Safe to say that Sturgill Simpson wasn’t a fan of Garth Brooks’ Chris Gaines era. It’s honestly a wonder that anyone was. The country music superstar made his out-of-left-field career turn while he was one of the most popular artists on the planet. Then he kind of went away for a while before returning to his regular, Garth Brooks ways. His alter ego experiment is one that will live on in infamy for years to come. In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, Garth Brooks flipped the whole music industry on its head when he rolled out a punk/rock alter ego by the name of Chris Gaines in 1999. Some might call the idea inventive. Others might label it unintentionally hilarious and colossally embarrassing. An album titled Garth Brooks in… the Life of Chris Gaines was released in September of that year, and was supposed to be a pre-soundtrack for a movie about Gaines that was to come out in 2000. That movie, allegedly titled The Lamb, was never filmed. However, we still have the VH1 Chris Gaines special that came out, which just might be the most absurd documentary the world has ever seen. It touched on the life of Gaines, which included sex, trauma, death, car crashes, plane crashes, house fires, scandals… and pretty much every other wild thing you could think up. All in all, the endeavor by Garth Brooks was straight up weird, and it still gets talked about in the modern day. The topic was even touched on back in 2014, when Sturgill Simpson sat down on The Joe Rogan Experience for the first time shortly after his breakout album Metamodern Sounds in Country Music was released. Host Joe Rogan was talking to Simpson about how scary it would be to get trapped in one’s career, and having so much success that it ties your hands to doing only one thing. That sparked the talking point of Chris Gaines, and Rogan asked Simpson what he thought about that era of Garth’s career. The artist that’s know known as Johnny Blue Skies offered up a scathing review: “Chris Gaines man… woof. There was nobody there to say, ‘Hey, maybe you shouldn’t do this.’ He was surrounded by yes people. You just know. If someone was like, ‘Yeah, that’ll be cool.'” Chris Gaines = not cool. Johnny Blue Skies = really cool. Sturgill is probably right in saying that though. No one told Garth to pump the brakes on that big idea? Or at least approach it with a little bit less seriousness? The pair talked about Chris Gaines for a while in that 2014 episode, and eventually, Simpson capped it off with this thought: “High art man. It’s his filtered interpretation of… I think he was going for a Ryan Adams-sy sort of thing. Or he went f***ing nuts. That’s a very distinct possibility.” One of those two, for sure. Simpson went on to say that, at some point, country music turned into a “really s***** Van Halen concert,” and blamed it on the ripples that were created by Garth Brooks years earlier. Even in the early days of Sturgill’s career, he wasn’t afraid to be outspoken against the genre’s biggest stars. As they say, this one is an oldie but a goodie: The post “Surrounded By Yes People”: Sturgill Simpson Offers Scathing Review Of Garth Brook’s Chris Gaines Era On An Old Joe Rogan Podcast first appeared on Whiskey Riff.