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One of my parents’ best friends from college was singer/songwriter/painterIn 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.”…….
Kris Kristofferson: the soldier turned star made a tough life into tender poetry
No other musician could have landed a helicopter in Johnny Cash’s yard to deliver a new tune, or renounced a debut in praise of the Vietnam war with decades of activist songswww.theguardian.com
Played mostly coffee shops and small nightclubs (and would play at our house - wrote songs for/about me and my sister)
Heckuva painter too - I still have some of his paintings (and while always looking boho/hippie, painted mostly landscapes and slice of life - but he also airbrushed vans for scratch)
Anyway i idolized that dude - he was the epitome of renaissance man
And I always felt Kris was our family friend x100
