Ever stumble across something that just completely blows your mind? It’s either a complete joy or something totally freaky when that happens. Had it happen to me just the other night when I was watching THE BIG LEBOWSKI for about the 800th time. My favorite scene came on – the “Gutterballs” mini-drug-powered-movie-dream that The Dude has in the middle of the movie. If you’ve not seen LEBOWSKI yet, well, I’m just gonna leave this right here for your education and enjoyment:

Now, if you know me at all, you know I’m prone to getting earworms, and then having that earworm stay lodged in my noodle for days at a time. Well, the theme to “Gutterballs” was no exception, and it got wedged in there for at least two days. My usual fix for this is to just buy the damn song on iTunes and play it incessantly for a couple of days until I want to vomit, so I started figuring out who sang the damn thing so I could give the Ghost of Steve Jobs my 99 cents.

Imagine my shock when I learned that this song about dropping acid, this hip, bluesy, Doors-sounding tune was recorded by none other than KENNY ROGERS. That’s right. “The Gambler” dropped acid before he developed a gambling problem. As someone who grew up in the 70s in a house that listened to a metric buttload of country music, this pretty much blew my mind. That is, until I found out that the guy who rocked the guitar on that was GLEN CAMPBELL. The guy that did the song “Rhinestone Cowboy” from the 70s whipped out this jewel of 60s rock. The last piece of the puzzle was finding out that the producer of the song was MIKE POST. If you’re not familiar with that name, he’s the guy responsible for just about every action-based TV show’s theme song in the 80s. Yep, the guy that composed the A-Team theme produced this song.

Finding out all of this made me look like The Dude for a minute or two while my brain adjusted itself to a hip Kenny Rogers in the universe:

As The Dude would say: “That’s wild, man, you know? Just wild.”

And in case you don’t believe me, check out Kenny Rogers and First Edition rocking “Just Dropped In” live in the video below. I’m gonna go fix a White Russian and just groove, man.