Interview: Kenny Rogers Reflects on Career, Crossover Success

At the dawn of the ‘80s, as outlaws and urban cowboys staked their turf on either side of the country and pop fence, Kenny Rogers bridged the divide.

A mere four years since he first attained mainstream solo stardom with “Lucille”—and after a string of subsequent smashes like “The Gambler” and “She Believes in Me” continued his good fortune—the former First Edition singer achieved the highest pinnacle of his career, topping not only the country charts but, for the first time, the pop charts as well with “Lady.”

While he’d flirted with the pop charts before, with “Lady”—composed and produced by another proven hitmaker of the era, Lionel Richie—Rogers assumed the sort of stature otherwise reserved for music’s unmitigated superstars. Indeed, the rhapsodic ballad broadened his audience to an unprecedented degree, while at the same time heralding even more crossover collaborations to come, not only with Richie but also with likes of Barry Gibb (“Islands in the Stream”), James Ingram (“What About Me?”), and Richard Marx (“Crazy”), among others.

Now on the road for the final time, on a tour billed as The Gambler’s Last Deal, the 78-year-old music legend recently reflected on how his mainstream appeal—particularly how such crossover success hasn’t compromised his homegrown country music credentials—bears its roots in his earliest, most foundational experiences. In doing so, he reminisced on how his adolescent musical passion ultimately inspired one of the most celebrated careers in all of popular music.

“When I was in high school I played guitar,” Rogers explained during a conference call with select music journalists, “and I met this guy [Bobby Doyle] doing commercials in Houston who was blind and he was about my age and he said he wanted me to come play bass with his jazz group. I said, ‘Well, Bobby, I don’t play bass and I don’t play jazz … I’m a country singer and a country player.’ He said, ‘I’ll teach you how to play bass and trust me, there’s more demand for bad bass players than there are bad guitar players.’ I thought about every group I’d seen. They’d all had a bass player; they didn’t all have guitar players.”

Rogers was convinced, and the tutelage he received as a bassist began to serve him well in short order, manifesting in both practical and often surrealistically impractical moments. “We used to work across the street from the Shamrock Hotel in Houston,” Rogers recalled, “and people would come in—big names would come in to work there—and we had an after-hours job. They would come over after hours just to have a place to go. Tony Bennett used to come in and sing with us all the time. Every time he was in town he’d come across the street and sing with us and it was really something special.”

Beyond reaping the benefits that often come with knowing how to play a musical instrument, Rogers said the experience of performing live with Bennett and various other artists of the day in turn facilitated the eclectic—and successful—career that lay ahead. “When people came in you had to learn to play their type of music,” he said, “and we would do that. We had all kinds of people come in, and each one of them was kind of different. Al Hirt used to come in and play with us. So that was another direction we had to go. It was just a wonderful life.”

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Lionel Richie Retraces Country Roots, Rekindles Old Flames on Tuskegee

The seeds had likely been sown long before they surfaced in his songwriting, yet to various degrees throughout his career Lionel Richie has shown he has a soft spot for country music.

In Commodores songs like “Easy” and the underrated gem “Lucy” the influence was evident; whether in his down-to-earth, say-what-you-feel lyrics—“I gave you my heart and I tried to make you happy, but you gave me nothing in return,” he sang in “Sail On,” another one that sounded more Music City than Motown—or in the earthy, Southern drawl in Richie’s delivery.

Upon going solo, however, Richie branched out beyond the group's hardline R&B and funk foundation to embrace new influences, including mainstream country, in earnest.

There was “Deep River Woman,” on which the legendary Alabama—then at the peak of their success—sang backup; and to a lesser extent “My Love,” which featured Kenny Rogers hitting the high notes and harmonies. Richie’s rolled the dice a few times with The Gambler, in fact, producing his 1981 LP Share Your Love (which included hits “I Don’t Need You” and “Through the Years”) and penning “Lady”—a #1 smash on the country and pop singles charts.

And so Tuskegee (Mercury Nashville) doesn’t sound so much like a genre experiment as it does an extension of what Richie has been doing in fits and starts for years. A host of contemporary and veteran country acts are on hand and often help to effect new perspectives and contexts out of old memories, but the real stars here are the songs themselves. Most of them are instantly familiar—if you were awake in the ‘80s some were unavoidable—and just about all of the ones here have held up to time and interpretation.

Willie Nelson and Kenny Rogers know a thing or two about how to interpret a song, of course; and Richie creates magic with both of them, culminating in a poignant performance of “Easy” and an epic reprisal of “Lady,” respectively.

Also, Richie and a sublime-voiced Shania Twain offer a compellingly understated take on “Endless Love”—the only song here that was a duet to begin with—one that is attuned more to subtleties of an adult relationship than to the rapturous, burgeoning romance celebrated in the original. Other standouts include “My Love,” on which Kenny Chesney sings with a strikingly dignified, crooner-like cool; and “You Are,” which Blake Shelton injects with a homegrown shot of grit and twang to make it arguably the most characteristically country-sounding cut on the album.

Indeed this is not your daddy’s country music, but the timeless qualities that made those old songs great are by and large the same as the ones present in Richie’s best work and, specifically, in the music on this album: stories to which anybody can relate and melodies which everybody will remember.

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(First published at Blinded By Sound.)

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DVD Review: Bee Gees - In Our Own Time

In a career as extensive and artistically diverse as that of the Bee Gees, perhaps the one prevailing theme has been the group’s near-prodigious ability to compose songs that are both of their time and timeless. It's what makes classics like “To Love Somebody,” “Massachusetts,” and “How Deep Is Your Love” seem as vital and moving today as when they were originally released. And it's this distinction that underscores In Our Own Time, a new Eagle Rock documentary that commemorates fifty years of music by the Brothers Gibb.

The retrospective is told by the artists themselves, including all-new commentary by Barry and Robin Gibb as well as select and pertinent clips of the late Maurice Gibb, who died in January 2003. Along with a slew of archival footage—from a performance of “Words” on The Ed Sullivan Show to a recording session of “Tragedy” for the group’s 1979 LP, Spirits Having Flown—the overall presentation is as enlightening as it is irresistibly entertaining.

In chronicling the highs and lows of their history—including the all-too-brief life and career of their younger brother, Andy—the film traces the Gibb’s evolution as songwriters and composers. Indeed, when the Bee Gees endured the consequences of oversaturation in the aftermath of the Saturday Night Fever phenomenon, they possessed the wherewithal—and the talent—to switch gears and write for other artists. In so doing, they notched sizable hits with the likes of Diana Ross (“Chain Reaction”), Dionne Warwick (“Heartbreaker”), Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton (“Islands in the Stream”), and Barbra Streisand (“Guilty”), among others. As such, their career continued unabated; it just took a different shape for a while.

The immense achievements and stature of the Bee Gees merit more of a concentrated assessment—something along the lines of The Beatles Anthology or Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who—yet In Our Own Time nonetheless does a fine job of profiling one of the most legendary and beloved groups in pop music history.

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