My Encounter with Toby Keith

We don't choose the subcultures that raise us; usually, they choose us when we're looking for a shield against the rest of the world. Long before I was patching modules into a Eurorack or thinking about sound design, my entire reality was built on a foundation of aggressive basslines and a strict adherence to a midnight colour palette. But the universe has a hilarious way of puncturing your carefully constructed aesthetic when you least expect it. Case in point...

Moore High School

The Trenches of Moore High School

There I was, in the glorious, angst-ridden trenches of high school life. Picture it: the quintessential punk Industrial kid. I didn't just wear black, I wore black—a uniform of righteous teenage misery, accessorized with an alarming amount of guy-liner. My spiritual sustenance was a steady, aggressive rotation of Front Line Assembly, Skinny Puppy, and Front 242. Naturally, the operation was covert: CD player in the pocket, earbud cord snaking up my shirt, past the collar, and into my ears, creating an impenetrable sound barrier against the relentless tyranny of quadratic equations and whatever unholy lesson the teacher was attempting to peddle.

https://youtu.be/Foq_b9nZ9IE

My sole mission was chronological survival. Part of this daily slog involved the meandering journey from the main building to the two-story academic annex. It was during this epic trek that I encountered a genuine cultural anomaly. Standing by the door was a gentleman—and I use that term loosely—in jeans, a tucked-in shirt, and a cowboy hat so broad it could host a small square dance. I, a vision of metropolitan despair, simply held the door for him, because even Industrial punks practice basic door etiquette.

The silent alliance ended by the stairwell.

“Son,” he drawled, in one of those utterly baffling, annoying 'southern' tones that signaled a clear and present danger to my hearing, “you know where’s Mrs. B’s classroom?”

I sighed, performed the tedious act of extracting an earbud, and confirmed I was headed that way anyway. As I led this walking caricature up the stairs, my peers descending looked at me with expressions that screamed, "Has the Goth kid finally snapped and taken a hostage?" I knocked on the door and announced, with the drama of a reluctant page, “Mrs. B, you got a guest.”

A Seismic Event

What followed can only be described as a seismic event.

Mrs. B didn't just greet him; she sprinted for a hug. The classroom collectively lost its pre-calculus-addled mind. He stayed for nearly two hours—two hours beyond my class period—and it became painfully clear that this fella was, to put it mildly, a big damn deal. Turns out, he was an alumnus of my soon-to-be alma mater, Moore High School, who had gone on to become a star.

As I left, the star—the genuine, literal, country music star—asked me to wait. When I did, he actually thanked me for the escort. That’s it. That’s the entire anecdote of how I, the black-clad human anti-radio, met Toby Keith.

The tragicomedy deepened later when I recounted this story to my dad. He got visibly upset, not because of my near-religious avoidance of country music, but because I hadn't secured an autograph or a picture. Dad, I kindly reminded him, we were still living in the dark ages. We didn’t have flip phones, let alone the miracle of the iPhone, which was a full decade away from becoming the average family's pocket accessory.

The whole thing was a perfect moment of cosmic irony. The road off campus is literally named after the guy, yet it took me all that chaos for the math to finally math: 1+1=2. "Thee" Toby Keith was the guy I politely walked up the stairs, purely because I was too busy listening to electronic existential dread to notice a living legend in a gigantic hat.

Decades later, I still think about that day whenever the math doesn't quite math. It's a reminder that we can be so buried in our own creative bubbles, so tuned into our own specific, beautiful noise, that we completely miss the bizarre spectacles happening right beside us. I'm still listening to electronic existential dread, and I'm still chasing those deep atmospheric soundscapes. Only now, I'm building them myself from scratch.

This feature is presented strictly for entertainment purposes. All memories are subject to the fog of teenage angst, all claims are alleged, and no cowboy hats or industrial punks were harmed in the making of this recollection.