BOB RITCHIE at his home in the jagged hills outside Nashville, the guy who will likely greet you at the door is a tall, well-dressed, exceedingly polite gentleman who goes by “Uncle Tom.” Because of course he does. Ritchie makes his living as, but a big part of being Kid Rock these days involves doing things that are simultaneously provocative, offensive, and, at least to him, funny.
“We’ve got bigger targets,” he says, referencing Planet Fitness, which is currently in the crosshairs of the right-wing outrage machine for its trans-inclusive policies, and Ben & Jerry’s, a perpetual bugaboo among conservatives. “I don’t want to hurt people’s jobs and stuff like that when they don’t have any dog in the fight, but there’s a whole lot of other companies we should be going after.
“I don’t understand where a lot of this came from,” he told me. “I’ve always felt music should inspire people, not divide people. A lot of people from back in the day ask me, ‘What’s going on?’ I don’t know.” TO UNDERSTAND WHERE Kid Rock ended up, you need to understand where he started. Although Romeo, Michigan, is often described as a Detroit suburb, when Ritchie was growing up there in the Seventies and Eighties, such a designation was a stretch. The Detroit suburbs were geographically sprawling even then, but most people probably would have considered Romeo at the distant edge of that sprawl.
Ritchie tells me that his grandfather had family from Kentucky. “They grew up on mountain music and hillbilly music.” Ritchie’s dad loved music, but his taste ran toward rock & roll and classic country. “He didn’t understand what I was doing, rightfully so,” says Ritchie, “this white kid from an upper-middle-class family running around the hood doing all this stuff.”
“That’s how I was feeling at the time,” Ritchie says now of the song. “That was a stressful time when my son was born. A white kid, not married, bringing home a half-Black kid to a Catholic well-to-do family.” Ritchie’s father struggled to adapt at first. “There were borderline things, like maybe using the n-word at times, but my son and my dad became best friends. People say that people can’t change. Yes, they fucking can.
Harmon recalls a conversation with Ritchie around this time about his change in artistic direction. “He straight-up told me, ‘I need to get back in touch with my whiteness,’” says Harmon. Gandy remembers Ritchie using the same phrase.The Detroit music scene during those years was small and felt a bit like a cultural backwater. Motown had long since decamped to California, and the city hadn’t produced a credible star in more than a decade.
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