Luck or Something Like It (17 page)

This is exactly how the conversation went down: “I have a song I’ve been working on for a while and the Commodores passed on it. Would you like to hear it?”

With a setup like that, how could I say no? Lionel sits down at this old upright piano in the dressing room that looked like it hadn’t been played since the days of vaudeville and proceeds to play and sing.

“Lady—la la la la la la la la la la la la—you have made me what I am and I am yours.”

I waited and waited. Then he said, “That’s all I have so far. What do you think?”

I swear to you, having heard only that much, I said jokingly: “I can’t believe the Commodores turned that
word
down.”

Actually, I loved what I had heard—a highly romantic and soulful love song that was so universal in its feel that it transcended commercial music pigeonholes. And it felt like something I could sing. I was quick to say, “Let’s do it.”

“Who’s going to produce it?” Lionel asked.

“You are,” I said. “It’s your song, you produce it.”

“When?” he asked.

“Next week,” I said. “In my studio in Los Angeles. I’ll see you there.”

Little did I know, going in, that Lionel had never actually produced a song before. It was quite a session—unlike any I’ve ever done. I really didn’t know Lionel personally or musically, so I didn’t know what to expect. But I can promise you, I didn’t expect what I got either. At one point, I noticed that while I was singing into the microphone, I couldn’t see Lionel. I finished singing what was written and realized there was another verse to come, but there were no more words left to sing. So I asked James Carmichael, Lionel’s coproducer, and he said, “Here’s how it goes . . . when you go in to sing, you get what is written so far.” I said, “Well, what do we do now?” James said, “Lionel is actually in the toilet writing the second verse.”

I think a lot of the song was being written as I was singing it. Lionel would disappear and come back with more lyrics. I guess it’s a true testament to a songwriter’s talent to be able to write under that kind of pressure. Plus, Lionel is a master of making music out of conversation. I hear his songs and invariably I say, “I could have written that,” but in truth, I couldn’t have.

And with that, we set off to record a song that scored big on every chart. “Lady” became the first record of the 1980s to chart on four
Billboard
singles charts—Country, Hot 100, Adult Contemporary, and Top Black Singles. It went to No. 1 on three of the four.

“Lady” came out in 1980, and our feeling that it would cross all the usual categories of popular music was proven true. The audiences of the four categories in the singles charts where “Lady” rose to the top heard their own music in that song. A black guy from R&B and a white guy from country had created a color-blind hit.

It was the launch of both a classic love song and a thirty-year friendship. Lionel produced “Lady” for my
Greatest Hits
album. On the album,
Share Your Love
, released in 1981, he produced the record in its entirety, including the No. 1 hits, “I Don’t Need You” and “Through the Years.” It was a marriage made in Vegas.

I can’t move on before telling my favorite Lionel story in at least an abbreviated form. At the time, the
Greatest Hits
album with “Lady” on it was huge, selling 250,000 copies a week and heading toward platinum status. I had purchased a big boat called, naturally,
The Gambler’s Lady,
and along with Jim Mazza and our wives had planned a boat trip to the Bahamas. We asked Lionel to come along. His response: “I don’t care anything about going out on a boat.”

My response to that: “Oh, come on. You’ll have a great time!”

We finally convinced him to come along. As we headed out to sea, the water was like glass and Lionel, the breeze in his face, was exclaiming, “Wow, I think I could really like this.” Then, as often happens on the ocean, we turned a corner and things got ugly. Suddenly fifteen-foot waves were pitching the boat around like a toy in a bathtub. Lionel proceeded to toss up everything in his stomach, including the Ritz Crackers I thought would save him.

After a few hours of this, we got to the Bahamas and Lionel was feeling good again. So I suggested that we try a little scuba diving.

“Wait a minute!” he said. “Let me get this straight. You want to put weights on a black man and throw him into the water? I’m sorry, I don’t see me doing that!”

But he did, out of pride or whatever, and in his own words: “Suddenly I went straight down! My feet hit the bottom of the ocean and I couldn’t get back up. I was sure I was going to drown. I would try to push up and then go right back down again. I finally found the anchor rope and pulled myself back up, still thinking I was dying, when I broke the surface of the water. And there’s Kenny, leaning over the side of the boat with a big smile on his face . . .”

“Now, wasn’t that fun!!!”

Coming back, we hit the big swells again and now everyone on board was sick. By the time we sighted land, we were sharing high-fives. We had cheated death. Just then, the Coast Guard pulls up, guns drawn, ready to haul us in for running drugs. We obviously looked suspicious. I mean, who else would be out in this ridiculous weather?

As they were corralling us in the middle of the boat, one of them recognized Lionel, and all was instantly forgiven. Now they all wanted autographs and pictures with each of us. After one of the worst experiences of his life, Lionel had saved the day. Was it worth it? You’ll have to ask him. For me, that trip was a journey I wouldn’t have missed for the world.

“Lady” came only three years
after Larry Butler and I walked into the studio to record “Lucille.” You see what I mean by crazy? The first half of the 1980s represented, without question, the pinnacle of my professional and financial career. Between 1977 and 1985, we managed to turn out fifteen No. 1 country hits, each of them a story of its own. Some not mentioned before, but just as memorable, included: “Love or Something Like It,” “She Believes in Me,” “Love Will Turn You Around,” and “Morning Desire.” On top of that, we released twelve studio albums plus the first two
Gambler
movies, the
Coward of the County
movie, another TV movie,
Wild Horses,
the theatrical movie release
Six Pack,
and an untold number of videos, TV specials, tour dates, and special appearances. I know this list-making can get a little boring after a while, but it’s the fastest way I know to underscore how much was going on in my professional life in such a compact period. I can’t explain it—hell, I still don’t quite understand it to this day—but I can only say that it was the perfect storm of success for a fortysomething singer from the projects of Houston with a prematurely gray beard and what some might call a gravelly voice.

During this insane period, I had sold an unimaginable fifty million albums and set concert attendance records everywhere. And I had many of the material things that go with that kind of success. I had the boat that almost killed Lionel, I lived in a big house in Bel Air, I owned a nine-story office building on Sunset Boulevard, and I had bought a state-of-the-art recording studio on Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills. It seemed, at that time, every record we cut went multiplatinum. My albums had stayed at No. 1 for an unprecedented 119 weeks on the country charts. One would rise and fall, only to be replaced by another one.

Here’s a perfect example of the craziness of it all. In 1982, Jim Mazza suggested I record a duet with Sheena Easton of a great Bob Seger song, “We’ve Got Tonight,” and made it the title track on an album of the same name. David Foster, winner of sixteen Grammys and producer of scores of artists, produced the duet on a Wednesday. By the following Monday, it was playing on the radio all over the country. Before you could blink, the single was on top at No. 1 and the album made it to No. 3. Sometimes I thought I was more of a bystander watching this stuff go on than the person actually in the middle of it.

In 1983, my contract with Liberty Records (formerly United Artists Records) was coming to an end. I had just met Bob Summer, the president of RCA Records, and he wanted me to meet with them and discuss a “groundbreaking” record deal. I wasn’t sure what he meant by “groundbreaking,” but that word got my attention, so I showed up for the meeting.

I was offered a twenty-one-million-dollar deal for signing for five years. I doubt seriously if I even stopped to think about what that meant, but somehow we got around to yes. I have always been a tough negotiator. This was supposed to be the beginning of something really big and special. I say supposed to, because within about a year Bob Summer was fired, for something completely unrelated to my deal.

So I go into RCA and meet the new president. I’m excited to say hello and let him know I’m ready to do whatever the record company would like to keep this momentum going. I honestly don’t remember the new guy’s name, but his exact words were “You need to enjoy your twenty million because that’s the last money you’ll ever get from us.” When I said, “I don’t get it,” he proceeded to explain how the music business—and maybe all big business—really works.

“If I continue to make you successful,” he said, “then I make Bob Summer look good and someone may question why they fired him. If I find my own act to sign, then
I
look good.”

I never understood such twisted logic, but I knew one thing: I had no hope at RCA, and I got the message loud and clear.

But the party was far from over. In 1983, before the genius executive told me he wasn’t going to lift a finger on my behalf, one of the most amazing events of my long career happened—I sang a song with Dolly Parton.

Not a night goes by that someone in my audience doesn’t yell, “Hey, Kenny, where’s Dolly?” If this continues, I plan on giving everyone who asks her home phone number and they can ask Dolly herself where the hell she is. The answer to the question is, I have no idea.

What an incredible career the two of us have had, and what a joy she was and is to work with. I’ve known Dolly the better part of forty years. And I have yet to see her when she’s not dressed beautifully—hair, makeup, and clothes.

Well, that’s not entirely true. There was one time when Dolly and I were on tour and Rob Pincus, my son Christopher, and I were standing in front of some hotel. We had asked Dolly to go sightseeing with us and she had gracefully declined. Standing there, we saw Dolly’s assistant, Judy, and asked, “Where’s Dolly?” Without saying a word, Judy smiled and motioned to her left, and there was Dolly five feet away, in full makeup but dressed like an old lady. She was going out on her own, incognito. I swear she could have said hello and I would have never recognized her.

The first time I met Dolly Parton was in the 1970s. I was asked to perform on her television show in Nashville, simply called
Dolly
. I remember she had an eight- or nine-foot-high butterfly as her logo. I would like to say that we became immediate friends, but we didn’t. I was just another guest in the mix of her very hectic schedule.

Now I must bring Barry Gibb into the story of Dolly and me. It was now 1983. I’m not sure who suggested Barry to produce my next album, but he certainly represented a style of music I had never performed. I knew he wrote hit songs and that the Bee Gees’ tracks were always a little slick but, without exception, exciting. The fact that Barry was going to produce an album for me made the project that much more intriguing. I had never analyzed what it was that made Barry Gibb songs so different, but when I started singing, his style of music did not come natural to me, as they say. His lyrics tend to all be on the upbeat, which is totally different from what everybody else does. We worked for hours to get things just right. I knew one thing for sure—I could never have been the fourth Bee Gee.

This was clearly a new direction for me. As Ken Kragen said years later, “Kenny is the master of retreating and attacking from another direction. And that’s different from reinventing yourself. Madonna reinvents herself. Kenny circles the wagons, comes in at a different angle, and comes up with something different.”

Well, I surely needed a different angle about now. Barry and I were working on a solo version of “Islands in the Stream,” written by three of the Gibb brothers, Barry, Robin, and Maurice. I had worked on this song with Barry for at least four days, something I was not used to doing. I finally told him I didn’t even like the song anymore. Pondering this for a split second, Barry had an epiphany. Without breaking stride he raised one finger in the air and said, “What we need is Dolly Parton.”

So I guess “Where’s Dolly?” started way back then. What are the chances that Barry, recording in L.A. and not Nashville, says “Dolly Parton,” and forty-five minutes later, probably via Ken Kragen, Dolly marches through the door and changes my life forever? She happened to be in town and in pure Dolly fashion, just signed on to the idea without a lot of hemming and hawing. The minute she started singing, we all knew this was going to be special. In a matter of hours, we did have something special. Who could have known how that song would take off around the world? Who could have known that a fateful recording session in L.A. would lead Dolly and me, over the next five years, into producing four television specials and three albums, doing two world tours together, and creating another No. 1 hit, “Real Love” and a lifetime of memories?

I’ve lived through earthquakes in California, twisters in Kansas, and hurricanes in Georgia, but nothing prepared me for working with Dolly. Before we started touring, we rehearsed for a week or so. I was sure I could hold my own, but quickly learned, when Dolly comes marching out onstage, I don’t care who you are, you might as well stand back.

Our first night together, I almost started clapping for her myself when she came out. We were working in the round and when we began singing, we were to enter from opposite sides of the stage and meet in the middle. By the time I got to the top of the stairs, she was already on my side of the stage, at which point she announced, “Come on up here, Kenny! What’s keeping you? You’re not that old!” Remember, this was our very first show together.