Garth Brooks is prioritizing the safety of patrons and “manners” for his latest business venture as owner of Friends in Low Places Bar & Honky Tonk in Nashville.
“I want it to be a place you feel safe in, I want it to be a place where you feel like there are manners and people like one another,” the country music icon told Billboard Wednesday during a Country Live panel.
Brooks added: “And, yes, we’re going to serve every brand of beer. We just are. It’s not our decision to make. Our thing is this: If you (are let) into this house, love one another.”
He suggested “plenty of other places on lower Broadway” for customers who don’t act with kindness.
The “Friends in Low Places” singer’s bar is opening this summer in Nashville’s South Broadway District.
Brooks’ statement comes as celebrity bar owners John Rich and Kid Rock have pulled Bud Light from their Nashville businesses after the brand’s partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
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In an interview with Fox News on Friday, Rich said, “If Garth is serving Bud Light in his bar, that’s fine. Garth can do that. Garth might find out not many people are going to order it.”
“At the end of the day, you have to put things in your establishment that people are going to purchase if you’re going to run a successful business. So he might find that out,” Rich added.
Brooks has been an ally to the LGBTQ community dating back to the 1990s. His 1992 song “We Shall Be Free” spoke out against homophobia and racism.
In the liner notes for his album “The Chase,” Brooks called the record “easily the most controversial song I have ever done. A song of love, a song of tolerance from someone who claims not to be a prophet but just an ordinary man,” per Variety.
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“I never thought there would be any problems with this song. Sometimes the roads we take do not turn out to be the roads we envisioned them to be. All I can say about ‘We Shall Be Free’ is that I will stand by every line of this song as long as I live. I am very proud of it,” he concluded.
During Brooks’ Billboard interview, he touched on other aspects of equality, including the lack of airplay for women on country music radio stations.
“I want to hear country radio again where half of it is female voices,” he said, giving a shoutout to The Chicks and Lainey Wilson.
Brooks is also launching a radio station called Sevens Radio in partnership with TuneIn this summer.
