Garth Brooks

Deb Whittington, a 41-year-old high school science teacher from Effingham, S.C., and a devoted Garth Brooks fan, had to go to Wal-Mart.com to pre-order the country singer's new CD and DVD boxed set. And when she wanted another "Garth Brooks: The Limited Series" - just in case anything ever happened to her first set, she said - she had to go to her local Wal-Mart store to get it. That's because the retailer has exclusive rights to the discs and all of...

`TC The lights are up full. The crowd is going bonkers. And Garth Brooks is striking The Pose. His head is thrown back, his face lit up by an open-mouth smile. The faint sounds of a "Heeeee-yah!" can be heard over the PA system. It's Mr. Brooks' way of saying: I am having the time of my life! Is anything better than this?And why shouldn't he feel that way? During the past two years, the singer-songwriter has taken country music into the realm of multimillion record sales, instant concert sellouts and saturating media attention -- peaks generally reserved for pop phenomena, not Nashville nudniks.

MARINA DEL REY, Calif. -- For a guy who one critic dismissed as "a thumb with a hat," country star Garth Brooks sure is all over the place these days.Brooks just wound up a 2 1/2 -year tour in December that sought to satisfy fans who bought 16 million copies of his three albums. He has swept all the major country music awards. And now, he's getting his first network special."This Is Garth Brooks" (9 p.m. Friday, NBC, Channel 2) is a high-energy salute from an engagingly grateful Okie who grew up in tiny Yukon and still can't quite believe his luck.

It was a phone call Dean Dinning would not soon forget."I was just sitting around my house when I got a call from our manager," recalls Dinning, bassist with the band Toad the Wet Sprocket. "He said, 'I just got off the phone with Gene Simmons from Kiss. And he is a Toad fan.'"I couldn't believe it. [Simmons] really liked 'Walk on the Ocean' and he bought 'Fear' and liked the whole album. He wanted us to be on the Kiss tribute album, and he was waiting for me to call him back. Out of the blue one day. It was unbelievable.

What's the big trend for pop music this fall? Well, it's not country crossover albums, nor is it techno singles and all-night raves. Nor should you worry over funk/metal bands, "alternative" rap acts, Seattle grunge groups, English shoe-gazer combos or any of the other mini-crazes the music press has heralded over the past nine months. That's all old news now.Why? Because the trend this season is cocooning -- that is, the art of staying home with the stereo.Whether you blame it on a weak economy, an aging pop audience or election year jitters, the fact remains that despite a plethora of superstar releases -- including new albums from such heavy hitters as Madonna, Peter Gabriel, Garth Brooks, Bon Jovi, R.E.M.

These days, when we see a guy in a cowboy hat with a guitar, we immediately think: country singer.But it wasn't always that way. There was a time when what we now think of as country music was divided between two camps.One belonged to the so-called "hillbilly" singers, artists like Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, and relied on old Appalachian tunes and what came to be known as "the white man's blues." The other was the province of cowboys, a sound that drew on camp songs, gold-rush ballads and the sweet, sad norteno sound of Texas and northern Mexico.

VERO BEACH, Fla. -- Tradition died hard at Dodgertown, where the stability of the staid Los Angeles Dodgers organization used to be reflected in the familiarity of the faces that populated training camp each spring.Turnover was a dirty word in the glory days of one of baseball's most storied franchises. The Dodgers were slow to join in the free-agent frenzy of the 1970s and '80s and stubborn in their emphasis on player development. They clung to the ways of the past until time began to pass them by.Not anymore.

As President Barack Obama extends his buy-my-economic-plans-please tour through 60 Minut es tonight and into Tuesday with a prime-time news conference, the question that begs to be asked is whether the president is spending enough time actually governing - as opposed to talking about governing on TV. There is a difference. And as much as I - a TV critic and political blogger - welcome Obama's commitment to use of the tube, I worry as a citizen that he's not doing the nitty-gritty, late-night, closed-door, on-the-phone politicking that it takes to really govern this troubled land.

ONCE AGAIN the republic is gearing up for the Super Bowl, that hugely overblown sports event which this year features the politically incorrect Redskins against the oddly informal Bills.The sharpies in Las Vegas have installed the Redskins as early six-point favorites, mainly because it is inconceivable that a team from Buffalo would actually win a championship in anything except the AC Delco Games, wherein squads of strapping young men in heavy parkas vie to be the first to jump-start a dead car battery in a frozen parking lot.(At this year's Delco Games, the upstate New York contingent was pitted against a team from Green Bay, Wisc.

Remember the days of "Thriller" when record executives would hyperventilate at the thought of signing Michael Jackson to a contract?No longer.If you throw out any votes he may have received from representatives of his Sony Music family, Mr. Jackson didn't get enough support to finish among the first 20 artists in a Los Angeles Times Sunday Calendar poll to determine the hottest recording properties in the United States.How bad was Mr. Jackson's showing?Consider this: Mr. Jackson even finished third among artists with the same surname -- far, far behind his sister Janet Jackson and country star Alan Jackson.