2024-10-04 09:38:19
Johnny Cash told it like that one day a helicopter suddenly landed on his front lawn. “I stood as if scalded. Kris Kristofferson climbed out of the cockpit, a bottle of beer in one hand, an audio cassette in the other. He handed me the cassette, smiled, climbed back into the helicopter and flew away,” the singer described how he came to his hit Sunday Mornin ‘Comin’ Down.
The story is probably largely made up, but it has a real basis. Johnny Cash introduced ex-army pilot and budding singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson, who had been vying for his attention for weeks, on his television show shortly thereafter. He also invited him to the Newport festival, and above all he recorded a hit from the cassette, which launched his career. It ended this Saturday, when the charismatic personality of the world of country Kristofferson, otherwise an actor from the Hollywood films A Star Is Born or Blade, died at the age of 88.
Nothing described him like the song known to the Czechs by Pavel Bobek under the name Sunday Morning. It tells of a strange sadness that causes a flood of sensations in the abandoned narrator upon awakening. Kristofferson wrote it in 1969, when he was making extra money flying helicopters in the Gulf of Mexico for a mining company. His wife and daughter left him shortly before. “When you didn’t have a family, Sunday morning was the worst. The bars didn’t open until one in the afternoon, and until then there was nothing to do,” explained the mood of the hero, who “had a mug of beer for breakfast” and for whom “perhaps even death is less serious than these Sunday moments “, when loneliness overwhelms him.
And nothing epitomized Kris Kristofferson’s status like Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down when he took home the Country Music Association’s Song of the Year award the following year. In the television footage, a casually dressed, unkempt cowboy, smelling of marijuana according to witnesses, staggers onto the stage among the cream of the crop in suits. “It was a shock to the audience. The traditionalists took it as a sign of disrespect,” writes musician biographer Mary G. Hurd in Kris Kristofferson: Country Highwayman, published in 2015. “Back then, people in the country world valued hard work, family values and orderly living,” he reminds.
Kris Kristofferson lived much of what he sang about. He came from a military family: his great-grandfather fought in the American Civil War, his grandfather lost an eye in the Spanish-American War, and his father reached the rank of major general in the Air Force after World War II. Hoch was to continue the tradition. But already in high school, in addition to boxing and rugby, he showed an interest in literature, which he then began to study at Oxford with the prestigious Rhodes scholarship.
Change of mind
Kristofferson spent his military service at a base in what was then West Germany, where he still flew helicopters within sight of Czechoslovakia in the mid-1960s. But then he turned down the assured future of a teaching position at West Point Military Academy, left the Army and found a job as a recording studio cleaner in Nashville, the home of country music. The family disowned the rebellious son, reinforcing the boy’s already strong sense of alienation.
Kris Kristofferson as Billy the Kid in the western Pat Garrett and the Billy Kid. | Photo: Profimedia.cz
It was in country music that Kris Kristofferson saw an opportunity to express himself. He first wrote and later half-spokenly sang distinctive, story-like songs about lonely people who face misunderstanding or injustice, feel like they don’t belong anywhere, defy society’s expectations or pressure, but, like him, don’t give up.
It was a bit of alternative country: intimate, confessional compositions, often longer than the recommended three minutes, not very musical, without frontline melodies, but with literary references, for example, to romantic poets William Blake and William Wordsworth, with whom he shared a penchant for intense emotions.
Kristofferson captured sometimes ambiguous inner states, but he wrote clearly at the same time and from life. In the 1960s, this met with the so-called counterculture, i.e. the attitude of Americans, whose demonstrations for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam grew into a general generational protest of young people against parents, the establishment and authorities of all kinds.
Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson in A Star Is Born 1976. | Photo: Profimedia.cz
The son of Major General Kristofferson volunteered to go to Vietnam as a student and recorded a song in support of the American intervention as early as 1966. “At that time, I saw the world through the eyes of a soldier. Within a few years, I turned my opinion on Vietnam 180 degrees,” he later said.
Country listeners were far from hippies, but the sincerity of Kristofferson’s songs, whose protagonists dive into darkness and overcome their own shortcomings, appealed to them.
Hippies, in turn, appreciated that the singer-songwriter from Nashville shows affection for people on the margins of society, sings about alcohol or drugs and takes a rebellious attitude towards the establishment. For example, in the autobiographical composition The Best of All Possible Worlds, where Kristofferson tells that he rammed into a policeman and scolded him for why the lawmen only dare to attack blacks or the poor. For which, in this “best of all possible worlds,” says the Oxford student, alluding to Voltaire’s satire, he ends up behind bars with a broken nose.
But the fact is that Kris Kristofferson did not belong to either party. He also notes in the book’s biography that for half his life he was bullied in Los Angeles and New York, while in Nashville he was overlooked for his liberal views. Nevertheless, he contributed to the fact that country music became more serious, personal and relevant in its time. “Kris Kristofferson was a revelation in Nashville. We can divide Nashville into pre-Kris and post-Kris, because he changed everything,” even Bob Dylan declared in 2015.
On a recording from the 1980s, Kris Kristofferson sings Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down. | Video: Austin City Limits
The cycle of life
Nevertheless, Kristofferson started a career in Nashville only as an author, not as a singer. “I never broke into the clubs there. I started doing concerts in Los Angeles and New York,” admitted the man who didn’t have a permanent band, didn’t want to do shows, wasn’t much of a guitarist and had only a limited range as a singer.
All his hits were first made famous by others. Jerry Lee Lewis recorded Help Me Make it Through the Night, Ray Price sang For the Good Times, and Kristofferson’s lover, Janis Joplin, recorded a cover of perhaps his best-known song, Me and Bobby McGee, shortly before her death. Characteristically for the 60s, full of free-spirited wanderlust, it tells about an adventure on the road: the hero hitchhikes across the USA with his love Bobina, until the wind blows everyone away. “Freedom is just another word for having nothing to lose,” Kristofferson sings here.
Another well-known song, Casey’s Last Ride, takes place entirely in the head of the narrator, who returns to his family from an extramarital fling. The song Jody and the Kid clarifies the sad undertone present all the time until the last verse, which closes a kind of cycle of life. And Billy Dee’s song also ends with death, which confused the listeners already with the opening contradiction “Billy Dee was seventeen when he was twenty-one”.
Kris Kristofferson sings Me and Bobby McGee, made famous by Janis Joplin. Photo: ČTK | Video: Austin City Limits
Above all, Kris Kristofferson valued freedom. He preached that everyone could do whatever they wanted, even if they chose to destroy themselves. He came close to this in the late 1970s, when, after divorcing his second wife, singer Rita Coolidge, he entered rehab. “Addiction to alcohol, drugs and women contributed to exhaustion,” his biography states. He cites burnout as another cause, after the musician had been releasing albums for a whole decade, but interest in them was declining.
Since 1970, when his first solo record sold only a few tens of thousands of copies, however, Kristofferson has maintained a second career. He began acting in films, which provided him with a steady income and allowed him to stay in the limelight. Although he mainly used his masculine charisma in front of the camera, he played quite a few memorable roles. His role as a no-nonsense rancher in Martin Scorsese’s romantic comedy Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore landed him on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine for the first time. His gunslinger Billy Kid from the ballad western Pat Garrett and Sam Peckinpah’s Billy Kid was especially popular.
Kris Kristofferson as a vampire hunter in the Blade action film series. | Photo: New Line Cinema
He achieved his greatest success in 1976 with the film Zrodila se hvězda about the love of a budding singer for a retired rocker. Kristofferson even won a Golden Globe for the film, in which he acted with Barbra Streisand, and the soundtrack alone sold 1.5 million copies. However, he still received acting opportunities in the new millennium. The next generation recognized him as a vampire hunter from the comic saga Blade, the second part of which he also filmed in Prague in 2001.
Musically, he has already risen to the top once, in the mid-80s as a member of the country supergroup Highwaymen. In an admittedly over-the-top stylization as outlaw cowboys with friends Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash, they humorously revived their careers with the help of various clichés, easily distinguished themselves against the younger generation that had previously pushed them off the charts, and with their admittedly country-pop music had a huge commercial response. Between 1985 and 1995 they released three records. Today, only the ninety-one-year-old Nelson is alive.
The kind of comeback that Johnny Cash experienced with producer Rick Rubin at the end of the millennium, however, he did not meet Kris Kristofferson. Perhaps only This Old Road from the spring of 2006, recorded with the respected Don Was, belonged to his more significant recordings. A year later, he performed for the first time in Prague, where he played about thirty songs in the Congress Center alone with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica. And he took a picture with the Czech group Fešáci, who sought him out in the USA during communism and made his Help Me Make It Through The Night famous at home under the name Sundej z hodin vážní.
Such a fate befell several of Kristofferson’s songs, led by Sunday Morning. That was sung by Pavel Bobek, as well as Me and Bobby McGee, with lyrics by Vladimír Poštulka under the title Chvíle kdoj zách sé sé. Just the Other Side of Nowhere performed by Zelenáč became I can smell the scent of your hair, Why Me was texted by Zdeněk Borovec as Hlídej můj spánek, love, while Silver Tongued Devil and I turned into Eloquent Devil and I.
For a change, Jody and Kid had Wabi Daněk in his repertoire, who jumped ahead of his role model in 2012 at the second Prague concert again in the Congress Center. There, daughter Kelly joined Kris Kristofferson for several songs.
The Czechs were last able to see him seven years ago in the park at Sychrov Castle, where he performed a very limited performance in his eighties. After that, he climbed into a black camper van parked right next to the stage and headed to the next station with his wife. Until the last years, living on the road like his heroes. Or like in their youth, when they often moved because of their father’s service in the army.
“I thought about what advice I would give kids in life. But I’ve never learned anything that doesn’t contradict itself,” Kris Kristofferson told Esquire magazine in 2007, with whom he also shared his motto. “If you can’t get out of something, do it properly. And if it can’t be done properly, you don’t do it,” he advised.