Perceptions by Gerry Warner

Don’t look now, but I’m about to commit a great heresy. And I think the 1,500 or so fans at Western Financial Place Wednesday night will solidly agree with me. So here goes and I hope a lightning bolt doesn’t strike me dead.

I think Kenny Rogers put on a much better show than Bob Dylan did. A damn lot better!

Yikes, I said it. I can hardly believe it myself. But cross my heart and hope to die, I’m just being honest. I’m not even that big of a Kenny Rogers fan to begin with, but those of us of a certain age felt a pang when Dolly Parton’s “best buddy” limped out on the stage in obvious pain from knee replacement surgery and strummed up a storm of his greatest hits interspersed with jokes and a lot of kibitzing with the crowd. I turned to the good wife and said thanks for cajoling me to dig deep in the penny bank for this one. Sandra always has better judgment anyway.

And Rogers with his splendid white beard and royal blue cowboy shirt sang all his hits stretching far back into the 1960s when, as he pointed out, many of the younger members of the audience weren’t even born. And unlike Dylan, the hits were recognizable even though the Country Music Hall of Fame member was sometimes a bar or two behind the beat.

Of course, two of his greatest hits, ‘The Gambler’ and ‘Islands in the Stream,’ his great duet with Dolly Parton came late in the show, but they were all there; ‘Lucille’ (you picked a fine time to leave me), ‘Coward of the County,’ ‘Lady,’ ‘You Decorated My Life,’ ‘Reuben James,’ ‘Just Dropped In’ (To see what condition my condition was in) ‘I don’t Need You,’ and my favourite, ‘Ruby’ (Don’t take your love to town) with the First Edition, Rogers’ original group. And there were more. After all, Rogers, a classic singer/song writer charted a 120 hit singles in several different genres and sold 165 million records world-wide in a five-decade career that made him one of the most popular singers of all time.

Aside from my wife, who greatly enjoyed the show too, I think what drew me into the arena more than anything else was Roger’s early, smash hit Ruby, a song that rose surprisingly to the top in 1969 when the U.S., and to a large degree Canada too, was being torn apart by the rightness or wrongness of the war in Vietnam.

Country star Mel Tellis wrote the song in 1997 and must be given credit for the famous line about a paralyzed veteran of a “crazy Asian war.” The line, of course, doesn’t specifically mention Vietnam, but in the “peace, love and good vibes” ‘60s there was only one “crazy Asian war” to millions of us with long hair, beads and sandals and wardrobes of tie-dyed shirts. Back then, I can remember marching down Robson Street in Vancouver chanting “Hell no. We won’t go” and “Hey, hey, LBJ. How many kids did you kill today?”

Even then, I felt a little sheepish because Lyndon Baines Johnson wasn’t Canada’s president and Canada was blessed with a fearless anti-war leader, Pierre Eliot Trudeau, a prime minister with the guts to say “no” to an American president. Say what you like about Trudeau, but we haven’t been blessed with a leader like him since although his number one cabinet colleague Jean Chretien must be given credit as well for keeping us out of the war in Iraq.

But back to Kenny Rogers. I guess as we get older nostalgia deepens and anything or anyone that reminds us of our own youth resonates deeply within us. As Rogers sang in The Gambler, “You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em. Know when to walk away, know when to run.” And you should also know when to show your appreciation. Thanks to impresario F.J. Hurtak of Kootenay Concerts Connection and City of Cranbrook Leisure Development Manager Chris New for giving us an evening with a country music great.

– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist and a Cranbrook City Councillor. His opinions, especially on music, are his own.

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