Kid Rock: Role Model

We need more like him

I had an opinion of Kid Rock. It changed the first time I saw him live.

My mom made me learn to sing, play the piano, and speak in public. She came from an old, Southern family—D.A.R. and all. She also sent my two eldest sisters to “charm school.”

Mind you, our immediate family wasn’t anywhere close to D.A.R. material. Though Mom’s grandfather and great grandfather were doctors, and her great-great grandfather owned a plantation in southeastern Kentucky, whatever wealth the Mahons once controlled was gone by the time my mom was a teenager. Her dad (whom I never met) was a fireman and an inventor. He invented the hydrostat fire alarm that responded to temperature—a precursor of the smoke detector. He was also a heavy drinker and a gambling addict. So, he sold the patent rights on the hydrostrat to his sister’s husband for a fraction of what the company was worth.

During the the Depression, Mom and her six siblings often ate Corn Flakes for all three meals. It was all they could afford. Yet, her mom—Grandma—would make stew for hobos who wandered into their backyard from the train tracks that ran just a few yards from their back fence. Grandma saved meat and vegetables to make food for the hobos because, “you never know when the Lord will show up disguised as a hobo.”

Before those lean times, Mom’s family was pretty well off. Doctors, lawyers, a famous impressionist painter, William Jennings Bryan and Daniel Boone in the ancestry. So, the kids had to learn to play the piano, sing, and speak in public.

But my mom was full of contradictions. She also dug in the garden with her bare hands, listened to the lowest of country music (loved Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother).

I guess that’s why Mom wanted me to play the piano. So I could plunk out Redneck Mother on request. (Man, that song brings back memories. Is Tony Kircher reading?) Whatever her quirks, Mom drove me to learn musical things. And entertaining. She encouraged my short, obscure acting career.

Before I really looked into Kid Rock, I considered him a exploiter. He was, in my view, exploiting the hip hop world as the anomalous White Rapper. I took Kid Rock for growing up one of four white kids in a three-mile radius of his house and school. He acted black to keep from getting beaten up.

Then, my wife made me go to a Kid Rock concert.

I was embarrassed. I hoped no one would recognize me. My son, Patrick, ridiculed me.

Of course, by then, Kid Rock had “expanded” beyond rap into, well, everything. But I didn’t pay much attention, except to the song about summers in northern Michigan, which is impossible to ignore if you’re my age and lack self-control like I do. I didn’t really know what to expect.

I’ll skip ahead to the important part.

About 90 minutes into the concert, Kid Rock did something that would have made Mom proud, had he been her son. I don’t remember the song, but Kid Rock did vocals and . . . everything else. He played the guitar like Eddie Van Halen, the drums like Buddy Rich, blew a trumpet like Chuck Mangione on coke, hit a few other instruments, then settled on the piano.

That’s the moment it hit me.

Kid Rock wasn’t trailer trash in a black neighborhood who adopted rap to survive (though there’s nothing wrong with that). Kid Rock had a mom like mine, but he was a better son. He practiced. He fell in love with the piano.

The look on Kid Rock’s face when he took over the piano was unmistakeable. He was in love. He was touching the soft, cool skin of his mistress’s inner arm. He was home in the house he grew up in smelling what his mom was cooking for dinner, practicing scales and finger warm-ups and visually scanning the seven music books on the shelf of his instrument deciding what to attempt to impress Mom with today.

I have no idea whether Kid Rock’s mom was anything like mine. Or if even knew his mom. But Kid Rock is a music geek. Forget the hoozh pretense. He’s like me. He likes the finer things, and he wishes he could make as much money playing Chopin and Handel and Bach. But he can’t, so he’s Kid Rock.

I get it. I appreciate it. I’d like to be a traveling actor, putting on shows and plays and skits that fit the audience in whatever town I find myself in. But I got comfortable.

Mom also wanted me to have a real skill. She wanted me to be a doctor like her grandfather. Or a lawyer like her uncle. Or a financier like her other uncle Wallace. (She liked that name, I think, because Wallace is the only uncle who was mentioned by name instead of “my uncle.”) Wallace had to wear a whitewall haircut to work, I remember, and to a kid of the 70s in the 80s the idea of whitewall (now called a “zero fade”) was anathema. Finance, my ass. (I’m listening to Chuck Mangione while typing, by the way.)

I was too undisciplined to do medicine or law, so I learned how to write code. And how systems work. And some psychology. And business. I got by. I got comfortable. And I never worked up the guts to walk into a town and put on a show.

Kid Rock did. Like Donald Trump, Kid Rock cast a mold and stepped into it. Animated it. Lived it. Became it. Perfected it.

There’ll never be anything like Kid Rock because the 80s are over and women like our moms are a dying breed. If they exist at all today. Where moms like mine and Kid Rock’s psychologically manipulated their sons to be tough and play the piano, the dominant mom today asks her son his/her/their pronouns and slips puberty blockers (aka, chemical castrators) into his Gatorade. It’s a different time.

Kid Rock is more talented than you can imagine. He’s also more dedicated. And he loves America. You don’t anathematize yourself to half the country if you don’t believe what you say.

Kid Rock. Bill Hennessy. The only difference is one of us took his show to town.

God bless Robert Ritchie. I’ll be happy to see him again on Saturday.

Make fun of me all you want.