Friends in low places

Headin’ to the Oasis

Have you ever started reading about something and it led you into a rabbit hole of information? This happened to me recently and I dropped into a hole much deeper than I imagined possible. My daughter and I were at a hockey game a week ago, watching our local juniors team, the Waterloo Blackhawks. Baseball has always been my first sports love, though track and field and more recently, hockey, have pulled up a chair at that table.

For a small organization with a limited budget, the Blackhawks do a lot of things right, from community engagement to the fan experience to pregame introductions and intermission entertainment. Throw in some topflight hockey from the best 17- to 19-year-olds in the country, and you have a really good sporting experience. During the second intermission, they play the song “Friends in Low Places”. Fans turn on their phone lights and sing along and for the next four and a half minutes, the place is a rocking good time. My daughter and I made it onto the jumbotron at the last game during the song. I’m an extreme introvert, so I hated every second of it, but she loved it, so that made it worth the pain.

I love the song. It’s not a song that you have to think a lot about the meaning. Some songs are deep, like “A Day in the Life” or “Here at the Western World” for example. Not Low Places. It’s a lovesick drinking song, the staple of country music, three chords, and the truth. It’s a song that should be played in every honky tonk in America at about 11:50 on Friday and Saturday nights. No one wants to fight when this song comes on. It makes me want to raise my glass and hug the person next to me, while I’m bellowing off key “Yeah, I’m not big on social graces, think I’ll slip down to the Oasis”.

Ah yes, the Oasis. Turns out the Oasis in the song was an old bar in Concordia, Kansas. I’ve been to the Oasis, once, and left part of my liver there. While attending Kansas State, my friend Steve Steinhaus and I decided to make a Saturday night road trip to Concordia. We ended up at the Oasis, closed it down and later slept it off on the living room floor of a high school classmate’s dorm. Good times.

The Oasis ended up in Low Places because the guitarist in Garth Brooks band was one Jim Garver, who grew up in Concordia. My family lived in Concordia for several years. That rabbit hole I talked about? We’re just getting started. Garver was a couple years older than me, so I have no memory of him, but we might have been in the same elementary school for a couple of years. Garver played around the central Kansas area for a few years in various bands before moving to Nashville, where he caught lightning in a bottle, joining Brooks’ band just months before Garth signed with Capital Records and blew up.

If you missed the Garth Brooks experience of the early 1990s, I’m not quite sure how to describe it to you. For a couple of years, the guy was like the country western version of the Beatles. He was huge. And by huge, I mean HUGE in a worldwide sense. He performed at our local county fair back in the fall of 1990. He signed the contract when he was a struggling musician, before the Garth Brooks train left the station. He could have easily backed out of the contract but didn’t. He was a man of his word, showed up, played to an overflow crowd in a small, decrepit venue for almost three hours. My wife and our two sons went over, without tickets, and stood outside the arena to catch the vibe. The crowd was five to seven deep all the way around the building. I begged off, being an introvert and all and being allergic to crowds. She said you could hear the music just fine. In a nutshell, that was the Garth Brooks experience.

The whole thing gets better. Many of you remember when Brooks attended spring training with the Royals back in 2004. A huge baseball fan, this was Brooks’ fourth spring training stint, his first coming with San Diego in 1998 and 1999, followed by one with the Mets in 2000. At this point, he was oh-for-17 at the plate, which shows you just how difficult it is for a normal person, say me or you, to get a hit off a major league pitcher. Brooks resurfaced with the Royals in spring training 2004. The publicity was good, especially for a downtrodden team like Kansas City and Brooks finally got a hit off Mariners pitcher Mike Myers in his last spring training game.

At this point, you can cue Ron Popeil - but wait, there’s more! In 2008, “Friends in Low Places” became the sixth inning sing-along song at Kauffman Stadium. Brooks recorded several different introductions, which played on the Jumbotron prior to the song and I’m sure many of you sang along. Some of you probably even liked it, some of you probably despised it.

Me? I loved it. It gave us something to rival Boston’s “Sweet Caroline” love fest. To me, Friends is a Midwest song. All of us probably know someone who could have been the main character in this song. I know several. Red Sox fans love their Sweet Caroline. My son James and I were at Fenway on July 29th, 2017, to watch the Royals battle the Red Sox. At the time, KC was sitting at 54-47, just two games out of first. Dayton Moore had just pulled the trigger on a trade with San Diego which brought three new pitchers to the roster. Plus the Royals were riding a nine-game winning streak. It all ended that night. Joakim Soria blew an eighth-inning lead and the Sox walked it off in the tenth off Mike Minor. The Royals closed the season with a 26-35 slump which left them 23 games out of first. The game lasted a brutal 4:45 but I was determined to hang around until Sweet Caroline was played. I have to hand it to the Red Sox fans. They were having a good time.

Once the Royals got good again, Friends became a little too lowbrow for the team, so in 2014, they switched to Journey’s “Don’t stop believin’”, which is a perfectly fine sing along, late night drinking song. Except for the lyrics.

“Just a city boy, born and raised in South Detroit”.

Uh, yeah. Detroit. Hey Royals Marketing Department, you do know that Detroit is one of our rivals in the Central division, right?

I suppose Wilbert Harrison’s classic “Kansas City” wasn’t available?

Now that the Royals are bad again (but improving! Don’t stop believing!), the fifth verse of Don’t stop believin’ fits.

“Some’ll win, some will lose, some are born to sing the blues”.

That’d be us.

When the Royals are losing 100 games a season, I can relate to that, Detroit or not. But wait, there’s more. After the Chiefs won the 2024 Super Bowl, Travis Kelce dusted off “Friends in Low Places” during the championship parade, giving it the treatment that only someone of Kelce’s gravitas can do. Come on now, sing along with me….

‘Cause I’ve got friends in low places

Where the whisky drowns and the beer chases my blues away

And I’ll be okay

Yeah, I’m not big on social graces

Think I’ll slip down to the Oasis

Oh, I’ve got friends in low places