Scanner : toby keith

Bearded Man of the Week: Kris Kristofferson

Brian Fairbanks — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:01:00 GMT

Over the next few days, two of your Scanner bloggers will be seeing Kris Kristofferson play solo acoustic concerts. Most people wouldn't even know it if country music's greatest living songwriter passed through their towns, but we never miss him. The author of "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down," "Me and Bobby McGee," "Help Me Make It Through the Night," and many other classics is no showman-- and his voice ain't much these days, either. But few have written songs this good before or since, and that's worth the price of admission alone.

Now, for the first time in ages, Kris is making headlines across the country, thanks to a controversial Rolling Stone article by Ethan Hawke. The anecdote that begins the story is the best music tale we've ever heard... and one you won't want to miss.

Oh yeah... and did we mention lots of beard photos after the jump?

In the new Rolling Stone, Ethan Hawke recites a story that involves hanging with Kris backstage at Willie Nelson's 70th birthday several years ago. While everyone waited in the wings to go on, Toby Keith (he's not named, but it's been confirmed elsewhere) walks by and says, "Hey Kris, none of that left shit out there tonight." We wish we had the full article in front of us (it's not online) so we could recite every word, but here's what we could pick up from press releases and other excerpts:

At that moment in time, the Star had a monster radio hit about bombing America's enemies back into the Stone Age...
[After Kris said something like, "What did you just say to me?" and stepped to Keith, Willie muttered something about not getting Kris riled up.] Then Kris, an Army vet during the 60's, got in Keith's face and asked, "Have you ever killed another man? Huh? Have you ever taken another man's life and then cashed the check your country gave you for doing it? No, you have not, so shut the fuck up."
Mr. Keith replied, "What?" and Kristofferson said, "Don't what me, boy! You heard the question. You just don't like the answer. I asked, 'Have you ever served your country?' The answer is, 'No, you have not.'"
And then, right there in front of Ray Charles and Norah Jones and Willie Nelson and a bunch of others, Kristofferson told Toby Keith... "You don't know what the fuck you are talking about!"
[Willie, of course, was trying not to laugh. At the end, he told Hawke-- this is not a direct quote-- "Waylon Jennings always used to say, 'Those kind of people did for country music what pantyhose did for finger-fucking.'"
Side note: according to Walyon's son Shooter, his Dad used to say that about one person specifically: Garth Brooks.]

Excerpts via the Tennessean, Rolling Stone, and other sources.

Meanwhile, Toby Keith and Kris Kristofferson both denied the story, with Keith claiming he never even met Kris that night. The media are having a field day with this one, thanks to there being no other entertainment news out there right now.

Related:

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Bearded Man of the Week: Justin Vernon

Top 10 Breakup Songs

While You Were Sleeping: Better To Be Fat And Fit?

Brian Fairbanks — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:03:00 GMT

What the hell? Toby Keith is a Democrat?! Impossible... maybe a Reagan Democrat, but other than that...

Mark David Chapman said he's sorry about shooting John Lennon multiple times for no reason.

Think fast: name the two most hated "internet micro-celebrities..."

...if you said Julia Allison and Emily Gould, you'd be correct. (Tila Tequila was in 3rd, although we'd say she's safely a "television micro-celebrity" at this point.)

Spencer Pratt's claims that Heidi Montag is still a virgin (wait, a virgin who needed breast implants and already has a boyfriend?) would be laughable enough if someone hadn't discovered irrefutable evidence to the contrary immediately afterward.

First, it was definitely going to be Biden. Then, as we reported yesterday, it was definitely going to be Tim Kaine. But... what if it's Hillary?

Did anyone honestly believe that Bigfoot nonsense?

Roger Moore was a big wuss, even in character as James Bond.

New York Times headline: "Better To Be Fat and Fit Than Skinny and Unfit"

...half of overweight people and one-third of obese people are “metabolically healthy.” That means that despite their excess pounds, many overweight and obese adults have healthy levels of “good” cholesterol, blood pressure, blood glucose and other risks for heart disease.
At the same time, about one out of four slim people — those who fall into the “healthy” weight range — actually have at least two cardiovascular risk factors typically associated with obesity, the study showed.

EXCLUSIVE: Toby Keith Worships Satan, Ted Nugent, And Lynch Mobs

Brian Fairbanks — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:57:00 GMT

Toby Keith, America's highest-rated terrorist, is sending the liberal blogs into a tither after his appearance on the Colbert Report last night.

And it isn't even for anything he said-- actually, it's for a song he's been singing for years and which was a smash hit single after 9/11, containing lyrics that most thinking people would find insane and dangerous had they not been avoiding country music radio since 1976...

Why Stephen Colbert, who out of character is a practicing liberal and would never be caught dead allowing a person like Toby Keith to get away with ruining what little is left of this country's well-being, should allow this guy to sing this song, "Beer For My Horses" (God, what a cheesy ass song, not even including its cultural ignorance) and not goof on him mercilessly is beyond us:

Grandpappy told my pappy back in my day, son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he'd done
Take all the rope in Texas
Find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys
Hang them high in the street
For all the people to see

Yo, that's about lynching, okay? Not cool, Colbert! Why didn't you attack him on that? As Max Blumenthal pointed out at the HuffPo:

During the days when Toby Keith's "Grandpappy" stalked the Jim Crow South, lynching was an institutional method of terror employed against blacks to maintain white supremacy. According to the Tuskegee Institute, between the years 1882 and 1951, 3,437 African-Americans were lynched in the United States, mostly in the heart of Dixie. Felonious assault and rape (read: corrupting "the flower of white womanhood") were the two most frequent justifications for lynch mob actions.
Georgia was ground zero for lynch mob activity. Though most of the Peach State's victims were black, one of its most high-profile hangings claimed the life of a Jew, Leo Frank. Frank, a college-educated Northerner, was wrongly convicted in 1913 of murdering a 13-year-old girl after a show trial in which his prosecutor portrayed him to a grand jury as a bisexual pervert. Before the trial, one juror remarked, "If I get on that jury, I'll hang that Jew for sure."

You can imagine what happened to Frank and others like him, in Keith's glorious, Hitler-esque vision of the South. By the way, if Toby Keith loves lynching, then we can also correctly assume he worships Satan, who is a big fan of eye-for-an-eye anarchic lawlessness, and Ted Nugent, who is a racist pigporker and will kill us all with his 2,227 guns.

PS. Besides being a world-class shitbag, Toby Keith is also a talentless wanker we'd easily take in a fight, with a Guantanamo hood over our heads... bring it on, indeed.

Via the Huffington Post.

While You Were Sleeping: All Kinds Of Sh*t Went Down, No One Was Injured

Emily Farris — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:37:00 GMT

We thought that whole "testicles on trucks" thing was settled a while ago. Apparently not. [Reuters]

U.S. newspaper circulation fell 3.6%. [Yahoo!]

Tina Fey's Baby Mama grossed 18.5 million its opening weekend. [US Weekly]

Grand Theft Auto IV swept New York City. [NYT]

The Kardashian sisters got into a kind-of weak cat fight. Scanner Emily and little sister would have ripped these girls seven new orifices back in the day. [MollyGood]

Super patriotic, Dixie Chicks hating country star Toby Keith encountered mortar fire when entertaining troops in Afghanistan. [People]

Halle Berry just had a baby, and other than her glorious breasts, you'd never be able to tell. [Jezebel]

[Image via]