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Kenny Rogers: Before there was roasted chicken, there was LSD
08.27.2015
01:05 pm
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Although today he’s perhaps better known for being a fast food kingpin than a musician, country hit-maker Kenny Rogers was once actually a rock and roller. Hell, the undisputed successor to Col. Sanders was even a psychedelic rocker there for a brief minute…

The First Edition were formed in 1967, with Rogers (lead vocals and bass), Mickey Jones (drums) and Terry Williams (guitar ). Mike Settle (guitar) and opera singer Thelma Camacho joined later. They were basically a country-folk band, but they did release the classic psychpop single, “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In).”
 

 
Written by the great Mickey Newbury, “Just Dropped In” featured in-demand session pro Glen Campbell playing the backward guitar intro. The trippy background voices were fed through a rotating Leslie speaker and re-recorded and the song can almost be called “proto-metal” (listen to that boss guitar riff).

Allegedly, Jimi Hendrix told Kenny Rogers that “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” was his favorite record. The song was later famously featured in the dream sequence from The Big Lebowski.

Get a load of the amazing promo film!
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.27.2015
01:05 pm
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Frank Zappa solos furiously as Kenny Rogers, Jimmie “J.J.” Walker and Mike Douglas look on


 
Longtime afternoon TV talkshow host Mike Douglas was so square—and seemingly so self-aware of his basic squareness—that he ended up being one of the most unlikely “hip” people on American television in the 60s and 70s. Mike Douglas didn’t try to be “down” with John and Yoko, Malcolm X, The Rolling Stones, Sly Stone, The Vanilla Fudge, Angela Davis, Moby Grape or any of the other counterculture types who occasionally came on his normally staid Philadelphia talk show, but he was unfailingly friendly and cordial to them all and genuinely interested in what they had to say. That Patti Smith made a couple of early appearances on his show (she brought her mother, a huge fan of his, to one of the tapings) says much about how agreeable and open to new things the guy was, but he never pretended to be anything that he wasn’t. (Fun fact: Mike Douglas provided the singing voice of Prince Charming in Walt Disney’s Cinderella.)

A great example of the often incongruous people a viewer could tune in and see randomly assembled on a given day on The Mike Douglas Show occurred when Frank Zappa appeared to promote his Zoot Allures album on November 9th, 1976. The “Dy-no-mite!” co-host that week was Jimmie “J.J.” Walker star of Good Times and the other guest that day was Kenny Rogers. There’s a brief interview before Zappa, performing with the unseen house band, does a scorching “Black Napkins” one of his signature mid-period compositions. Then there’s more conversation before Frank shows an excerpt from A Token of His Extreme featuring Bruce Bickford’s freaky claymation.

Imagine how strange seeing this on TV after school was. But it wasn’t so much that it was strange as that it was the Seventies…
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.07.2014
02:18 pm
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Know When to Fold ‘Em: Peculiar Kenny Rogers Art
11.11.2009
11:24 am
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image


Maxim posted this funny piece titled 11 Awesomely Bad Pieces of Kenny Rogers Art. Maxim says, “He may not have had a hit in over a decade, but you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t think Kenny Rogers is a beloved cultural icon, not to mention a flat-out badass. Hell, after Elvis and Tony Montana, Kenny gets the velvet painting treatment the most often. Some of these attempts have turned out better than others, so with that in mind, here are 11 pieces of Gambler tribute art - velvet and beyond - that prove you gotta know when to walk away ... and when to run.”
 
11 Awesomely Bad Pieces of Kenny Rogers Art
 
(via Presurfer)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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11.11.2009
11:24 am
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