Luck or Something Like It (14 page)

Chapter Eleven

Lucille

During this difficult period,
Ken Kragen remained solidly behind me. He never considered that I wouldn’t emerge on top. He was always the voice of reason in that chaotic time, and he always had a plan. His plan for this transitional time in my life was to keep my name and face before the public.

With that in mind, and also seeing the possibilities of Nashville, he booked me to appear on
Hee Haw,
probably the most popular country-oriented TV show at the time. It was there I met the woman who was soon to be my fourth wife, Marianne Gordon Trikilis. Marianne was in the middle of an amicable divorce from a producer at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Productions, Michael Trikilis, and against immeasurable odds, I had finally survived my divorce with Margo. Over time Michael and I became good friends, and he ultimately produced the only actual theatrical movie I have ever starred in,
Six Pack.
He was a joy to work with.

Neither Marianne nor I was in any hurry to get married again after what we had just been through, but there was no doubt there was an immediate attraction between us. During our courtship, I was visiting Marianne in her hotel room one night. The then girlfriend of Hugh Hefner, Barbi Benton, had become a regular on
Hee Haw
and had just gotten a record contract with Playboy Records. Barbi, who had connecting rooms with Marianne in the hotel, innocently asked if I would write her a song for her new album. I said “sure,” like I did that every day, and went next door to her room with my guitar and proceeded to write a song called “Sweet Music Man,” which may be the most personal song I’ve ever written.

The song was rooted in a conversation I had had on an airplane the day before with Jessi Colter, Waylon Jennings’s wife. She had been telling me about Waylon’s band and how they would never say no to him, so they were always working, and how worried she was that something would happen to him on the road. But no matter what problems they may have had, she said, “When he starts to sing, he is still my sweet music man.” I thought there was something so special about that concept and their relationship.

The first half of the song was written about Waylon, but the more I got into it, the more I started writing about myself and my own career.

So sing your song, sweet music man.

You’re makin’ your livin’ doin’ one-night stands.

They’re through with you, they don’t need you.

You try to stay young but the songs you’ve sung

Have all begun to come back on you.

Not long after, I sang the song on
The Tonight Show.
John Davidson was guest hosting and somehow the conversation got around to my rose-tinted glasses. It really made me start thinking about my image. If you are afraid to change your image in this business, your time is limited. Less than a week after writing that song, I had cut my long hair, gotten rid of the glasses, and removed the earring from my ear. I felt so much more like me and less like that guy who wanted to be with the First Edition. In a sense, I was shedding a costume of an earlier era and becoming “Kenny Rogers” again. It was transformative, to say the least.

Back to Marianne: she was a true blessing. At a time in my life that I didn’t have a penny to my name, along came a woman who did not seem to care about any of that. Marianne even ended up loaning me money for child support payments. Not many women would do such a thing. I, of course, now had a double reason to get back on my feet and prove to the musical community that Kenny Rogers wasn’t done yet—not by a long shot.

Despite my bad experience with Shug, country kept calling. After all, my earliest exposure to music was country music. My dad and brothers played guitar and fiddle on the front porch like true country musicians. That singing prize I won at age ten where I got to meet country star Eddy Arnold was for my rendition of “Lovesick Blues,” a Hank Williams song.

Sometimes, I guess, it takes a while—and any number of detours—to end up where we should have been in the first place. And we don’t really know it until we get there. In my case, it took almost half a lifetime to locate my natural musical terrain. There were no guarantees that I’d be welcomed there with open arms, but at least it felt like the right direction home.

My objective, once again but with even more determination, was to leave L.A., get back to Nashville, and see if Ken and I could turn my country-rock successes like “Ruby” into a solid country career.

I was about to take off for Nashville when a strange thing happened. Remember those hip black-and-white leather outfits the First Edition had worn and been so proud of? Well, someone broke into the trunk of my car in the Holiday Inn parking lot and stole all six of mine the night before I was to leave.

At first I was furious that someone would take my memories from me. That is, until the hotel offered me $8,000 to settle the matter. Memories or not, that one was a no-brainer. I took the money. There was a God, and just as with that Henry Mancini song years before, I had witnessed my second miracle.

My first experience in Nashville on that fateful trip was walking into the Ryman Auditorium—the legendary home of the Grand Ole Opry and a country music shrine—late on my first night in town, not knowing anyone, and hearing this country band I had never heard of performing onstage. When they finished, the roar was deafening. The announcer said, “How about a nice round of applause for Tommy [Somebody] and Family; they had a hit back in 1943.”

I had never heard that kind of appreciation for a group that hadn’t had a hit record for thirty years. I remember saying, “Wow . . . this is where I want to be.” Country music just felt so right.

The next day Ken and I had a meeting with a producer named Larry Butler. Unbeknownst to me, Larry, then head of United Artists Records in Nashville, had been following me since my days in the Christy Minstrels. He was a child prodigy pianist and a multigenre artist who performed with the Harry James Orchestra at age six and sang with Red Foley at age ten. Moving to Nashville in the early 1960s, Larry soon was playing piano on hit records like Conway Twitty’s “Hello Darlin’,” and he so impressed Johnny Cash that Johnny hired him as a studio manager, producer, and pianist.

I didn’t realize it at the time but this one man, Larry Butler, would be responsible for some of the most successful years of my life. Larry became not just a friend but a champion of my talent. He not only believed in me; he put his career on the line for me. I didn’t know until recently how hard he fought the record company to keep my chances alive.

As I mentioned earlier, the executives at United Artists Records thought I was too old, creeping up on forty, and too pop to have much success in country at this stage of my life. The Nashville music establishment has traditionally been something of a closed society. Not just anyone can march in and announce that he or she is a country singer. They were leery of “outlaws” like Waylon Jennings and are still tentative about artists who might bridge the gap between country and pop or rock. I was one of those potential crossover performers, and it made them nervous. Fortunately, Larry had his own power with the label, and between Larry and Ken, the executives finally caved and let Larry try to make me into a country star.

Our first year together was pretty much uneventful. We had some success but nothing you would remember. My first album for United Artists Records,
Love Lifted Me,
did okay, thanks primarily to the title song and another song called “While the Feeling’s Good.” It was not much but enough to keep going, and that’s all we needed.

Then in 1977, lightning struck. Larry had found a song that was both tender and tragic at the same time. It was called “Lucille.” The backstory of the song was simple: songwriter Hal Bynum was sitting in a bar near the Greyhound Bus Station in Toledo, Ohio, one night, when he heard a couple nearby arguing. No names were spoken, as he remembered, just one haunting line: “You picked a fine time to leave me.” The song spent its first year scribbled on a bar napkin, until Hal got together with a songwriter named Roger Bowling and they finished it. Then Roger pitched it to Larry.

“Lucille” is a classic example of the story-song form that I referred to earlier. First, in these kinds of ballads, you know exactly where you are from the first line.

In a bar in Toledo across from the depot

Then the song takes you on a journey and drops you off at the end with a powerful feeling, something “Lucille” certainly did.

You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille,

With four hungry children and a crop in the field.

I’ve had some bad times, lived through some sad times,

But this time the hurtin’ won’t heal.

You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille.

What a great song. And what a start for my country music career.

United Artists felt the same way about “Lucille” that they’d felt about Larry signing me in the first place. They worried that the audiences wouldn’t accept it. They had finally gotten excited with the music I was making with the more pop-flavored country. Now here came “Lucille,” deep in stone country territory, too deep as far as they were concerned. What was Kenny Rogers doing singing about “four hungry children and a crop in the field”? He didn’t grow up on a dirt farm in East Tennessee. He’s “countrypolitan,” not old-school country.

Larry thought they were wrong. Whatever my past styles, he thought I had nailed this sad country ballad and that he should roll the dice with the release. He went to the wall for it. Ken did the same, and the executives caved.

Out of nowhere, “Lucille” sprang from the album and started something none of us could have ever imagined. This was going to be huge and we knew it. The single ended up selling five million copies and created a whole new acceptance for me on the radio. It was the beginning of a country career we could only have dreamed of.

Once we made the story
song a viable country art form for me, the songs just poured in. Every songwriter with a story song sent it to me. There must have been thousands to pick through. Most were stupid and not well written, but boy, when you found a good one, it made it all worthwhile.

My life was suddenly spinning fast. I was soon operating on a whole other plane. I had real money. Marianne and I, having spent a year together, got married in 1977 in Los Angeles. No one can ever say I have a fear of commitment. We were married at the first of many homes I would buy in L.A. The wedding guest list included many dear friends from the L.A. music and entertainment community whom I had met in the First Edition days and before: Ken Kragen, Chuck Woolery, John Denver, John Davidson, and Don Henley.

Back on tour, I hired more band members to complement the guys who had stuck with me through the hard, pre-“Lucille” times. They included Edgar Struble, Randy Dorman, and Chuck Jacobs. Edgar stayed through the 1980s and then went on to become a top-rated musical director. Randy and Chuck are still with me today. I also doubled my crew by adding a road manager, Garth Shaw, who would stay with me through the next ten years.

I now also had a record label that was solidly behind me. Jim Mazza was the head at EMI, which had taken over United Artists. Ken and I scheduled a meeting with him, and Ken was going to ask him to allocate $63,000 as a promotional budget for our new album; Mazza looked at us like we were out of our minds. “Sixty-three thousand?” he said. “I’m going to put a million dollars into promoting Kenny Rogers.” I immediately knew there was something I liked about that guy.

As the bookings piled up and the royalties began to pour in, my financial status reached new and amazing heights. It was hard to imagine that only two years earlier, I was living in the Holiday Inn with a negative net worth. That’s what an international hit single—including hitting the top of the UK singles charts—and a hit album and a nonstop concert schedule can do to a bank account.

Because of the relentless touring schedule, I finally did something that I had never thought possible. I bought my own plane to move from venue to venue. It was a British-made BAC 111 jet that belonged to Las Vegas businessman Kirk Kerkorian and, as I found out later, had once belonged to Elvis. In fact, we were actually in the air when Marianne told me in 1981 she was pregnant. It just took all my whiplash success that much higher. Life was hectic but it was good.

After “Lucille” in 1977, songs and projects seemed to come out of the woodwork, but I just want to pause a moment and talk about one very important person in my life and our work together.

At my very first recording session with Larry Butler, I walked into a dark recording studio and sat down next to him, and it was there, for the first time, I heard Dottie West sing:

You want things your way

And I want them mine.

And now we don’t know

Just where to draw the line.

How can love survive

If we keep choosing sides?

And who picks up the pieces

Every time two fools collide?

“Larry,” she said, shielding her eyes from the glare of the studio lights. “Is that Kenny Rogers there?”

“Yeah,” Butler answered. “Come on over and say hello.”

That simple invitation was the beginning of a great musical and personal friendship between Dottie West and me. I had heard a lot about Dottie but had never actually heard her sing live until then. She was special in so many ways, to so many people. She was, at this time, a single mom with three kids and getting it done for her family. That alone was a great credential. But equally as impressive was her voice. You believed everything she sang. That was her gift.

To me, Dottie represented everything good about country music, and as I would come to learn, she had, in one form or another, lived or would one day live most of the things she sang about. I had often heard the expression “Dottie doesn’t sing her music, she lives it.” It didn’t take me long to realize how true that was.