By The Summer Of 1992 She Was No Longer Behind The Merchandise Table
Martina McBride was opening shows for Garth Brooks including his sold out appearance at the Forum in Los Angeles that July
Sometimes the difference between an unheard demo and a record contract was simply getting someone to open the package
Martina McBride went on tour with Garth Brooks selling T-shirts and a few years later she was walking onstage to open his shows
Martina McBride moved to Nashville with her husband John in January 1990 just as country music was entering one of its biggest commercial eras
John found work as a sound engineer and in 1991 became production manager for Garth Brooks
Martina was still trying to build a singing career but she also wanted to spend more time with her husband so she joined the tour in a very different role
She sold T-shirts while Brooks was filling arenas and Martina worked the merchandise table and kept trying to get her own voice heard in Nashville
A Bright Purple Package Slipped Past The Rules
She recorded a five song demo and began approaching labels but RCA had strict rules against accepting unsolicited material
Martina found a way around them and put the cassette inside a bright purple package and wrote REQUESTED MATERIAL across the front in large letters even though nobody at RCA had requested it
The package made it through and RCA listened to the tape and signed Martina McBride in 1991
Her debut album The Time Has Come arrived in May 1992 and leaned heavily toward traditional country and earned some critical praise but commercially it struggled and failed to give Martina the breakthrough she needed
Still the record deal had already changed her place on the tour of Garth Brooks
The jump was enormous because Brooks was playing some of the biggest rooms in country music while Martina was being asked to walk out in front of those crowds before she had a major hit of her own
She later described the experience as sink or swim and it forced her to learn quickly how to command an arena and trust herself onstage
The Second Album Revealed The Artist
The first album still did not take off but her second one did
With The Way That I Am in 1993 Martina stopped second guessing herself as much
My Baby Loves Me became a major hit and Life No. 9 followed and Independence Day helped establish the kind of strong and message driven material that would become central to her career
By 1994 she was touring with Brooks again this time with hit records behind her and European dates ahead
Garth Brooks gave Martina McBride access to enormous audiences before country radio had fully decided what to do with her
Having the voice is not always enough because somebody still has to press play
But the first real door had opened earlier back in Nashville when a five song cassette arrived at RCA inside a purple package carrying two words that were technically untrue