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When Kris Kristofferson turned Nashville on its head
Graeme Thomson
Share 0 comments 2 Aug 2010
A collection of demos takes the country legend back to his early days.
He may have the scrubby white beard and the gnarled iconic visage, but Kris Kristofferson has always been an unlikely candidate for country music sainthood. When he finally pitched up at Nashville’s Music Row in the mid-1960s he was nearly 30 years old and lacked the easily romanticised down-home biography of a Willie Nelson or a Johnny Cash. The son of a major-general, Kristofferson was born into a military family in Texas and spent a year as a Rhodes scholar at Merton College, Oxford, earning a BPhil in English Literature before becoming a captain in the US Army in 1960. Hank Williams he was not.
In 1965, Kristofferson faced a pronounced fork in the road. Offered the post of Professor of English at West Point, America’s foremost military academy, instead he opted for an honourable discharge and moved to Nashville with his wife and young son to pursue his dream of becoming a songwriter.
“I always felt that I was going to be some kind of writer,” says Kristofferson, whose speech echoes the low, cool, unhurried rumble of his singing voice. “I started writing a bunch of songs when I was at Oxford.” Here he allows himself a brief comic pause. “I didn’t know they were bad at the time.”
The switch from soldier to songwriter required significant sacrifices. His parents disowned him for what they regarded as his fecklessness, while he admits “it cost me my first marriage, but I’m just grateful that I had the nerve to get out of the military. It looked like a very audacious thing to do at the time, but I’m glad I did it, because everything seemed to fall into place after a while”.
It took time. In Nashville, Kristofferson combined songwriting with a variety of odd jobs, including working as a janitor at Columbia recording studios. From that unobtrusive vantage point he met Johnny Cash and watched some legendary records being made, including Bob Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde.
“I can still see him sitting at the piano in that big studio, all by himself,” says Kristofferson. “He’d come up with something at five in the morning and the band would quit playing ping-pong or cards and go and cut some masterpiece. Pretty heady ... It was so un-Nashville, and I was the only songwriter in town who could be there. I think all that feeds into your creative pool. If that’s your personality and your talent then you go around soaking up life, and everything lends itself to it, whether it’s digging ditches or being a janitor. It all adds to the dimensions of what you’re able to create with.”
Eavesdropping on Dylan, pitching songs to Cash and hanging out with Nashville royalty like Mickey Newbury and Roger Miller, Kristofferson undertook what he calls his “graduate work”. He steadily grew as a songwriter, raising his game to write songs like Help Me Make It Through The Night and Sunday Morning Coming Down.
“It was a great ride, starting in about ’68,” he says. “It was a wonderful time to be in Nashville, such a nice, creative atmosphere. The great thing was the way we liked each other’s writing so much. I remember singing Me And Bobbie McGee to Joni Mitchell and people coming in to do The Johnny Cash Show, and they were all so enthusiastic about it. Everybody was pulling for everybody else. Usually there’s a superficial politeness, but this was really sincere. I don’t know if it’s like that any more.”
It’s astonishing to recall the furore Kristofferson’s hip new take on country music caused at the time. His songs were peppered with references to drugs, Dylan and getting his lady friend to help him make it through the night, and when he was given a gong at the 1970 Country Music Association awards he loped on stage with his hair covering his shoulders and his trousers hanging from his hips. The audience, comprised mainly of pillars of the Nashville establishment, gasped at this upstart hippie freak.
“It caused a lot of angry reaction,” he laughs. “A couple of editorials in the papers said I should never be allowed on camera again, but I think I was aware then that the soulful part of songwriting that I identified with would eventually prevail. I wasn’t conscious of working at being controversial, I was just expressing myself as best I could every time.”
Earlier this year Kristofferson released Please Don’t Tell Me How The Story Ends, an album of gnarled, knotty publishing demos recorded between 1968 and 1972 with little musical accompaniment, mostly in the offices of his publishing company Combine. For Kristofferson, hearing the demos “takes me back to when I wrote them, and that’s very rejuvenating at my age, when there’s definitely more behind you than ahead of you. I’m still connected to those songs, I still sing ’em a lot, too. There’s some good memories, like when we were hanging out, staying up all night and writing”.
The first ever version of Me And Bobbie McGee arrived at one such session, beginning at dusk and lasting through until dawn. The song was written in the Gulf of Mexico, where Kristofferson was working flying helicopters back and forth to oil platforms, and recorded when he returned to Nashville at the weekend. “It was a good one,” he says. “Sometimes they’re keepers, sometimes not. I remember saying, ‘Boy, this feels real spiritual, like Hey Jude.’”
Epitaph was another impromptu affair, written as a moving tribute to Janis Joplin, Kristofferson’s on-off girlfriend, who had scored a posthumous hit in 1971 with her definitive version of Me And Bobby McGee. “I hadn’t been able to listen to Bobby McGee since they played it to me right when Janis died,” he recalls. “I was listening to it again for the first time in the publishing house office because there was nobody else there. I was pretty choked up, and I wrote and recorded Epitaph that night.”
Please Don’t Tell Me How The Story Ends spans an auspicious period, tracking Kristofferson’s development from obscure songwriter to superstar. It covers the release of his eponymous first album in 1970, his appearances at the Isle of Wight festival and Carnegie Hall, and his first acting roles, in Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie and Cisco Pike. Indeed, for much of the 1970s and early 1980s Kristofferson was best known as the brooding, laconic leading man in films such as Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia, Convoy and A Star Is Born. At the same time he was married to singer Rita Coolidge and still making records, but movies seemed to take precedence.
“I was very lucky to be doing movies and music – each one would pick up the slack for the other,” he laughs. “I’m just amazed that I wasn’t more amazed by it at the time, because it was such a long way from where I’d recently been. The downside is that when you’re famous you have a lot less alone time, which is good writing time. I think you get more withdrawn and reflective.”
He and Coolidge divorced in 1980, and today Kristofferson lives on the Hawaiian island of Maui with his third wife Lisa, whom he married in 1983. Despite his God-given aptitude in the distant past for hell-raising and womanising, family is clearly hugely important. “I feel so grateful,” he says. “I’ve got eight kids who love each other, and a whole bunch of grandkids, and it’s all turned out well from day one.”
At 74, he doesn’t dwell on the past. He still makes movies but could no longer be called a film star. He tours regularly and his last two albums, This Old Road and Closer To The Bone, have been well received. He’s currently working on new songs with producer Don Was. “I’m writing songs all the time, and it will be interesting to see where they go,” he says. “I’m sure Don Was will keep me going. I feel like I’ve got plenty of respect for my work and I still fill houses when we go out and play. I’ve been lucky all down the line.”
Kris Kristofferson plays Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on August 2 and Usher Hall, Edinburgh, on August 3. Please Don’t Tell Me How The Story Ends is out now on Light In The Attic.
Kristofferson demos
