Luck or Something Like It (4 page)

We took turns singing lead and sang a lot of harmonies, because doo-wop and R&B harmonies were the music styles of the times. Although I played guitar, we were primarily a vocal group. I think I was the only musician in the band. We rehearsed in the basement of the church and ended up playing for sock hops at every school around. We were in high demand, or so we thought. Performing for free added a lot of luster to our career.

It wasn’t long before we felt that our sound was good enough to play for bigger audiences. My brother Lelan was a clothes salesman at the time, but he agreed to be our manager. Now we were pros. We had a manager.

Lelan was something else—a good-looking, slim, five-foot-eleven guy who always had a smile on his face. Nothing ever seemed to get him down. He always had a hello or a pat on the back when someone needed it. He was also a bit of a street hustler. If you weren’t streetwise back then, you’d get chewed up in that world of indie labels, major labels, promoters, producers, and clubs, both paying and nonpaying. Nobody chewed up Lelan Rogers, and he never tried to chew up anyone else. If anyone could help me maneuver through the mine fields of this business, it was Lelan.

Somehow, Lelan got us booked for a show at the officers’ club at a military base in San Antonio. So off we went, in a 1956 Ford Fairlane, for the 340-mile round trip. After playing two twenty-minute sets, we each got paid $13. Hell, we were professionals now!

What was important to us was that those air force officers had no idea that this was the band’s first real-for-sure paying gig. They treated us like professionals, and I believe that when you’re treated like a professional, you become a professional. After that night at the San Antonio officers’ club, we were off and running, at least as a cover group.

The hottest venue the Scholars ever played was a strip joint in Dallas allegedly owned by Jack Ruby, the mob-connected guy who shot Lee Harvey Oswald. This was a club where patrons would put up with twenty minutes of band music to see the main attraction: dancers like legendary Texas stripper Candy Barr. We would put in our twenty minutes, then trip over each other racing to the balcony to see Candy in action. And not one of us was of legal age.

Life was good.

Chapter Five

Goin’ Solo

The Scholars formed in
1956 and developed throughout 1957, but in the middle of all this, an abrupt, unforeseen event turned my life upside down. The first girl I had ever had sex with got pregnant. Her name was Janice Way and I met her at one of the high school talent contests, where every band in the area took a shot at local stardom. Janice was beautiful and truly one of the sweetest girls I had ever met. She was a dancer, and a good one, a student of Patrick Swayze’s mom, Patsy, a fixture in the Houston dance community long before her son became a movie star. Janice and I had a few dates, and while we weren’t looking down the road to a future, we did care for each other. We didn’t know it at the time, but we had a future looming that read “big time.” This was the same time my brother Lelan decided that I should try to make it as a solo artist, as I’ll explain in a moment. But first, Janice and I had an appointment with a justice of the peace.

I got the call from Janice’s mother on a Wednesday. “You better get over here right now, Kenny,” Mrs. Way said. “I need to talk to you.”

“How about Saturday?” I replied, thinking foremost about my music.

“I don’t think so,” she barked. “You need to get here right now. We have plans to make. You and Janice are getting married on Saturday. My daughter is pregnant and you are responsible. Come tonight and be prepared to get married on Saturday, young man, do you understand?”

My response, as weird as it may sound now, was simply, “Well, okay.”

My family was stunned at the news that I was getting married in four days, to say the least. My dad sat at the table with his head in his hands. They thought they should go to Janice’s house with me.

“My God, son,” he said, “just when you are old enough to help out around here, you let this happen.”

“You’re the one,” I told him, “that taught me, ‘If you’re man enough to get yourself in trouble, then you need to be man enough to get yourself out.’ ”

So I went alone. Having no understanding of the seriousness of this moment, in some perverse way I was proud of myself.

Prior to Janice, when I was still the rule follower, I had always stopped before consummating the act. I understood how girls got pregnant and that guys had an obligation when they did. When my Janice got pregnant, I was fully prepared to take the step into married life. It never occurred to me to walk away from the responsibility. I was my mother’s son, after all. Not only was this Lucille Rogers’s personal moral code, it was mine, too. It was not for nothing that Kenneth Ray Rogers had taken the downtown bus to the First Baptist Church with his mom all those years.

The fact that I stood up to take responsibility at that moment did not mean my parents were happy about my getting married. They saw it from the perspective of losing another wage earner in the family. Our family hadn’t been out of the San Felipe projects that long. Both Lelan and Geraldine had quit high school to start working and help the family out, and my mom had hopes that with a high school degree, I could earn even more. She wanted me to be happy and pursue my dreams—something a teenage marriage threatened—but she was also determined to bring her family out of poverty, and I was part of the plan.

I saw the marriage in a different light. When I got married, I thought that having a wife just meant a guy could have sex anytime he happened to think about it, which in my case was
all
the time. I can still see the look on my dad’s face when I told him my all-sex/all-the-time theory of wedded bliss. He looked at me and shook his head.

“Just know this, son,” he said. “Sooner or later you’ll have to get out of bed.”

Janice and I were married on May 15, 1958, and our daughter, Carole, was born the following September. At the time, I honestly didn’t feel “trapped” or cheated out of anything. I thought the idea of being married was pretty cool. The Scholars were going strong, plus I was sitting in with groups around town and even playing in some recording sessions. We moved in with Janice’s parents for a year until I had a job that paid enough to rent an apartment. We bought furniture for the living room, dining room, and bedrooms. We were playing house.

Around the time Janice and I were married, I graduated from high school. I became the first person in my family to walk across the stage and pick up a high school diploma. My mom and dad and seven siblings were so proud that day. It seemed like a turning point for my family and its hope for a better future.

Now out of high school, I took any musical job I could find and also worked a series of day jobs, trying to earn enough for rent and diapers. It was important to me that we had our own place and furniture we could call our own. I even saved up enough to buy a brand-new “pea green” 1959 Chevrolet. I did everything I could to pay the bills and still keep my hand in the music business. I had a dream; I was married; I had a beautiful wife and a beautiful daughter. I was happy.

I landed a day job selling office supplies, carbon paper, and typewriter ribbons. I was determined to make a success of both the sales job and my so-called music career, so I planned my schedule carefully. I played music at night, then came straight home and got some sleep. At eleven
A.M.
, I was off to the day job. I started by making appointments with people working at offices in the Gulf Building in downtown Houston. I would begin on the top floor and work my way down to ground level. Even though I was only showing up for three hours a day, I was the company’s top salesman. I figured that I was doing pretty damn good. Unfortunately, my boss, Ed Benson, saw it otherwise and fired me.

First he called me in and demanded that I work a regular nine-to-five schedule. “But I’m already selling more than anybody else,” I said.

“That doesn’t matter,” Ed said. “Just think how much you could sell if you put in a full day. Look at the commissions you could be earning!”

“I don’t care about the commissions,” I countered. “I’m doing just fine.”

“Well,” he replied, “you’re bringing down the company’s morale. You’re the top salesman and only working three hours a day!” I found that to be a position I couldn’t argue with. Ed had a point. I had to go.

Ed Benson was actually a good guy. He and his wife, Elaine, liked me and no doubt just thought I was undisciplined. The trouble was, it wasn’t discipline I lacked. It was time. I needed every hour I could squeeze out of a day to become a musician.

The truth is, Janice’s parents never got used to the idea of their son-in-law being a musician, whether I was making money with a series of day jobs or not. Once they saw that I wasn’t going to change my career ambitions away from music, they wanted little to do with the marriage. They wrote me off as a long-term breadwinner, and our marriage turned sour and lasted only until the next October of 1959.

The whole thing ground to a halt one day when our daughter, Carole, was about six months old. Janice and I were having what some might call an argument, but it was actually more of a difference of opinion. I don’t even remember what it was about. I am capable of getting pretty heated during an exchange of views, and Janice was the kind of person who hated confrontation.

The one thing I didn’t want to happen was to say something that would hurt Janice or fill me with guilt and regret down the line. I loved Janice and had no intention of hurting her. Plus, remember, I never saw my dad, even in his most drunken state, fight with my mom. I hadn’t grown up around parents who yelled at each other or said nasty things. So I decided to take a walk and cool off.

“I’m gonna walk around the block,” I said. “Let’s not say things that will be hard to take back.” I left, walked around a while, and returned to the apartment to find Janice’s mother there helping her pack.

“You’ve ruined my daughter’s life,” she snapped. “I’m taking her out of here, and don’t you ever call her again.” I was so shocked I honestly didn’t know what to think or do. Afterward I kept trying to get Janice on the telephone, but I never could make it past her parents. Finally one day I called in the middle of the day and Janice answered. I had my speech prepared.

“This is crazy, Janice,” I said. “I love you. Let’s go somewhere with Carole and get a sandwich or something and try to work this out. I know we can.”

“Just a second,” she replied. “I have to ask my mother.” When she came back to the phone, she said, “I’m sorry, Kenneth, but Mother won’t let me go.”

Janice’s parents obviously thought I was worthless. That’s when I decided to just walk away. That’s how I have always been with unresolved, and seemingly irresolvable, situations. I give someone every chance, but if the situation turns bad, I completely shut down. I close myself off to that person and it’s never the same for me. It’s like a light switch. I click it off and walk away.

In April 1960, less than two years after we married, our divorce was finalized, with Janice having custody of Carole and me paying $80 a month in child support. The divorce was hard enough, but losing Carole was extremely painful.

Soon after, Janice married another high school boyfriend, David Billingsley, and she asked that Carole be adopted by them. She also wanted to change Carole’s name to Billingsley. I reluctantly agreed. I wasn’t happy with the decision, but I truly believed Carole would be better off with a dad in the house with her, whose name she used, rather than trying to explain where her real father was. I made a conscious effort not to create problems for their family. Consequently, my daughter and I never had a chance to really bond. I’m not sure I handled the situation in the best possible way, but I was very young and simply made what I thought was the best decision at the time.

So that was the end of that intense, emotionally confusing teenage marriage. I have said this often: music, at least for me, is like a mistress, and she’s a difficult mistress for a wife to compete with. It took me five tries to find the right woman and get this marriage thing all worked out in my life. Looking back, I think the failure of each of my first three marriages was 85 percent my fault. If success—and I’m not talking about dollars but about professional acceptance—had been less important, I could probably have stayed with any of the three. But at the time, especially with Janice, the need to succeed was more important than holding a marriage together.

I’ve long thought about my marriages and about being so career-driven. Just the other night, I sat up in bed and thought,
You know, Kenny,
there’s a fine line between being driven and being selfish.
And I may have crossed that line.

Even before my days
with Janice were over, the Scholars had their shot at fame and fortune. Lelan arranged for us to record a tune called “Poor Little Doggie” on Jimmy Duncan’s local Houston label, Cue Records. Soon after, we recorded a follow-up, “Spin the Wheel.” Neither went very far, but they got us some national distribution. Then Lelan set up a recording deal with Imperial Records in L.A., the people who brought you Fats Domino and Ricky Nelson, among other ’50s stars. We cut a couple of forgettable tunes before we got to what would become the group’s swan song, a tune called “Kan-Gu-Wa.” This was written by the then-famous gossip columnist Louella Parsons. The idea was that if we cut her song, Ms. Parsons might help promote us through her column.

“Kan-Gu-Wa” was as close to the big time as the Scholars got.

The record company flew us out to Los Angeles to record. That was my very first trip outside of the state of Texas. It was quite an experience for a bunch of greenhorn kids still in high school. The label booked us rooms at a hotel and hired some of the top studio musicians in town for the sessions. In addition, we were each paid the princely sum of $150.

“Kan-Gu-Wa” went nowhere, but the experience of being in Los Angeles, a world away from Houston, stayed with me. I knew that despite how rich the music scene in South Texas might be, everything I wanted for the future was happening in Los Angeles, California. That trip just fed my ambition to shoot for the moon.

Like most teenage bands, even those who got the thrill of cutting records, the Scholars soon went by the wayside. One guy decided to go to college. The L.A. experience had convinced another that he should try to become a solo singer. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when “Kan-Gu-Wa” flopped and the band broke up. Remember, I was never the lead singer of the group—I sang first tenor and played the guitar. But still, all I knew was that I wanted to keep singing and playing my guitar.

Though nothing came of it, my brother Lelan succeeded in steering the Scholars from Cue, a local label, to Imperial, a national one. And though the Scholars disbanded, Lelan was sticking with me. Like a lot of promoters, Lelan himself wasn’t musical. But he
loved
music, especially R&B. He knew everybody on that side of the business, and he later became heavily involved in the careers of some terrific talents, including Big Al Downing and Esther Phillips. He may not have been credited with everything he did, but he was there pulling strings. I am still in awe of him.

While I was working at being young and married, Lelan was spending time with a local singer-songwriter named Ray Doggett, who was writing songs for guys named Jimmy Duncan and Larry Kane there in Houston. Ray was on Decca and trying to decide what material to record when he asked Lelan for advice on his songs. The minute Lelan heard Ray’s “That Crazy Feeling,” he thought it was right for me, so, under the more formal-sounding name of Kenneth Rogers, we released the song on the Carlton label.

Larry Kane had a local television show in Houston using the
American Bandstand
format. I was scheduled to perform “That Crazy Feeling” on that show as Kenneth Rogers. Larry graciously told me, “You can’t use Kenneth Rogers; it’s too formal. You need to be Kenny Rogers.” I said I really didn’t want to do that because it would break my mom’s heart. But once the show started, Larry Kane introduced me as Kenny Rogers, against the best instincts of both my mom and me. Every little girl in the audience clapped and screamed “We love you, Kenny!!!” With that, the decision had been made—I was now Kenny Rogers.