He could have taught English literature, but chose the path of the Nashville studios. Friend of Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and Janis Joplin, Kris Kristofferson also shone in the cinema in “Heaven’s Door” or “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid”. He died at age 88.
Published on September 30, 2024 at 9:05 a.m.
Updated September 30, 2024 at 4:08 p.m.
In 1941, a car drove through Brownsville, Texas. The radio spits Gene Autry’s country music, “America’s Favorite Singing Cowboy”, who is also an actor in popular westerns. “This music is horrible,” cuts the driver. His wife approves. Quite the opposite of their 5-year-old child, sitting in the back seat, who still wants it: he loves it! Told a few decades later in an interview, the scene marks the first emancipation of Kris Kristofferson who, once grown up, frees himself from the codes of country music.
Kris Kristofferson, who died on September 28 at the age of 88, was an American hero, charismatic and gifted in everything. A helicopter pilot during his military service, he could have had a career in the US Air Force, like his father’s general; or choose high-level sport, since he excelled at boxing, rugby and American football during his student years; or even teaching English literature after a brilliant course of study took him to the lecture halls of Oxford. Instead, in 1965, two weeks before his induction as a professor at a prestigious military academy, and as Vietnam was flaring, he chose to settle in Nashville, the epicenter of the country nation. His parents disowned him. “My family thought I had lost my mind,” he will tell. Kris Kristofferson liked to quote his favorite writer, William Blake: “If the fool persisted in his madness, he would become wise. » But the young man was healthy in body and mind. Simply, he had been writing songs since he was 19 and he wanted that to be known.
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Living off odd jobs rather than his music, Kristofferson was the janitor at Columbia Studios in Nashville when Bob Dylan recorded his album there. Blonde on Blonde. The two men will have a mutual admiration for each other, will cross their repertoires and will play in the same film, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), de Sam Peckinpah. “Dylan is probably my biggest hero as an artist, songwriter and singer,” swore Kristofferson, who also said more or less the same thing about Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. Of the first, the damned genius of country music who died in 1953, at the age of 29, KK said that he “put his heart and soul into every word”. Failing to attract the attention of the second in the studio at Columbia, he landed by helicopter in his garden to give him a demo of his songs… Dylan like Cash said that there was, for Nashville and country, a before and an after -Kris Kristofferson.
He had read, studied, traveled. Breaking with rural country music, his poetic and scholarly texts explored the themes of the folk scene – pacifism, freedom, sexuality and intimate torments. But others besides him benefited from it, at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, Johnny Cash made a hit Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down, thanks to which Kris Kristofferson was named “songwriter of the year” at the Country Music Association Awards. As for Janis Joplin, she experienced a posthumous triumph with Me and Bobby McGee, recorded just before his death. Released at the same time, the man’s first album, Kristofferson (1970), in which he nevertheless performed these two masterful scores, sold little. “Everyone who has performed my songs has done it better than me, he will tell NPR radio. Let Janis take over Me and Bobby McGee deeply moved me. I only knew her for a short time but we were close. The first time I heard her version, she had just died. And it blew my mind. »
His second album, The Silver Tongued Devil and I, on which the single appears Lovin’ Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)was the commercial peak of a checkered decade. Once again, his repertoire was more successful in the voice of another, Willie Nelson, who devoted a full album to him in 1979. Nelson and Kristofferson, as well as Cash and Waylon Jennings, were the best known of the outlaws, outlaws who robbed Nashville’s business by asserting their artistic and commercial autonomy. From 1985 to 1995, the four stars even formed a supergroup, The Highwaymen, author of three major albums. Kristofferson was a counterculture icon and his audience, often foreign to the country scene, also followed his acting career in films like Alice is no longer here (1974), by Martin Scorsese, A Star is Born (1976), by Frank Pierson, with Barbra Streisand, or the historic failure of Hollywood that was Heaven’s Gate (1980), by Michael Cimino.
Over time, Kris Kristofferson has acquired an esteem that reflects on country music itself. To measure its dimension, we must remember Bob Dylan’s birthday, at Madison Square Garden, in 1992. Invited to perform there, Sinéad O’Connor was booed by the audience because she had just torn up a photo of John Paul II on American television to protest against sexual abuse within the Church. Kristofferson then goes on stage to whisper in his ear: “Don’t let those bastards get you down. “I’m not dejected,” she replies, before singing a cappella War, by Bob Marley. He recounted this episode in Sister Sinéad, song from his twentieth studio album, Closer to the Bonein 2009. Two others followed, before the lights went out. Kris Kristofferson famously wanted the introduction of Bird on the Wire, by Leonard Cohen, forms his epitaph: « Like a bird on the wire / Like a drunk on a midnight choir / I have tried in my way to be free. » (“…I tried in my own way to be free”)…
