The three sides of Kenny Rogers
Kenny Rogers begins our interview with a piece of advice.
No, it’s not, “Know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em,” but something more valuable.
“If you’re ever going to tell your life story, don’t write anything that anyone can dispute,” he laughs from his Atlanta home. “You don’t keep notes of your life, so you can’t prove anything. If you tell the truth, nobody cares.
“If you lie, everybody finds out about it.”
Good advice, but Rogers is wrong on one point. A lot of people are going to care about the truth he tells in Luck or Something Like It, his engagingly honest autobiography published in Canada this week by Harper Collins. (His only personal appearance in the area will be on Oct. 5 at the Walmart at 675 Upper James St. in Hamilton.)
“I’m really three people,” he says. “Who I think I am, who you think I am and who I really am. Add ’em all up. That’s Kenny Rogers.”
So who is that? A dirt-poor boy from Houston, Tex., who worked in just about every musical genre except classical. He’s been in doo-wap, blues, jazz, folk, rock and — most memorably — country. He’s had more than 120 hit singles and five wives, although he laughingly denies the two are connected.
“I’m not afraid of commitment. I really loved every woman I married and I look back fondly on them with great memories.”
Even those hardscrabble days starting in 1938, when he grew up with six other brothers and sisters in a three-room public housing development, have a certain glow when filtered through Rogers’ bourbon-and-molasses voice.
His mother was named Lucille and you can bet she gave him hell in later life when he had a hit song about a woman of that name who left her husband and kids. “What in the world were you thinking of, Kenneth Ray?” he recalls her screaming at him. “What are the people going to think when they hear you singing about your mother leaving her family?”
They both could eventually laugh about it because, in truth, Lucille Rogers held the family together; the father, Edward, was a life-long alcoholic.
While admitting the pain that caused everyone, Rogers is willing to forgive and look at the good in the man.
“My dad had the greatest sense of humour of anyone I ever met. He wasn’t a mean drunk, he was a funny one. But he was still a drunk and there were times the paycheque didn’t make it home on Friday night.
“But there’s a good side to all of that. Because of him, I don’t drink. I never drank. I saw how it can destroy someone.”
Also, amazingly enough for someone who lived through the music scene of the ’60s and ’70s, drugs were never part of Rogers’ story (although he does relate a hysterical story about trying to perform during his one and only encounter with wacky tobaccy).
“I learned about drugs early, too. My sister was going to marry this amazing guy. The greatest athlete Texas had ever produced. He lettered in all five sports (basketball, baseball, swimming, track and football) during his first year at school. Then he got messed up in drugs and was never the same again.”
So Rogers didn’t drink and he didn’t do drugs, but he did love his women. His first marriage was due to a teenage pregnancy while he was in high school and her parents brought it to an end soon after the child was born.
His second, he candidly admits, “seems almost inconsequential to me now. I was on the rebound, I met her and she was breathtakingly beautiful. We didn’t fight, we didn’t argue. We just didn’t have a life.”
Marriages three and four lasted much longer, resulting in one child each, but they also ended in divorce. “It was all my fault,” admits Rogers. “There’s a fine line between driven and being selfish. I was so driven to be successful that I always sacrificed my family to my career.” But it wound up being quite a career. Starting out as a teen with a local band called The Scholars, he went on to play with the experimental jazz group The Bobby Doyle Trio for several years before trying to strike out as a solo artist. That failed, so he joined the squeaky-clean folk group The New Christy Minstrels, even though the shaggy-haired, gruff-voiced Rogers wasn’t quite their style. “I loved their music, truly I did, but it was the choreography that did me in.” He roars with glee. “Can you picture old burly me jumping up in the air on high notes and waving my arms around?” That didn’t last for long and — together with three other disaffected members of the group — he left to form a group called The First Edition, which later put his name up front. Their breakout hit was “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” a strange, bitter song about a crippled war veteran begging his young wife not to seek sexual satisfaction in a string of random encounters. Mel Tillis was inspired to write it about a true-life story concerning a WWII vet he knew, but he changed it to Korea in the lyrics. But as the years passed, he now called it “a crazy Asian war” and when Rogers sang it in 1969 at the height of anti-Vietnam feeling, it struck a chord.
“That was such an angry age. Everybody was rebelling against everything. Ten thousand people killed means nothing. One person whose life was destroyed means everything. That’s why the song hit home.”
Rogers wasn’t expecting that song to be such a winner, but he had no doubts about the one he sent to the moon in 1978, “The Gambler.”
“I thought that one was a home run the minute I heard it. The tune is great, there’s a good story to tell and I love telling good stories. But, best of all, it has a chorus people love to sing along with it. That’s the deal-maker.
“Theoretically, it’s about gambling, but realistically it’s a life history. Take me for example. Ever since I was kid and lost all my savings once at a penny arcade, I learned that I can’t ever win enough to excite me, but I can lose enough to depress me. So that’s another vice I keep clear of. But I understand that song.”
Rogers’ high-flying career dipped in the mid 1990s with a tough divorce, a phone-sex scandal and a loss of popularity, but he rode through it all with equanimity.
“Be happy where you are. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen. It’s how you handle the bad things that determine how long they’re going to last.”
He’s 74 now, but he’s been happily married for 13 years with two new children. (“Fifth time’s the charm,” he quips.) The career is going strong once again and he shows no sign of stopping.
But what does he think waits at the end of that concert tour called life?
“You have to make a choice. You either have to live life as if there isn’t a God and you find out there is, or that you believe there is a God and then you find out there isn’t.
“If there is a God, when I get there, I hope he asks me to sing ‘The Gambler.’ ”