From turning his back on an academic career in literature to work on an oil rig, to suffering censorship because of his political beliefs, Kris Kristofferson knows to never let them get you down . . .
WHEN SINÉAD O’Connor took to the stage of Madison Square Gardens to perform at a Bob Dylan tribute concert in 1992, she was visibly rattled when her very appearance led to nasty boos from the audience. The MC for the night, Kris Kristofferson, knew he had to act.
"This was just a few weeks after Sinéad had torn up the pope's photo on Saturday Night Liveand I just couldn't believe a Bob Dylan audience, of all audiences, were reacting like that to her," says Kristofferson.
“I remember going out to her and saying: ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down Sinéad,’ which was picked up on the microphones. I suppose what I was reacting to was the fact that I had been shunned and booed at by ‘patriot types’ within the country music scene many times during my career so I knew what was going on and how to advise her: that is, don’t let those bastards ever get you down.”
On his current album, Closer To The Bone, there's a song called Sister Sinéad, which Kristofferson wrote in response to the deluge of clerical child abuse stories of recent years. He remembered how the point Sinéad O'Connor was trying to make on Saturday Night Livewas badly misinterpreted. The lyrics go: "When she told her truth just as hard as she could, her message profoundly was misunderstood, there's humans entrusted with guarding our gold, and humans in charge of saving our souls, and humans responded all over the world, condemning that bald-headed brave little girl."
Sister Sinéad is the not the only Irish connection on Closer To The Bone. The album contains a bonus CD: a live recording of one of his shows at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin from two years ago. Kristofferson has dedicated the bonus disc to the venue's famous bar manager, Maureen Grant, who, he writes, "has been curing and creating hangovers for me since I started coming to Dublin".
Now 74, Kristofferson kicked off a nationwide two-week tour of Ireland last Thursday. The reviews of this current tour have it that “he has a voice like Johnny Cash reciting from the Old Testament and he provides a rare link to an old idea of a mythic, honourable America”.
Cash was, and still is, Kristofferson's lodestar. "He's like America's father," he says. "Johnny Cash became a good friend but when I was just starting out, he saved me. When he recorded my Sunday Morning Coming Down, that changed everything for me. Before that I was just someone working on an oil refinery who had thrown away an English literature academic career to try to become a musician."
Even as a teenager growing up in Texas, it was obvious Kristofferson had a real ability with the English language. “When I just started college I won this really prestigious short-story competition and then I got a Rhodes scholarship to go to Oxford to study English literature. But my big loves in life were boxing and music so I turned my back on academia and tried to become a songwriter. It was while working on the oil rigs that I wrote all my early material,” he says.
Going to live in Nashville, as all aspirant songwriters of the time had to, he got his foot in the door of a record company there by working as a janitor.
"I was working there at the time when Bob Dylan recorded his Blonde on Blondealbum. There were all these people outside trying to get in and I could just walk past them because I worked there. I just remember this guy in dark glasses sitting behind a piano and taking ages to record these songs: in Nashville you usually got a song down every hour. I didn't dare talk to him – I probably would have been fired – but it was amazing to watch on as he created this masterpiece," he says.
As songs such as For The Good Times, Help Me Make It Through The Nightand the stone-cold classic Me and Bobby McGeesoon got picked up by grateful singers, Kristofferson pushed to begin his own performing career.
"The labels just didn't think I was 'marketable' as myself fronting these songs," he says. "They didn't even let me sing on the demos of my songs for other people. And I've no problem at all that, say, it's Janis Joplin's (Kristofferson's long-time lover) version of Me and Bobby McGeethat people think of, not mine. I always get asked which cover of my songs do I like the best and I always say: 'All of them!' I mean, I've had Elvis and Sinatra and Johnny Cash and Janis cover my stuff: you can't ask for anything more."
His friends always tell him that if he took the words “freedom” and “sidewalk” out of his lyrics, he’d be speechless. “It’s meant as a joke but there is something to that” he says. “People with Rhodes scholarships weren’t supposed to be working as janitors. Imagine how my family took that. It was more than frowned upon. So the freedom for me was to leave this career behind and do what I really, really wanted to do. So yes, freedom is a big deal in my life.
"And even when I was sitting on this oil refinery dreaming that some big Nashville name would record one of my songs, I never regretted what I did. And anyway, that oil refinery was good to me: I wrote Help Me Make It Through The Nightand Me And Bobby McGeeon it."
Concomitant with the music career has been a film career of some distinction. “That all started back in 1970,” he says. “At the time I was performing my own songs and I gigged a lot at this certain venue in Los Angeles where many of the movie people hung out. It was as simple a connection at that – they saw me on stage and thought I’d be good in movies. My film career still amazes me a bit, to be honest.”
Now viewed as a grizzled but venerable veteran, it’s easy to forget the struggles Kristofferson had because of his political beliefs. “The first big objection to me was from country music radio in the US,” he says. They just wouldn’t play me, they objected to the nature of the lyrics.
“And later I had certain stances on US foreign policy in El Salvador and Nicaragua but if there’s anything I learnt from Johnny Cash it’s to tell the truth, whatever the consequences.”
His Irish tour takes him from Mayo to Belfast to Kerry and he’s just added another date at the Olympia, Dublin, a benefit concert for the ISPCC.
“It’s incredible when you hear the facts,” he says. “There were over 815,000 calls to the ISPCC last year and they don’t receive a penny of government funding. It’s unbelievable. I’m happy to do that show and very happy to be back playing in the Olympia again.”
Kris Kristofferson plays dates in Derry, Belfast, Dublin, Kilkenny and Kerry between now and August 18th. See mcd.ie for all shows.
