Balladeers like Kenny Rogers don’t come around often
Mickey Jones, a drummer and actor from Houston, remembered getting mistaken for the singer of the First Edition shortly before the band became known as Kenny Rogers and the First Edition.
“We had a routine on tour. Kenny and I would have breakfast together at the airport coffee shop every morning,” Jones said. “One day, he’d pick up the check and I’d run ahead to the gate. The next day, we’d do it the other way. So one of us was always about 30 steps behind the other. One day, this businessman sees us and asks me, ‘Are you guys the First Edition?’ I told him we were. He says, ‘I knew it!’ and he points to Kenny and says, ‘I recognized the drummer.’ ”
Rogers’ recognizability, and fortunes, would soon change after that.
The First Edition put two songs in the Top 40 between 1968 and 1969, and another five after changing its name. The band’s run cooled, though it stuck together until 1976. From it, Rogers emerged as a solo artist who bridged pop and country music with a rare degree of success. He put out another 21 pop hits and had enough country hits to decorate his life and a few others as well.
Prior to Beyoncé, Rogers, 78, was the most successful singer to come out of Houston, due in part to his ability to hear hits that didn’t neces-
sarily fit neatly within a single genre. Anybody with half a voice can sing repeatedly within the confines of a genre. A great balladeer operates outside those confines, whether it’s Willie Nelson, Tony Bennett or Tom Waits.
“Ballads say what every man would like to say and every woman wants to hear,” Rogers said. He knows the form well. Rogers earlier announced his current tour would be his last. He stops Friday at the Stafford Centre to say farewell to the town that first shaped his music career when he was the bassist in a Houston jazz trio, the first stop on a peculiar path that would move through folk, psychedelic rock, country music and becoming a cultural icon.
As testament to his crossover appeal, his two No. 1 pop hits, “Lady” and “Islands in the Stream,” were written by Lionel Richie and Barry Gibb, respectively. Rogers had an ear for a hit, which is why he reached out to Richie in 1980 asking for something akin to “Three Times a Lady,” which was one of the hits Richie wrote for the Commodores.
“I just wrote, ‘Baby, I’m your knight in shining armor and I love you … bah bah bah bah,’ ” Richie said. “And Kenny asked, ‘Where’s the rest of the song?’ I told him if he liked it, I’d finish it. He said, ‘Let me tell you a story. I married this girl named Mary Ann, and I had no business being with her because she was a lady. A full-on lady. I don’t know what she was doing with a country guy like me. … What was the name of the song again?’
“I said, ‘Um … ‘Lady.’ ” Just dropped in
Rogers once told David Letterman that Bobby Doyle was the greatest musician with whom he’d ever worked.
Doyle’s career certainly didn’t enjoy the heights that Rogers’ did, but the Bobby Doyle Three was, for a time in the late 1950s, one of the hottest bands playing Houston. Rogers joined the group as a bassist and vocalist while attending Jefferson Davis High School.
Rogers’ family didn’t have much money when he was growing up. He attended Wharton Elementary in Montrose, which today is a dual-language academy. His parents were musical, but neither pursued it as Rogers did. By age 20, he was making $800 a week.
“That band was great,” said producer Steve Tyrell, who was a performer in Houston at the time. “They got really big really quickly here and started playing Vegas. It doesn’t get written about much because he’s been so successful as a singer, but he was a terrific bassist.”
Rogers’ brother Lelan, an eventual record producer, brokered an early record deal for him. Rogers cut a 45, “That Crazy Feeling,” in the late ’50s, which was popular in the region, though the old-fashioned, doo-wop-influenced tune didn’t get heard much outside Houston.
Thinking his prospects would improve elsewhere, Rogers headed west in the mid-’60s.
“In Houston I was a jazz singer,” he told the Chronicle in 2012. Rogers was unavailable to speak prior to this week’s show. “I arrived in California and became a folk singer.”
He briefly joined the New Christy Minstrels before putting together the First Edition, which threaded together folk and rock. They looked the part, too, decked out in matching uniforms that drew equally from staid folk vocal groups and bellbottomed ’60s excess.
They made their first impression with a song by a Houstonian, Mickey Newbury.
“He’d written part of ‘Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In),’ ” Tyrell said. “He called me because he’d played it for Kenny, and Kenny wanted to record it. I said, ‘Give it to him!’ ”
The song reached No. 5 on the charts in 1968.
A year later, as Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, they’d cut Mel Tillis’ “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” which had been a country hit for another artist. The band was one song short for its next album, and producer Jimmy Bowen was about to leave town. Rogers, in a panic, remembered the Tillis song from a Roger Miller record.
“He said, ‘Run it down,’ ” the drummer Jones said. On the fly, Jones tapped out the now iconic intro. According to Jones, the entire session lasted 20 minutes, and the song was considered filler.
But in 1969, radio stations in Boston and Denver began to play “Ruby” instead of the album’s single, and it became an unlikely Top 10 hit.
Rogers and the First Edition charted four more times through 1970, but then the hits ran dry. He went looking for a new style. Know when to run
Richie remembered the first time he saw Rogers. It was a promo photo from the early ’70s.
“He was standing in front of a mirror, his shirt unbuttoned down to the navel,” Richie said. “An earring and a chain around his neck. He was trying to be some kind of hippie. He told me one day he decided to take all that off and just wear what he wore on the street. That’s when he discovered Kenny Rogers.”
A new Kenny Rogers emerged in 1976, though the album “Love Lifted Me” didn’t make much of an impression. A year later, he put out a second solo album with a title suggested a new beginning: “Kenny Rogers.” Among the songs was one of marital woe and untended crops written by Roger Bowling and Hal Bynum. “Lucille” was a country song, yet it reached No. 5 on the pop charts thanks to a rousing singalong chorus worthy of Neil Diamond: “You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille.” At 39, the reinvented Rogers was a star again.
“Kenny, he knows good songs, good melodies,” producer Tyrell said. “He always knew what to do. It just took him some time to put it all together.”
Two lesser hits followed, and then in 1978 he struck gold again with what would become one of his best-known hits.
Bobby Bare had recorded “The Gambler,” a song written by a young North Carolina songwriter named Don Schlitz, but it went nowhere.
“The song was just waiting to find the right singer, and it did,” Schlitz said. “Of course, all the elements made that a perfectstorm song. It was following ‘Lucille,’ for heaven’s sake. It’s one of the great album covers of all time. And a persona that absolutely fit him.”
Rogers said the song’s appeal was because it was deeper than its titular subject.
“It’s not about a gambler,” he said. “It’s about a structure, a way to live life.”
It became a sizable part of Rogers’ life. “The Gambler” was a No. 1 country hit, won a Grammy, inspired a TV movie, and its refrain about knowing when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em became ingrained in the cultural lexicon.
By the time he made “Lady” in 1980, Rogers was one of the biggest pop stars of the day.
“When Lionel wrote those songs for him, it was just perfect,” ’60s pop star and Houston native Archie Bell said. “He was a dynamite entertainer already. You can always tell talent, but it doesn’t always get you there. But he knew what to do to get people’s attention.” Love the world away
After 1984, Rogers went 16 years without a pop hit. That time wasn’t kind to his legacy.
His roasted-chicken food chain — Kenny Rogers Roasters — made delicious chicken but struggled in a crowded field and declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1999. He’d still hit the country charts every now and then, though more often than not Rogers’ interactions with pop culture were played for comedic effect: “Seinfeld” featured his chicken chain in an episode. “Breaking Bad” used T-shirts with Rogers on them for a sight gag. Men who look like kenny rogers. com became an amusing and popular website.
“Hot Tub Kenny is my favorite,” Rogers said of the site, suggesting he could take a joke.
A year ago, he announced his plans to retire after a 2016-17 farewell tour. He and his wife have twin sons who are 12. And when he played Houston in 2012, he hinted at wanting to spend more time with the family, both at home and traveling. On that visit, he drove around his hometown, saddened that he recognized so little of it.
“We drove to every house I could remember, and they were all gone,” he said. “It’s like they wiped me from memory.”
The buildings are gone, and Rogers soon will give up performing. But beloved balladeers don’t come around often. It’s a status that will outlast Rogers after he goes silent.