Kid Rock’s ‘Chillin’ the Most’ cruise floats fans’ boat

MIAMI — The Carnival Destiny cruise ship hasn’t even left port, and half the ship’s guests are already wasted.

Passengers pack the lobby bar, balancing luggage with buckets of ice-soaked beer bottles, and flashing room keys that double as charge cards to keep the drinks flowing.

When it’s time for a mandatory safety drill, the life-saving instructions playing over the vessel’s intercom can barely be heard over sounds of drunken guests stumbling over one another, spewing obscenities, cheering, slapping high-fives and yelling chants like “Ain’t no party like a … Kid Rock party.”

Photos: On a Caribbean cruise with Kid Rock and fans

And it’s still two hours before Kid Rock — the rapper turned country-rock star — officially launches his “Chillin’ the Most” cruise with a kickoff concert.

For the next four nights, 2,650 of Kid Rock’s biggest fans will wander the 12 decks of the nearly 900-foot-long ship in various stages of undress, toting giant inflatable penises, downing the musician’s own Badass American Lager out of breast-shaped beer bongs and consuming more than three times the amount of alcohol than a typical Carnival voyage. Onboard the cruise from Miami to the Bahamas’ Half Moon Cay are also 12 other acts, including Southern rapper-Eminem protégé Yelawolf, Uncle Kracker and brazen folk signer-songwriter Roger Alan Wade.

As the ship pulls out of port, guests finally make it to the outdoor deck to watch Kid Rock perform, leaving behind a Dumpster’s worth of beer bottles in the lobby. Scantily clad women gyrate to the pre-show music while a guy with a pack of condoms dangling from a lanyard around his neck watches. A few fans juggle buckets of brews as they climb up the pool’s slide for a better view. Someone’s scribbled “Kid Rock Rules” in blue marker on a window overlooking the deck.

The Detroit rocker, born Robert Ritchie, has just finished posing for 1,400 photos with fans (the photo op is part of the cruise package) and takes the stage to raucous cheers. He launches into a set far more akin to a monster truck rally than a Caribbean cruise. “[The night before it departed] I couldn’t sleep,” says Ritchie in the middle of his hit “All Summer Long,” the city skyline fading in the distance. “Then I realized this cruise has become my adult Christmas. I get so … excited this time of year.”

Cruises have quietly gone from depositories for has-been entertainers to floating music festivals for current-day platinum-selling artists. For the younger crowd these voyages now prove worthy alternatives to multi-day, landlocked festivals such as Coachella, Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, who charge upward of $350 for general admission passes. Dedicated fans such as Ritchie’s who shell out between $800 and $4,000 for a ticket (minus airfare, fees and drinks) get a more intimate experience with the artists they love and a vacation out of the deal.

Since his breakout 1998 album, “Devil Without a Cause,” Ritchie’s blend of rap metal, Southern rock, blues and country has helped him sell more than 23 million records — without iTunes, which he doesn’t support — and made him a force in today’s country rock. His last album, “Born Free,” spawned the hit title track that Mitt Romney has used during his presidential campaign theme.

Ritchie’s outing, his third, kicks off this year’s music cruise season where Kelly, Blake Shelton, Backstreet Boys, New Kids on the Block, Rick Springfield and KISS will also sail before the year’s end.

Promoters such as Sixthman (which is behind Ritchie’s cruise), Entertainment Cruise Productions and Rose Tours have built genre-specific voyages around themes including malt shop pop (Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell, Ronnie Spector), jazz (George Benson, Boney James), “Soul Train” (Patti LaBelle, Kool & the Gang, the O’Jays) and hard rock (Anthrax, Lamb of God).

“It was difficult to get artists on board. But now it’s getting easy, and some are calling us,” says Dane Butcher, director of operations/programming for Entertainment Cruise. “First when you hear a cruise ship, [the thought was] your career was on its way out. Now they realize they have a captured audience.”

Party with rock stars

Ritchie’s cruise is headed for 55 acres of a Carnival-owned private island in Half Moon Cay, Bahamas, that he’s christened “Redneck Paradise.”

There, crisp blue water and white sand will compete for attention with a special-made beachfront stage, a giant inflatable bottle of Badass beer and a shipwrecked boat transformed into, what else, a bar. Paradise for “Chillin’ the Most” guests means chugging beers while sunbathing, wading in the ocean or watching Ritchie play a two-hour concert. As for other activities? A bikini contest that bans actual swimwear but encourages ladies to parade in makeshift bikinis and a men’s Speedo competition where many participants stuff their swimwear with plastic appendages to compete for a crown and cloak.

Jody Sparks doesn’t mind that he’s getting sunburned as he roams Redneck Paradise with a beer in hand. He’s having fun.

Photos: On a Caribbean cruise with Kid Rock and fans

So are his modelesque twin daughters, who are celebrating their 21st birthday nearby with a pack of lusty-eyed males. Sparks, who’s from Sterling Heights, Mich., attended 13 Kid Rock concerts last year, spending around $1,000 per ticket. This year he shelled out $16,000 for the cruise, including hotel and airfare, for himself, his wife and daughters.

“Worth every penny,” says Sparks, who’s gone on all three of the musician’s voyages. “The cruise is unbelievable, there’s nothing like it. I could never go on another without Kid Rock. The man has heart. It’s not about the money. I will come every year till I die.”

Unlike concerts, where star-adoring fans can only cheer and sing along, on the cruise they become drinking buddies with their heroes. “I get paid to go on vacation and take all my favorite bands. If that’s not a sell, I don’t know what is,” Ritchie says after the cruise. “Usually you try to find the negative in this business, because somebody’s always got an angle. But there’s no angle on this.”

Back on the boat, it’s easy to spot an act, including Ritchie, buying booze for fans (and vice versa) or chatting it up with passengers at the casino. One late night he dropped by to play a round of craps before taking the party back to his suite. “I played them my new record,” he recalled. “Just those 40 to 50 people were packed into the room. The story spread through the boat like wildfire, so there’s a lottery factor for fans knowing moments like those can happen.”

For many working stiffs, this cruise is their sole vacation of the year — something Ritchie says he keeps in mind by keeping the prices lower than competitors.

“I just have to go,” says Roxie DeCambra, 48, who sports 14 Kid Rock-themed tattoos, including the cruise logo. The star would later sign a message on her back, which she planned to get inked (she had the choice of using Ritchie’s favorite tattoo artist, who was onboard working). “I think he knows his fans. They can get along even if he wasn’t here. It’s family, though dysfunctional.”

Personal show business

Though music cruises such as Ritchie’s are successes, they aren’t cash cows for artists. Acts can make anywhere from a couple of hundred thousand to more than $1 million for an act of Rock’s stature. “We’re not paying what these bands would make [on the road], but we probably pay them about 1.5 times what they would make in one night,” Andy Levine, Sixthman’s chief executive and founder, says.

“I remember thinking, ‘This is it: The bands and the fans on vacation.’ Screw radio, screw the record business, screw the lawyers and the publishing companies,” says Levine, who along with his staffers were treated like rock stars on the ship, often posing for pictures and hugging guests. “This is the essence of the music business — the bands and the fans with no distractions.”

Fans who pay for these cruises are getting real value when compared with some traditional VIP packages. For instance, on KISS’ current tour there’s a deluxe VIP package for $1,250 that includes the ticket, sound check access, an autograph and photo with the band. The base price for its October cruise is $750 and features two KISS shows (one without its signature makeup) and a variety of perks, including a meet-and-greet.

The Atlanta-based promoter Sixthman, also behind cruises featuring Weezer, 311, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Lyle Lovett, Sister Hazel and KISS, has chartered 45 cruises since its inception in 2001 and boasts a 60% rate of return for its trips.

It operates cruises under two models: The host model (such as Kid Rock’s) offers no guarantee, with profits being split between Sixthman and the host, the artist taking the lion’s share. In addition, Sixthman gives the host funds to spend on supporting bands (Kid Rock was given about $100,000 for his roster). On the festival model, such as the singer-songwriter-driven Cayamo cruise, they spend about $100,000 a day on talent. Only a small number of acts didn’t work out and haven’t returned, Levine says, but most do.

“Sixthman has gotten hip to one thing: It’s easier to isolate a fan base or target market. It’s a manager’s or record label’s dream,” says Kalen Nash, lead vocalist of Kid Rock support act Ponderosa. “The last year we played 250 to 300 shows and only had Christmas off. For us, at our level, it’s like four great days out on the road.”

Loose atmosphere

Artists also look at the cruise like a working vacation, or at least Uncle Kracker does as he drunkenly stumbles through his embarrassing final set of the “Chillin’ the Most” cruise. The show consists of slurred lyrics and extended solos by band members. Southern rapper Yelawolf, born Michael Wayne Atha, saw an opportunity to build his fan base. After playing to a light crowd on opening night, word spread about the emcee with the biting, rock-tinged flow and attracted capacity crowds for his other sets.

“I built my career on touring and I could have been out on the road, but I’m being introduced to some rock fans that didn’t know about the music,” Atha says.

On decks with staterooms, passengers decorated the doors of their cabins like college dorms. Some pasted Detroit Lions or Tigers logos, others wrote mission statements about their hedonistic plans. A few lived up to those promises, such as the couple openly engaged in unprintable behavior at the bar, the middle-aged woman who passed around a Sharpie to men who took turns signing her fully exposed chest, and the guy who stripped to his thong on the casino dance floor.

“[Regular] cruises are a buzz kill. I wouldn’t do it unless it’s Sixthman. They connect with you,” says Taylor Coates, a 35-year-old Methodist pastor from South Carolina, over dinner in one of the ship’s grand dining rooms.

She initially hesitated to reveal her occupation given the lively passengers that surrounded her, though last year one approached her about getting onboard sacrament. “There’s a connection that’s made. It’s a bond. It’s safe to say it’s not just for Kid Rock but Simple Man and Weezer. It takes the right artist, the right brand and the right vision. You let that collide, and you’re gonna have something special.”

The last day of the cruise, Ritchie offers up a Q&A session with fans. With a Coors Light in one hand and cigar in the other, he fields an hour’s worth of questions from bleary-eyed fans suffering the consequences of four days of debauchery and rock music.

As the ship coasts back toward Miami, one fan nicknamed Double D asks Ritchie if he would return to the high seas. He pretends to ponder, then answers “yes,” but with more profanity.

Photos: On a Caribbean cruise with Kid Rock and fans

gerrick.kennedy@latimes.com