Beloved producer Allen Reynolds will celebrate his birthday this week — but in August of 1988, he was the one giving gifts. It was then that Allen's calm hand and sharp instincts started guiding Garth Brooks from Oklahoma rookie hopeful to having a career worthy of the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Allen, Garth, engineer Mark Miller, and Garth's powerhouse studio band christened the G-Men assembled for the first time in August of 1988.

It's the 35th anniversary of “Friends in Low Places,” the first single from Garth’s No Fences album. Instantly recognizable from the first 4 notes of its guitar intro, “Friends” has become a classic in the American songbook, a raucous singalong that everyone knows the words to.  The song is sung everywhere from football stadiums to frat houses; dive bars to upscale lounges; summer camps to college campuses; and black-tie weddings to backyard barbecues.

"The comeback tour had started . . . and the ‘crazy’ started with it,” Garth Brooks recalls in the opening pages of The Anthology, Part V: The Comeback, The First Five Years, available April 4 at Amazon and TalkShopLive.  The latest installment of The Anthology series provides an all-access pass to Garth’s record-shattering arena comeback tour that sold over 6.2 million tickets.

It’s time to look back at 1997 with the release of the Sevens vintage t-shirt, available at Friends in Low Places Bar & Honky Tonk starting this week.

Released in November 1997, Sevens – Garth Brooks’ seventh studio album – debuted at #1 on both the Billboard Top 200 and Country Albums charts with first-week sales of 896,932 units. It was the top-selling debut week of any album released that year. Fueled by two Billboard #1 singles – “Longneck Bottle” (the duet with Steve Wariner) and “Two Pina Coladas”…as well as the GRAMMY®-winning “In Another’s Eyes” with Trisha Yearwood – Sevens received an RIAA Diamond Award for certified sales of over 10 million units.