When I was a young boy, the late, lamented Kenny Rogers was a ubiquitous presence on top 40 radio. His ballads fit in with a bunch of radio formats: country, pop, adult contemporary... the man was as mainstream as an artist could get, having a knack for duets with performers as diverse as Dolly Parton and Lionel Richie. It came as a surprise to an older me that he got his start with a psychedelic number, originally done by Mickey Newbury, with the band First Edition:
Yeah, who knew that Kenny Rogers could have given Roky Erickson a run for the money in the psychedelia business? As if that weren't weird enough, the reversed guitar intro to the studio version of Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In) was played by that other pop-country juggernaut, Glen Campbell.
The other big hit for First Edition was a melancholy number which is completely antithetical to the typical macho swagger of both rock and country music:
Not exactly the typical pop music song... While Kenny Rogers sang a lot of love songs, perhaps his weirdest hit as a solo artist was basically a Sam Peckinpah film rendered as a pop-country ditty. The lyrics are... uhhh... disturbing:
It's pretty mind-boggling that this song became a major hit in 1979. I don't think it would have charted in today's social climate. At least he never sang this one with the Muppets:
Amid all of the encomiums and accolades (rightfully) heaped upon this pop-culture titan, I figured that someone had to note the weird little discordant notes in the man's copious body of work.
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2 comments:
I remember seeing this rendition on the telebision in the late '60s.
That is extremely groovy, old chum. I kinda wish Kenny stuck with this sort of music, but it wouldn't have been a path to megastardom.
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