Bio - 40 - Fortunate Son Read online

  Fortunate Son

  Jeff Apter

  Random House Australia (2009)

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  Suburban loner, gifted guitarist, drug addict, planinum-plated superstar: Keith Urban has squeezed a lot of living into his 40 years. He now ranks with Kylie Minogue, INXS, Silverchair and Savage Garden as one of the country's biggest musical exports of the past 20 years. FORTUNATE SON, the first biography of this movie-star-handsome country hero, tells the unlikely story of how Urban - who was born in New Zealand in 1967 but raised in Queensland - followed and eventually fulfilled his dream of selling country music back to the Americans, the people who created it in the first place. In an age when a crew of crack Nashville songwriters generate most of the hit songs recorded in Music City, Urban is an anomaly: actually writing, or at least co-writing, most of his material. Many feel he's watered down his rootsy take on country music to please the masses, but Urban's success is undeniable: to date he's sold more than five million albums, has scored five US Number One...

  About the Book

  Keith Urban – suburban loner, gifted guitarist, drug addict, platinum-plated superstar – has squeezed a lot of living into his 44 years. He now ranks with Kylie Minogue, INXS, Silverchair and Savage Garden as one of the country’s biggest musical exports of the past 20 years. Domestically, his star has risen off the back of the reality TV sensation The Voice and his greatest hits album, The Story So Far, debuted at #1 on the ARIA album chart.

  Fortunate Son: The Unlikely Rise of Keith Urban, the first biography of this movie-star-handsome country hero, tells the unlikely story of how Urban – who was born in New Zealand in 1967 but raised in Queensland – followed and eventually fulfilled his dream of selling country music back to the Americans, the people who created it in the first place. In an age when a crew of crack Nashville songwriters generate most of the hit songs recorded in Music City, Urban is an anomaly: actually writing, or at least co-writing, most of his material. Many feel he’s watered down his rootsy take on country music to please the masses, but Urban’s success is undeniable: to date he’s sold millions and millions albums, has scored fourteen US Number One singles and typically sells out his stadium-sized shows in minutes. And his very public relationship with ‘our’ Nicole Kidman, whom he married in an A-list affair in June 2006, has earned Urban a totally new audience, as gossip mags across the planet chart the ‘Kurbans’ every move. Frank and authoritative, and based upon extensive interviews with friends, foes and Urban insiders, Fortunate Son: The Unlikely Rise of Keith Urban reveals how Keith Urban lived out his childhood dream – and the price he’s had to pay to reach the top of the music business.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  One: The Lost H

  Two: Sticky Carpets

  Three: Saddle-pop

  Four: Global Peace Through Country Music

  Five: Friends in Low Places

  Six: Toeing the Line

  Seven: The Gold-plated Road

  Eight: The Kurbans

  Discography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Notes

  About the Author

  Photo Gallery

  Copyright

  More at Random House Australia

  For Diana

  Keith Urban has good reason to look satisfied. The New Zealand-born singer and guitar-slinger is on stage at Sydney’s cosy Metro Theatre, a 900-odd-capacity venue that’s more likely to host indie rock acts than your everyday, 21st century country-pop superstar. And the Metro is positively Lilliputian in comparison with the concrete super-bunkers Urban’s been packing with bottom-line-pleasing regularity over the past half dozen years, right across the country music heartland (America, that is, not Tamworth). But Urban doesn’t seem to mind this temporary downsizing. In fact, he seems pleased that, just for once, he can actually see the people as he gazes out from behind his trademark floppy fringe, rather than merely glimpsing them somewhere off in the distance, their mobile phones held aloft, blinking in the night.

  The event is a ‘secret’ showcase gig – a preview of his latest album of slickly crafted, listener-friendly twang-pop, Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy Thing. In the crowd is a collection of hardcore true believers who’ve scored much-sought-after tickets for the show, alongside the usual music biz players who are nursing free beers and whispering bad jokes about how Urban, recently sprung from rehab, looks like he could use a drink. Urban, quite frankly, doesn’t care about the makeup of the crowd or the bitchiness of the local media. He’s just happy to be back on a stage, with his guitar, playing for the faithful. He’s emerged from a year that has put a whole new spin on the term ‘emotional rollercoaster’, and this wildly received show – ‘We Love You Keith’ banners and all – is just the sort of homecoming the guy could use. Soon enough, of course, he’ll be back for big-ticket shows at Sydney’s Acer Arena, but for now, this will do.

  Tonight, Urban is flanked by a six-piece band, each member a musical all-rounder, all of whom seem just as thrilled to be back in a world they understand: playing live, rather than sitting at home worrying about their boss’s health. Among the band members is bassist Jerry Flowers who, admittedly, is a hard guy to miss. Tall enough to pass for a basketballer, but built like a brick outhouse, Flowers’s head is shaved so cleanly that the stage lights occasionally reflect straight off his sweat-drenched skull. This is a guy with way more stage presence than your average Nashville sideman. In fact, he looks more suited to a gig as some big-screen bad guy. Flowers has been there for a good part of Urban’s now lengthy career, from early days in America with country-rock contenders The Ranch, through his gradual rise to the top and now as part of the band backing a guy who currently rules the roost. Sidekick and confidant, Flowers has seen, from close proximity, Urban’s struggle to deal with addictions and the machinations of the music industry, and has kept right on playing (and not talking). If you could hope for one guy to be watching your back, it would be Flowers.

  As clichéd as the album title may be, Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy Thing neatly sums up Urban’s past year. It started with the high-profile, paparazzi-heavy Sydney wedding, on 25 June 2006, to Australia’s current queen of Hollywood, Nicole Kidman, after a relatively swift romance and the usual round of denials. Of course, this wasn’t the first coupling of country music star and big-screen starlet: Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett, and Renée Zellweger and Kenny Chesney, had beaten Urban and Kidman to the altar. But that didn’t make their union any less unlikely: she the former Mrs Cruise, he a star in America but still relatively unknown at home – and what was with that stubble?

  But the confetti had barely been swept off the steps of the stately Cardinal Cerretti Chapel when word started circulating that there was trouble in paradise. Urban, ensconced in the studio, working on the album that was intended to firmly establish his multi-platinum stardom and extend his empire beyond Middle America, had fallen off the wagon with a sickening thud. In fact, he didn’t so much fall as stumble off the wagon, bottle in hand, which resulted in a one-way ride all the way back to rehab. (Urban had done an earlier stretch in rehab, for cocaine use and abuse back in 1998, and had allegedly relapsed in 2001.) Naturally enough, Urban downplayed his readmission, insisting there was no ‘cataclysmic event’ that drew him back to rehab, just a series of ‘warning signs’. But there were enough ‘warning signs’ to have him extend his proposed 30-day stay to three months, a sure sign that some key part of his psyche needed serious realignment.

  A member of his management team had inadvertently hinted at Urban’s dilemma only a few days before the st
ory broke, when I sent an email requesting an interview. ‘Fact is,’ the message read, ‘that we’re in the middle of an album launch tour etc at this time, which is taking up all of our time. In the course of the next 12–18 months there is going to be a lot of Keith activity.’ The next day, 19 October 2006, Urban checked himself into California’s Betty Ford Center, which might explain the back-story to that cryptic ‘etc’ in the email. ‘I deeply regret the hurt this has caused Nicole and the ones who love and support me,’ Urban said, in a hastily prepared press release. ‘One can never let one’s guard down on recovery, and I’m afraid that I have.’ Three months would pass before he got the chance to promote his sixth studio LP, which would eventually reach the top spot in the US country charts – his second successive album to hit number one. In a madly conservative sector of the music biz, in an equally right-leaning country, the deeply flawed Urban had somehow managed to stay at the top. It was no small achievement.

  As I watched Urban work his spell at the Metro, my mind kept flashing back to my first close encounter with him on a sticky-hot Tennessee afternoon, mid-summer 1998. It was the time of Nashville’s annual Fan Fair, a larger-than-life week-long celebration of all things country, where Music City’s newest and shiniest stars gather at a speedway track to play infotainment-length sets to their gushing devotees. Thousands of fans, cameras in hand, are shuttled along in front of the stage by security, where they’re allowed to stop briefly and take their prized snaps before the steady arm of security swiftly moves them back in the direction of their seats. It’s the pedal-and-steel, big-belt-buckled trailer park equivalent of a pilgrimage to Lourdes. After their set, each act retires to a series of huge farm sheds – more like saunas, actually – to sign everything that’s flung their way, all the while pushing their latest product. Country king Garth Brooks, an early Urban booster, once spent 24 hours in a Fan Fair shed signing, signing, signing, leaving only when his arms went numb. No wonder he sold so many records: the guy truly knew how to connect with regular Joes and Joannes.

  Yet on this Fan Fair day in 1998 Urban was neither playing, nor signing autographs. He’d been in the States since 1992 but was still without a footing or a true believer in the industry (with the exception of Greg Shaw, his Australian manager). His band, The Ranch, who had released their first LP the year before, had recently folded under not-entirely-pleasant circumstances. There was a gathering of Aussies backstage, who’d come to watch earnest sets from the likes of Troy Cassar-Daley, Gina Jeffreys and Shanley Del, good enough singers who everyone knew didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of making it in the wildly competitive US market. As if to drive home the point, the Australian showcase, like that of their Canadian counterparts, had been given the dead spot on the bill, kicking off just as the searing midday sun turned the speedway into a concrete-and-bitumen hell. No ‘serious’ act played Fan Fair before late afternoon, at the earliest.

  Urban looked on, shaking a few hands, not giving too much away, pretty much keeping his own company. We spoke briefly and then he said he had to leave. ‘Keith’s done it tough,’ one of the Australian contingent whispered to me as we watched him walk away. I had more to say to Urban – I was hoping he’d agree to speak for a story I was writing – but didn’t get the chance. As I soon learned, maybe Urban was ‘doing it tough’, but he also knew what was required to truly succeed in the USA: you had to stick around, for one thing, and not just fly in for a week’s schmoozing. He’d been in the USA for six hard years and was learning how to play the game. He also genuinely believed that Nashville was where he was meant to be – it was his calling.

  As Urban once explained, ‘I always wanted to go to Nashville to see what it’s really like. I’d read about it in all of my liner notes and all the records I had. It was a fictitious place to me and I wanted to see what it was like because to me it was the long-term view. It was the goal that I was working toward.’ A close friend of Urban’s told me about a phone conversation they had as his star finally began to rise. ‘It must feel great to be living your dream,’ the friend said. ‘It’s not my dream,’ Urban replied, ‘it’s my destiny.’

  Back at the Metro, nine years down the line from Fan Fair, Urban was having the last and the loudest laugh. Sure, he’d lived through some dark days, coming to grips with a dangerous cocaine addiction and this recent battle with the bottle. Shaw and many of Urban’s other early supporters had been removed from Team Urban and replaced by Nashville-based industry heavyweights. But the cashed-up faithful hadn’t deserted him; if anything, as this show proved, they treated him with even more reverence than before – his every ‘thanks, guys’ and ‘wow’ were treated as though he was uttering words direct from the country music sermon on the mount. Urban was a survivor, without doubt, who’d given up plenty – a life in Australia, maybe even his musical credibility – to climb to the top of the pile.

  Urban had every reason to be pleased: he was hitched to a smart, beautiful woman; and he had buckets of cash in the bank, a stunning Nashville spread and the unconditional devotion of millions of fans. At the end of another song, he stopped, savoured the moment, smiled his signature grin and got back to work. Tomorrow would bring another showcase, some more hands to shake and a new round of temptations to avoid. Rural Caboolture, where he’d begun his wild ride some 30-odd years back, seemed like a million miles away. Maybe it was another lifetime altogether.

  Keith looked pretty much the same as he does now, except with a more pronounced mullet, tight jeans and a fierce love of Dire Straits and Iron Maiden.

  Caboolture High friend, Sherry Rich

  Keith Urban once co-wrote a song entitled ‘Who Wouldn’t Wanna Be Me’, and from the outside looking in, it’s not hard to understand what he was getting at. Multi-platinum sales, sold-out arena shows, a Grammy, even an Oscar-winning Hollywood star for a wife – it all seems to have come just a little too easily for the man from Caboolture. The standard Urban media profile runs something like this: guitar-slinging country music lover is raised in rural Queensland, learns to ply his trade in various dingy dives, sets his sights on the country music heartland of Nashville, Tennessee, and then shifts Stateside to achieve his goal. Along the way he learns to cope with such inconveniences as a drug and alcohol addiction, failed relationships and the usual vicissitudes of the music industry – fairly typical prices to be paid for the success he has achieved. But the truth, as is so often the case, is a little more complicated than that sketch would suggest. In the Keith Urban story there are more players than in Ben-Hur. Ex-manager Greg Shaw, a true believer, deserves an Oscar for his staying power alone, let alone the cash he poured into Urban’s career.

  Urban didn’t choose an easy career path. He targeted possibly the most insular and impenetrable music city on the planet, totally convinced that it was his ‘destiny’ – more than once he has stated how his career was preordained; simply meant to be. Nashville isn’t Los Angeles, London or New York – and it’s definitely not Tamworth. In those cities, talented outsiders are often welcome and the rules of engagement are relatively straightforward: write great songs and make enough noise to be heard above the din and there’s every chance you’ll succeed. Although similar in sheer numbers and dollars, Urban’s success is quite different to the international acclaim scored by Kylie Minogue, Silverchair or INXS, and more recently, Jet and Wolfmother. Urban targeted Nashville – effectively a big country town, a place more clannish than Amish Pennsylvania, where an established system has been in place for the past 60 years. As writer Dan Daley pointed out in Nashville’s Unwritten Rules, his cogent study of the country music epicentre, rule number one is pretty damned simple: ‘Thou Shalt Live Here’. (Although Urban opted to do just that, the unspoken part of this rule is that if you don’t come from these parts, boy, then don’t even bother trying.) Authenticity – or at least the appearance of same – is part of the country music manifesto. The very notion that an outsider – let alone someone from a place as far-flung as Australia – could get
anywhere in the town known as ‘Music City USA’ rates with sightings of the Loch Ness monster: rare doesn’t even begin to describe it.

  Of course, Urban wasn’t the first Australian with a twang to look Stateside. Many others have tried and failed to gain a foothold there over the years, including James Blundell, Lee Kernaghan, Slim Dusty and, more recently, songbirds Kasey Chambers, Melinda Schneider and Catherine Britt. And yet somehow Urban has broken through without even donning a Stetson, the standard headwear for Nashville’s many ‘hunks in hats’. So what’s his secret? Clearly, Urban had many things working in his favour. He has raggedy-assed good looks complete with designer stubble, blond highlights and the whiff of ‘bad boy’, hinted at by his earrings and inkwork – even before he opened his mouth to sing he was a publicity department’s wet dream, especially in these highly visual times. But this cat can also play: he possesses slick guitar-picking skills and a crooner’s way with syrupy ballads, plus an encyclopaedic knowledge of American musical history and its vast back catalogue. He’s a crowd-pleaser, too, with the ability to cover everything and everyone from Hank Williams to James Taylor and Tom Petty, while few post-gig autograph hunters go home empty-handed. If Urban had a dollar for every fan’s cheek that he’s kissed over the years, he’d be an even wealthier man. ‘At the end of the day,’ said Rob Potts, Urban’s close friend and Australian agent, responsible for booking his shows from 1989 until early 2008, ‘he’s one of the greatest artists this country has ever produced. International success, 10 million-plus records, redefining an American music genre – huge achievements.’

  Urban sings it like he means it, too. His songs often possess an old-fashioned, somewhat fawning attitude towards the object of his desire – he either wants to be ‘their everything’, is dazzled by how they ‘look good in my shirt’, devotes his time to ‘making memories of us’ or considers them ‘his better half’ – so it would be fair to say that searing insight into modern love isn’t his specialist area. But he can make pure dross sound more meaningful than Shakespearean sonnets. And by opting for full disclosure with his addictions, Urban has created a public persona – not so much by design, it should be said – that suggests he’s a straight shooter, a no-bullshit kind of guy. Urban is very willing to play the game, unlike many of his edgier contemporaries, talking crap with DJs and VJs and ‘celebrity reporters’, all of whom he refers to by Christian name, and smiling on demand.