KENNY ROGERS – "Lucille"

“For a minute I thought I was dead.”

The Pistols came and went, and the chart went serenely back to quiet middle-aged despair. Anyone over forty in 1977 could have instantly identified with the barroom scenario in “Lucille,” where the woman comes up to the stranger and pleads – or does she? – “I’m hungry for laughter, and here ever after/I’m after whatever the other life brings.” And then this man comes over to join them (“His big hands were calloused/He looked like a mountain”) and instead of beating the shit out of the stranger, ignores him altogether, turns to the woman and starts weeping about the four hungry children and the crop in the field which she has left behind. He leaves, and the woman and the stranger walk to a “rented hotel room/We walked without talking at all,” but when it comes to coming, he cannot; the words he’s heard, the ruined lives he’s glimpsed, make him turn away in secondhand grief. Despite the woman’s name being Lucille and not Ruby – but how do we know? – this could be what happens to Ruby after she slams the door on her crippled, dying husband and takes her love to town; the tragedy seen from the opposing perspective.

Rogers’ softly hoarse tenor has always conjured up the thought of the voice being entangled in the ash being dispassionately tapped off the end of someone else’s cigarette. “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town,” number two for six weeks in late ’69/early ’70, is one of the most pitying yet pitiless of country-pop songs; the Vietnam veteran is powerless to stop his wife from doing whatever the hell she wants, or treating him like an inadequately flushed turd in the toilet bowl of her life. There is such clenched rage in his ideation of shooting her dead – what has he to lose, he’s gonna die soon anyway? – and such heartrending vulnerability in the final plea – or is it a threat? – of “for God’s sake turn around.” It is infinitely more frightening than the tacky peepshow that is “Delilah.”

“Lucille” is far less radical, but Rogers sings it as someone who’s too experienced and too exhausted to do much more of anything. Coming after “God Save The Queen” – and I note how “Lucille” had fallen from 2 to 3 the previous week, then reversed back up to number one; some darkly muttered that the chart positions had been swapped, but I fear we are venturing into grassy knoll territory here – it is a marked turning of the back towards anything that might bring light, life and real love; back into a defunct and pointless past. As a cod-country chart-topper it was obviously a considerable improvement on “No Charge” or “Mississippi”; as a 1977 chart-topper it suggested that even more radical surgery had to be undertaken so that pop might still live. This time, “Lucille”’s hurting wouldn’t and couldn’t heal.

I blame Sydney Devine.

I’d never knowingly heard this before Dale played it yesterday! I was pleasantly surprised. It is a really interesting and nuanced story. The narrative gives you a vivid sense of the three characters, and there’s an interesting ambiguity to its lack of a comprehensive conclusion that a marginally more sentimental song would have. The tune’s a bit antiseptic, though.

I don’t think that I’ve ever met anyone under 40 who’s ever given much thought to Kenny Rogers, despite his massive success. It’s real parents’ music, isn’t it?

READ ALL ABAHT IT! PEOPLE STILL BUY NAFF SENTIMENTAL RECORDS SHOCK HORROR!

Move along there please. Nothing to see here. Thank you!

One of my gods? Come off it! Although I don’t mind this as much as I do a lot of this genre. The whining self-pity is missing, well, it’s not missing but it has been removed from the protagonist, so that the song becomes a narrative, a slice of Mid-West life. Having seen the Mid-West I can believe that this kind of scenario happens – it might have scripted by Sinclair Lewis. But it really doesn’t grab me. There’s real human drama there but Kenny, as Tom suggests, is just too suave to carry it off.

Parents music? Well, I’m a parent, probably old enough to be a parent of many Populists, and it’s not my music. Certainly not my parents’ music. I think I know the sort who did buy this sort of thing – yesterday on a bus back from a toughish walk in the Yorkshire Dale (so we’re not talking the old and decrepit here) the pair in the seat behind me were talking about just this kind of thing. Not my age, a bit older. Probably about as much older than me as I am older than Marcello. So, in mid-to-late thirties in 1977. The sort who might once have bought classic Elvis, or the Everlys, or Connie Francis. Or, for that matter, similarly-titled (and far superior, and far more radical, and far more influential) pieces by Little Richard on the one hand and B B King on the other.

Billy #5–

I’m well over 40 and even back in the late 60s I thought Kenny Rogers was for a generation older than I. (As a teenager I imagined “Just Dropped In . . . ” was what it would sound like if parents dropped acid and pretended to be hip.)

So, then, from your point of view, it might actually be grandparents’ music.

(BTW, if you’ve seen what KR looks like after his botched plastic surgery, he looks more like great-grandpa.)

Re #7 and #4: it’s scientifically proven, then: Kenny was Big In Yorkshire!

All this sentimental keech and tollie when us youngsters were checking out hip Glasgow bands like Johnny and the Self Abusers JOHNNY BEATTIE MORELIKE!

“Islands In The Stream” rather than “I Could Be Happy” – and that’s why G**lty Pl**s*r*s must DIE

I refuse to post on the last thread on principle. But I am following it (and much enjoyed both Tom’s post and MC’s lengthy first comment). All I will say is that the establishment conspiracy to keep the corrupting influence of “God Save The Queen” from us impressionable kids worked: it wasn’t until Christmas 1979 that I heard the song for the first time (under the bed covers, listening secretly to Peel’s Festive 50 rundown).

As for Kenny R, I think you’ll find it works a treat if like me age 12 you (deliberately?) mishear the “four hungry children” line as “four hundred children”. Strewth dude! And strewth, Lucille, for that matter.

At least we can’t say “this is why punk happened” about this one.

We used to sing that “four hundred children” line too, and follow it with “and a wife on the pill”

It’s like puns never happened

Not my parents’ (or indeed, grandparents’) music in any way, but I have plenty of time for Kenny, and this is a decent song with a narrative (good) and a proper surging but mournful chorus (also good). Kenny, I can report, was pretty big in Mexico, too…

I’m surprised that people are lumping the First Edition era in with solo KR. Ruby (which – I’m sure someone may confirm this – was a no.1 on some chart or other) stomps all over this. Aside from the impotency issue, the story of Lucille is of a one-dimensional bad woman, with her ex a blubbering ape. Ruby makes me think of Fat City, or something from ‘New Hollywood’, as America began to crack and crumble on the cusp of the 70s. You certainly feel sympathy and pity for both characters; the war as a “patriotic chore” is a neatly non-commital line, too.

Production wise it’s no contest. Anyone know how they created that wooden, waggony rhythm track on Ruby? I can’t think of any other record that sounds like it. Lucille, meanwhile, sounds like someone’s pressed the ‘c&w’ button the way that UB40 used to press the ‘reggae’ button.

KR never meant much to me. I quite enjoyed “Ruby”, “Something’s Burning”, and to a lesser extent “…Condition”, but that’s about par for the course as far as I’m concerned, liking about three songs by a performer I don’t particularly like… maybe I am too easily pleased.

A little meme no one seems to have recalled here – If you go to Google and search “Kenny Rogers lookalikes”, then view the first site, you should have a good laugh. This was widely circulated a few years ago so you may already have seen it, but it’s worth ten minutes of your boss’s time!

The ORIGINAL “hello to all you truckers out thaar.” It was always either “I Recall A Gypsy Woman” or Ray Conniff doing “Yes Sir That’s My Baby.”

The Saints being possibly the only group in the 70s, other than the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, who went down the chart after appearing on TOTP. I remember Mark E Smith saying he was impressed by their rendition of This Perfect Day because “the singer was leaning at a weird angle”. Too angular – probably what sunk them.

TOTP Watch: The Saints performed ‘This Perfect Day’ on the Top of the Pops of the 14th of July 1977. Presenter was David Jensen. Also in the studio that week were; The Real Thing, Rita Coolidge, Dave Edmunds, Jigsaw and Cilla Black, plus Legs & Co’s interpretation of ‘Easy’ (…cue salivating Waldo?)

This edition survives, as will all from the 15th September 1977.

Personally I loved this story-song, the characters nicely sketched as with “Ruby” and the later hit that the bunny forbids mention of. In between there was “The Gambler”, an overlooked gem which was picked up on by Dave Sexton, ex-Chelsea manager now leading Manchester United to the 1979 Cup Final, and later by the England team at the 2007 Rugby World Cup – the common factor being that they lost in the final.

I’ve always wondered about “Ruby” – the song is generous enough to have the wounded soldier seeing things from her point of view (“it’s hard to love a man whose legs are bent and paralysed”) – and you wonder how many couples in that real situation came to a compromise where the woman could get her oats with the able-bodied while still looking after her man. It’s a solution that’s just about hinted at in the song, but a real moral maze.

For a companion piece about a man torn between easy sex and his conscience, or at least his memories, try Bruce Springsteen’s astonishing “Reno”, which earned for “Devils and Dust” the Boss’s first “Parental Guidance” sticker at the age of 55. Even as the Nevada hooker prepares him for the sex act in graphic detail, Springsteen’s protagonist, an immigrant we’re led to assume, finds his mind wandering to a sunlit Mexican river valley and the true love he’s lost. Gripping and beautiful.

Frustrating, yes. Fruitless, clearly not!

No, Bowie was on RCA not Harvest.

As indeed were Wire!

So, it was a good harvest. as were wire.

Actually, that “perfect day” 12″ was the first to feature a ‘bonus track’, which had a “owing to a pressing error, this 12″ single features an additional track” (yeah, righto) sticker.

http://www.menwholooklikekennyrogers.com/

This’ll kill ya .

Re 45. I’m glad God made it onto the list! ‘Heavenly Kenny’ indeed… I imagine God, if he existed, would also speak with that deep, rasping timbre to his voice. But he may not necessarily approve of day-time friends becoming night-time lovers. Err, time for the football…

Re#48- theres also the sound of 20-somethings who never ever had a sniff of LSD but tried unsucessfully to convince everyone that they were superhip acid guzzlers- tracks like Maybe the Madman by The Troggs or Judy in Disguise by John Fred and the Playboys spring to mind..
Even stranger is the case of young bands who also sounded deeply unconvincing and ‘straight’in their attempts at “trippiness” but actually WERE genuinely off their tits the whole time- the best example IMO being the Moody Blues..