Goodbye, country outlaw and rebel poet with the gentle eyes

WHO WAS KRIS KRISTOFFERSON?

Goodbye, country outlaw and rebel poet with the gentle eyes

From rugby player and boxer to helicopter pilot and student of Shakespeare who turned country music on its head – there was simply nothing ordinary about Kris Kristofferson, writes WILLEM KEMPEN.

WHAT did Kris Kristofferson's passport say about his occupation by the time he passed away on Sunday at the age of 88 in his home in Hawaii? Singer? Songwriter? Actor?

Any one of those would have been accurate, but what it actually said was “Writer".

Because a writer was what he wanted to be from an early age. At first, though, quite a few things stood in the way of that ambition. One  was that his father, a major-general in the US Air Force, wanted him to pursue a military career like his - and he did, for a time. At school in California, he not only excelled academically, but also in rugby, American football, boxing, and athletics.

Kristofferson completed his BA in Literature at California's Pomona College summa cum laude, which earned him a Rhodes scholarship to study English literature at Oxford's Merton College. This was where he began writing songs, but Oxford also awarded him a Blue in boxing, and he played rugby for his college (Perhaps a reader knows in which position?)

He graduated from Oxford in 1960, but then served as a helicopter pilot for the American army in Germany – around the same time that the already famous Elvis Presley was there in uniform too. In 1965, Kristofferson was promoted to captain and, thanks to his Oxford degree, was asked to teach English to prospective officers at the prestigious West Point in New York. Incidentally, this was the same year that Jim Morrison, who like Kristofferson was the hyper-intelligent son of a senior commander in the American military, founded the group The Doors in Los Angeles with Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore. And like Morrison, Kristofferson was an admirer of the English poet William Blake.


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Kristofferson turned down the West Point job and, against the wishes of his family and his first wife, Frances Beer, gave up everything to take the road to Nashville, Tennessee, the home of country music. His parents didn't speak to him for a long time, and he divorced Beer shortly after.

In 1970, he told the  New York Times Magazine about this time in his life: “Not many cats I knew bailed out like I did. When I made the break I didn’t realize how much I was shocking the folks, because I always thought they knew I was going to be a writer. But I think they thought a writer was a guy in tweeds with a pipe. And I quit and didn’t hear from ’em for a while. I wouldn’t want to go through it again, but it’s part of what I am.”

The highly competitive Nashville of the time didn't think much of Kristofferson's writing style. His Oxford grammar sounded out of place to American ears, and he struggled to attract attention. In the early days he worked as a janitor at Columbia Studios in Nashville, and later recounted cleaning the studio on occasion while Bob Dylan was recording Blonde on Blonde (1966) there.

His first major success as a songwriter was the ballad “For the Good Times" which was sung by Ray Price in 1970, and in the same year “Sunday Morning Coming Down" for his friend and mentor Johnny Cash. It was also the beginning of a long tradition of his songs being sung with success by other artists who often crossed the boundaries between country and other musical styles, including rock and folk.

The Nashville of the 1970s was as far from the hippies of San Francisco and Los Angeles as you could get, but Kristofferson was a key figure in steering the music in a more serious and introspective direction; like the so-called outlaw country which was less of a caricature of rhinestone cowboys who only sang about lost love on the equally idyllic ranch next door.

For example, read these lyrics from “Sunday Morning Coming Down":

Well, I woke up Sunday morning
With no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad
So I had one more for dessert

And then compare it to this from The Doors' “Roadhouse Blues" from the same year:

Well, I woke up this mornin'
And I got myself a beer
The future's uncertain
And the end is always near

In addition to all the country singers from that era who covered Kristofferson's songs (including Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Dolly Parton), over the years literally hundreds of artists from other genres did the same, including Grateful Dead, Gladys Knight and the Pips and even people like Michael Bublé. And of course, Rita Coolidge, to whom he was married from 1973 to 1980, Barbra Streisand and Janis Joplin, both of whom he was romantically involved with.

With Rita Coolidge when they were still married.
With Rita Coolidge when they were still married.

Among his many friends, Kristofferson counted everyone from Muhammad Ali and Mama Cass Elliot and much later the Irish singer Sinead O'Connor, and Dylan once said of him: “You can look at Nashville pre-Kris and post-Kris, because he changed everything.”

Joplin's iconic rendition of “Me and Bobby McGee" is by far the best and rightfully the most famous of all its cover versions, but it was a hit for Kristofferson himself as well as for Gordon Lightfoot, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roger Miller and Charlie Pride.

By the time Kristofferson wrote the song, there was little left of the Oxford English of his early days in Nashville:

Busted flat in Baton Rouge, and headin' for the trains
Feelin' nearly faded as my jeans
Bobby thumbed a diesel down just before it rained
Took us all away to New Orleans

Yet the inspiration for it was in the best European tradition: The closing scene of Federico Fellini's La Strada, in which the tough but broken Zampanò (played by Anthony Quinn) looks up at the stars on the beach before bursting into tears.

Kristofferson began to focus more on his career as an actor in the early 1970s. He eventually appeared in more than 50 movies, the most famous perhaps as Billy in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid from 1973, and in Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974). He received a Golden Globe for best actor in 1976 for his performance in the romantic drama A Star Is Born with Barbra Streisand, and my colleague Hans Pienaar believes his performance in Limbo (1999) with David Strathairn and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is at least as good.

Over the years with Barbra Streisand, with whom he always remained friends.
Over the years with Barbra Streisand, with whom he always remained friends.

He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1977, the National Academy of Popular Music's Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1985, and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2004. He was also honoured for Lifetime Achievement at the 2014 Grammy Awards.

It's a cliché to quote Kristofferson's most famous song once again, but it would be erroneous to say farewell in any other way:

Freedom is just another word for nothin' left to lose
Nothin', and that's all that Bobby left me, yeah
But feelin' good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues
That feelin' good was good enough for me, mmm-hmm
Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee

♦ VWB ♦


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