Do you like tattoos?\u00a0 You\u2019ll see plenty before a Toby Keith concert, especially if it\u2019s outdoors in August in the Inland Empire, an exploding conglomeration of hot and sandy city-towns inhabited by those who can\u2019t afford or don\u2019t want to live near Los Angeles an hour to the west.\u00a0 Out east in the desert, this is cowboy and horse and big vehicle territory.\u00a0 This is Toby country, where perhaps a third of the women have tattoos. \u00a0There are tattoos of chains around fleshy female shoulders, roses on forearms, designs on breasts, and big cats on backs.\u00a0 A little girl about seven sports a tattoo on her arm.\u00a0 The women, young to middle age, are frequently wearing cowboy hats, and almost all are in old blue jeans.\u00a0 They fill them out.\u00a0 This is a crowd of hearty eaters and smokers and beer drinkers.\u00a0 And the men look almost as tough as the women.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re all excited on a splendid Saturday evening as waning sun lights up the San Gabriel Mountains to the north and soft barren hills roll around the rest of the amphitheater near San Bernardino. \u00a0Shooter Jennings, Waylon\u2019s son, opens the show with several songs from his debut album \u201cPut the O Back in Country,\u201d and he\u2019s a good rocker but that doesn\u2019t matter.\u00a0 Lines are way long to the Toby souvenir stands where T-shirts and other memorabilia are flying out fast.\u00a0 One woman has already changed into a shirt that says: \u201cHe\u2019s not as good as he used to be.\u00a0 He\u2019s even better.\u201d<\/p>\n
These circumstances must be difficult for Lee Ann Womack. \u00a0In 2001 she won a Grammy for best country song and the Country Music Association award for female vocalist of the year.\u00a0 She\u2019s also pretty and charming.\u00a0 But when she steps on stage, hundreds of country music aficionados aren\u2019t in their seats.\u00a0 They\u2019re still buying Toby stuff.\u00a0 Many won\u2019t see any of her set, which is a bridge to the next intermission when souvenir sales surge again and people start asking when the big guy\u2019s coming out.\u00a0 Anticipation \u2013 that\u2019s a key part of the experience.\u00a0 Unlike much of the American public, these folks know who Toby is and what he\u2019s gonna bring.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
Toby Keith Covel was born in Clinton, Oklahoma in 1961 and as a child moved with his family to Oklahoma City.\u00a0 He got his first guitar at age eight and spent summers absorbing the roadhouse music scene at his grandmother\u2019s supper club in Fort Smith, Arkansas.\u00a0 After high school he still hadn\u2019t committed to a musical career and instead was pipelined to the oil fields where he often toiled seventy hours a week.\u00a0 Three years later the oil market crashed and Keith pointed his muscular six-foot-four frame toward the gridiron.\u00a0 Three hundred men, all but Keith with college football experience, were trying out for the semi-pro Oklahoma Drillers of the United States Football League.\u00a0 He made the squad and started at defensive end.\u00a0 The experience was gratifying but he realized he\u2019d never make the NFL or enough money to pay bills.<\/p>\n
In 1984 he charged another direction, joining the country band Easy Money and touring small clubs in Oklahoma.\u00a0 What were those places like?\u00a0 Last year Keith told CMT.com they were \u201ccomplete dumps\u2026little, old, puke, whiskey-stained carpets.\u00a0 I think I got twenty-five bucks a night and some beer\u2026You\u2019d just get up there and jam.\u00a0 No bouncer in the house, just a big ol\u2019 bunch of rednecks.\u00a0 If a fight broke out, you were on your own.\u201d<\/p>\n
Playing fifty-one weeks a year four or five nights a week, Keith and the band struggled to climb into better clubs, then earned regional status, appearing in places from Arkansas to Arizona and down into Texas and to the Gulf of Mexico.\u00a0 He eventually outgrew other band members and became head of his own group.\u00a0 In 1993, after nearly a decade on the road in cramped vehicles pulling wobbly trailers, he sensed his career was ready to surge.\u00a0 He was riding his first tour bus, with Shania Twain aboard.\u00a0 And as they passed through Bowling Green, Kentucky \u2013 the birthplace of this writer, incidentally \u2013 he heard what he\u2019d so long hoped for: one of his songs on the radio.\u00a0 \u201cShould\u2019ve Been a Cowboy\u201d climbed to number one on the Billboard country chart and his debut album, Toby Keith<\/em>, registered platinum.<\/p>\n Throughout this period Keith was composing music, and he still stresses he\u2019s a \u201cdriven songwriter\u2026really driven\u2026I stood up and fought for what I believed\u2026I held my ground artistically\u2026No corporate bullshit\u2026\u201d\u00a0 Alas, the words corporate and bullshit are impossible to permanently separate.\u00a0 After a series of creative disputes, Keith moved from Mercury Records to Polydor then back to Mercury which, despite the success of his first four albums, rejected his next proposed work, so he jumped to DreamWorks Nashville and it produced How Do You Like Me Now?! <\/em> The album sold more than two million copies and garnered his first two Academy of Country Music awards, for best album and vocalist.<\/p>\n The business boys have since sold DreamWorks to Universal, which now owns four country labels, including Mercury, and employs some of the same bureaucrats Keith had clashed with.\u00a0 Did big Toby this time respond by delivering a forearm shiver or sacking the corporate quarterback?\u00a0 No, he declared independence with plans to start his own label.\u00a0 One more album then he\u2019s free. \u00a0Keith the entrepreneur has also entered the restaurant business and his I Love This Bar & Grill roadhouses have opened (or soon will) in Las Vegas, Oklahoma City, Kansas City, Shreveport, and Council Bluffs, Iowa.\u00a0 He says people\u2019ll enjoy dropping into places that offer catfish and meatloaf and chicken and ribs and a music system pumping out The Doors and The Rolling Stones along with Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard and Alabama before the house band takes over or big-name singers play or even Toby stops in to surprise.<\/p>\n All that sounds fun.\u00a0 But business isn\u2019t what drives Toby Keith.\u00a0 Music moves the man.\u00a0 When he gets up to run four or five miles several times a week, he\u2019s energizing his powerful voice.\u00a0 He\u2019s enhancing his stage presence.\u00a0 He\u2019s preparing to pump iron in his home gym.\u00a0 He\u2019s got to be ready when the introductory video ends and the cloth screen covering the stage falls and another monitor shows him bigger than a horse striding toward you.\u00a0 Everyone\u2019s standing now.\u00a0 And they ain\u2019t gonna sit down.\u00a0 Not as long as Toby and his big three-horn band electrify the night with songs about love and booze and Mexico and war. \u00a0Some say he\u2019s country, but that\u2019s a subtext.\u00a0 He\u2019s a rock and roller.\u00a0 He\u2019s Elvis with a beard and biceps.<\/p>\n .\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Do you like tattoos?\u00a0 You\u2019ll see plenty before a Toby Keith concert, especially if it\u2019s outdoors in August in the Inland Empire, an exploding conglomeration of hot and sandy city-towns inhabited by those who can\u2019t afford or don\u2019t want to live near Los Angeles an hour to the west.\u00a0 Out east in the desert, this…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[92,93],"tags":[],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n