Kris Kristofferson – To beat the devil: intimations of immortality
From picking fights in bars to jumping out of combat planes, though, Kristofferson’s persistent shadow dancing was all of a piece. For much of the first 30 years of his life, he had followed a well-lit, overachieving path in keeping with his parents’ status and respectability. Yet as rife with prospects as that well-heeled life might have been, it never really fed the gnawing in his soul. As a young man who’d been given so much and done so much with it, Kristofferson was still searching, as Mary Gordon would write of Jane Austen, for a sentence to fit him.
In Kristofferson’s case, that sentence would be a song, not a novel — and later, on occasion, a script. But whatever was going to fit, it was going to have to be something that didn’t come easy, something that wasn’t encumbered by the weight of societal or familial expectations. It would have to be something, even if it cost him everything — and maybe because it would — where the only burden would be freedom. This burden of freedom is precisely what he’s getting at in “Me And Bobby McGee” with the gloriously double-edged line, “Nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’ but it’s free.”
There certainly was a whole lot of nothing, and much of it onerous, after Kristofferson, then on the verge of turning 30, turned down that teaching appointment at West Point and moved to Nashville to pursue his songwriting muse in 1965.
Not that the move was without invitation. Marijohn Wilkin, the writer of such country classics as “Waterloo” and “Long Black Veil”, was starting a small publishing house on Music Row. Acting on a tip from a relative who saw Kristofferson perform in Germany (as “Kris Carson” he’d previously cut some unreleased sides for the British pop impresario Tony Hatch), Wilkin signed him, along with the left-of-center likes of Chris Gantry and Johnny Darrell, to her fledging company, Buckhorn Music. The demo tape that prompted the deal was, as Wilkin recalled in a 2003 interview with writer Michael McCall, “a mix of Shelley and Keats set to the tune of Hank Williams.”
The trouble was, Kristofferson’s highfalutin’ hybrid wasn’t where country radio’s collective head was at back in 1965. Buck Owens’ sprightly “Before You Go” — a terrific though by no means Keatsian single — was the most successful hit on the Billboard country chart that year. Novelties like “Girl On The Billboard” and “May The Bird Of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose”, as well as MOR ballads by Nashville Sound perennials such as Jim Reeves and Eddy Arnold, also predominated.
Roger Miller’s “King Of The Road” — #1 for five weeks that spring — might have augured the progressive movement to come, but it clocked in, with Hemingway-like economy (and abundant comic relief), at just over two minutes. It would still be a few years before radio would be ready for Kristofferson’s rambling mix of abstract and concrete, of shadows, devils, castles and whatnot.
A&R reps on Music Row weren’t interested, in any event, in pitching Kristofferson’s aphoristic musings to the acts they represented, and the few cuts that Wilkin did place weren’t exactly hits. The first, a recitation of Kristofferson’s “Talkin’ Vietnam Blues” by the DJ and TV host Ralph Emery, didn’t even break into the Top 100 of the Billboard country singles chart. Much the same fate befell the version of “For The Good Times” that producer Jerry Kennedy recorded with a female singer whose name nobody seems to remember anymore. “The Golden Idol”, a 1966 single of Kristofferson’s that Wilkin talked a head-scratching Billy Sherrill into releasing on Epic, stiffed as well.
In all fairness — and as Wilkin readily points out — Kristofferson had yet to calibrate the blend of highbrow and lowbrow that would become his stock-in-trade. He had some things to learn, or rather unlearn, before country audiences, the singers as well as the fans, would relate to his songs. “He had been a poet and an English teacher, so his songs were too long and too perfect,” Wilkin said. “His grammar was too perfect….He had to learn to write the way people talk. He did, too.”
Indeed, and not just by peppering his narratives with colloquialisms like “ain’t,” “Lord,” and “nothin’s” stacked back-to-back. Kristofferson also developed an indelible melodic sensibility — a languid, circuitous lyricism — that went well beyond the gutbucket, Hank-cribbed shuffles he hit town with.
Avid to surpass himself and his peers — and not just as a writer, but also as a dipso and a brawler — he doggedly persisted, plunging into the shadows and mortgaging his future, as he sings in following stanza from his new album, for a stab at immortality:
We used to drink about a bucket of booze
To try and chase away the black and blues
When it come the time to pay your dues
We gave an IOU
To the devil with a dirty smile
Which he added to the growing pile
Of the promises we mean to keep
The day your dreams come true.
All of which was met with the enormous chagrin of his duty-bound parents. “I remember,” Kristofferson said with a laugh, “my mother saying that nobody over the age of 14 listens to that kind of music, and that it wouldn’t be anyone we’d want to know.”
And they didn’t, even if that nobody was their son, and even if the “shitkickin'” music in question was the least of their concerns. Not having bargained for the hobo-songwriter life, Kristofferson’s wife and high-school sweetheart Fran was as bewildered as everyone else, leaving him and taking the kids with her not long after he’d dragged them to Nashville to pursue his quixotic adventure.
“God it was hard on the people around me, like my family,” Kristofferson said, looking back on this dissolute yet thrilling time of his life. Even his brother, who’d stood by him longer than anyone else from the past he’d abandoned, eventually flew to Nashville to see if he ever was going to come to his senses. The occasion was Kristofferson getting fired from his side job — the only one that really paid anything — flying workers to and from offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. He’d been found slumped over the controls of his helicopter sound asleep, with the blades revving wildly above him.