Country

I’d trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday

Posted on by brucehhackett

The popular music world is populated by many musicians who were brought up in musical households with parents who encouraged their interest in artistic expression.

But there are also hundreds of songwriters and musical artists whose parents had other plans for their children and strongly discouraged or even forbade them from pursuing a life in the musical arts.

If Kris Kristofferson‘s parents had had their way, we would have never experienced the pleasure of hearing his wondrous songs or viewing his compelling film performances.

Kristofferson’s father Lars was a major general in the US Air Force, and he wanted his son to follow his footsteps into a lifelong career in the military. For a while, it looked like that might happen when, at age 24, Kristofferson accepted a commission as a lieutenant in the Army and became a helicopter pilot, eventually reaching the rank of captain in 1965. Also a gifted writer, Kristofferson was slated to teach English at West Point, but he declined and instead traded that life to pursue his dream to become a country songwriter in Nashville. His parents were scandalized and disowned him for a while.

“Not many cats I knew bailed out like I did,” Mr. Kristofferson said in a 1970 interview. “When I made the break, I didn’t realize how much I was shocking my folks, because I always thought they knew I was going to be a writer. But I think they thought a writer was a guy in tweeds with a pipe. So I quit and didn’t hear from them for a while. I sure wouldn’t want to go through it again, but it’s part of who I am.”

Kristofferson, who died September 28 at age 88, didn’t experience a seamless transition from military man to songwriter, but he had the innate talent and a lot of perseverance. He had graduated with honors with a degree in literature from Pomona College, and had prizewinning entries in a collegiate short-story contest sponsored by The Atlantic magazine before being awarded a Rhodes scholarship to study English literature at Oxford.

All that formal training didn’t translate at first in the world of country music. His early songs read like classic poetry with perfect grammar, and he had to learn to adapt, using more conversational vocabulary with vernacular terms and real-life experiences. During his time as a janitor at Columbia Records, he absorbed a lot by sneaking into the recording sessions of major artists like Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. “I had to get better,” Kristofferson said. “I was spending every second I could hanging out and writing and bouncing off the heads of other writers.”

He developed, as a New York Times writer put it, “a keen melodic sensibility and a languid expressiveness that bore little resemblance to the straightforward Hank Williams-derived shuffles he was turning out when he first arrived in Nashville.” He continued evolving over the next few years until he garnered the attention of publishers and artists in town who were impressed with songs like “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down,” perhaps the most poignant hangover song ever written: “Well, I woke up Sunday morning with no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt, /And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad, so I had one more for dessert…”

His diligence paid off. Between 1970 and 1972, the name Kristofferson seemed to be everywhere. Singer Ray Price took his ballad “For the Good Times” to #1 on the country charts and #11 on the Top 40 pop charts, and soul legend Al Green made it a staple of his shows after recording his own version. Cash registered a Country #1 with “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down” a couple months later.

Most significantly, his iconic composition “Me and Bobby McGee” (first recorded by Roger Miller in 1969 and Gordon Lightfoot in 1970) became an international #1 hit when Janis Joplin’s recording of it was released posthumously in 1971. Years later, Kristofferson said, “I remember one of my songwriter friends said, ‘You’ve got such a good song going on there. Why do you have to put that philosophy in there?’ He was referring to the line ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.’ It turned out to be one of the most memorable lines I ever wrote. So you’d best take your friends’ advice with a grain of salt.”

Concurrently, Kristofferson’s song “Help Me Make It Through the Night” topped country charts and reached #8 on pop charts with singer Sammi Smith’s delicate rendition, which won a Country Song of the Year Grammy for the songwriter.

Kristofferson’s second LP (1971)

All four of these songs appeared on “Kristofferson,” the songwriter’s own recording debut in 1970, but his gruff, uncultured singing voice wasn’t exactly embraced by critics or the public (one writer described it as “pitch-indifferent”). Kristofferson often knocked his own voice. “I don’t think I’m that good a singer,” he said in a 2016 interview. “I can’t think of a song that I’ve written that I don’t like the way somebody else sings it better.” Indeed, although he released more than 15 albums of his own, five of which charted reasonably well on country and pop charts, he had only one successful single, the country gospel tune “Why Me,” which peaked at #16 in 1973.

It turned out to be a fortuitous time to be a songwriter in Nashville, where Kristofferson found himself huddling with with like-minded writers such as Willie Nelson and Roger Miller. “We took it seriously enough to think that our work was important, to think that what we were creating would mean something in the big picture,” he said in a 2006 interview. “Looking back on it, I feel like it was kind of our Paris in the ’20s — real creative and real exciting, and intense.”

Kyle Young, the CEO of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, had this to say this past week: “Kris Kristofferson believed to his core that creativity is God-given, and that those who ignore or deflect such a holy gift are doomed to failure and unhappiness. He preached that a life of the mind gives voice to the soul, and then he created a body of work that gave voice not only to his soul but to ours. Kris’s heroes included the prize fighter Muhammad Ali, the great poet William Blake, and the ‘Hillbilly Shakespeare,’ Hank Williams. He lived his life in a way that honored and exemplified the values of each of those men, and he leaves a righteous, courageous and resounding legacy that rings with theirs.”

Author Bill Malone noted in “Country Music, U.S.A.,” the standard history of the genre, “Kristofferson’s lyrics spoke often of loneliness, alienation and pain, but they also celebrated freedom and honest relationships, and in intimate, sensuous language that had been rare to country music.”

I wholeheartedly agree. Consider these lines from his 1974 song “Shandy (The Perfect Disguise)”: “‘Cause nightmares are somebody’s daydreams, /Daydreams are somebody’s lies, /Lies ain’t no harder than telling the truth, /Truth is the perfect disguise…”

He could also be quite provocative, as in these lyrics from the title tune from his 1972 LP: “Jesus was a Capricorn, he ate organic food, /He believed in love and peace and never wore no shoes, /Long hair, beard and sandals, and a funky bunch of friends, I reckon we’d just nail him up if he came down again…”

Coolidge and Kristofferson at home in Malibu in 1974

In 1971, he developed a personal and professional relationship with singer Rita Coolidge, marrying her and recording a handful of albums with her (“Full Moon” in 1973, “Breakaway” in 1974 and “Natural Act” in 1978) that reached the Top 20 on country charts. The couple won two Grammys (Best Country Vocal Performance by a Duo) for “From the Bottle to the Bottom” in 1973 and “Lover Please” in 1975. They would divorce in 1980 but remained friends and occasionally performed together.

Said Coolidge last week, “Kris was a wonderful man and an extraordinary songwriter. He’s been a close friend of mine and the father of my daughter. We had a volatile marriage, but I have nothing but glowing things to say about him today.” In her 2016 autobiography, “Delta Lady,” she bemoaned his drinking, his verbal abuse and his infidelities, but concluded, “Everything we did was larger than life. I never laughed with anybody in my life like I did with Kris. When it was good, I was over-the-moon happy, but when it was sad, it was almost too much to bear.”

Kristofferson’s acting career took off in 1973 when Sam Peckinpaugh cast him as outlaw Billy the Kid in “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” in which Coolidge also appeared. Martin Scorsese concurred that Kristofferson’s rugged good looks and magnetism lent themselves to the big screen, and cast him as the male lead alongside Ellen Burstyn in the critically acclaimed 1974 drama “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.”

When Barbra Streisand was unable to secure Elvis Presley as her co-star in the 1976 remake of “A Star is Born,” her next choice was Kristofferson, who won a Golden Globe for his turn as John Norman Howard, a singer on the downside of his career who ends up killing himself in a drunk-driving incident. Kristofferson, who had described himself as “a functioning alcoholic,” said he was so disturbed by the scene where Streisand’s character tends to his dead body, he quit drinking in real life. “I remember feeling that that could very easily be my wife and kids crying over me,” he said in the 1980s. “I quit drinking over that. I didn’t want to die before my daughter grew up.”

He followed that experience with “Semi-Tough,” the sports comedy film opposite Burt Reynolds and Jill Clayburgh, but his movie career suffered in 1980 when he starred in Michael Cimino’s epic Western, “Heaven’s Gate,” one of the biggest box-office disasters in Hollywood history. Kristofferson fared reasonably well in the reviews, but the movie itself was so mercilessly panned that anyone involved with it found themselves unhirable for years to come. It would be another 15 years before he regained his footing in John Sayles’ Oscar-nominated “Lone Star.”

Kristofferson in “Heaven’s Gate” in 1980

He attracted a new generation of fans for his portrayal of mentor/father figure Abraham Whistler in Marvel’s first successful film, “Blade,” and its two sequels. Indeed, many superhero movie fans of the late 1990s and early 2000s had no idea that Kristofferson had another career as a singer-songwriter, which he found rather amusing. “I was doing a show in Sweden, and somebody backstage mentioned to me, ‘Hey Kris, there are all these kids out there saying, ‘Geez, Whistler sings?'”

When he experienced a dry spell in both acting and songwriting in the early ’80s, he found solace in his friends in the music business. Kristofferson teamed up with Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Cash to record “Highwayman,” Jimmy Webb’s marvelous song about a soul with four incarnations in different places in time and history. It became a multiplatinum hit that inspired a full album by the foursome, who came to be known as The Highwaymen. They capitalized on the favorable commercial and critical response by recording more albums and touring multiple times over the next decade. Kristofferson later marvelled, “I always looked up to all of those legends, and I felt like I was kind of a kid who had climbed up on Mount Rushmore and stuck his face out there!”

He often talked about how grateful he is to the established songwriters and singers in Nashville who took him under their wing when he was new to town. In comparison, he noted, “Those shows like ‘American Idol’ are kind of scary to me. They wanted me to be on one of those panels one time, and I said it’s the last thing in the world I’d ever want to do. I would hate to have to discourage somebody.”

Cash and Kristofferson on TV in 1977

His legacy as a songwriter is cemented by the number and diversity of artists who have admired his material enough to record it. In addition to Johnny Cash, Janis Joplin, Ray Price, Rita Coolidge, Roger Miller, Gordon Lightfoot, Sammi Smith and Al Green, you can hear strong covers of Kristofferson songs by The Grateful Dead, Frank Sinatra, Willie Nelson, Gladys Knight and The Pips, Elvis Presley, Dolly Parton, Wilson Pickett, Charley Pride, Olivia Newton-John, Ronnie Milsap, Tina Turner, Glen Campbell, Bryan Adams, Joan Baez, Jerry Lee Lewis, Emmylou Harris, Michael Bublé and Thelma Houston.

Streisand said recently, “At a concert in 2019 at London’s Hyde Park, I asked Kris to join me on stage to sing our other ‘A Star Is Born’ duet, ‘Lost Inside Of You.’ He was as charming as ever, and the audience showered him with applause. It was a joy seeing him receive the recognition and love he so richly deserved.”

Kristofferson was married to his third wife, Lisa, for more than 40 years, from 1983 until his death. He had a total of eight children from his three marriages, and seven grandchildren. When asked about his family in 2016, he said, “When I was thirty, and a long time after that, I felt like I had to leave home to do what I had to do. Now, it’s just the opposite.”

Kristofferson in 2017

Bypass surgery in 1999 slowed Kristofferson down, as did an extended bout with Lyme disease in the decade that followed, but he remained active into his 80s. On his final album of new material, 2013’s “Feeling Mortal,” the title song sums up Kristofferson’s feelings near the end of his life: “Here today and gone tomorrow, that’s the way it’s got to be, /God Almighty, here I am, /Am I where I ought to be? /I’ve begun to soon descend like the sun into the sea…”

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Are you ready for the country?

Posted on by brucehhackett

477111097.jpgSince when does rock music include pedal steel guitar or banjo?

Since the very beginning, actually.  Many of rock and roll’s 1950s trailblazers — Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino — were raised on the Delta blues, gospel and boogie-woogie, and those genres were (and continue to be) the pervasive influences in the birth and evolution of rock.  But a critical ingredient in rock’s recipe has always been country music.  Rock pioneers like Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Gene Vincent came from eastern Louisiana, small-town Mississippi and the plains of West Texas, with a twang in their voices and lyrical tales of heartbreak and woe so typical of the country music genre.

By the 1960s, however, the British Invasion bands and their infatuation with the blues was dominating rock music on the charts, and only rarely did a song with strong country influence make much of a splash on the mainstream Top 40.  But not unlike fashion, rock and roll is cyclical — what’s in style now eventually falls out of favor, only to come back around eventually.  In 1965, as loud electric guitars and psychedelia took hold, there was at the same time a subtle countermovement toward “roots” music, or “wooden” music, as some called it.  Simple, unvarnished, back-to-nature music.

Many observers point to Bob Dylan, always one of rock’s trendsetters, as the chief instigator of the move back toward country elements.   After upsetting the folk music crowd by going electric in 1965, Dylan promptly turned around and chose to record his next batch of songs in Nashville, the epicenter of country music.  He utilized some of that city’s best studio musicians available — Kenny Buttrey, Pete Drake, Charlie McCoy — to give his rock-oriented songs on the monumental double album “Blonde on Blonde” a noticeable country flavor.  He found the experience so satisfying that he returned to Nashville in 1967 for his barebones “John Wesley Harding” LP, and again in 1969 for his most countryish album of all, “Nashville Skyline,” which included a duet with Johnny Cash on a remake of “Girl From the North Country” and an appearance by Charlie Daniels on a couple of tracks.

Dylan often recorded with a band known as The Hawks, a mostly Canadian assemblage that dominated the country-tinged music on 1967’s “The Basement Tapes,” although they weren’t released until eight years later, after The Hawks had become The Band.  Robbie Robertson and his cohorts are generally regarded as the forefathers of what is now known as Americana, an authentic type of country/rock/folk hybrid genre on albums like “Music From Big Pink” and “The Band.”

The appeal of country among rock and rollers reached well beyond Dylan and his Nashville period.  Roger McGuinn, leader of Southern California folk-rock pioneers The Byrds, had always enjoyed and appreciated country music.  He mastered the five-string banjo long before he became a guitarist, and was heavily influenced by country-inflected artists like Carl Perkins and The Everly Brothers.  So when rocker David Crosby left The Byrds in 1968, McGuinn replaced him by recruiting the late great Gram Parsons, a gifted country music aficionado who is credited with pretty much inventing the country rock genre (although he preferred to call it “cosmic American music”).  Their watershed 1968 album “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” (recorded partly in Nashville) is widely regarded as the first country rock album, deftly using traditional country instruments like mandolin, fiddle, banjo and pedal steel on rock song arrangements.

The Nashville country music establishment did not take kindly to what they considered “long haired hippie interlopers from California,” and consequently, most of the albums that were responsible for the burgeoning country rock chart success would be recorded elsewhere, mostly in Los Angeles, sometimes with Nashville-bred sidemen who relocated there.

Interestingly, another country rock leader was former ’50s teen idol Ricky (now Rick) Nelson, whose Stone Canyon Band paved the way for many more Southern California artists that crafted country rock songs:  The Stone Poneys with Linda Ronstadt, Mike Nesmith (formerly of The Monkees), The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Loggins and Messina, Firefall.

Parsons, a restless soul who ultimately died young (age 26, in 1973) from too much fast living, moved to California to form another country rock pioneer band called The Flying Burrito Brothers, whose debut album, “The Gilded Palace of Sin,” is often listed as one of the unheralded classics of the era.  Playing banjo and bass in that band was an amazing talent named Bernie Leadon, who became a founding member of The Eagles two years later.

The Eagles, of course, burst on the scene in 1972 with the country rock hits “Take It Easy” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” and the outlaw concept album “Desperado” in 1973, but with each successive album, they became more rock and less country as they added guitarists Don Felder and Joe Walsh to the lineup.  The Eagles became the most successful band in the land by the mid-’70s, but were no longer a country rock outfit by then.

Many of the bands coming out of Southern California at the time — Buffalo Springfield, Poco, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash (and Young) — included country tunes amidst an eclectic mix of rock and folk.  For example, CSNY’s “Deja Vu” featured the countryish Nash hit “Teach Your Children,” sparked by guest Jerry Garcia’s sweet pedal steel guitar, and then followed that with the Crosby counterculture rocker “Almost Cut My Hair,” followed by Young’s plaintive country number “Helpless,” and concluding the side with their hard rocking version of Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock.”

Young has dabbled in every genre imaginable, but his most commercially successful album, 1971’s “Harvest,” was loaded with countryesque material (there’s even a song called “Are You Ready for the Country?”) and was recorded in Nashville with a loose assemblage known as the Stray Gators, including Kenny Buttrey.

Some of the major albums of the period included one or two country-inflected songs but wouldn’t exactly be labeled country rock LPs.  For example, James Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James” had tracks like “Anywhere Like Heaven” and “Country Road,” while Carole King’s “Tapestry” included “Smackwater Jack,” but those records offered far more folk and blues than country.

The same goes for the “Southern rock” sub-genre — rock bands from Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas who had strong blues leanings but loved to dabble in country themes and structures.  The Marshall Tucker Band, The Outlaws, Charlie Daniels Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd and especially The Allman Brothers Band were almost schizophrenic in their output of blues and country tracks.  The Allmans were legendary for their blues numbers that used improvisational jazz techniques, particularly in concert, but their biggest chart success was the #1 single “Ramblin’ Man,” perhaps the quintessential country rock song of the era.  Dickey Betts’ sweet country voice, and lyrics that could have been written by George Jones, complemented soaring electric guitars rocking furiously in unison.

Country rock music came from other cities as well.  In San Francisco, psychedelic veterans The Grateful Dead took a two-album diversion into country rock with what many consider their finest, most accessible records, “Workingman’s Dead” and “American Beauty,” both in 1970.

Coming out of  Southern Ohio was perhaps the most underappreciated of the country rock groups, Pure Prairie League, led by Craig Fuller.  Their two 1972 LPs, “Pure Prairie League” and “Bustin’ Out,” were critics’ darlings but didn’t sell well, and their main claim to fame, the hit single “Amie,” didn’t make the charts until 1974 after Fuller had left.

By the late ’70s and throughout the ’80s, country rock all but disappeared, overshadowed by disco and hard rock and then New Wave and R&B/funk.  But what goes around comes around, and the 1990s and 2000s saw a new trend.  Instead of rockers injecting country elements into their music, we saw country artists injecting rock riffs, rock beats, rock showmanship into their material.  Whereas the old guard in Nashville weren’t interested, the new generation saw the market appeal of the crossover concept, and began scoring huge chart successes.  Garth Brooks, Billy Ray Cyrus, Steve Earle, Brooks and Dunn, Toby Keith, Eric Church, Jason Aldean, Keith Urban and many others have transformed the Nashville sound in recent years by writing and singing songs that have much more of a rock flavor.

Although purists will always turn up their noses at the blending of musical styles, the upshot of this has been more diversity than ever, more options for music lovers of all stripes.  There will always be pure country artists, and pure rock bands, but there’s not a damn thing wrong with fresh new music (and great stuff from decades ago) that melds elements of both genres.  Country rock isn’t for everyone, but it’s a thoroughly legitimate and often innovative blending of instruments, arrangements, vocals and production values in the recorded output from Nashville and Los Angeles and elsewhere.