When she was a teenager and aspiring musician, Stefanie Eulinberg figured success meant getting on MTV. Now 31 and the drummer for rap-rock "bullgod" Kid Rock, she's got her MTV and then some. Meet the woman who's most comfortable barefoot and behind a drumkit...

by Kristina Feliciano

If you're, say, sitting across from her, the first thing you notice about Stefanie Eulinberg is her eyes. They're huge and very blue, in cool contrast to her coffee-colored skin. Then you take note of her size. She's tiny -- probably not much over five feet tall. But when she's onstage with Kid Rock and his band, Twisted Brown Trucker, it's Eulinberg's power that gets your synapses firing. That and all that blonde hair flying with every stroke.

Eulinberg is one of the few female drummers in a noisy, raucous major-label rock act (Kid Rock and Twisted Brown Trucker are on Atlantic/Lava Records; Kid Rock's latest release, Devil Without a Cause, recently went gold). She plays the drums hard and smart (and barefoot), happily hams it up onstage, and says she was born to tour. That and an amazingly resilient liver have made Eulinberg the long-lost sister of Kid Rock and company.

Funny, just this side of foul-mouthed, and deceptively focused despite sometimes appearing flip, Eulinberg is on a major upswing in her career. She spent the ten years that led up to the Kid gig alternately touring with sundry Top 40 cover bands (lots of Ramada Inns, many, many Holiday Inns, the occasional truck stop), playing with bands in her native Cleveland, writing jingles, and selling gear in a music store. She was just building up some momentum with her band Puppy Steak, for whom she was also writing music, when she got a call from her friend DJ Swamp (of Beck fame). He was in L.A. scratching on a Kid Rock record and thought Eulinberg should know Kid was looking for a new drummer.

Eulinberg was not interested. "I was like, 'Noooo, not now,'" she recalls. She wanted to see how far she could take Puppy Steak. For once, she was in a band where she was in control, setting up rehearsals, writing the music, and basically just being in charge. She would not be easily diverted. But DJ Swamp insisted. "He's like, 'No, man. He's on Atlantic Records. It's going to be all good. You just wait and see. They're going on the Warped Tour. I'm going to give him your number,'" she says.

But in a classic Three's Company moment, Eulinberg thought Kid was going to call her, and he was waiting for her call. When they finally got that straightened out and spoke on the phone, Kid told her he already had three people auditioning. That was fine by her. "I was like, I don't care," she says. "I hated rap. HATED it, man. You couldn't fucking give me a rap CD. I'd throw it right out the window.

"I mean, it's cool, the lyrics parts are cool. But the musician that I am, there's never enough music involved to get my attention."

But Kid eventually called back. "I guess he started thinking, 'Wait a minute, chick drummer?' I mean, our band is crazy as it is." They're often joined onstage by a stripper and, when he's well enough to go on tour, a midget. "I guess that gimmick thing started appealing to him.

"This was a Thursday. He was like, 'Alright, this is the deal. I'm going to send you a tape of 4 songs. I want you to find a place to tape yourself playing them so I can watch you play them. Send the tape to me overnight so I can have it by Monday."

Eulinberg got Kid's tape Friday, booked a studio for Saturday morning, taped herself playing the songs, and FedExed her tape to Kid Rock for Monday delivery. By this time, she wanted the gig badly. She'd liked what she heard on the tape. "This is some good shit, man," she remembers thinking. "I heard the production involved and everything. Now the race was on."

But again, no word from Kid. Meanwhile, she was worried about whether or not she should tell her bandmates about the audition, whether or not she should say something to her boss at the music store. "Finally, he called me at work," she says. She asked him if he'd had a chance to watch her tape. "Oh, yeah, yeah, you got the job," he told her. "Can you be here by Friday?" "Here" was Detroit. It was Wednesday. She quit her job, told her band, and on Friday evening, arrived in Detroit behind the wheel of a Ryder truck. An hour later she was rehearsing with Kid Rock and Twisted Brown Trucker.

She had to learn how to play a rap beat, which was one kind of adjustment, but she also had to get used to hearing the words bitch and ho -- a lot. Kid Rock and Twisted Brown Trucker's signature gesture is flipping the bird, and their favorite vocabulary words are exactly the ones Queen Latifah railed against in her own rap rant.

"When I first joined the band," says Eulinberg, "I had a huge problem with this -- a HUGE problem. Because they're like, 'Shut up, bitch.' And I was like, 'The next person calls me bitch, I'm quitting.' I wasn't kidding. I was like, 'Listen, you can call any of these fucking hoochie-mama motherfucker groupie bitches that come in this bus bitch all you want, but if you want me to be part of this family, I won't have it. You need to treat me like I'm your sister or your mother.' They're like, 'Oh yeah, you're right. We didn't mean to make you feel like that.' I'm like, 'You need to understand. You don't see me sleeping around, you don't see me taking off my clothes and…'

"That's a ho to me," she continues. "Those people, I meet them every single day. Ho's and bitches are out there. That doesn't mean everybody's like that ... I don't think negatively of women at all. Believe me. But there are bitches. That's what they are. They're sluts. I have seen some shit that will turn you out, that you can't believe these girls are doing. There's no way that you would take these girls home to your mother." And the guys who do that? "They're pimps."

It's March 24, 1999. Kid Rock's playing a sold-out show at New York City's Bowery Ballroom, one of the stops on the band's Destroy Your Liver Tour. The 16-and-over (I guess it doesn't matter that, legally, you have to be 21 to destroy your liver) show was all about teens and their testosterone, and the place was jumping with guys for whom puberty was a very recent memory. Eulinberg was one of the few women in attendance, but she made her presence known.

Despite all the band's flash -- Kid in his red vinyl pants, the stripper (rumored to be Jody Watley's sister) giving the gawking boys a biology lesson, the noodling guitars -- Eulinberg was still a standout. Her hair was flying, she was twirling her sticks and throwing them in the air -- and, musically, she was kicking ass the whole time.

After the sweaty, lights-a-flashin' spectacular that is a Kid Rock show, there was a crowd of guys at the foot of the stage waiting for her. Eulinberg came out to hand out some drumsticks to her fans, most of whom were probably half her age. "You're the bomb. You rock." They all say the same thing.

Earlier that evening, Eulinberg was having dinner at a Lower East Side restaurant and talking about what it means to be where she is now. She was looking very vibrant in a shiny black-and-yellow Puma track suit, faded Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, and suede cowboy hat she bought on a tour stop in New Mexico (although she says her personal style is more along the lines of black jeans and a shirt).

"When I was a youngster, I remember my mom gave me the day off school to wait for the cable guy," she says. "And I remember I was like, I'm watching MTV first. I couldn't wait. He turned on the cable. And I was like, Turn on MTV. That's the first thing I wanna see. So he turned on MTV, and Duran Duran was on. And I was like, I'm going to be on MTV on day. This was in high school, you know? I knew I was going to do it, I didn't know when or how or where or why ... But it's funny how, like, all of sudden when you do get on MTV, suddenly your friends…you really start knowing who your friends are right away."

She also discovered that being in a video on MTV was not the life-changing experience she had expected it to be. "Nothing really changes that much," she says. "It's just, you know, you got a video out. I was kinda bummed about that. I was like, What? This is not as cool as I thought it was."

Her new definitions success? "I'd like to try and somehow have enough star power that I don't have to back up anybody," Eulinberg says. "Maybe one day be able to pull a Sheryl Crow -- you know, how she started out as Michael Jackson's back-up singer. I think I could do that and feel pretty good about it. But this is great stepping stone for me. And I do love playing drums."

And love is everything.

"I think it's an easy job if you love to travel and you love, and I mean LOVE, music," she says. "People that don't really love music that much, I don't think they'll last. If you do love playing drums, you should just fucking do it for as long as you possibly can and just never, ever, ever give up.

"But it's a long, long road. Don't expect shit to fall in your lap, because it doesn't work that way."

Fave drummers: "For single stroke, Neil Pert is the man. Lars [Ulrich] got me all excited about the double bass. But Dennis Chambers is master of ceremonies, man. That fucker can fly over the drums without even moving his body. His technique is so bad he doesn't even have to move."

Being female -- has it helped or hurt?: Helped. "The only thing that pisses me off is when you hear guys say, 'You're the best girl drummer I've ever seen.' What the hell is that supposed to mean? But you'll never not have that. No matter what, they're always going to say that. And it's not as bad as it used to be. I only hear it like once a week now."

Endorsements: Sabian cymbals and Vic Firth; shells built by Obelisk

What the future holds: Lots of touring -- with Manson, Limp Bizcuit, and others. See http://www.kidrock.com for dates and locations. Eulinberg's also working on a Twisted Brown Trucker album, whose cast of characters may include Tommy Lee, members of Limp Bizcuit, and, if Eulinberg can convince the guys, fellow female musicians, like Samantha Maloney of Hole.