I was reading a story in The New Yorker about the pending threat of a strike against United Parcel Service by their Teamsters drivers, and this paragraph brought me up short:
Twenty-six years ago, the sort of friendly rapport that he and many UPS drivers have with their customers helped fuel public support for UPS’s workers when they went on strike with their union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
I thought, well, wait a minute, that can’t be right. I covered the last UPS strike, and it couldn’t have been 26 years ago. I was working at the McKeesport Daily News and photographer Wade Massie and I went out to take photos of scab drivers crossing a picket line in Pitcairn.
(Oh, I remember the day very well. We both almost got our heads busted for our efforts — not by the Teamsters, by the Conrail railroad police. They saw Wade’s camera and my notebook and they saw our press cards and they knew we were media, and brother, they just didn’t give a crap. Or maybe they were trying to hurt us.)
And then I read on …
… At the time, in the summer of 1997 …
Oh, God, that was 26 years ago.
I think I’ll just lay here on the floor and wait for my AARP benefits to begin.
The other thing I remember about that particular event was that we were the only media on the scene. It was a tremendous scoop. We wanted to put it on The Associated Press wire. The photos and the story would have gone national.
Our managing editor wouldn’t let us.
It was at that point I knew I wasn’t going to be long for that particular newsroom.
If I knew then what I know now, we wouldn’t have asked permission, we’d have just sent it to the AP, damn the consequences.
Ah, well. Last Saturday, a listener requested “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” by The First Edition. You may know it best from “The Big Lebowski,” but it was a number five song in 1967.
When I got home, I went on a deep-dive into the history of the song. It was written by Mickey Newbury, a country and folk songwriter who also wrote “An American Trilogy” for Elvis, “Sweet Memories” for Andy Williams, “Time is a Thief” for Solomon Burke, and “Here Comes the Rain, Baby” for Eddy Arnold. All four songs charted the same week in 1968, on four different Billboard charts.
Five months before Kenny Rogers growled his psychedelic version of “Just Dropped In” in 1967, it was recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis, who did a very different take on the tune:
I won’t say it’s better. It’s definitely … different.
It’s interesting to me that Jerry Lee Lewis — whose life in the 1960s and 1970s was a non-stop bacchanal of drugs and booze — did such a tame version of the song, while Kenny Rogers — who wasn’t exactly straight and narrow, but definitely had a more wholesome image — did the definitive “wow-man-far-out-purple-haze” version.
By the way, everyone knows Jerry Lee was married seven times.
Kenny Rogers was married five times. His first marriage lasted less than two years and he left his wife with an infant to care for.
Oh, goodness gracious, Ruby, don’t take your love to town, great balls of fire!
Besides Kenny and the Killer, Bettye Lavette, Mojo Nixon and Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings have all covered the tune. So has Tom Jones. (He gives it a samba beat.)
Maybe I’ll have to steal a bit from WRCT’s Paul the Mockster and do a battle-of-the-cover versions. Sharon and Bettye have pretty good versions, but to be honest, Kenny’s is still the gold standard for my money. (Which is about 79 cents for the record, $1.29 for the tape.)
Finally, I posted something on Facebook about the news that the Pittsburgh Pirates have signed Andrew McCutchen to a one-year contract, which elicited this response from a listener:
I can’t possibly imagine who he’s talking about.