night, drive to the next town. I was killing my marriage,'' he admits with gentle intensity. What made him stop? ''Sandy told me I had an ultimatum. I found myself on my knees. I never want to get that close to that again.''

And that's where the James Taylor connection kicks in. Many of Brooks' lyrics were nourished by personal ordeals; they tell intimate stories, country cousins of those told by Taylor and other '70s folksingers. There's nothing in them remotely like the macho imagery favored by an older generation of male country stars. In ''If Tomorrow Never Comes,'' which he wrote in memory of two friends who died while he was in college and now calls ''my signature song,'' he sings about death, and how it taught him to express his love to the living. This intimacy helps attract fans outside country circles. ''I get a ton of 'em. They say, 'Hey man, I don't like country music, but I sure like what you do.''' His reaction, though, is more than a little ambivalent: ''I go, 'Thanks...I think.' The first thing I feel is, My God, they don't think I'm country.'' Because Garth Brooks still sees himself as a solidly traditional country singer, unchanged by his dramatic pop triumph. ''I ain't looking to cross over,'' he insists. ''I'm very flattered — but country music is my home, and I'm not going away from it.''