21 Things You Learn Hanging Out With Kid Rock
In Rolling Stone’s recent article on him, Kid Rock shoots hogs, takes verbal shots at Beyoncé and generally pulls no punches at his home in Troy, Alabama. But there was plenty of material that we didn’t include. Here are some weird, wild things you learn spending time with Rock, who is heading out on tour with Foreigner (most tickets are $20) starting June 24th in Hartford, Connecticut.
He’s “generous to a fault,” according to friend Jamey Johnson
“He’s the kind of guy that does the right thing even when no one’s looking,” says Johnson. “You’re more likely to go and find out some of the charitable things he’s done in his life from other people than from him, because he won’t talk about it. Shit, I’ve been driving with him, and he picks up the phone and hear a conversation go down and I know damn well he just sent a huge check to somebody. I’ll say, ‘Well, what was that all about?’ And he’ll say, ‘Just a friend of mine.’ He’s humble about his charities, I guess. Except the ones he wants to come out and broadcast about. When he wants to come out and make it a big effort and really do something, he’s not humble anymore.”
He still isn’t sick of playing “Bawitdaba”
“‘Bawitdaba’ is tough to beat,” he says of his 1998 hit. “I either do it when I come out or close to the end [of my set]. Put some fucking bitches shaking their ass, shoot some fire in the air, scream out your fucking name, people are pulling out their fucking hair.”
Limp Bizkit showed him how not to treat roadies
Rock was the opening act for the rap-rock crew in the late-Nineties. “I always told my band, ‘You see how Limp Bizkit treats their roadies and shit? We don’t do that.’ I was like, ‘These people are helping us. They’re not trying to harm us. We’re all working together.’ Then we saw Metallica, and they treat their people great. We want to be like them. We want to treat everybody good. Don’t spit on people. Don’t throw microphones at them. Don’t get pissed off. We want to go a long way, and that’s not how you treat people. I had been in the trenches for a lot of years. I was like, ‘Let’s not fuck this up by being brats. I’ll be a brat on the stage. When we get the fuck off, we fucking treat them like they’re part of our fucking family. And luckily, I was right. ‘Cause that fucking helped. You see who’s still standing.”
Being nice has other benefits too
“[Girls] were always throwing themselves [at us]. It’s just when we first put the record out, it was bigger girls in southern Ohio, northern Virginia. Sold 10 million records and I was banging supermodels, which I didn’t have a problem with.
“[But] I always treated people nice. Looking back at those times, I think I got more pussy than fucking anybody because I always treated people nice. That’s probably why I got so much fucking pussy. It doesn’t hurt to write fucking ‘Cowboy,’ I get it. ‘Picture,’ forget about it…. We had our morals in check. We didn’t fuck anybody’s wife, anybody’s girlfriend. We don’t need those headaches.”
It isn’t much easier being a parent when you’re rich and famous
“We went through our periods: ‘Well, you’re famous, I can’t do this and that.’ ‘Cry me a fucking river. Go play fucking Nintendo on your fucking 30-inch TV.’ You know what I mean? We all go through it with our parents, people we love, just a little push and pull, but we love each other. He loves his family and I love him.”