Las Vegas Weekly

February 24, 2009 · 8:57 AM

Exclusive: Toby Keith explains rebel label and vows to stay ‘captain of his ship’

By Robin Leach

Toby Keith and The Men of X model his clothing line TK Steelman.

Photo: Erik Kabik/Retna/www.erikkabikphoto.com

Country superstar Toby Keith wears many hats: singer, songwriter, producer, actor and restaurateur -- and now he’s launched his own fashion line! Toby was in Las Vegas last week for the biannual MAGIC Marketplace, and before unveiling the TK Steelman clothes at a concert fashion show, I sat down and talked with him one-on-one.

Toby was nursing a bad cold with whiskey and water, and he didn’t want to go onstage to sing for the crowd who’d come to see the clothes. I told him if it meant him humming or doing a soft-shoe shuffle, he had to put on some kind of a performance! He gave in to the pleas and went onstage with local band Lefty Lucy in his I Love This Bar & Grill inside Harrah’s.

Toby wowed the fans with his songs and the fashions! His empire continues to expand, and last year Forbes named him the top-earning male musician at $48 million. He’s sold 25 million albums since 2000, and he’s selling out stadiums on his tour dates across America. He’s about to start filming Provinces of Night with Hilary Duff, and he’ll be back in town in April nominated as Male Vocalist of the Year by the Academy of Country Music.

Here’s our candid conversation:

Robin Leach: Congrats on your nomination for Male Vocalist of the Year. How does it feel to be nominated again? Do you now pull out all the stops to win, or do you let whatever happens happen?

Toby Keith: Well, about five years ago, I got unenamored with the whole … as far as the people who were good to me … you only get one window in your life to be that red hot guy, so as far as awards like CMA, and Dick Clark’s thing, Billboard … Billboard never missed it that I stayed for five years. I was 51 weeks in a five-year period; from 2001-2006, I think I was 51 weeks at No. 1. If this record goes No. 1 on Monday, the one I have out now, it is my 25th No. 1 single. Fifty million spins as songwriter at BMI; that’s Lennon, Joel, Bee Gees and Elton John. The industry awards ACM and CMA are agenda driven, and I fought them so much that I won’t even go anymore to CMA. But the ACM was at least fair enough during that five-year period to make me Entertainer of the Year, so at least they were decent enough to me for me to show up and perform. I haven’t been nominated in a couple years, and somehow out of the blue this year I was nominated. It is an impossibility to me if you know how the voting process works. I think someone rigged it, so, no, I don’t expect to win.

RL: You wear all these caps: the hat of superstar singer, record producer, writer, actor and merchandising maven. Do you tackle it all because it is there to tackle, or do you get restless with one thing and want it all? Who is Toby Keith?

TK: I am very fortunate in the fact that I have my own record label. All my peers have to answer to someone, so as successful as they are, they still have these meetings where they pull their hair out because they have to fight with others on these creative issues. We don’t have any record label rules. I have nothing left to accomplish. I have won all I can win, I have sold everything I can sell, and I’ve written all I can write. That makes all of this other stuff possible. These other things like writing a movie script with Rodney Carrington starring in it and it being successful. Creating bars and grills. There are eight now; they are all successful. These are just creative things that you can go and do that are challenging.

It allows my music to have a reason to go on. Without it, I would get stagnant with just my music, and I would move to Mexico to fish, eat fish tacos and drink Sol beer. I used to work 50 weeks a year, then it got to be 160 shows a year, now we do 60, so I have all that free time to do other things that I want to do. It keeps my music fresh, and it keeps me out of the loop of what is pop on the radio right now, what is popular on the radio, I never hear. If I am doing a radio show on the Top 20, and they go talk about one of these people, unless it is Brooks & Dunn or Alan Jackson, I don’t know any of those new people. I don’t meet them; I don’t live in Nashville. I write my own thing and go about my business.

RL: Do you think of yourself as a rebel?

TK: No, I don’t think that. I think someone else has to label you a rebel. I think I’m a fighter; I fight for what is right. If there is something wrong with that, I don’t compromise, but that’s what they brand me as a rebel. But I am not set out to go against the grain. It is just that I want to be captain of my ship. I am not comfortable with someone else sailing and sinking my ship. If I am sailing and sink it, that is different. I can’t let someone else sail my ship.

RL: You have this TK Steelman fashion line. Does the Steel name sum up this controversial side of your personality where you don’t tolerate fools very easily?

TK: My son’s name is Steven, and we call him Steel Man. Any time you are trying to trademark something, someone has already got it, or if I try to trademark something, someone has already got it for a dollar on the Internet, so it is really hard to trademark anything I do because the second I come out, someone grabs up all of your catchphrases. My son, we call him Steel Man, so when I started the TK logo stuff for this clothing line of this rough country, sleeveless biker, cowboy stuff, we needed a name that was … and out of my own head I come up with Dirty South, and there is a band somewhere called Dirty South, so I said that doesn’t work. I was like we have to go with something we have already got, so TK, and I had heard of other guys naming it after their kids, so I went with Steelman. That’s a tough name, and they researched it and it came back big.

RL: Why do you rip the sleeves off your shirts?

TK: My biggest performances are outdoors during the summertime July 1 through Oct. 15, it can be 115 degrees, and you hit that stage sometimes at night with the lights on you. I always gain 8 to 10 pounds in the wintertime due to … just not being that … I can sweat it out … it is cardio, it is a hard-hitting two-hour show. I take my boots off and drain water out of them. It is just that sweaty sometimes. So sometimes I rip the sleeves off or wear a T-shirt because it gets so hot.

The problem I have is when you are in shape and you are big up through your chest and shoulders and you are tight in the waist and you buy a sleeveless shirt that is already sleeveless, it is the same size as the hips. I ride a motorcycle a lot, and a lot of biker shirts are sleeveless, but they are blocky. They are just straight, never designed to have a sleeve in them, so my stylist has to take a tapered shirt, cut the shirt and age it to where it fits everything that I wear.

So when they came to me and said, “What is the void in the market” What if you bought a clothing line, what would be the void?” I said I have a tough time finding motorcycle boots, great jeans comfortable enough to perform in and ride a motorcycle in, and so I threw it all at them. They took it all back, and six months later, they said look at what we have got. My stuff has a lot of steel on it, a lot of stud, a lot of crosses. I am a Christian, so my big Christian hearts are displayed, my patriotism is splattered all over the front of these things. There are a lot of different designs, I have to approve them all, but it is all my sick-ass stuff, OK?! I am very proud of it, and I’m going to wear it all the time now.

RL: You are out on tour at the moment, right?

TK: I do 55 outdoor shows in the summertime, I do 12 indoor shows in the wintertime, and we hit cities that don’t have the big outdoor amphitheaters. I have three left, then I do the Houston livestock show and rodeo, which is the biggest one in the world. There will be 50,000 to 60,000 people in a football stadium where they do the rodeo for two weeks. Then I go overseas for about two weeks every year, so in May I will go to Afghanistan a week and Iraq a week and then I start in June touring outdoors again.

RL: The troops must love you?

TK: They do.

RL: Because you are so patriotic?

TK: I love the troops … love to do it.

RL: You have said some very patriotic things about this country and our troops and why we can’t tolerate people who badmouth it.

TK: You can’t get into the political civil war, you have to just … just because you pull for the troops and you don’t think that people should fly planes into buildings doesn’t mean that you are a very conservative guy. All my songs are not very conservative. I have got 25 No. 1s. I’ve got one song that is a troop go to war song, so that one song outweighed all of this drinking and weed with Willie and all that stuff, and it is pretty amazing that people can put you into that, but I have been all over the world and I am telling you America is a great country to live in.

RL: The best.

TK: Yeah.

RL: This summer, Trace Adkins is going to open for you, but right now you’re out with Jack Ingram. He said he toured last year with Martina McBride, and it was a very peaceful series of concerts. Then he says he comes out with you on the very first show together, and you are in a fight with somebody in the audience. How do you get into these debates?

TK: Somebody tried to sabotage my show, destroy our property. A guy walked up at the end of the show out-of-his-mind drunk, and he poured a 16-ounce beer into our junction boxes that run our speakers. He flipped me the bird and started taunting me, and security did nothing about it. The more I tried to get them to arrest him, the more he taunted me. He took his cell out and it looked to me like he was going to take a picture of him flipping me the bird on stage. By the time he got up to the second level, I taunted him back and said, “Come back here. You want some?” He did. I met him halfway.

RL: This was during the show? You are a steel man!

TK: Sometimes you have to be a man about it. Sometimes there is a situation where you have to be a man about it. It is unfortunate and could have been a lot worse.

RL: Who won the fight?

TK: Well, once I found out that something wasn’t quite right with the guy, it kept me from smoking the guy, but I was mad enough to do a lot of damage, I just … when I got to him, I don’t know if he knew which way was up; he was really over served.

RL: You’ve already released your second movie, Beer for My Horses, and now you’ve got a third movie you’ll start filming soon.

TK: We’re doing Provinces of Night with Kris Kristofferson and Hilary Duff. Earl Brown wrote the screenplay … we haven’t worked altogether yet. The cast they put together and the script is really nice. Earl is a friend of mine, and he said, “Man, you are this guy in my script, and you have to come do this.” So then I saw they had Kristofferson, Hilary Duff and the rest of the cast, so I asked how many days they needed me and he said a couple weeks. Everyone is kind of equal in it the way the script is laid out. I don’t know when it will be released, but we are supposed to shoot it in the next month or two.

RL: You have come a long way from the oil fields where you started out. You’ve become a real steel man and a controversial character.

TK: A long way, but that is the work ethic that got me where I’m at now.

RL: But, in a sense, it sums up your personality characteristics, doesn’t it?

TK: It does, and it is beautiful that it does, too. It ended up being the perfect name for the new company.

Share This