In 2009, the actor Ethan Hawke wrote a profile of Kris Kristofferson for Rolling Stone magazine. It’s an intimate, illuminating interview, ranging from the Grand Ole Opry to Heaven’s Gate, that runs to several thousand words. In truth, it could be boiled down to a single sentence: “Kris Kristofferson is cut from a thicker, more intricate cloth than most celebrities today.”
Kristofferson’s life was quite remarkable: an Oxford-educated army captain who abandoned his military career to pursue music in Nashville, he would win four Grammys, sidestep into acting, work with Sam Peckinpah and Martin Scorsese and score a Golden Globe. His songs would be performed by everyone from Johnny Cash to Janis Joplin, Al Green to Gladys Knight. In his 40s, he would form a chart-topping outlaw country supergroup alongside Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson. He would continue to record and perform into his 80s.
Along the way, he would come to represent a particular kind of American masculinity; bohemian and intellectual, undeniably, but also rugged and defiant. A soldier who studied English literature; a lover of Hank Williams and William Blake; a songwriter capable of dreaming up the lyrics to Me and Bobby McGee while sitting on an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana. “Something inside me made me want to do the tough stuff,” he once said. “Part of it was I wanted to be a writer, and I figured that I had to get out and live.”
Certainly, it would have been a lot easier for Kristofferson if he had accepted the army teaching job instead of chasing his Nashville dream. For several years, the closest he got to a music career was working as a janitor at Columbia Studios. At weekends, he made a little money flying helicopters for the off-shore oil-rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.
He was determined to become a songwriter; failing that, a novelist. But these desires often ran at odds with the responsibilities to a wife and young family. He drank heavily, dressed shabbily, and after a time his parents – upstanding military types who cared little for country music – chose to disown him by letter. “Nobody over the age of 14 listens to that kind of music,” his mother wrote, “and if they did, they wouldn’t be somebody we would want to know.”
By 1969, he was divorced, and his drinking had lost him his job on the oil rigs. But after a stretch in the very depths of himself, Kristofferson’s life then took an upward turn: three of his songs were set down by rising country star Roger Miller, alongside covers by Bobby Bare, Sammi Smith, Ray Price and others.
Later that year, after a great deal of trying, Kristofferson finally caught the attention of his hero Johnny Cash by landing a helicopter in the star’s yard and swaggering out of the pilot’s seat with a demo cassette in one hand, and (Cash claimed) a beer in the other. On the tape was a recording of the song Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down. Cash was smitten. The track went to No 1, and won the Country Music Association’s song of the year.
The first song Kristofferson ever wrote was a pro-Vietnam tune he later regretted. Across his career, he atoned for the misstep in any number of activist songs, including Bobby Bare’s 1969’s recording, The Law is for the Protection of the People, 1986’s What About Me, which questioned the rightwing military hostility in Central America, and 2006’s anti-war anthem In the News.
At times, and in certain quarters, the political stance made the incline of his career a little steeper. “I found a considerable lack of work after doing concerts for the Palestinian children … and if that’s the way it has to be, that’s the way it has to be,” he once said. “If you support human rights, you gotta support them everywhere.” In 1992, he famously showed solidarity with the singer Sinéad O’Connor, who had left the audience of Saturday Night Live aghast when she tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II in protest against the Catholic church. Kristofferson strode out on stage at a Bob Dylan anniversary concert in New York City soon after and put an arm around her as the audience booed: “Don’t let the bastards get you down,” he told her.
The Rolling Stone profile, too, opens with a political sparring match. Hawke recalling standing next to Kristofferson at a tribute to Willie Nelson, at which a big country music star cautions the singer to dispense with the “lefty shit” for the evening. Kristofferson bridles, and calls the upstart to heel. “Have you ever served your country?” he asks him. “The answer is no, you have not. Have you ever killed another man? Huh? Have you ever taken another man’s life and then cashed the check your country gave you for doing it? No, you have not. So shut the fuck up!”
As much as his firm political positions spurred Kristofferson’s outlaw reputation, they also fed his songwriting, establishing his presiding themes of fairness and freedom and desire, and setting something at their core that was steady and unflinching and that in one light might look like hardness, and in another could seem something like hope. His first publisher, Marijohn Wilkin noted in a 2003 interview with Nashville Scene that in the beginning, Kristofferson’s songs were too long and too perfect, restrained by a neatness of grammar. He had to work to find their grain.
What he developed was a songwriting style that rests on the tension between that toughness and a deep sensuality. It’s there in the loosened hair ribbon of Help Me Make It Through the Night, and in the frying chicken of Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down, in the quiet, human desolation that runs through so many of his lyrics.
Play Kristofferson’s version of Me and Bobby McGee, and you’ll hear it there, too: how it becomes a song that rests not so much on the voice but the verses, played slower, more loping, in his take, and sung with a gentle resignation. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” he sings, like someone who has known the taste of both; in his hands the song growing somehow thicker, and more intricate.