If Kris Kristofferson, who died Saturday at 88, had been invented by a novelist, the author would be accused of engaging in magical realism. C’mon, a Rhodes Scholar helicopter pilot turned country music star turned Hollywood actor with a string of famous wives and paramours – who’s buying that a real person could do all that? It makes me think it won’t be long before the bioflick, if they can find a star imposing enough to play him.
Singing was the least of Kris Kristofferson’s panoply of talents. “I can’t sing, man. I sound like a frog,” he told Fred Foster when promised a songwriting contract if he’d also cut an album. Foster responded, “Maybe, but you’re a frog who can communicate.”
Kristofferson’s greatest success was as a writer. Few remember that he studied Romantic poetry before he started setting his own words to music. He wanted to fly helicopters in Vietnam but the Army wanted him to teach English literature to West Point cadets, so he chucked it all and moved to Nashville, where his experience proved beneficial. To ensure Johnny Cash got his demo tape, Kristofferson landed a helicopter on Cash’s lawn and delivered it himself.
The country establishment loved his plainspoken yet poetic approach to traditional subjects like drinking, heartbreak and regret. “For the Good Times” by Ray Price and Cash’s “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down” both won Song of the Year from the Country Music Association. Janis Joplin introduced his music to the broader rock audience with “Me and Bobby McGee,” which he co-credited to Foster, who contributed nothing but the title.
Kristofferson’s politics were less popular with his country audience and more with the singer-songwriter crowd he sang for at the Big Sur Folk Festival in 1970.
The tune was first recorded the year before by Bobby Bare. It includes a verse that Kristofferson dropped when he performed it himself, making three types the law protected us from – the addicts, the homeless and the hippies.
Kristofferson devoted more time to acting than singing after the 1970s. He didn’t give up music, but country stations weren’t keen on tracks like this one, released in 2003, at the height of Iraq war fever. This was around the time of his infamous backstage confrontation with Toby Keith, related (and perhaps embellished) by eyewitness Ethan Hawke.
