Luck or Something Like It (8 page)

I was in Dallas visiting a friend of mine, Billy Bob Harris, in the late ’60s when he took me to a clothing store to look at some leather shirts. While standing at the rack, a young long-haired guy named Jerry Surratt approached me and asked if I was Kenny Rogers. He said he was with a band named Felicity and wanted to know if I could come see them perform that night. I told him that I didn’t go to clubs to see new groups. He said he thought I would really like them, and it would mean a lot to them if I came. Don’t ask me why, but for some reason I went.

I have to admit this little group of young guys from Linden, Texas (about 150 miles east of Dallas), was worth the trip. It was Jerry on piano, Mike Bowden on guitar, Richard Bowden playing bass, and a guy named Don Henley playing drums. They really were, as Jerry had promised, exceptional.

I was so impressed I went back to Jimmy Bowen and suggested he might want to sign and produce them. Once again in typical Bowen fashion, he said, “I won’t produce them, but I will sign them, on your word, and give you $10,000 and you can produce them.” Now that was pressure. So I brought the gang out to L.A. and the first thing we did was change their name to Shiloh, which we all felt was stronger than Felicity. And as part of the deal, I owned the publishing rights to their songs and produced their first album.

Two weeks later, while I was back in Texas, we all went out on dirt bikes and in a freak accident, Jerry, the guy I had met in the clothing store, was hit by a car and killed. A group can’t lose a partner, a friend and musician like Jerry, and stay the same. I don’t know how long the group lasted, but we all stayed in touch. I ran into Don Henley one day in L.A., and he said he had a chance to be part of a new group that was being formed, but he needed his publishing back in order to be a part of the group.

I was glad to return it to him. The group he was forming was the Eagles. I hope one of the songs I gave away wasn’t “Desperado,” but I was happy for him then and I am happy for him now. (Later on, Don would sing a Grammy-nominated duet with me, “Calling Me,” on my
Water and Bridges
album.)

“Just Dropped In” was
on our first album, along with Mike Settle’s “I Found a Reason.” Mike had written eight of the twelve songs for this album. In my estimation, the album should have done better than it did. It didn’t do that well, even though Tom Smothers had written the liner notes for it. Guess who won the Best Album of the Year for 1968? Our buddy Glen Campbell, for
By the Time I Get to Phoenix.

Despite the modest album sales, being on the road with the First Edition was a blast. First, we all got along, which doesn’t happen that often with musical groups on tour. I remember one of our first trips going to Boston from Los Angeles. We packed up our station wagon and van with just the five band members and Keith Bugos, our soundman/roadie, and headed cross-country. What seemed like an eternity at the time had a charm written all over it in retrospect. On the road we stayed two or three to a room. We were living the life. Our first night at the club, at least for the first show, we outnumbered the audience. But a true phenomenon was about to take place. A group that drew no people was actually on national TV that night. So we talked to the manager and he agreed that what few people were there would be more impressed to sit in the room with us and watch us on TV than see our show. So the
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
came on and the First Edition, managers, waitresses, and a few patrons pulled up chairs and watched us perform on a fifteen-inch TV. It was pretty impressive, even at that size. Interestingly enough, maybe because of the TV show or maybe because the patrons told their friends, we had great crowds from then on.

Long before the First Edition had success, we were driving all over the country in minivans, sometimes pulling a trailer, sometimes not. Mickey Jones and I traveled together most of the time. I didn’t like to drive, but once I got a hundred miles under my belt, I was golden. I could drive for twenty-four hours nonstop, and Mickey had the muscle to do the heavy lifting of equipment. We were a good team.

I can now confirm that in the two weeks of my college education, engineering was not offered. I’m pretty sure Mickey missed it as well.

A classic example of our engineering knowledge (or lack thereof) took place one night in Arizona. The group had landed in Phoenix at eight
P.M.
, in a twin-engine prop plane that we had literally bribed the porters in New York to get our equipment on as luggage. Mickey and I had not even discussed what we would do with it once we got there.

After we landed, we rented a van with a nice big luggage rack on top. We had lowered the seats and were completely loaded in the back of the van; I mean completely. We were so proud of our packing skills—we had gotten a lot of stuff in that van—proud that is, until we realized that sitting on the curb like a big monolith was my Dual Showman.

A Dual Showman, just so you know, is a huge leather-covered, high-powered amplifier for a bass. It is about four feet high, eighteen inches deep, and twenty-four inches wide, with a gross weight of maybe two hundred pounds. A true electronic behemoth. After a long deliberation, Mickey and I decided that, as heavy as it was, if we could just muscle it onto the top, where it fit perfectly, it would ride there safely. We tipped a porter to help us get it up and on. We were convinced that sucker wasn’t going anywhere. Okay, we knew this much: we could not leave without it. We had three hundred miles to travel to the next city for a show the next day and no alternative but to get it on the van.

So now for the good part. We hadn’t gone twenty miles before we had both forgotten about our passenger on top. We’re laughing and telling jokes when we hear what sounds like an airplane crash behind us. We both snapped around to see what had happened and how much danger we were in.

At seventy miles an hour, the two-hundred-pound amplifier had become airborne. I can honestly say I have never seen leather spark like that before, but it looked remarkably like an asteroid shower behind us. It was very impressive.

Thank goodness there was no one behind us for miles. We must have driven back half a mile to get this mangled thing, and you can just imagine what kind of shape it was in.

Apparently two hundred pounds is safe on top up to a certain speed, but we had exceeded that speed. By a lot.

The next day when we were setting up onstage, Terry asked, “What happened?” We didn’t have the heart to confess how truly stupid Mickey and I were, so we did the next most honorable thing. We blamed the airlines.

More groups fall apart
because of drugs and alcohol than any other reason. Even though we looked wild and woolly and had a drug-themed song as a hit, the First Edition was a relatively tame outfit. Once in a while we would smoke a little pot, but that was about it. I remember one time, someone encouraged me to unwind and smoke before a performance. I decided to try it. I was fantastic onstage. I was witty, charming, and breezed through all the songs with ease.

This is great,
I thought. I was in tune with the universe, and I sounded wonderful—at least to me.

The next day Terry and the guys reviewed my performance from the night before. My supposedly clever banter with the audience went like this. “Uh . . . Uh . . . how are you guys? Like this, this next song, uh, uh, is called ‘All That I Am.’ ” That was it.

And my vocals were completely out of tune.

That was the one and only time I have ever gone onstage not completely clearheaded. I’m sure there were times that people thought I was high, but I promise you, I wasn’t. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve stayed away from drugs and alcohol for the most part. Partly because of a promise I made to myself as a young man, and partly because it is impossible to be professional if you’re stoned out of your mind. No one wants to have a conversation with a person whose scintillating contribution is “Hey, dude!”

But abstainer that I generally am, you never know what is going to happen when Mickey Newbury is involved. First, he couldn’t even sing or play when he wanted to join my no-name high school band; then in a matter of months, he turned it all around to become a brilliant vocalist and a solid guitarist. After that inauspicious beginning, he gave us “Just Dropped In,” which in turn gave us street cred during 1968, a time of massive social change, when music was expected to be edgy and in many cases, drug related. The First Edition was not made up of a bunch of druggies, especially when it came to me and Mickey Jones. On the other hand, I did my first and only hard drugs with Mickey Newbury. He was my friend and I trusted him.

Mickey was staying with me at my house in California when he brought out what he said was LSD, but in reality was psilocybin, a naturally occurring compound often found in “magic” mushrooms. It wouldn’t have made any difference to me what he’d called the stuff, because I wouldn’t have known the difference.

“We gotta try this,” Mickey said.

“Well, okay.” He didn’t get any argument from me. Maybe he was paying me back for rejecting him in high school. He was going to send me on a trip I would never forget.

Then we did the psilocybin, went into another psychic realm, and sat there listening to Cat Stevens’s song “Sad Lisa” for
hours
. Just that one song, over and over again. For eight hours it was magical. I could hear every instrument on that song, and I fell in love with it. We took a pause, then listened for
another
eight hours. During that period of time, I found myself beginning to really dislike “Sad Lisa.” We then sat and listened to it for a few
more
hours. The whole experience scared me to death. That’s why I never did the drug again.

The worst thing of it all was when I realized that I still had to drive Mickey to the airport. I swear to God that I never drove faster than twenty-five miles an hour the entire way, and yet there was Mickey sitting beside me shouting, “Slow down, man! Slow down!”

So much for my crazy drug days.

Chapter Nine

Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town

After starting out so great
with “Just Dropped In,” in 1967, 1968 turned out to be brutal for us. We were working steadily, but we couldn’t buy another hit. Plus, it was a strange time in America. We were working with Richard Pryor at Mr. Kelly’s Club in Chicago when Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. I remember that out of respect for Dr. King and the seriousness of the event, we canceled the rest of our engagement there. There was a lot of unrest in the country in 1968, what with the Vietnam War and peace demonstrations all over the U.S. and Robert Kennedy’s shooting, plus the King assassination and the North Korean capture of one of our ships, the USS
Pueblo.
In many ways, it was a nightmare of a year.

It was a strange time for the group, too. As I mentioned earlier, Thelma Camacho was this hot little lady with the pixie haircut. Everyone who met her fell in love with her. That probably explains what happened to us during an appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show.
Ken Kragen had been trying to make the First Edition into a household name and we were all excited to be doing
Sullivan
, then the number one variety show on TV. We had a rehearsal in the afternoon and it went fine. “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the First Edition,” Ed said, and we came out and did our song. The second go-round, for the actual nighttime show, he says, “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome . . .” and he couldn’t remember the name, so he says, “Thelma and her boys!” So much for name recognition.

Thelma was such an integral member of the band, but she became conflicted about touring. Finally, in 1968, we had to let her go. I’m not sure she wasn’t happy about our decision. She was tired of traveling and had fallen in love, so I don’t think it came as much of a shock or disappointment to her.

Now we had to replace her. She was very charismatic, and we knew it wouldn’t be easy. We held a vocal casting call. We must have auditioned at least thirty or forty female singers, and not one of them seemed right for the group. One of the people we auditioned was, believe it or not, Karen Carpenter. She was obviously great, but her voice just didn’t work with our sound. After all the panic, the right person was right in front of our eyes. Thelma had had a roommate for the last two years of her tenure with us named Mary Arnold. We all knew her and liked her very much. Sensing our frustration, Mary spoke up one day and said: “Can I try? Believe me—I know these songs backward and forward.”

We were all a little taken aback by Mary’s request, not remembering that she had heard all our songs every day for two years and had previously been with a group called the Young Americans. She knew her way around a stage.

Mary came in for literally one rehearsal and started doing shows with us right away. She picked up right where Thelma left off. What a lifesaver she was. Mary would eventually marry a man I introduced her to, the legendary singer-songwriter Roger Miller. They were still together when he passed away.

Despite smoothly replacing Thelma with Mary, our calling card, “Just Dropped In,” had actually become a bit of a monster for us. It had given us a hip, young, mind-expanding image, which wasn’t really us personally or musically. It had also given us, we thought, a springboard to showcase who we really were and to promote our choice of music. We could not have been more wrong. The music community wanted more of the bizarre, and we had nothing similar to offer.

We tried recording several ballads after “Just Dropped In,” but nothing seemed to work. The feeling was that we had squandered a great opportunity by not following our big hit with the right kind of record to keep the momentum going. Now we weren’t certain which direction we should go. Then, low and behold, Mike Settle gave us another chance at radio, and a more comfortable image for the group, with “But You Know I Love You,” a great song he had written that went on to become a BMI Award–winning song, which was later recorded by Dolly Parton, Bill Anderson, and Alison Krauss, among others.

With the surprise success of “But You Know I Love You,” we had found new life on radio, and we were taking no chances this time. We asked Mike to write us another song as a follow-up. He did—“Once Again She’s All Alone.” It was perfect. It was vintage Mike Settle. We released it as our next single. It was doing very well on the charts, which, ironically, soon created yet another problem for us. We seemed to have an affinity for making things difficult when by all appearances they should have been easy.

Mike Post had produced our first three albums, but his phenomenal success, and our lack of it at the time, forced him to move on with his career. So now Jimmy Bowen stepped in to produce us.

A friend of mine with Mercury Records, Frank Luffell, had come to my house to play me a Roger Miller recording of a song written by Mel Tillis entitled “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.” This was one of the most powerful songs I had ever heard. Although Mel claims it was actually written about the Korean War, people assumed, I guess because one lyric referred to a “crazy Asian war,” that it was about Vietnam. In all fairness, the song never specifically mentions either Korea or Vietnam. It is the story of a paralyzed, bedridden war veteran who, while he understands the needs of his young wife, agonizes over her infidelity. If he could, he would get out of bed and shoot her for cheating. He begs her not to take her love to town. The song is in his tormented voice:

It wasn’t me that started that old crazy Asian war,

But I was proud to go and do my patriotic chore.

And, yes, it’s true that I’m not the man I used to be.

Oh, Ruby, I still need some company.

This soulful narrative became an anthem for the unseen victims of war, those who were injured but not killed. They were unnoticed and unheralded.

I think Jimmy understood the country-rock genre where this song belonged better than Mike Post, which was so fortunate for us. We were so much more comfortable in that category than being psychedelic head-benders. It was a natural evolution, much in the same that drug-related music gave way to the Eagles and Jackson Browne in the 1970s. At the end of one recording session, we had twenty minutes left. In those days, you had three hours to do three songs, then you went into “overtime” and that was expensive. Plus, there were others waiting to use the studio.

As we were about to leave, I asked Jimmy if I could use the time we had left to do a song I had heard that I thought would be great. After I told Jimmy the concept of the song, I think he saw what had attracted me to it, but his words were “Because of the depressing lyrics, you will never get that song played on the radio.” I agreed, but then assured him, “Yeah, but if we do, it could be huge.”

So he said, “You have twenty minutes. . . . Have at it.”

We had performed this song in the live show so many times we knew we could do it. So Mickey, Terry, and I played on the track to save time. Mickey did some amazing things on the drums. Terry played a trademark scratch guitar, and I focused on the vocals. Twenty minutes later—and in one take—“Ruby” was done.

“Ruby” fit the mold of a classic story song or ballad, a song that was a narrative tale set to music. Such ballads have been a mainstay of traditional folk music since medieval minstrels went from village to village singing the adventures of Robin Hood. Many of the most memorable songs in both pop and country are ballads like this, from the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” to Johnny Cash’s classic “A Boy Named Sue.” Having sung a lot of story songs in my folk days with the Christys, I had an affinity for the form. A story song, to have any impact, demands that you listen to the lyrics and imagine the scenario in your head. I had the kind of voice and vocal style that could make those lyrics both understood and felt. Later, when I became a soloist, story songs became an essential part of my success, from “Lucille” to “The Gambler” and back. I guess I was born to sing these kinds of plaintive, often tragic tales.

As I’ve often said onstage, many of them are about dysfunctional families. And like “Ruby,” the narrator is often someone who has been badly hurt by life. Think of “Reuben James,” “Lucille,” or “Coward of the County.” What that says about me or the appeal of the songs, I don’t know.

Now, for the problem “Ruby” created. While “Once Again She’s All Alone” was starting to get some traction on radio, a few pop stations had discovered “Ruby” and were starting to play it in regular but light rotation. It was probably a test to see if their audience would accept the hard-core lyric of a paralyzed man watching his wife go to town to cheat on him. As you can imagine, the record company started to get excited. We went from no airplay to two records on the air at the same time.

Whenever a situation like this arises, there comes a point where one record has to be sacrificed for the sake of promoting a potentially bigger record. No station is going to play two songs at the same time by the same artist. Unless, of course, you have someone around who thinks outside the box. That was Jimmy Bowen. Jimmy came up with the idea of putting my name in front of the group on “Ruby” so as to separate the records from each other. “Once Again” was by the First Edition. The label for “Ruby” would now read Kenny Rogers and the First Edition.

Well, now, nobody understands group dynamics better than I do, having been in so many groups and watched so many dissolve for reasons just like this. It’s the kiss of death for a functioning group of musicians to suddenly be renamed with one name in front. Jimmy put a different spin on it—having two songs on radio at the same time—and that seemed to help. Believe me, it is not something I fought for or particularly wanted. I liked being in this group on equal status with all its members. We were friends first, musicians second. By framing it as a wise business decision, and not simply favoring one performer over the others, Jimmy took some of the sting out of the adjustment.

Bowen’s rationale for the name change was the audience needed one person they knew and could like or dislike when they heard the name. They needed a face and a voice they could recognize. It had been my lead voice on “Just Dropped In” and now, “Ruby.” He compared the switch to then-noted examples like Paul Revere and the Raiders and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.

The audience didn’t have to like that person in particular, but the name in front helped them remember the group and ultimately their music. I can only assume this logic didn’t apply to groups like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. Again, in our case, the concept worked only if it allowed radio stations to play two of our records at the same time.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. “Ruby,” with its topical war reference and tragic narrative about a forgotten soldier, went to No. 2 on the charts with the new group name. We, and America, never heard about “Once Again She’s All Alone” again.

We decided to try to find another story song of a similar ilk to follow “Ruby.” The ballad that we picked, “Reuben James,” came to us in a very bizarre way. After the success of “Ruby,” songwriters were pitching their music to us on a daily basis. We were spending a lot of time listening to demos, trying to find a good, strong follow-up tune. One day I was playing in a Jimmy Bowen celebrity golf tournament in Calabasas, California, and this guy started running alongside me. Between shots he would say, “Kenny, I’ve got a great song for you!” Trying to be polite, but a little miffed that some joker would interrupt my golf game to pitch a song, I tried to brush him off.

“Well,” I said, “I appreciate it, but as you can see, I’m playing golf right now. Maybe you could wait until I’m done.” I did my best not to sound sarcastic.

“No,” he insisted, “let me tell you about it now . . .” Normally, that kind of rude behavior wouldn’t have gotten the guy a handshake, let alone a fair hearing of his song, but damned if he didn’t follow me to the next hole . . . singing! And even though I didn’t want to be, I was drawn into the song. It was clearly unique and compelling. “Reuben James” was a song about a black man raising a white child. When it came out, it continued our musical trend of doing songs that made some kind of social statement. I wasn’t on a crusade, mind you. It wasn’t the politics of these songs that meant as much to me as the raw, human emotion.

The gossip of Madison County died with child,

And although your skin was black,

You were the one that didn’t turn your back

On the hungry white child with no name,

Reuben James

As it turned out, the guy who pestered me on the golf course wasn’t even the writer! He was just pitching the song for writers Alex Harvey and Barry Etris. They should have given him a raise. It’s hard to find that kind of commitment anymore.

Thankfully, “Reuben James” was a success. It didn’t soar quite like “Ruby,” but it was a solid hit. Our fourth album, entitled (naturally)
Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,
and including “Reuben James,” was released in October 1969. With four popular songs out there—“Ruby,” “Reuben,” “But You Know I Love You,” and our old stalwart, “Just Dropped In”—1969 was a very good year. These songs consistently put us in the Top 40, not only in the rock market, but in pop as well. This was quite a change from the stagnant year of 1968. A good part of this success was due to the efforts and the genius of Ken Kragen.

Ken knew the work involved in building a music act and continued to wheel and deal us onto the most popular television programs in the country. In ’69, we appeared on
The Red Skelton Hour, The Jonathan Winters Show,
and
The Andy Williams Show,
among others. We even hit talk shows like
The Tonight Show
and
The Merv Griffin Show.

A few years later, the First Edition appeared on Mac Davis’s variety show on NBC. While in the studio, we told Mac, the first-rate songwriter responsible for Elvis hits like “A Little Less Conversation” and “In the Ghetto,” that we were looking for new material for our next album. Soon after, Mac invited me to come by his house so he could play me some new songs he had written.