If the odd history of Garth Brooks [ tickets ]' pop album "Garth Brooks in.. the Life of Chris Gaines" teaches anything, it's that fans, country radio, retailers and the label aren't all on the same wavelength.

The main problem of Brooks' pop music project--the ''greatest hits'' of Chris Gaines, a fictional pop star who will be the subject of a Hollywood movie--isn't the supposedly slow sales or the $3 rebates to keep retailers from returning unsold copies. The problem is that some fans just don't grasp the concept.

"Some people thought [Brooks] was assuming another role, an alter-ego, and he was schizo," said Capitol Nashville publicist Scott Stem. "It seems like such a simple concept. We all thought people would understand."

The label said it never intended to market the album to country audiences or country radio. And according to Capitol Nashville president Pat Quigley, Brooks didn't want the album on country stations at all.

"Garth feels there's too much pop on country music radio already," said Quigley. "Just because he makes a pop/rock record, it doesn't mean country stations should play the record... The more pop they play, they more trouble they're in."

Still, country stations purportedly demanded a single, and the label unofficially gave them "It Don't Matter to the Sun." It only reached number 24, which told Quigley that the stations "weren't really willing to embrace this record and play it more."

Things didn't fare much better with the retailers. Despite the fact that store buyers and vendors are supposed to know the product, they dumped the Chris Gaines album in with the other Brooks releases in the Country section so that country fans would find it.

Most fans realized that the man on the album cover--dark-eyed, sporting a Tom Waits soul patch--wasn't walking the country road. But at the Tower Records in Nashville, customers found Brooks' tribute to 70's and '80's pop vocal styles to be a step beyond what they were expecting.

"Some had some obscene things to say that I can't repeat over the telephone," said an ingenuous Tower clerk who added that he had great respect for Brooks as an entertainer.

Clearly Capitol Nashville doesn't want to see 2.8 million returned copies flood its warehouses. But label president Quigley said that he is happy with sales of 700,000 in eight weeks--not bad for Chris Gaines as a "baby" act, which is how the label is treating the project. And the label's deal to let retailers take $3 off the price and credit the amount back to the label isn't really "unprecedented," as a recent Rolling Stone.com article claimed.

"Labels do it every day," Quigley said. Capitol Nashville wants to help the retailers hit their profit projections for the Christmas season, during which they do forty percent of their annual business in thirty days, Quigley explained. Where does that leave the master plan, which was to introduce the public to the fictional Gaines character before he appears in a movie that Brooks may or may not star in, and that hasn't been shot yet?

Capitol Nashville said that that's still the plan. But Gaines, like the true baby act that he is, could disappear from memory before he ever lives on the silver screen. And while one would think that it would push the album again after the movie comes out, the label is planning a soundtrack of different music that may include other artists besides Brooks' doppelgänger. (Billy Joel is a possibility: a friend of Brooks, he also has a role in VH1's fictional documentary ''Behind the Life of Chris Gaines,'' which debuted on the cable channel Nov. 24.)

The one certainty in all this is the eventual disappearance of Garth Brooks-as-Chris Gaines. After the movie comes out in late 2000, Gaines' simulated superstardom will come to an end. Capitol Nashville has no plans for future albums by Gaines as played by Brooks.

"It's a movie and that's it," said Quigley.