Remembering Kris Kristofferson

“For his busy dreams were filled
With the rooms he’d yet to build.”
— Kris Kristofferson, “Darby’s Castle” 

 It’s funny, I can tell you with near-letter perfect precision at what point in my life I came to love my favorite bands and artists.

The Beatles happened in 1980, the year I turned 12. It was the first adult band I became devoted to, a devotion that lasts to this day.

I had a huge Doors phase in 1980-81, as was required by law. It ended sometime around 1982.

Led Zeppelin, the Kinks, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix were favorites in junior high and early high school. I continue to love them all to this day.

I had my prog phase in high school, again as required by law. Yes and Genesis leading the way, with ELP picking up occasional steam. I am still a fan of much of it, indeed.

R.E.M. was late high school and into college, and they remain a favorite. Same for Bob Dylan, Sam Cooke and Stevie Wonder.

The Replacements were college, thanks to my partner in crime on this blog. They remain the most important band in my life, along with The Beatles.

Later came Nirvana and Pearl Jam, Living Colour, Soundgarden and Sonic Youth in real-time, as they occurred.

My point to this rambling? All of these bands hit me on a deep level at the time, and most of them continue to do so today. (Sorry not sorry, Doors.)

But none of them, not one, goes as far back holding a place in my life as Kris Kristofferson. No, with Kris, I remember his music dominating my life as deep as I can remember, all the way back to age 4 or 5. Thanks to my parents, who were (and still are) huge fans.

I thought about this yesterday when I got the word that Kris, that rogue outlaw American poet who often came across as William Blake appearing in The Wild Bunch (with the rugged amazingly good looks of an Errol Flynn, Clint Eastwood or mayhap even Harrison Ford) died in Hawaii at age 88. I was deeply saddened. But also, so very appreciative that his music has dotted my personal soundtrack for 50 years.

“Me and Bobby McGee,” “The Silver Tongued Devil & I,” “The Pilgrim. Chapter 33,” “For the Good Times” and more, they were songs I knew by heart not long after I learned to ride a bike or tie my shoelaces. As a child, they were there and I am sure I got tired of them. But once I hit late high school and college, I couldn’t help but be blown away by the poetry in those words, the gruff honesty, the self-realized beauty that Kris could always find.

His story is familiar to many. Born in Texas, a brilliant English student who became a Rhodes Scholar. Then it was off to a stint in the Army as a helicopter pilot and successful training as an Army Ranger, following by a time teaching literature at West Point. But Captain Kristofferson wanted to be Kris the songwriter, so he gave that up to head to Nashville to claw and scrap his way to get before anyone in the industry who would listen. Along the way, in a stumble nowhere near exclusive to him, he developed serious dependency problems with alcohol and heroin. He beat them back in time, but not without major struggle, something he wrote about frequently and, well, beautifully.

“He’s a poet, he’s a picker,

He’s a prophet, he’s a pusher,

He’s a pilgrim and a preacher and a problem when he’s stoned.

He’s a walking contradiction,

Partly truth and partly fiction,

Taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home.”

-                   - The Pilgrim, Chapter 33

“Taking nothing back to show there,

For these dues I pay.

But the soul I almost sold here,

And this body I’ve been giving away.”

-                   - The Other Side of Nowhere

“All he’s good for is getting in trouble,

And shifting his share of the blame,

And some people swear he’s my double,

And some even swear we’re the same.”

-                    - The Silver Tongued Devil and I

Those are words written and delivered hard-earned and, in most cases, hard-won. Kris Kristofferson was gifted, seemingly from the early going of his songwriting career in the late 1960ss, with a level of self-awareness that usually takes years, maybe even decades. His problems were active as he wrote them, yet still he wrote on, sidling up to anyone who would listen to share—and hopefully sell—his words to the right person.

The network of friends he built was, to say the least, impressive. Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings became brothers to him and later formed outlaw country band The Highwaymen with him. Ray Price and Roger Miller and, most famously, Janis Joplin recorded his songs with high levels of success. Once he started putting his own albums out with a staggering one-two punch of Kristofferson (1970) and The Silver Tongue Devil and I (1971), he was a star. Other top-selling albums would follow, as would a celebrity marriage to Rita Coolidge and a Hollywood career that saw him in disparate films like Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and A Star is Born. His appeal was wide—he had great looks, rugged toughness and this sweet, clanging heart that he never hesitated to display full force on his sleeve. Not unlike John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen did back then, or Paul Westerberg, Kurt Cobain or Jason Isbell later would.

For me, it was the words. I’ve always loved writing of any kind and have long been a sucker for musical lyrics ahead of almost everything else. It’s why Dylan, Lennon/McCartney, Springsteen, Westerberg and Cobain are heroes of mine. I love those who have this ability to take these intimate, often painful thoughts and turn them into poetic magic. Kris could do that, as both a young man and an old man.

In “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” he wrote about desperate love and the need for connection above all, even if that was all there was. (“Let the devil take tomorrow, Lord tonight I need a friend.”)

In “For the Good Times,” he broke your heart with a literal tale of the end of love, yet trying to salvage one last grasp of what they once had. (“Don’t say a word about tomorrow or forever—there’ll be time enough for sadness when you leave me.”)

On maybe his most autobiographical song, “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down,” he examined all that’s lost or thrown away by real and present forces in his life, and found a way to make them poignant. (“Then I headed back for home and somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringing. And it echoed through the canyons, like the disappearing dreams of yesterday.”)

On “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)” he gave a raw and gorgeous look at what love really is, whether it works or not. (“Waking in the morning to the feeling of her fingers on my skin. Wiping out the traces of the people and the places that I’ve been…Dreaming was as easy as believing it was never going to end, and loving her was easier than anything I’ll ever do again.”)

Much later in his life, on the terrific album This Old Road and the sage advice of the title track, he was an elder statesman with wisdom that came with plenty of scar tissue. (“Look at that old photograph, is it really you? Smiling like a baby full of dreams? Smiling ain't so easy now, some are coming true, nothing's simple as it seems.”)

And on arguably his greatest song, “Me and Bobby McGee” (named for the woman who worked as a secretary at Monument Records, though not written about her), he gave us a travelogue of the heart that went straight across the U.S.A., a story of doomed love that he still told with heart-swelling affection. (“Somewhere near Salinas, Lord, I let her slip away, looking for the home I hope she’ll find. And I’d trade all my tomorrows for one  single yesterday, holding Bobby’s body next to mine.”)

There are more throughout his expansive catalog that I can’t do justice to here in this space. But the simple guitar, the gravelly and grinding voice and that poetic, bursting heart always carried the way.

It was Kris Kristofferson who got in Toby Keith’s face when the young country punk tried to chastise him about his “lefty” politics—the exchange had to leave the late Mr. Keith feeling more than a little rattled. It was Kris Kristofferson—and Kris Kristofferson alone—who stood alongside Sinead O’Connor at the 1992 MSG Concert for Bob Dylan when she was being booed by a crowd that should have known better. It was Kris Kristofferson who so loved the opening lines of Leonard Cohen's seminal "Bird on a Wire ("Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free.") that he commented he wanted them written on his tombstone. And it was Kris Kristofferson who actually thanked Johnny Cash and June Carter-Cash at the beginning of a confessional song of recovery (“To Beat the Devil”), because it would have been incomplete of him not to do so.

Maybe country isn’t your thing, maybe an unpolished voice and difficult subject matter isn’t what you’re looking for. If not, I get it, but you’d be missing out on what Kris Kristofferson always had to offer. It was based on experience, failure, success, loss, heartbreak and triumph, sometimes all at once. It was based on an American life lived, in every sense of the word. 

If his compadre Johnny Cash was the 20^th century Walt Whitman—as I have seen him accurately described—then Kris Kristofferson may have been our Henry David Thoreau, with his life steeped in actions taken regardless of the outcome and lessons learned, no matter how hard.

My buddy Steve, with whom I attended a Kris Kristofferson concert in 2006 in Northampton, MA, when we were spellbound to finally see a hero singing his greatest songs right there in front of us in real life, texted me after news of his death yesterday: “Our heroes are dying of old age.”

Amen for that. Seven years ago here, I lamented the passing of Chuck Berry with the observation that old age is promised to no one in rock-n-roll. But Chuck fooled ‘em all, against the odds, and so did Kris. God bless them.

At the top of this post, I quoted a line from Kristofferson's song “Darby’s Castle” that has driven me for years, and especially over the past year, when two friends have challenged me to write creatively for a little bit every day. I have done just that, and it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made.

But that line is pulled from what becomes a terribly sad song. A man loves his wife and builds her this palace, and it becomes his life’s work. But one night he discovers her cheating on him and, despite the years of painstaking work to build the castle, “it only took one night to bring it down, when Darby’s Castle tumbled to the ground.”

So. Not a happy story. But that line was written to describe Mr. Darby’s obsession, of how consuming his personal passion project was. "For his busy dreams were filled with the rooms he'd yet to build."

And it speaks straight to me about the need to create, the excitement of facing a blank page in any art form—painting, music, dance, writing, acting, comedy, anything—and the joyful mystery that comes with creating something new. An artist friend of mine calls it “the uncertainty of creation,” and she’s right. We don’t know what’s coming next, but we know we have to seek it out. Because that’s what makes our hearts keep beating.

It works for me every day, and I like to think it worked for Kris Kristofferson. To have a gift as great as his for writing and storytelling is amazing. To use it the way he did, to work through the joys, sadnesses and horrors of his own life? It was a blessing.

Thank you, Kris. Thank you.