Kris Kristofferson: C/D?

Kristofferson's role in the country idiom is directly analagous to Dylan's among pop/rock practitioners. Each steeped himself in the tradition but employed a superior vocabulary to take it further than anyone previously had (or has). The difference is that Dylan remains an anomaly, a freak of nature so singular in his talent that we who would imitate him are revealed as foolish amateurs. Kris, coming from country music, is compelled to make his art accessible, so his songs are ones you can actually learn from craft-wise. Also, by peppering his songs with huge abstractions like "freedom" and "truth" and "dreams" (and managing to pull it off), he has made country music safe for big ideas and explicit profundity as opposed to the kind of savant wisdom that the regionally biased ascribe to Hank and Jimmie Rodgers. You know, folks who "like" country music but think it's quaint or funny, far less "serious" or "artistic" than, say, Sonic Youth. More than any country artist besides Johnny Cash, Kristofferson embodies a combination of all of the things I hold dear about country music: intelligence, plainspoken wisdom, populism, humor, and drop-dead sexy swagger.

"Jesus is a Capricorn" (the song) is not even in my Kristofferson top twenty. My favorite of his albums is "Spooky Lady's Sideshow," a rollicking mid-70's affair featuring Roger McGuinn and Bobby Neuwirth (Kris always had the best bands money could buy). It's not on CD but isn't too hard to find. As far as CD's, you can get "The Silver-Tongued Devil and I" for like nine bucks just about anywhere. It's a great fucking record, as is his debut although I like his singing better after he stopped trying so hard to hit those notes he never will.

And if you wanna see him act, check out "Cisco Pike," "Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid," or "The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea." All excellent films. "Cisco Pike" (1969-70?), which has never even been on videotape, is Kristofferson's movie debut. He plays a washed up rock star stooped to dealing drugs to Gene Hackman's corrupt cop obsessed with busting him. Best of all, you get to see the Sir Douglas Quintet in the studio and Doug Sahm laying down the most insane cocaine rant I've ever seen on film.

Sorry for the dissertation, but y'all gotta recognize. With Mickey Newbury dead and Dylan out of reach, he's the finest model for songwriting you may ever have. Look up the words to "Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I'll Ever Do Again)" and tell me that they're not perfect.

The best thing about Kristofferson as a songwriter is that not once in any song he's written can you TELL that he's a Rhodes scholar. He never brandishes his intelligence, just lets it naturally inform everything he says. There may be no greater lesson to the songwriters among you. Few things alienate like cleverness, the self-conscious attempt to impress one's audience. Just ask John Kerry.

and i picked up Silver Tounged Devil and I from a yard sale too, it's supa-classic.

Johnny Cash, in that box set of sessions that came out last year, has an anecdote somewhere about how Kristofferson apparently pitched a song to Cash by landing in Cash's yard in his helicopter!

I only have a live album and the first KK album, which is mostly great. "Blame It On the Stones" is funny, "Best of All Possible Worlds," "For the Good Times," "The Law is for Protection of the People," and obv. "Bobby McGee." And "To Beat the Devil" -- I love that song. Classic, for sure.

I've been loving that album lately.

I only half-agree with this. There are occasional moments on the first album (admittedly, the only one I know really well) where I hear the 'actor' come out (I didn't actually know he was a rhodes scholar) -- moments when his country-isms sound just a little too perfect. I particularly feel this way about "Beat the Devil," a song I find realtively unconvincing compared to the rest of the album (especially in the intro, i.e. when he says "a great and wasted friend of mine")

I don't mean to say that it matters to me whether he actually is a rhodes scholar or an alcoholic drifter, I'm just talking delivery here. But for the most part, Kristofferson is a great *storyteller* -- almost a Garrison Keilor type whose combination of folksy charm and rapier wit seem to exist outside of any class or regional specifics.

When he's at his best, I care no more about Kristofferson's background than I care that Bob Dylan was a midwestern suburban middle class Jew when he sings ballads of poor black southerners. And more often than not, this is the case.

Probably one of the best (or maybe *the* best?) bedroom singers, outside of Soul/R&B ("I'd Rather Be Sorry", "Help Me Make It Through The Night".) "For The Good Times" has been mentioned on the rolling Country thread, that sorta fits in as well.

"Highwayman" tho, wtf were they on about on that one. I own three versions of that song (this, Willie Nelson best-of, Cash box.)

I dig Bobby Dylan and I dig Johnny Cash
And I think Waylon Jennings is a table thumpin' smash
And hearin' Joni Mitchell feels as good as smokin' grass
And if you don't like Hank Williams, honey, you can kiss my ass

Chorus:
'Cause I think what they've done is well worth doin'
And they're doin' it the best way that they can
You're the only one that you are screwin'
When you put down what you don't understand

I said, I dig Roger Miller, Merle Haggard; George Jones
Shotgun Willie Nelson and them rockin' Rollin' Stones
And Jerry Lee's still gotta be the coolest in the class
And if you don't like Hank Williams, honey, you can kiss my ass.

Chorus:
'Cause I think what they've done is well worth doin'
And they're doin' it the best way that they can
You're the only one that you are screwin'
When you put down what you don't understand

ooh this sounds awesome:
Please Don't Tell Me How the Story Ends: The Publishing Demos 1968-72
Over 5 years in the making, and with the attention to detail and elaborate packaging the label is known for, LITA 050 is none other than the never-before-released 1968-1972 demos of Texas-born Renaissance man and maverick songwriting pioneer, Kris Kristofferson. With the outlaw Highwayman's full blessing, Light In The Attic is proud and honored to present Kristofferson s honest and upfront formative takes on the tunes that would eventually become part of the great American songbook.

Since penning these numbers (many of which were written during the mid-to-late 60s while working as a janitor for Columbia Records in Nashville), over 500 artists including patron saint Johnny Cash, one-time lover Janis Joplin, and co-actor Bob Dylan (to name but three), have covered Kristofferson's material. While we shouldn't forget his vast commercial accomplishments as an award-winning recording artist and actor, it's these soul-stirring demos that laid the groundwork for his rough and tumble creative journey. Drop the needle and be transported into the intimate candle lit studio session like a fly on the wall.

Please Don't Tell Me How The Story Ends: The Demos 1968-72 features comprehensive liner notes by Michael Simmons (MOJO, LA Weekly), including interviews with Kristofferson, the musicians, and other related-folks from these landmark sessions. Plus, dig into a handful of testimonials from friends Dennis Hopper and Merle Haggard. Includes full lyrics housed in a massive 60 page full color booklet featuring unseen photos and archival material, plus a gloriously mastered audio soundtrack.

http://www.amazon.com/Please-Dont-Tell-Story-Ends/dp/B0036ZKL9G

I will be picking this up.

Just picked up Border Lord (which I used to own and seem to have mislaid) and Jesus was Capricorn. Nobody Wins is today's saddest song ever....

Listened to that new collection last night, it's a winner.

Streaiming on NPR now .... sounds very good: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126169194

So this demos collection... is awesome. That is all. Really nice liner notes too.

just searched this thread to post exactly that ian. listened to thing in loud cars for a month or so but the first go through at home is just killing it.

from tracks 4 to 5 alone you get pretty much most of what makes this dude mostly all time, but fuck it, whole thing is ace

oh man, amazing random roles q&a with kris: www.avclub.com/articles/kris-kristofferson,46544/

tonight is a kris greatest hits night imo

My deeply alcoholic friend blames this guy's self-titled album for his problem.

don't blame it on the .... country?

blame it on the stones is one of the few kris songs i'm really not down with.. it's just got that goofy production and vibe to it.

My deeply alcoholic friend blames this guy's self-titled album for his problem.

If I had any inclination to drink alone, I could see this as a pretty encouraging soundtrack.

ah yeah, but music to drink to isn't necessarily music that makes you drink.

in fact, i'm going to go & get a drink.

hey, kris has a new one out today -- Feeling Mortal. sounding pretty good. voice just getting more grizzled, but in a mostly good way.

https://search.mog.com/v2/albums/29523585/image.jpeg?size=800
underrated

never heard that one, but i'd like to.
<3 kris.

he's the emcee of the Johnny Cash TV show DVDs I've been watching. (Cash's "Sunday Morning Coming Down" from the show was released as a single and won awards.)

Didn't really start his music career til he was nearly 30, after being a Rhodes scholar, and a presumed Army lifer.

a texas friend quoted KK saying "Garth Brooks did for country music what pantyhose did for finger fuckin'."

haha

lol

great line in the sabre and the rose "when stagger lee had drunk his fill of moonlight / he turned his burning eyes upon my soul"

http://youtu.be/HaalvZ5S4Aw

this weird thing happened last night
https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/1174611_10201727473052288_1320997475_n.jpg
l-r: kris, me, lyle lovett

okay wow!

Details!

i'm kind of distantly related to kris and he and his wife were ridiculously nice/accommodating. lyle was dropping in to discuss their duet during his set. lyle seems like mayyyybe the nicest dude in the world.

omg!! wow.

are you meeting in a mine shaft or

ha, that's just the subterranean backstage of red rocks (http://redrocksonline.com)

everything about that is awesome, lucky you!!

such a great pic.

Too bad they hadn't been sharing stories about the women in their lives at that particular moment.

that rules!

best part was kris telling me about being a helicopter pilot in the gulf of mexico

i may or may not have offered to help him write his memoirs. he said he hasn't done it yet because he sits down to start writing, but then decides he would rather be watching a football game.

Kris otm

Kris Kristofferson...pilot...Gulf of Mexico...what was he transporting?

i think he was flying people back and forth out to oil rigs. he was also a pilot in the air force for a while. and was a rhodes scholar. dude had kind of an interesting life even before he became famous, really.

yeah that helicopter pilot/military stuff has cropped up in interviews I've read with him

amazing pic btw!!

also got to talk to him a bit about mickey newbury!

oooh, what he say about mickey?

"lyle seems like mayyyybe the nicest dude in the world"

lyle love it

(Kristofferson) achieved some success as a performer himself, following Johnny Cash's introduction of Kristofferson at the Newport Folk Festival. Kristofferson had previously grabbed Cash's attention when he landed his helicopter in Cash's yard without prior arrangement and gave him some tapes

oooh, what he say about mickey?
he seemed super excited -- said that he was his best friend, mentor and pretty much "the guy I wanted to be." when kris got fired from his pilot job, mickey was like "great! come back to nashville and pitch songs to the johnny cash show." so they hung out in one of the local hotels where guests for the show stayed and just played songs for whoever. kris also said he thought mickey could've been huge if he just went out and played live but for whatever reason he never liked it. said that his favorite thing was to "play a song and then pass the guitar to someone else." i mentioned "she even woke me up to say goodbye" as one of my favorites and KK pretty much shouted "SHE EVEN WOKE ME UP TO SAY GOODBYE! Can you believe that title!?"

ha! awesome.

she even woke me up to say goodbye, the bitch

If I could have been anybody during the '70s, I think I might have chosen him. (I mean, except for myself, of course.) He was definitively a 1970-71 guy, and he got to stay a 1970-71 guy for the whole decade and become more successful and more famous along the way.

I just noticed his RS cover with Rita Coolidge has an American version (with beard) and a British version without:

http://i1059.photobucket.com/albums/t427/sayhey1/kris-1_zpsa65a2de1.jpg http://i1059.photobucket.com/albums/t427/sayhey1/kris-2_zps41ca728c.jpg

The headline changes on the Sex Pistols, too.

my first association with him will always be:

http://www.moviespad.com/photos/kris-kristofferson-convoy-0cef0.jpg

well that's pretty amazin'

it's unbelievable

Awesome

Sad, but he seems to be taking it in stride, and can still perform:

http://www.showbiz411.com/2014/01/26/kris-kristoffersons-memory-loss-worsens-but-his-sense-of-humor-is-great

Sorry to hear.

He frequently pops up in bios of the prior generation of musicians- Arthur Alexander, Charlie Louvin, Johnny Cash- and I am always touched by the respect he accorded these guys. The epitome of a gentleman and a scholar.

Also, wow at those RS covers.

Jerrod Niemann sings on his newest album that he, himself, is “no Shakespeare or Kris Kristofferson.”

The half assed hanging on to the words on the exhalations on "nobody wins" my god

<3

yea he's a pro

deserves more

like most dorks I fuck w those first two albums but these two from the notably less impressive Border Lord are so good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exDp_PxLcCI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI0sfsunaL4

I went to see Dwight Yoakam Friday night and sat by a very intoxicated older lady who was telling me all about this Outlaw Country cruise she went on and how great it was. She said "Kris Kristofferson was there too! He died shortly after the cruise so I feel so blessed to have seen him." I looked at my wife and was like, should I tell her?

lol

He did legit retire shortly after a cruise, so she's probably just conflating/inflating. I saw him at Bonnaroo in 2010, and he was pretty ragged and rugged but he always was to some degree. It was a weird set, like 1 p.m. on a hot day, so we were all crowded in under the tent out of the sun, and the sound wasn't great because it was mostly just him and his guitar and it didn't carry well. Still! It was great. Found this clip from it, it has "Nobody Wins" and "From the Bottle to the Bottom."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_XJs50oc3M

There's this whole odd mid-90s concert of Kris Kristofferson and Lou Reed swapping songs (with Victoria Williams showing up for "Strawman" too):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxpTBYMG1-M

dying's just another word for nothin' left to lose

rip legend

sunday morning comin' down

I’ll get along

sure was handsome when he was high

Sounding a bit like Leonard Cohen to me right now, another guy whose distinctive vocal charms I was mostly resisting until very recently

I'm no pusher, I never have pushed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYAHBGApQTU

A genuinely cool dude. What a life

I was just thinking about the funny parallels with him and Leonard Cohen — Janis Joplin supposedly running into LC at the Chelsea Hotel while she was looking for Kristofferson, the way both of them as songwriters were first made famous by women singing their songs. And yeah, that their vocal delivery takes some adjustments and/or forgiveness.

closer to the bone hit me hard only last week, for all his tendency to folksy mythologism (?) of whatever politics or outlook or cause he was espousing at any given time i think he was also usually wryly unsparing of himself too

Pour one out, RIP.

for me when he could sing, hes a great singer. just not a guy interested in living in a way that lent itself to looking after his singing capabilities.

but when his voice was full and craggy and hangover-deep, when he can hit that last line of pilgrim or the verses of to beat the devil, thats a *great* voice, a voice to play a technicolor movie god or moses. lovin her was easier demonstrates his actual singing ability, that warmth and character that seeps into the best of his stuff like the barrel seeps into whiskey but very softly applied around the song.

covers might have helped his profile but jesus the cash version of sunday mornin, the janis version of bobby mcgee? theyre vanilla altogether vs the man himself doing it imo. startling clarity, strikingly unphoney delivery, im buying it every time, missed notes sore throats and all.

otm

Jesus was a Capricorn

And he defended Sinead when his crew of boomer cowards let an audience booed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2dEwY0xzcI

Spectral cover imo

I love Willie’s cover of Help Me Make Through the Night. Then someone posted Kristofferson doing a duet with Miss Piggy and I dunno maybe Kris takes it back

For the good times and help me make it through the night are two of the absolute best love songs ever written

Unlikely combo of Marianne Faithfull, Mark Isham, and Kristofferson songwriting, from the Trouble in Mind soundtrack:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7bOqhmaQao

A stone cold fucking legend. Enjoy your rest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbqGWTxwZEA

On the Sunday morning sidewalk, wishin' Lord that I was stoned
Cause there is something in a Sunday, makes a body feel alone
And there is nothing short of die'n, half a lonesome as the sound
On the sleepin' city sidewalks, Sunday morning coming down

<3

hat tip for having one of the most used record bin staples i never bought because of the cover

tried to post a link but SESAC dispute with YouTube meant YouTube blocked it. It was Gladys Knight & the Pips' cover of "Help Me Make It Through The Night."

The half assed hanging on to the words on the exhalations on "nobody wins" my god

― Alderweireld Horses (darraghmac), Friday, February 9, 2018 2:50 AM (six years ago) bookmarkflaglink

simply one of the best songs ever

From the rocking of the cradle to the rolling of the hearse, the going up was worth the coming down.

Scorsese tells a story when they working on Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. He was dissatisfied with the ending, which was Alice moves in with Kristofferson's character at his ranch, and when he asked him about that Kris went "well fuck the ranch! she doesn't have to stay with him, he can go with her".

Nice remembrance from a friend who runs the Tennessee Theatre in Knoxville:

In 2006, a little more than a year after the Theatre reopened after its massive renovation, Kris Kristofferson was booked to play. It was sold out. I got a phone call from a woman whose octogenarian mother, ill with cancer and entering hospice soon, wanted to meet him. "It would fulfill a lifelong dream," she told me. So I told her what I still tell people today: it is very unlikely for an artist to meet a random member of the public, but I will ask the tour manager. I told her not to get her hopes up.

This time, the answer was yes. The woman and her three adult children would be allowed to come backstage about 45 minutes before the show and wait in a room, where he would come to meet them. They showed up on time, their mother in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank, and we maneuvered through the lobby crowds and downstairs to the room.

In walked Mr. Kristofferson, lean and dressed ready to go on stage, with his wife Lisa. I expected a perfunctory visit: a handshake, a photo, autographing the worn album cover the old woman brought, and then heading back to his dressing room. Instead, he pulled up a chair, sat next to the frail woman, held her hand as she talked to him. Her three kids and I stood nearby, tears in our eyes as we watched this superstar shrink his world down to the eyes of her, his own eyes sparkling with kindness as he listened to her say things he'd heard for decades. He received it all as if it were the very first time.

Eventually, after about 20-30 minutes, his wife Lisa reminded him gently that he had to get on stage. He unfolded his striking frame, said thank you to all of us, and strode out of the room. He had made a lifelong memory for all of us.

Rest in Peace, Kris Kristofferson.

Jon Langford posted this performance of Kris in Wales:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7rAB-ES0PU

We don't talk much about his film roles. I dug him opposite Divine in Alan Rudolph's Trouble in Mind.

i love how Huston used "help me make it through the night" in "Fat City"

He's a real bastard in "Lone Star."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-aDHbBWfMQ

Nice.

Isaac Hayes did a nice cover of "For the Good Times" too