By Jack Rafferty
“I’ll only live ‘til I die.”
Kris Kristofferson recently passed away. To me, his voice and lyrics conveyed a level-headedness, self-assured demeanor, that was full of compassion, and always with the wink of mischief. I didn’t know him, so I don’t know if any of these qualities reflect who he was as a person, but I will always remember seeing when Sinead O’Connor was booed at Madison Square Garden in 1992, Kristofferson came on stage and embraced her and whispered, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” That seemed to tell me a lot about him.
This has only been expanded on over the years as I learned of his vocal support for Palestine and his staunch antimilitarism. I’ll always love the clip of him with Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Johnny Cash, where on the topic of American chauvinism he states, “it reminds me a lot of the flag-waving and the choreographed patriotism that we had in Nazi Germany.... We got a one-party system…lapdog media that’s crankin’ out propaganda for the administration that’d make a Nazi blush.”
I resonated a lot with Kristofferson’s tongue in cheek sense of humor in his writing, and his brazenness. The lines below from “Good for Nothing Blues,” illustrate one of my favorite things about his worldview, which is how he expressed not wanting pity from others,
I prefer your condemnation to your suckin’ sympathy
Baby good for nothing’s good enough for me.
“Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” is in my top five country songs of all time, which is not a statement I make lightly. Kris was nearly unmatched when it came to his songwriting.
He had a master’s degree in English, and he could quote William Blake from memory, which checks out, as I have often felt his lyrics were both gruff yet literary. They were conversational, yet full of simplicity and truth.
Duvalier was a bitter man who cursed the morning sun
That brought a new betrayal every day
He shunned the world of mortals and the sound of human tongues
And blessed the night that chased their sight away
A disillusioned dreamer who would never love again
Who’d tried of it and found that it was rotten
Preferring perfect strangers to the company of friends
Because strangers are so easily forgotten.
—“Duvalier’s Dream”
I could go on all day about the songs and lines I love, but another standout to me is “Best of All Possible Worlds.” It is a type of comedic anti-cop/prison song that reminds me a bit of the tone of Cool Hand Luke, in which each line is more irreverent and cleverer than the last.
Well I woke up next morning
Feelin’ like my head was gone
And like my thick old tongue
Was lickin’ somethin’ sick and wrong
And I told that man I’d sell my soul
For somethin’ wet and cold as that old cell
That kindly jailer grinned at me
All eaten up with sympathy
Then poured himself another beer
And came and whispered in my ear
‘If booze was just a dime a bottle
Boy, you couldn’t even buy the smell’
I said I knew there was somethin’ I liked about this town.
Much like John Prine, who Kristofferson helped put on the map, Kris explores themes of darkness, alienation, abandonment, and seeking freedom in a world where that seems like an impossibility, and he often did so with a certain humor, kindness, and lightheartedness. Kris could also be more serious with a lot of his writing. One of my favorite examples of this is in “Casey’s Last Ride,” in his descriptions of the desolation of a person’s alienation and despair in an industrial capitalist world.
Casey joins the hollow sound of silent people walking down
The stairway to the subway in the shadows down below;
Following their footsteps through the neon-darkened corridors
Of silent desperation, never speakin’ to a soul.
The poison air he’s breathin’ has the dirty smell of dying
’cause it’s never seen the sunshine and it’s never felt the rain.
But Casey minds the arrows and ignores the fatal echoes
Of the clickin’ of the turnstiles and the rattle of his chains.
Overall, Kris seemed like a beautiful person full of contradictions, like us all. There have been few that equaled his songwriting capability in his lifetime, and I’ll always be glad to have his songs to listen to. Leonard Cohen wrote that Kristofferson told him he wanted the lines from Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire” on his tombstone, so it only feels fitting to include it here,
Like a bird on a wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried, in my way, to be free.
