It is a truth universally acknowledged that any man who can look like Kenny Rogers will look like Kenny Rogers.  I’m confident that this sentence has never been uttered: “That guy would look just like Kenny Rogers if _____________.”  If the possibility can be envisioned, that blank will already have been filled in.  There is no potentiality in looking like Kenny Rogers.  If there is even a hint that the Kenny Rogers Look is attainable, man is pre-wired to seek the fullest rendering of The Look.  It is a calling, not a choice.

With great power comes great responsibility, of course.  Obviously, those who have been called to The Look could use that power for evil.  I doubt that Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers are self-governing or are organized in any meaningful way, or that they have a board of ethics with the power to pass judgment on those men who have abused The Look and, in drastic situations, expel a member from its ranks.  But I think there is an unwritten code among those men, addressing, among other things, matters of chivalry.  If you look like Kenny Rogers, you have to hold yourself to a certain standard.  It’s the Men-Who-Look-Like-Kenny-Rogers Way.

Kenny Rogers

Where were you the first time you heard “Lucille”?  I was in Loving, Texas, in Clay Daily’s mother’s new yellow van.  I was ten years old. 

“Did he say he had four hundred children?”

“I think he said four hungry children.”

“And why won’t his crop till?”

“What?”

“He said he had a crop that won’t till.”

“No.  He said a ‘crop in the field.’”

“All crops are in a field!”

I was fascinated by the song.  The song told a story.  It had a setting, characters, drama.  Something happened.  It didn’t matter that what was happening—a man refusing to do the deed with a woman in a motel room after having witnessed the recriminations of her broken-hearted husband—was over my head.  I liked stories.  My favorite album—indeed the only album I really recognized as an album—was Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger.  It’s still one of my top two favorite albums (Blood on the Tracks is the other one), one of the few thing from my childhood that were really important to me then and then grew up with me, gaining importance as I matured.  (Stuart Little is pretty much the only book I’ve had that experience with.)  In that album, which I am almost certain to write about in one of these entries before the Edict is fully performed, a nameless preacher roams the west leading his dead wife’s horse and winds up shooting a “yellow-haired lady” who grabs at the horse in front of a saloon.  The woman was buried at sunset, but the preacher goes free, “because you can’t hang a man for killing a woman who’s trying to steal his horse.”  I didn’t know what that was all about either.  Clearly, though, something was going on, something mysteriously adult.  In “Lucille,” I think what I picked up without really realizing it was that the guy hears the abandoned husband’s tale, yet he still takes the woman back to the motel room.  Only after he gets there does he find that he “couldn’t hold her” because the husband’s words still echo.  There’s some moral depth there.  It would be a lesser song if he never took her to the motel at all.

“Lucille” is not a great song by any means.  It may not even be a good song.  And Kenny Rogers is . . . Kenny Rogers.  He’s the guy who sounds like he just woke up.  Everybody knows “The Gambler,” of course, and the stupid and borderline morally offensive “Coward of the County.”  (For one thing, what did a kid in the third grade do that could earn him the reputation of the coward of the county?  I mean, really, the whole county?)  And Kenny had a hit also with a truly great and dark song, Mel Tillis’s “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.”  But “Lucille” was the one I heard first, first from Kenny and then, more often, from Waylon Jennings, who covered it on Ol’ Waylon (because in those days, in country music, if somebody had a hit with a song, you’d just go ahead and record it yourself as soon as you heard it, because, hell, a hit for somebody else might as well be a hit for you.  Willie Nelson recorded “Fire and Rain,” for Pete’s sake.  Waylon also did “MacArthur Park.”  I was in my twenties before I knew it wasn’t a Waylon original.)  So “Lucille” has meaning to me, and so I am grateful to Kenny Rogers.  And I still feel bad for that big sad bastard whose wife left him with four hungry kids who apparently aren’t hungry enough to go out and eat some of that crop that’s apparently in the field.

OCCASIONAL REJOICING

The Song.  I don’t know why I did it as a honky tonk song—Kenny Rogers is as far as anybody can get from honky tonk—except that honky tonk is a natural idiom to me.  I grew up listening to all that stuff, it seeps into you, and you can’t shake it.  Just like there’s only one blues song, there’s only one honky-tonk song.  The master (aside from George Jones, but you have to leave George Jones out of every discussion of music unless you’re talking specifically about George Jones, because otherwise George Jones would be all you’d talk about) is the late Gary Stewart.  Gary Stewart sings how I think.  So does Willie Nelson and a lot of other people armed with only “three chords and the truth,” as Harlan Howard memorably put it.  (Willie knows and uses a hell of a lot more than three chords, by the way.)  I’d love to be able to write a really cool pop song, with really interesting chords and interesting chord changes—something like Crowded House or Jonathan Coulton or Richard Thompson or my old friend John Lowe.  I like those songs, I know those chords, I can play those songs (some of them).  I just can’t think that way.

The Performance.  I’d have liked to have given the song the full honky tonk treatment, complete with a Greek chorus of voices singing the refrain on the opening pickup notes (“He’s not Kenny Rogers!  He just looks like him!”)  Alas, that is beyond my talents.  So you get this kind of muddy, sloppy mix with a second guitar that comes in too loud.  Buck does okay.  He can get to the high notes; he just doesn’t know what to do when he gets there.

The Video.  Easiest video I’ve done yet—did it all Sunday morning before making pancakes.  I stole all the photos from “Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers”, a website run by prophets whose only mission is to document as many Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers as possible.  (The photographs included in the video above area only a small sampling of what is possible when a man finds himself called upon to render the Look.)  I did the poker scene in a couple of minutes on Saturday afternoon.  The kids helped me with Buck’s MWLLKR makeover. 

Dedication.  This song is for all the men who look like Kenny Rogers, including the late Keith Fullerton, who lived in my hometown when I was growing up and was the first person about whom I heard said, “He looks exactly like Kenny Rogers.”  And it’s for everybody who looked in the mirror, saw what needed to be done, did it, and didn’t lie about it.  Or at least told the truth by the time they got to the motel room.

Next Week.  I may have to stop doing this, because I’m always wrong.  This week was supposed to be “Grandpa, Don’t Eat the Gravy,” but this was another week when I got a song written, recorded and videoed in real time, so “Grandpa” will have to wait.  For now, it’s scheduled for next week.