Through the Years

Kenny Rogers understands the benefits that come with age, as well as the hazards of trying to defy it.

While Rogers plays The Orleans today, Dierks Bentley will have the younger women screaming on the pool decks of Red Rock Resort.

Bentley and other young bucks who sing about "growth and happiness and rockin' and partyin' and all this other stuff -- that's where they're most honest in their music," Rogers figures.

By contrast, the 69-year-old veteran believes he has the most impact singing about "something I've lived through. Something I'm feeling. Something I feel very strongly about."

He just recorded a song called "Last Words," which collects some famous ones from history and points out that you never quite know when you will utter yours.

"Talk about thought-provoking. This really will make you stop and think," Roger says. The song therefore meets one of his three criteria: "Country music should make you laugh, make you cry or make you think. If it doesn't do one of those three things, than you're wasting everybody's time."

Rogers had a sage and seasoned, learned-the-hard-way voice as far back as "The Gambler" in 1978, so it's not like he would ignore it now. "I think that is a gift as you get older; that you're allowed to do those songs with some legitimacy.

"I never felt I was a particularly good singer, but I always felt I had a gift for telling a story," he says.

The only thing that's wrong with this picture is the uproar the singer created when people saw his new face on "American Idol" in 2006.

"I felt a touch grotesque," he confesses, after all the Web chatter that cosmetic surgery rendered him no longer recognizable as the face that inspired the Web site menwholooklikekennyrogers .com.

Rogers explains -- with a patience that sounds like he's done a lot of explaining these past two years -- that he wasn't happy with the cosmetic surgery to remove the bags around his eyes.

"But is it worth going back and changing?" he asks. "I don't know." The eye tightenings have "settled down some now. I'm not as unhappy with them."

But, before anyone else can ask, he adds: "Was it frivolous to do it? Maybe. You reach an age in your life to where you try things. I think you're more courageous to try things. It doesn't mean 'intelligent,' it just means 'courageous,' " he says with a laugh.

Rogers still defends the right "to try to look younger but not try to look young." It's not like he's going around in hip-hop garb, he points out. He first started feeling self-conscious about his image in his early career, because of remarks about his weight.

"There's a point where you have to just step back and say, 'Hey, this is me and this is how I look.' And I'm not unhappy with how I look. I wish it were somewhat different, but I'm not unhappy with it."

Rogers says he still performs at least 100 concert dates per year, even though he doesn't yet have a new album to promote and his home life is busy with young twin boys, who turn 4 in July.

About 60 band and crew members depend on Rogers to do shows, and he doesn't think it's fair to furlough them just because he doesn't need to work. "There's a comfort level when I walk onstage with these guys," he says of the band. "I have seen their kids born, be raised and go to college."

And now they're seeing his. The twins are the product of Rogers' marriage to his fifth wife, Wanda, whom he married after a 1995 divorce sent him packing from Las Vegas to Georgia.

"I've always been a believer that children give a marriage purpose and marriage gives a life purpose," he says. At some point, he wants the boys to watch him record the album-in-progress, "because this may be my last album. Even though they won't remember it, I'd like them in some way to be part of it."

That doesn't mean it will be the last, either. Rogers has shown amazing tenacity with country radio, defying its ageism with "Buy Me A Rose" in 2000 and "I Can't Unlove You" in 2005.

"The one thing I think I did that was proper and appreciated was I never trashed country radio when they didn't play me," he says.

As a result, he senses radio programmers are telling him: "Do a great song and we'll play it. If it's an average song, you're gonna stand in line with everybody else."

And, like a lot of things, "I can live with that," he says.

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.