Free Luck or Something Like It by Kenny Rogers Page B

everyone else. As I turned to leave, I mentioned how much I had enjoyed his movie An American in Paris , and he immediately perked up. He started reliving the whole production of the movie. I had opened up a floodgate to the past, and he wanted to talk about it for the next thirty minutes. He couldn’t remember what had happened five minutes before, but he knew every detail of a movie made in 1951. I’m sure he never knew who I was—just a guy in a gray beard asking him questions—but later, when he died, the family asked me to be a pallbearer at his funeral. I was incredibly honored to do so.
    And it all started with Bobby Doyle.
    For someone just getting started in the music business, I was in paradise. Between gigs with Bobby Doyle and any pickup work I could find, I was making up to $800 a week, a sizable amount of money for the early 1960s. I ran right out and bought a brand-new Lincoln. People have pointed out in some articles that I had actually bought a Cadillac, but that’s not quite the story.
    I did drive a Cadillac around Houston for a while in those days, but it wasn’t mine. It was borrowed from the infamous woman named Candace “Candy” Mossler. In 1964, Candy, a platinum blonde and ex-model, had been arrested for murdering her millionaire husband in his Florida condo. It was a nationwide scandal and fodder for every tabloid in existence. She and her partner/lover in this situation, her husband’s nephew, Melvin Lane Powers, were defended by a famous lawyer named Percy Foreman and acquitted of the killing. Foreman later defended Martin Luther King’s killer, James Earl Ray.
    Things do get tangled up down around the coast of Texas.
    Candy needed cash and her son loaned me her Cadillac with the hope I would buy it. By the time she found the pink slip two years later, I was in my new Lincoln.
    “You should put your money in the bank and buy a Chevrolet,” my mom advised, forgetting that I already had had a Chevy that was repossessed in high school. I loved those flashy cars, but also figured that if I drove one to a club to negotiate a salary with an owner or a promoter, it would make me look good by appearing successful. At that stage of my career, I was convinced that what you had was sometimes not as important as what people thought you had.
    Of all the people who stopped in to see the Bobby Doyle Three at the Showbiz, the luckiest break for me came in the person of Kirby Stone, a trombone player who fronted a group called the Kirby Stone Four. Kirby was a mediocre trombone player who made up for it by being a great entertainer and by finding very good musicians to work with.
    Kirby traveled with musicians on guitar, accordion, and drums, but since his music spanned big band and pop, he needed a larger band and picked up extra players wherever he was booked. He had hit the national charts with a song called “Baubles, Bangles and Beads,” which meant he got a lot of bookings—good bookings. He was a name.
    In 1961, about three years after I started playing with Bobby, Kirby happened to hear us at the Showbiz one night and was so impressed that he came back every night that week. He especially loved Bobby’s voice, which sounded a little like a Ray Charles vocal. Kirby thought our drummer, Don Russell, had a Sinatra-type sound, whereas my own voice was high enough and versatile enough to do many kinds of material. There are some groups, like the Bobby Doyle Three, which are made up of singers who can play. Kirby took us under his wing because he needed more versatility in his band. He liked to take show tunes and make them into pop or big-band songs.
    Teaming up with Kirby was an opportunity for the Bobby Doyle Three to be heard by audiences all over the United States and Canada. With every appearance with Kirby, and endless hours of rehearsal with Bobby, my bass playing got better. Kirby was the lead, and the band backed him up. For twenty minutes of every show, we, the Bobby Doyle Three, would