REAL GONE
Be Glad We Had Some Time
Outlaw country great, master songwriter and actor Kris Kristofferson left us on September 28.
For the good times: songwriter, singer and actor Kris Kristofferson, 1976.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images (2)
THE LAST TIME Kris Kristofferson played on-stage was in April 2023 at the Hollywood Bowl, part of a two-night celebration of the ninetieth birthday of his friend and fellow Highwayman Willie Nelson. Kristofferson, three years Willie’s junior, sang on both nights. This would have seemed a miracle seven years ago when, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I saw him sitting in the wings of a Nashville arena watching a bevy of country stars paying tribute to songs he wrote but could no longer play. As it turned out, he was misdiagnosed. After treatment for Lyme’s disease he was back on the boards.
That first Hollywood night he sang Loving Her Was Easier – one of his great early love songs – as a duet with Rosanne Cash. On the second he sang Help Me Make It Through The Night, another of his standards, with Norah Jones. His voice was soft and raspy, but then even a half-century ago, when he was in his mid-thirties and recording his first albums, Nashville seemed to view him as a songwriter more than a singer. His 1970 debut Kristofferson, a masterclass in songwriting, flopped. It was only Janis Joplin’s successful cover of Me And Bobby McGee that led to the album’s reissue in 1971, when it made the Top 10 country chart and the Billboard Top 50. His songs have been covered by countless singers in multiple genres, from Al Green to Tom Verlaine, but there’s nothing like hearing these simple-seeming but deeply profound songs about love, sex, loneliness, booze and freedom sung in the ragged voice of the man who wrote them.
Nashville cat:
Kristofferson in 1968, after moving to Music City to start his songwriting career.
“If you were cut out to be an artist, it was your moral responsibility to be one, or you’d be haunted throughout your life.”
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON
Born on June 22, 1936 to an army family in Brownsville, Texas, he wrote his first song aged 11 (I Hate Your Ugly Face finally emerged as a bonus track on 2009’s Closer To The Bone). He was 29 – “as old as Hank Williams when he died,” he told me – when he decided to move with his wife and kid to Nashville and devote himself to make a living at it.