Just dropped in (Kenny Rogers and the First Edition) (LP 3651 - 3652)

Kenny Rogers & the First Edition  Greatest Hits (Vinyl, Reprise Records, 1971) ****  

Kenny Rogers and the First Edition  Backroads (Vinyl, MGM Records, 1972) **   

Genre: Country rock, pop 

Places I remember: Passionate about vinyl (Waipawa);  Turakina Antiques

Fab, and all the other pimply hyperboles: Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town (Greatest Hits)

Gear costume: Just Dropped In (Greatest Hits)

They loom large in his legend (The Album Collection playlists): Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5

Active compensatory factors: I know it's not too fashionable to admit it, but I have a real soft spot for Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. 

They started out as The First Edition, before morphing into K R and...They had a popular TV show in the early seventies, which I watched each week, and the popular songs of the late sixties were also very familiar to me from radio exposure. 

So, it was a no brainer to buy the Greatest Hits album in 1971. It was one of the first albums I ever bought with my own money - maybe even the first? I was given The Beatles Hey Jude album for Christmas so, this, along with The Hollies, The Cowsills, and Headband were the first albums I actually saved up for and bought. I can remember buying Greatest Hits for $5.75 from the newly opened St Lukes shopping centre. 

I played it a lot and each song on the album is an old friend. That's not the case with Backroads which came out a year later. Reuben James had signaled Kenny's love for country rock and I was anticipating songs like that on Backroads but sadly it leans toward the overly sentimental country direction Rogers would move towards when The First Edition were abandoned for his (lucrative) solo career.

Where do they all belong? That Greatest Hits album though? Magic!