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September 7th, 2008
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One wild American

A legendary singer-songwriter goes back on the road

By Darrell Jonsson
For The Prague Post
March 7th, 2007 issue

Photo by Mary Ellen Mark
With the rise of alt-country, Kristofferson's controversial work has a new audience.
“I’ve always just written what I was feeling at the time,” Kris Kristofferson says via telephone from his rural Hawaiian home. This seems like a humble statement coming from an artist who, in the early 1960s, had everybody from Jimmie Rodgers to Gladys Knight and the Pips scrambling through his catalog to find their next hit song. Recording a Kristofferson song back then was a safe bet — and far less of gamble than what Kristofferson himself had taken several years earlier.
The son of a two-star Air Force general, Kristofferson had by 1965 already worked his way through the ranks of Rhodes scholar and Army captain. Well-groomed for a prestigious career at West Point, he took a job instead as a janitor in Nashville. What madness possessed him?
“I fell in love with the whole songwriter scene,” Kristofferson says. “After my tour in Germany, I went to Nashville and just fell in love. I was shown around by Mary John Wilkin, a relative of my platoon leader, and just watching people sharing their songs and the excitement being created was something that came naturally to me.”
It took three or four years of odd jobs before Kristofferson got his big break. Even with covers of his songs “Me and Bobby McGee” and “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” in the charts, Kristofferson’s career as live performer amounted to an impromptu one-night gig at a Nashville restaurant. All that dramatically changed when Johnny Cash pushed him out onto the stage at the 1969 Newport Folk Festival. Soon he was comparing notes with the likes of James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and the Everly Brothers.
Of all the stars Kristofferson met in the realm of folk and country, it was Cash who became his mutually declared “blood brother.” “John was a remarkable person, one of the most amazing people I ever met,” he says. “He always seemed larger than life. He stood for integrity and just being around him was like an electric experience. He never looked human, although he was very human and had a great sense of humor and it was great to be his friend. But I think what resonated with the American people is that he represented the sort of integrity a lot of Americans like to think they represent.” Kristofferson pauses to add, “something that’s taking a beating these days.”
Kris Kristofferson

When: Thursday, March 8, at 8
Where: Congress Center
Tickets: 200–1,350 Kč, available through Ticketpro

Kristofferson’s career rose like a rocket in the ’70s, with more than 400 artists singing his songs. But, by the ’80s, a persistent social discontent began to emerge in his lyrics. “In some places and at some times it made me unmarketable, because they were trying to market me in the country and western market, which is generally pretty conservative,” he says. “When I was writing songs about Nicaragua and what we were doing in Central America, I remember reading a review — I think it was in USA Today — that said, ‘Surely he knows pigs will fly before they play any of this on the air.’ ”
On his 1986 release, Repossessed, his populist hymn to Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Jesus Christ and Mahatma Gandhi titled “They Killed Him” made a few people flinch, though it did manage to get some airplay. In 1990, Krisofferson’s last album with Mercury, Third World Warrior, contained songs such as “Aguila Del Norte,” which he says “was about how the American Eagle was perceived by the people we were terrorizing — attacking schools, health facilities and agricultural co-ops in Nicaragua.” By then, Kristofferson’s song content had clearly jumped the mainstream C&W shark. “I certainly wasn’t the kind of artist that was going to wear a Nudie suit,” Kristofferson chuckles, referring to the flashy attire once popular with musicians and movie stars. “They probably considered me more like Bob Dylan than Hank Williams.”
Despite hovering slightly beneath the celebrity radar since then, making a living hasn’t been an issue for Kristofferson. Since his acting debut in Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie in 1971, his name has appeared on marquees next to the likes of Streisand, Stallone, Snipes and Peckinpah. In the ’90s, he formed a country and western super-group called the Highwaymen — himself, Cash, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson — that gained a solid following.
By the end of the ’90s, independent labels like Nashville’s Oh Boy Records and Austin’s New West Records were beginning to take note of the strong country undercurrents known as alt-country and Americana. In 2003, Oh Boy re-released Kristofferson’s controversial earlier works, along with a live performance at San Francisco’s Gershwin Theater. The stripped-down sound of his 2003 live CD Broken Freedom Song signaled an appropriate return for the Texas-born bard as a solo artist. His 2006 release, This Old Road, on New West, continues the simple, rustic approach of strummed guitars with poignant and masterful lyrics.
His current tour, which begins in Florida and ends in Scotland, offers an opportunity to hear one of Nashville’s original outlaws. As Kristofferson recently told a Toronto audience, “It ain’t Dylan, but it’s all I’ve got.”

Darrell Jonsson can be reached at features@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (7/03/2007):

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