It’s a wonder Toby Keith ever picked up a drink again after his first experience. The 58-year-old vividly recalls the first time he ever had alcohol, before he was even old enough to drink legally, and getting incredibly sick from over-imbibing.
“It was a Flaming Armadillo,” Keith told CMT‘s Cody Alan. “It’s like three liquors, and they set it on fire, and you blew it out, and you put ice water down the rim and down it. It was so hot from the flame that it had like an aromatic thing that went up in your nose like horseradish and blew your head off.
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“I was eating in a steakhouse and was underage, and I remember, I said, ‘I want another,’” he continued. “I just thought, ‘I’ll take advantage of this.’ I got a little over-served, and I puked for like three days. I was really sick.”
Keith has had plenty of success in country music, especially with drinking songs like “Beer for My Horses,” “I Love This Bar,” “Red Solo Cup” and others, but he says he likely would have never become a household name without his debut single, “Should’ve Been a Cowboy,” released in 1993.
“I was a songwriter, and I wanted to be a songwriter whether I was a singer or not,” Keith previously told PopCulture.com and other media. “The artist [thing], I just got lucky. I just wanted to be a songwriter. If [being an] artist would’ve never happened, somebody would’ve cut those songs. So that’s what I wanted to do no matter what, even if you got sick and couldn’t perform or something, you’d still write songs.
“I know one thing, this song – everything I’ve done in my catalog, and I’ve recorded hundreds of songs I wrote and probably charted somewhere along a hundred or more – none of them probably would’ve ever been heard if it hadn’t been for ‘Should’ve Been a Cowboy’ … That song, and a follow-up single (‘He Ain’t Worth Missing’), gave me enough breathing room to find my way, whereas a lot of people didn’t get that chance.”
Keith will continue his Country Comes to Town Tour in May. He is also scheduled to perform at the Grand Ole Opry on March 22. Find dates on his website.
Photo Credit: Getty / Noam Galai
