Interview: Toby Keith, Eric Church talk “Red Solo Cup,” to be featured Tuesday on “Glee”
To read more of my new interview with Eric Church, click here. To read more of my fall interview with Toby Keith, click here.
From Friday’s Weekend Look section of The Oklahoman.
Toby Keith’s “Red Solo Cup” to be featured on “Glee” Tuesday
Up-and-coming country star Eric Church proud of the smoking cameo he made in Keith’s smash viral video.
“Red Solo Cup” is more than just a boozy ode to cheap plastic beverage receptacles or the latest hit from Oklahoma country music megastar Toby Keith.
Cementing its status as a pop-culture phenomenon, the raucous track from Keith’s new album “Clancy’s Tavern” will be the latest song to get the show-choir treatment on the new episode of the cult hit TV show “Glee,” airing at 7 p.m. Tuesday on Fox.
Eric Church
But the William McKinley High School singers will be hard-pressed to pay a more memorable tribute to the song and the cups that inspired it than up-and-coming country standout Eric Church puffed up in Keith’s smash viral video.
When Keith’s team invited Church, who played this year on the Norman resident’s “Locked & Loaded” tour, to make a cameo in the video doing an activity of his choice with a red Solo cup, well, you can imagine what the “Smoke a Little Smoke” singer had in mind.
“We were out on the road and bored like band members and artists get, and I came to my band and crew and I said, ‘Hey, we got about an hour, I need somebody to make me a smoking apparatus out of a red Solo cup. Is it possible?’” Church said with a laugh during a recent phone interview.
“Like 22 minutes later, a couple of my band guys and a crew guy — they were so proud of it, it took three people to carry it — they come up like it was on like a velvet pillow or something and they bring it up on the bus and they say, ‘Here it is.’ And it was full functional, a fully functional bong.”
The unedited version of the video features cameos from late-night TV host Craig Ferguson, comics Carrot Top and Jeff Dunham, rockers Sammy Hagar and Ted Nugent and basketball legend Larry Bird. But even fellow country singer Joe Nichols toasting in a bubble bath couldn’t top Church’s smoking appearance. Church’s cameo was cut from the edited version that has dominated the charts at Country Music Television, but plenty of people have seen it, since the unedited video has garnered more than 4.5 million views on YouTube.
“The funny part of the story is Toby and his camp said, ‘Aw, man, we’re not gonna show this to anybody. This is just kind of a viral thing. It’ll be on the Internet, but we’re not gonna release this song, it’s just gonna be one of these small viral things. And I said, ‘All right, cool.’ So I did my part of it, the smoking part, and now it’s everywhere,” Church said.
“I was laughing and was like, ‘Appreciate you guys not showing that to anybody.’ … It’s huge, it’s crazy, it’s like the biggest thing. And maybe I should have known that anyway with something like that that’s viral. It wasn’t like I shied away from it, I laughed at it, but I just thought it was funny, they were like ‘Oh it’ll never be a single, we’ll never send it to CMT.’”
Keith’s publicist announced this week that “Red Solo Cup” has officially become the second single from “Clancy’s Tavern.” The rowdy homage to the cheap cups and cheaper beer often poured into them already has cracked the top 30 on Billboard’s country songs after just six weeks.
Keith didn’t need a chart to tell him that the song was making an impression on his fans.
Toby Keith
During his recent tour dates, his crew started dressing up in giant red Solo cup costumes and doling out mini versions of the cups to frenzied crowds, who often insisted the star perform the song twice.
The catchy ditty was written by Brett and Brad Warren and Brett and Jim Beavers, and Keith said it wasn’t pitched to him to record but just sent to him as an MP3.
“It was ‘listen to what I heard last night,’ one of them deals. I played it, I laughed out loud, and my first comment was, ‘That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. That is stupid; somebody wrote a song about red plastic cups,’” Keith said. “And next morning, I wake up from just hearing it and I’m going, ‘Holy cow, I know that song inside and out. I cannot get it out of my head.”
“There’s nothing else there like it, and it’s just one of those crazy things that happens sometimes in music,” Keith added. “It’s just one of the craziest things we’ve ever done. And I’m having so much fun with it.”
Although he recently became a father for the first time, Church is having fun with his part in the “Red Solo Cup” craze, even if some view it as controversial.
“Oh, I think that was good American ingenuity,” he said, laughing about his team’s cup creation. “It really was MacGyver-ed.”
-BAM
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