Kris Kristofferson – To beat the devil: intimations of immortality
In another helicopter incident, Kristofferson landed his chopper on the bluff above the Cashes’ house on Old Hickory Lake to deliver a demo tape rumored to have included “Sunday Morning Coming Down”. “When you’re heading for the border,” he’d later sing, “you’re bound to cross the line.”
TRYING TO SING UP ALL THE SOUL IN SIGHT
“I was so thirsty to be hungry to be an artist,” Kristofferson said, with characteristic wryness, of his fevered pursuit of songwriting glory. “There were a couple of guys who were sort of the heroes of the ones of us who considered ourselves underground ’cause no one cut our songs. It would always be Roger Miller, Willie Nelson or Johnny Cash. Everybody just seemed to zero in on one, but I was the only one who liked all of ’em.”
This omnivorous and insatiable appetite for inspiration, coupled with his exposure to a mind-boggling amount of great songwriting in so short a span of time, certainly served Kristofferson well. “I had to get better,” he told Michael McCall. “I was spending every second I could hanging out and writing and bouncing off the heads of other writers.”
Talking with me by phone in December, he said, “We took it seriously enough to think that our work is important, to think that what we were creating would mean something in the big picture. Looking back on it, I feel like it was kind of our Paris in the ’20s. Real creative and real exciting. And intense.”
Pushing himself relentlessly, Kristofferson was living the Romantic ethic, the privilege and self-assurance to which he was born perhaps affording him the strength and resiliency to do so. He and his cohorts called the most intense of these times “roaring” — marathon sessions where they binged not just on music and smoke and drink, but on inspiration itself.
“We used to take about a day and a night, trying to sing up all the soul in sight,” Kristofferson sings to the bare-bones, neo-rockabilly arrangement of “The Show Goes On”: “Anyone who couldn’t see the light, we had to leave behind.”
Yet after three years in Nashville during which he left just about everyone he loved behind, the hits still weren’t coming. Not only that, Kristofferson’s contract with Buckhorn was up for renewal at the end of the year. Thinking his songs might stand a better chance in other hands, he jumped to another publishing company, Combine Music. Owned by Nashville movers-and-shakers Fred Foster and Bob Beckham, Combine had a clutch of hungry young writers on staff, including Shel Silverstein, Mickey Newbury, Tony Joe White, and Billy Swan. Foster also owned Monument Records, without which Kristofferson likely wouldn’t have been afforded the chance to record his raspy debut album, easily the greatest set of “demos” ever assembled.
That album, monolithically titled Kristofferson, was still two years in the offing. For the time being, the most auspicious thing about Kristofferson’s deal with Combine was meeting Newbury. A fellow Texan — Kristofferson was born in the border town (where else?) of Brownsville — Newbury didn’t write by the numbers any more than Kris did, but at least he’d managed to get some of his songs cut. The biggest by far had been “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)”. The song’s title was as outre and unwieldy as anything to come out of Nashville, but “Just Dropped In” became a Top 5 pop hit for the First Edition in early 1968, for better or worse jump-starting singer Kenny Rogers’ blockbuster career.
Inspired by Newbury’s writing and encouraged by his friendship and example, Kristofferson finally — and in an elegant encapsulation of the code by which he’d been living to this point — found the sentence, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” that fit him. Just as crucial, it would also prove to be the sentence that put him over the top as a songwriter.
Newbury was with Kristofferson on a madcap flight across the country when he sang that line from “Me And Bobby McGee” for Roger Miller. From its hipster argot to its peripatetic narrative, the song sounded nothing like what people were playing on country radio at the time. But it was perfect for Miller, a boho-leaning eccentric whose mid-’60s rash of Grammys might have done more to make country cool with pop audiences than the trio of LPs that Bob Dylan subsequently recorded on Music Row.
Miller’s version of “Me And Bobby McGee” climbed only as high as #12 on the country chart in the spring of 1969. It was enough, however, to give Kristofferson his first major hit as a songwriter, paving the way for an epochal streak that included four #1s over the span of just nine months.
The first, which peaked the final week of June 1970, was Ray Price’s tender, countrypolitan reading of “For The Good Times”. Then, in September, came Cash’s version of “Sunday Morning Coming Down”. (Ray Stevens had cut the song, to little notice, in 1969.) Sammi Smith’s heart-stopping transformation of “Help Me Make It Through The Night” followed in December. Three months into the new year, Janis Joplin, with whom Kristofferson briefly was linked romantically, hit #1 on the pop charts with “Me And Bobby McGee” (in the wake of her death the previous October). All three of the country #1s also charted pop, with “Help Me Make It” reaching the Top 10 and “Good Times” stalling at #11.
Even more important than this commercial breakthrough, if inconceivable without it, was the way that Kristofferson, at this point in his mid-30s, revolutionized how people on Music Row thought about and wrote songs. Overnight, it seemed, he had infused country music with the sexual candor of soul music and the mystical-existential urgency of Dylan, the Beats, and his beloved Romantics.
Meditating on freedom and commitment, alienation and desire, darkness and light, Kristofferson’s songs tapped down-home as well as countercultural vernacular, and with them, the prevailing zeitgeist. Steadfastly refusing to talk down to his audience, he proved that country music could be both hip and grounded while speaking to the most fundamental of human struggles and emotions.