INTERVIEW: Toby Keith Talks About His Start in the Early 90s

The first trip to Nashville, I met with Capitol and I brought a six song demo in. The executive that did take the meeting just kind of fast forward through a verse of the chorus through the tape and said, “You can sing and you’ve got a quality to you, but your songs aren’t that good. You need to go back and put more work into them.” Then, I just went home and I was like, “All right, I got judged by the best, some executive at Capitol said that my songs weren’t as good as they needed to be.” Of course, I thought, “Well, this is the best I could.”

He [Harold Shedd] gets on the phone and says, “Hey, I’ve got a six song demo here” and he signed me and “Should’ve Been a Cowboy,” “He Ain’t Worth Missing,” “Wish I Didn’t Know Now,” “Does That Blue Moon Ever Shine on You?” They were all on that demo that got turned down. I thought how ironic that the one that got turned down by Capitol, ended up being good enough after all.

So I had a friend of mine who was flipped out over this lady. And everybody had been telling him that she wasn’t treating him right. And he didn’t care. He just didn’t want to know. And so finally, he got the nerve up to drive over to her house and there was somebody else staying at her house with her, some other dude. So it freaked him out and he runs off to California. So I called him one day. I said, “Why would you want somebody, why would you want to be like that? Why would you want to be with somebody don’t want to be with you?” He said, “Well, I’m not saying that. I just wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.” I was like, “Hold on a minute. I got to write something down. Well, on an up note here, buddy, you just gave me a great idea for a song.”

He [Harold Shedd] goes, “All right. You ready to do another album?” I was like, “I haven’t written a song. What are we going to record?” All of a sudden, you got to figure out, “Can I do this over and over and over and over and over?” Or is this just, “Okay, I worked my whole life to write this first album, now am I going to have to work another lifetime to write the second one?” So, man, I went to work. I wrote “Who’s That Man,” “Upstairs, Downtown,” “You Ain’t Much Fun Since I Quit Drinking.” Called it ‘Boomtown,’ stuck it out. “Who’s That Man” went number one right off the bat.

Me and James Stroud had recorded this album and I turned it in and they said, “We don’t hear a hit on here.” So I said, “Why do you guys want to just stifle me? If we disagree, me and my producer think this album’s fantastic and you guys don’t. So why don’t we agree to disagree? And you guys let me go instead of just sticking me on the shelf and not letting me feed my family?” And he said, “Well, if we let you go, we’re going to have to say we dropped you. It can’t be that you’ve left the label. That we’ve decided to drop you on the street.” I said, “That’s okay. I’m good with that.” So as I’m walking out the door, I said, “What are you going to do with that album?” And they said nothing. I said, “Can I have it?” He said, “If you want to buy it, we haven’t got use for it.” I said, “Okay. I’d like to take that album with me.”

I walked up there and I still had that other trophy in my hand so now I got two. And I remember looking down and seeing the Mercury staff sitting there, which some of them were my friends, some of them weren’t in on the bad side of it, but I remember seeing them and I remember them getting up on about the sixth row and walking out. And I remember yelling, “Who kicked the sleeping dog? How do you like me now?” I had fun with it though. They said when you get to bat don’t beat people up. I said, what about when you get a 100 pound sledgehammer?