Call the world if you please "The vale of soul-making..." I say "Soul making," soul as distinguished from intelligence. There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions, but they are not souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself.
-- John Keats, "The Vale Of Soul-Making"
Am I young enough to believe in revolution?
Am I strong enough to get down on my knees and pray?
Am I high enough on this chain of evolution to respect myself and my brother and my sister,
To perfect myself in my own peculiar way?
-- Kris Kristofferson, "Pilgrim's Progress"
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight.
And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings.
-- Wendell Berry, "To Know The Dark"
The life and songs of Kris Kristofferson have often inhabited the shadowy vale to which Keats and Berry refer -- a liminal zone between darkness and light where souls are born and where, in the best of cases, they thrive. Sometimes the pursuit of these twilight reaches comes to a tragic end, as in "Casey's Last Ride" and "Billy Dee", songs in which Kristofferson's characters seek in vain "to satisfy a thirst [they] couldn't name." Other times the chase for this indistinct horizon can be bracing, as in the heady yet weighty rush of freedom in "Me And Bobby McGee". Maybe nowhere has Kristofferson given clearer voice to this liminal pursuit, though, than in "To Beat The Devil", a talking blues inspired by an early encounter with a wraithlike, self-medicating Johnny Cash.
The narrator of "To Beat The Devil" is an archetypal Kristoffersonian troubadour trying to find himself. Staving off a hunger that runs much deeper than his craving for whiskey or beans, he seeks refuge in a tavern on "Music City Row." There he not only confronts the shadows that await him (his own and those of the devil he meets), he embraces this veil as if it were his friend. Relishing the possibilities for transformation at hand, Kristofferson's scuffling protagonist matches wits with the devil and -- just as Jacob did after wrestling all night with the phantom at the river's edge -- emerges, if not with a blessing, then at least with a song to feed the hunger in his soul.
Kristofferson has long sought the shadows in the service of soul-making. As a singer, songwriter, actor, and activist -- as a man -- he's greeted the perils and promises inherent in those murky precincts as "provings of the heart," to borrow Keats' evocative phrase -- as portals to self-discovery.
"Those shadows definitely challenge and test you, whether you're up to it or not," Kristofferson said by phone from his home in Hawaii in December. "And you definitely learn from the tough ones. It's funny. Bucky Wilkin, who used to be in Ronny & the Daytonas and was with my first publishers, told me one time that if you took shadows and the devil out of my songs there wouldn't be anything left. I think maybe freedom, too."
Kristofferson added this coda about freedom with a chuckle, but he couldn't have been more serious. Early on he feverishly extinguished light after light, throwing away one bright prospect after another -- breaking every tie, as he puts it in "Border Lord", before any of them could bind him.
He cast aside careers as a Golden Gloves boxer and as a Special Forces Captain and helicopter pilot in the Army. He turned down a cushy gig teaching English at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He squandered the respect and support of his parents, as well as the love and devotion of his wife and two young daughters. He chucked it all -- comfort, security, prestige -- for a move to Nashville, a ramshackle apartment, and drudge jobs as a bartender and janitor on Music Row.
And, of course, for a song, and with it, a shot at writing some for the ages. Which he did, forever changing what country music could say and how it could mean. Kristofferson, however, didn't just create a neo-Romantic prototype for Nashville tunesmiths; making his way sightless but with abundant imagination, he wrote the restlessly self-surpassing song of himself. Pursuing a persistently penumbral path to perfection, he took every "wrong" direction, as he sings in "The Pilgrim: Chapter 33", in the process of finding himself on his sometimes lean, often lonely, ultimately transformative way back home.
AIN'T YOU COME A LONG WAY
Over the course of his prodigious career, but especially during bleaker times, Kristofferson has taken comfort in a maxim of William Blake's: "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise." This Blakean sense of completion or arrival, of a wayward pilgrim come full circle, is evident throughout Kristofferson's new album, This Old Road. The record's spiritual generosity, disarming sincerity, and unvarnished arrangements are reminiscent in places of both June Carter Cash's Press On and Neil Young's Prairie Wind. Equal parts autobiography, gratitude inventory, and rule for living, Kristofferson's short, sweet album is, in terms of emotional, social, and historical reach, his most realized to date.
Singing in the gnarled Sprechgesang that only in recent decades has begun to sound commensurate with his years, Kristofferson looks back on his wild-eyed early days in Nashville, "roaring" with the likes of Roger Miller, Willie Nelson, Mickey Newbury, and Harlan Howard. He thanks Lisa, his wife of 24 years now, for teaching him the meaning of love. He ponders the sanctity of life and how, inexplicably, people habituate themselves to death. The entire album is infused with an abiding sense of wisdom gained through struggle, the sense of someone "approaching perfection," as Kristofferson sings in the record's closing tune, "Final Attraction".
And yet this is not perfection smugly or arrogantly conceived, but rather born of grace, humility, and a fierce awareness of finitude. This Old Road is Kristofferson bearing witness to how, in his peculiar crucible of shadow and folly, he has forged a soul.
"I got lucky, I got everything I wanted/I got happy, there was nothing else to do," he sings, to a bounding melody recalling that of "I Walk The Line", in "Pilgrim's Progress". This bit about having nothing to do but get happy is anything but glib. Hard-won and then some, it testifies to the singleness of purpose needed to make any life work, and also to the overwhelming sense of gratitude Kristofferson feels for having had a shot at such happiness -- for "the freedom and the chances," as he says elsewhere on the album, "and all the truth and beauty [he's] been shown."
"I'd be crazy," he goes on, rounding out the chorus of "Pilgrim's Progress", "not to wonder if I'm worthy of the part I play in this dream that's coming true." Once again -- and with lines that echo his early '70s number "Why Me" -- Kristofferson isn't referring to the dream in question as if it's some passive fantasy that's happening to him. He's talking about the formation of something real that he has labored, by dint of folly and imagination, his entire life to create. A dream incredibly vivid and intense, and one that has encompassed so much. The triumphs and disappointments of a lifetime; a staggering array of collaborators and friends; the flowering of a radical political consciousness; a family once lost, now found; and lately, some heady recognition, including induction into the Country Music Hall Of Fame in 2004 and a retrospective of his movies at Austin's South By Southwest festival in March.
"Look at that old photograph, is it really you?" he marvels to open This Old Road. Set off by Don Was' roomy production, the track's rustic strains of piano, harmonica, and mandolin lend a suitably hymnal cast to the mix of wonder and weariness in Kristofferson's craggy, pitch-indifferent whisper. It's the lassitude that lingers, especially when, after remarking to himself, "Ain't you come a long way down this old road," he sings of "running out of time," of "holy night...falling," and of "faces that [he's] passed along the way."
Many of those faces are now gone, including those of peers and running buddies such as Miller, Newbury, Howard, and Shel Silverstein -- and, more recently, Waylon Jennings. Easily the toughest goodbyes that Kristofferson has had to say of late, however, were those he bid Johnny and June Carter Cash, just four months apart, in 2003.
"God, I miss them," he said when the Cashes came up in our conversation, and they often did. "I look back on all that time that we spent together. I just wish that I had cherished every moment even more. But I feel so grateful to have known them as well as I did.
"That's kind of a presumptuous thing to say, you know? But to be close to them...," he went on, before pausing, maybe thinking the better of going too far down so intimate a path.
"Coming to town, you know, John was my idol," he began again, tracing a still personal yet ultimately more public arc. "I was just thinking the other day. One of the things that I like best about my life is looking at some of these people who were my heroes who became my friends. Like Willie and Waylon, and Muhammad Ali. But John was really special."
Cash, after all, befriended Kristofferson when he was still just a wannabe songwriter emptying ashtrays and running errands at Columbia Studios on Music Row. And it was the Cashes who, after inviting him to a dinner party at their home, asked Kristofferson to join them onstage at the Newport Folk Festival in 1967 -- and who practically had to drag him up there with them after he'd hitchhiked all the way from Nashville to get there.
Cash, in an interview I did with him at the Carter Fold for No Depression a year before he died, still had vivid memories of his protege's Newport debut. "When it came time for him to go onstage, I said, 'Kris, you go out and do whatever you feel like doing, then call me back out and I'll come back on,'" Cash began. "So it came time for him to go on and he stood there frozen. He couldn't move. I said, 'Kris, the emcee's calling you,' and he still couldn't move. He couldn't speak. He was petrified. Well, finally, June walked up to him, kicked him in the seat of the pants, and said, 'Get out there.'
"So he went out and he did 'Sunday Morning Coming Down' and 'Me And Bobby McGee'. I forget what else he did, but the next day, on the front page of The New York Times, it said, 'Kris Kristofferson Takes Newport'. I was really proud of that for Kris. He really needed that break; it was a great leap forward, and he got a really good one there."
Maybe not as big a break, though, as the one Kristofferson got from appearing on Cash's prime-time variety TV show two years later. Or from Cash scoring a #1 country hit with the unexpurgated version of "Sunday Morning Coming Down" that he performed on his show in 1970.
That record would become Kristofferson's first chart-topping cut as a songwriter and would win him the award for Song of the Year at the CMAs. It also opened the door, as has been widely chronicled, to his shaggy, inebriated reception of the honor at the Ryman Auditorium, ensuring him Outlaw status a few years before anyone thought to give the iconoclastic persona he helped create a name.
THE BURDEN OF FREEDOM
The scene that Kristofferson made at the 1970 CMA Awards was hardly an anomaly. In many ways he had been crossing lines and taking risks, even to the point of self-sabotage, for much of his life. And maybe as a matter of course.
Along the way he had lettered in football and soccer at Pomona College and been a Golden Gloves boxer. He'd been inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He'd won fiction contests sponsored by The Atlantic Monthly, and, as a young military officer, trained as a member of the Army's elite Airborne Rangers. The pressure -- as an athlete, student, writer, and serviceman -- to perpetually surpass himself must have been overwhelming at times.
Kristofferson's accomplishments were a great boon, to be sure. Yet being blessed with such a profusion of gifts, and with the privilege to pursue them so freely -- his father was a two-star general in the Air Force -- must also have been a burden. It was a legacy that had to be lived down or shrugged on occasion, or at least be put in jeopardy every now and then for it to mean or be worth anything at all.
Why else would Kristofferson, with the constitutional impulsivity of someone with attention deficit disorder (how, in hindsight, could he have focused on any one thing?), discard the innumerable opportunities his many gifts afforded him? Why, at times, would he go so far as to risk his life to feel more fully alive?
The most unforgettable and perilous cases of this habitual risk-taking were those when, while stationed in Germany, Kristofferson and his fellow pilots would get bombed and fly into the hollows of the Rhine River Valley, skidding along the surface of the water.
From picking fights in bars to jumping out of combat planes, though, Kristofferson's persistent shadow dancing was all of a piece. For much of the first 30 years of his life, he had followed a well-lit, overachieving path in keeping with his parents' status and respectability. Yet as rife with prospects as that well-heeled life might have been, it never really fed the gnawing in his soul. As a young man who'd been given so much and done so much with it, Kristofferson was still searching, as Mary Gordon would write of Jane Austen, for a sentence to fit him.
In Kristofferson's case, that sentence would be a song, not a novel -- and later, on occasion, a script. But whatever was going to fit, it was going to have to be something that didn't come easy, something that wasn't encumbered by the weight of societal or familial expectations. It would have to be something, even if it cost him everything -- and maybe because it would -- where the only burden would be freedom. This burden of freedom is precisely what he's getting at in "Me And Bobby McGee" with the gloriously double-edged line, "Nothin' ain't worth nothin' but it's free."
There certainly was a whole lot of nothing, and much of it onerous, after Kristofferson, then on the verge of turning 30, turned down that teaching appointment at West Point and moved to Nashville to pursue his songwriting muse in 1965.
Not that the move was without invitation. Marijohn Wilkin, the writer of such country classics as "Waterloo" and "Long Black Veil", was starting a small publishing house on Music Row. Acting on a tip from a relative who saw Kristofferson perform in Germany (as "Kris Carson" he'd previously cut some unreleased sides for the British pop impresario Tony Hatch), Wilkin signed him, along with the left-of-center likes of Chris Gantry and Johnny Darrell, to her fledging company, Buckhorn Music. The demo tape that prompted the deal was, as Wilkin recalled in a 2003 interview with writer Michael McCall, "a mix of Shelley and Keats set to the tune of Hank Williams."
The trouble was, Kristofferson's highfalutin' hybrid wasn't where country radio's collective head was at back in 1965. Buck Owens' sprightly "Before You Go" -- a terrific though by no means Keatsian single -- was the most successful hit on the Billboard country chart that year. Novelties like "Girl On The Billboard" and "May The Bird Of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose", as well as MOR ballads by Nashville Sound perennials such as Jim Reeves and Eddy Arnold, also predominated.
Roger Miller's "King Of The Road" -- #1 for five weeks that spring -- might have augured the progressive movement to come, but it clocked in, with Hemingway-like economy (and abundant comic relief), at just over two minutes. It would still be a few years before radio would be ready for Kristofferson's rambling mix of abstract and concrete, of shadows, devils, castles and whatnot.
A&R reps on Music Row weren't interested, in any event, in pitching Kristofferson's aphoristic musings to the acts they represented, and the few cuts that Wilkin did place weren't exactly hits. The first, a recitation of Kristofferson's "Talkin' Vietnam Blues" by the DJ and TV host Ralph Emery, didn't even break into the Top 100 of the Billboard country singles chart. Much the same fate befell the version of "For The Good Times" that producer Jerry Kennedy recorded with a female singer whose name nobody seems to remember anymore. "The Golden Idol", a 1966 single of Kristofferson's that Wilkin talked a head-scratching Billy Sherrill into releasing on Epic, stiffed as well.
In all fairness -- and as Wilkin readily points out -- Kristofferson had yet to calibrate the blend of highbrow and lowbrow that would become his stock-in-trade. He had some things to learn, or rather unlearn, before country audiences, the singers as well as the fans, would relate to his songs. "He had been a poet and an English teacher, so his songs were too long and too perfect," Wilkin said. "His grammar was too perfect....He had to learn to write the way people talk. He did, too."
Indeed, and not just by peppering his narratives with colloquialisms like "ain't," "Lord," and "nothin's" stacked back-to-back. Kristofferson also developed an indelible melodic sensibility -- a languid, circuitous lyricism -- that went well beyond the gutbucket, Hank-cribbed shuffles he hit town with.
Avid to surpass himself and his peers -- and not just as a writer, but also as a dipso and a brawler -- he doggedly persisted, plunging into the shadows and mortgaging his future, as he sings in following stanza from his new album, for a stab at immortality:
We used to drink about a bucket of booze
To try and chase away the black and blues
When it come the time to pay your dues
We gave an IOU
To the devil with a dirty smile
Which he added to the growing pile
Of the promises we mean to keep
The day your dreams come true.
All of which was met with the enormous chagrin of his duty-bound parents. "I remember," Kristofferson said with a laugh, "my mother saying that nobody over the age of 14 listens to that kind of music, and that it wouldn't be anyone we'd want to know."
And they didn't, even if that nobody was their son, and even if the "shitkickin'" music in question was the least of their concerns. Not having bargained for the hobo-songwriter life, Kristofferson's wife and high-school sweetheart Fran was as bewildered as everyone else, leaving him and taking the kids with her not long after he'd dragged them to Nashville to pursue his quixotic adventure.
"God it was hard on the people around me, like my family," Kristofferson said, looking back on this dissolute yet thrilling time of his life. Even his brother, who'd stood by him longer than anyone else from the past he'd abandoned, eventually flew to Nashville to see if he ever was going to come to his senses. The occasion was Kristofferson getting fired from his side job -- the only one that really paid anything -- flying workers to and from offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. He'd been found slumped over the controls of his helicopter sound asleep, with the blades revving wildly above him.
In another helicopter incident, Kristofferson landed his chopper on the bluff above the Cashes' house on Old Hickory Lake to deliver a demo tape rumored to have included "Sunday Morning Coming Down". "When you're heading for the border," he'd later sing, "you're bound to cross the line."
TRYING TO SING UP ALL THE SOUL IN SIGHT
"I was so thirsty to be hungry to be an artist," Kristofferson said, with characteristic wryness, of his fevered pursuit of songwriting glory. "There were a couple of guys who were sort of the heroes of the ones of us who considered ourselves underground 'cause no one cut our songs. It would always be Roger Miller, Willie Nelson or Johnny Cash. Everybody just seemed to zero in on one, but I was the only one who liked all of 'em."
This omnivorous and insatiable appetite for inspiration, coupled with his exposure to a mind-boggling amount of great songwriting in so short a span of time, certainly served Kristofferson well. "I had to get better," he told Michael McCall. "I was spending every second I could hanging out and writing and bouncing off the heads of other writers."
Talking with me by phone in December, he said, "We took it seriously enough to think that our work is important, to think that what we were creating would mean something in the big picture. Looking back on it, I feel like it was kind of our Paris in the '20s. Real creative and real exciting. And intense."
Pushing himself relentlessly, Kristofferson was living the Romantic ethic, the privilege and self-assurance to which he was born perhaps affording him the strength and resiliency to do so. He and his cohorts called the most intense of these times "roaring" -- marathon sessions where they binged not just on music and smoke and drink, but on inspiration itself.
"We used to take about a day and a night, trying to sing up all the soul in sight," Kristofferson sings to the bare-bones, neo-rockabilly arrangement of "The Show Goes On": "Anyone who couldn't see the light, we had to leave behind."
Yet after three years in Nashville during which he left just about everyone he loved behind, the hits still weren't coming. Not only that, Kristofferson's contract with Buckhorn was up for renewal at the end of the year. Thinking his songs might stand a better chance in other hands, he jumped to another publishing company, Combine Music. Owned by Nashville movers-and-shakers Fred Foster and Bob Beckham, Combine had a clutch of hungry young writers on staff, including Shel Silverstein, Mickey Newbury, Tony Joe White, and Billy Swan. Foster also owned Monument Records, without which Kristofferson likely wouldn't have been afforded the chance to record his raspy debut album, easily the greatest set of "demos" ever assembled.
That album, monolithically titled Kristofferson, was still two years in the offing. For the time being, the most auspicious thing about Kristofferson's deal with Combine was meeting Newbury. A fellow Texan -- Kristofferson was born in the border town (where else?) of Brownsville -- Newbury didn't write by the numbers any more than Kris did, but at least he'd managed to get some of his songs cut. The biggest by far had been "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)". The song's title was as outre and unwieldy as anything to come out of Nashville, but "Just Dropped In" became a Top 5 pop hit for the First Edition in early 1968, for better or worse jump-starting singer Kenny Rogers' blockbuster career.
Inspired by Newbury's writing and encouraged by his friendship and example, Kristofferson finally -- and in an elegant encapsulation of the code by which he'd been living to this point -- found the sentence, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose," that fit him. Just as crucial, it would also prove to be the sentence that put him over the top as a songwriter.
Newbury was with Kristofferson on a madcap flight across the country when he sang that line from "Me And Bobby McGee" for Roger Miller. From its hipster argot to its peripatetic narrative, the song sounded nothing like what people were playing on country radio at the time. But it was perfect for Miller, a boho-leaning eccentric whose mid-'60s rash of Grammys might have done more to make country cool with pop audiences than the trio of LPs that Bob Dylan subsequently recorded on Music Row.
Miller's version of "Me And Bobby McGee" climbed only as high as #12 on the country chart in the spring of 1969. It was enough, however, to give Kristofferson his first major hit as a songwriter, paving the way for an epochal streak that included four #1s over the span of just nine months.
The first, which peaked the final week of June 1970, was Ray Price's tender, countrypolitan reading of "For The Good Times". Then, in September, came Cash's version of "Sunday Morning Coming Down". (Ray Stevens had cut the song, to little notice, in 1969.) Sammi Smith's heart-stopping transformation of "Help Me Make It Through The Night" followed in December. Three months into the new year, Janis Joplin, with whom Kristofferson briefly was linked romantically, hit #1 on the pop charts with "Me And Bobby McGee" (in the wake of her death the previous October). All three of the country #1s also charted pop, with "Help Me Make It" reaching the Top 10 and "Good Times" stalling at #11.
Even more important than this commercial breakthrough, if inconceivable without it, was the way that Kristofferson, at this point in his mid-30s, revolutionized how people on Music Row thought about and wrote songs. Overnight, it seemed, he had infused country music with the sexual candor of soul music and the mystical-existential urgency of Dylan, the Beats, and his beloved Romantics.
Meditating on freedom and commitment, alienation and desire, darkness and light, Kristofferson's songs tapped down-home as well as countercultural vernacular, and with them, the prevailing zeitgeist. Steadfastly refusing to talk down to his audience, he proved that country music could be both hip and grounded while speaking to the most fundamental of human struggles and emotions.
Maybe nowhere did Kristofferson achieve this more sublimely than with "Sunday Morning Coming Down", as vivid an evocation of being hung over as any ever written. At one level, the song shines a sobering light on the shadow side of roaring, of smoking your brains all night with cigarettes and songs and whatever else could be had for inspiration -- and wondering, as Kristofferson puts it in "The Pilgrim", "if the goin' up was worth the comin' down." And yet the hangover depicted in "Sunday Morning" is as much spiritual and moral as it is physical; the estrangement felt by the song's protagonist -- "nothing short of dying" -- is devastating.
The sound of people singing in church, the smell of chicken frying, and the laughter of a father playing with his daughter all remind Kristofferson's protagonist of the places he might have been had he not been wandering the streets with a throbbing head, wishing he was stoned. These scenes clearly tweak his conscience, much as it must have stung Kristofferson to have cut himself off so completely from his family.
Still, and herein lies the rub, Kristofferson's narrator knows he wouldn't feel any more at home in those putatively more nurturing places or situations. No less than in songs such as "Rank Strangers" or "Stones In My Passway", the veil of loneliness and estrangement -- no mere state of mind -- borders on the absolute. Illumination, not judgment, is the byword here, and Kristofferson's gift for inhabiting such shadows, his willingness to venture into and search the darkness for enlightenment, is the key. It is his ability to find beauty even in utter loneliness that redeems it. Indeed, that makes it sing.
THE BURDEN OF FREEDOM (NOT JUST ANOTHER WORD)
Kristofferson, of course, went on to become an enormous celebrity in the decade that followed. He had a prolific if uneven run as a recording artist, both with his second wife, Rita Coolidge, and as a solo act (his 1971 LP, The Silver-Tongued Devil And I, was certified gold, and his 1973 single "Why Me" was a country #1).
He also embarked upon a successful if uneven movie career, including strong starring roles in Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, and Louis John Carlino's bracing adaptation of Mishima's novel, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea. By the time he co-starred with Barbra Streisand in the 1976 remake of A Star Is Born, Kristofferson had become a strange melange of Hollywood beefcake/millionaire, hipster renaissance man, and poet laureate of country music.
He also was still living hard, his drinking and drugging at times getting out of hand. His Hollywood exploits, including a spread in Playboy with Sailor co-star Sarah Miles, made for fecund tabloid fodder. Kristofferson was living in Los Angeles by this point and his life had begun to resemble the unmanageable one of the character he played (a self-fulfilling prophecy?) in A Star Is Born. Musically, he seemed out of touch, so much so that at the time Tom T. Hall said, "One of my favorite songwriters died of overexposure."
Kristofferson admitted as much in a previous interview with No Depression. "Whether it had been the movies or just the reality of being on the road," he said, "it would have cut in on some of the creative experiences that are in 'To Beat The Devil' or 'Sunday Morning Coming Down'. I wasn't living in that place anymore."
Kristofferson got something of a handle on his drinking as the '70s drew to a close. Perhaps because of this newfound clarity -- "Chase The Feeling" from his new record seems to be born of those insights -- he also got serious about writing songs again. Freedom had long been at the heart of his lyrics, but primarily as understood from a personal or artistic standpoint. Now, for the first time in any sustained way, Kristofferson's writing spoke to the meaning and implications of shared freedom, and especially, to the social and political burdens it entails.
Such discernment is a crucial part of the process of soul-making, and in this case, of becoming a self within the larger human community. "I get lazy and forget my obligations/I'd go crazy if I paid attention all the time/And I want justice but I'll settle for some mercy/On this holy road through the Universal Mind," Kristofferson sings, exhorting himself, in "Pilgrim's Progress". Sounding both a Buddhist and Jungian note with this reference to the "Universal Mind," he's talking about the archetypal journey to consciousness, the process of becoming a soul.
"There's a responsibility that comes with freedom to do what's morally right," he said in our interview, referring to the opening outward of his understanding of freedom. "I was always writing what I was feeling. But the stuff that I was becoming aware of in the 1980s, the things that were going on in the world, were important enough that they were something that I should be talking about. You know, what was going on down in Nicaragua and El Salvador."
The fruits of this increasingly political turn in Kristofferson's songwriting didn't surface on record until the release of his 1986 album Repossessed. In the song "What About Me", he took aim at the Reagan administration's not-so-covert military operations in Central America. With the single "They Killed Him", he lifted up prophetic martyrs such as Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, each of whom died for standing up for what they believed.
Radio programmers weren't interested. "One guy said, 'The only thing wrong with killing Martin Luther King was they didn't have more bullets in the gun,'" Kristofferson told writer Peter Cooper in an interview that appeared in this magazine in January 2005. Record labels likewise grew wary; apart from his work with Waylon, Willie, and Cash in the Highwaymen, Kristofferson found himself relegated to the indie fringes.
Nevertheless, he persisted with this "folly," becoming more explicit in his denunciations of U.S. treachery and aggression -- and in his embrace of Latin and African rhythms. Broadsides decrying greed ("Love Of Money") and hypocrisy ("Aguila Del Norte") appeared alongside anthems offering encouragement (the title track) and advocating moral responsibility ("The Eagle And The Bear") on his 1990 album Third World Warrior. Traces of liberation theology were evident as well, notably in paeans to solidarity such as "Jesse Jackson". "He was marching next to Martin when he died," Kristofferson sings, "Working face to face in Cuba/And Managua, Nicaragua/He did not yet beat the devil, but he tried."
"Sad to say, it's even worse today," said Kristofferson, who included a song about an artist killed in a missile attack of Baghdad on his 2003 album Broken Freedom Song. "I can't help but be appalled at the arrogance of our behavior as a superpower -- the superpower -- to attack a sovereign nation. To attack, basically, a bunch of people because you disagree with what their leader is doing. If that's OK, then the rest of the world is going to be gunning for ours, because they certainly don't like what our government's doing.
"And the people who are paying for it are the people that we're bombing. There's no way in hell we can ever make up to the people in Iraq what we've done to them. There's not been a time when I've been on the planet that I've been as depressed at the direction that our country's been going.
"And it's all being done in the name of God. It amazes me. It's a real holy war going over there and I really have no idea how it's gonna end up."
A song on Kristofferson's new album called "In The News" speaks to this idolatrous equation of divine will and human agendas with particular eloquence -- as well as anything since Buddy Miller's Universal United House Of Prayer, an album steeped in the wisdom and outrage of the Hebrew prophets. "Anyone not marching to their tune they call it treason," Kristofferson sings, "Everyone says God is on his side."
From here, just as he did in 1986's "Love Is The Way", Kristofferson goes on to portray God as an empathetic being who not only shares in human suffering, but who suffers at the expense of humanity's habituation to death. "Don't Blame God, I swear to God he's cryin' too," he admonishes, before shifting voices to God's. "'Not in my name, not on my ground/I want nothing but the ending of the war/No more killing or it's over/And the mystery won't matter anymore.'"
PILGRIM'S PROGRESS: THE LAST THING TO GO
The mystery that's at stake in "In The News" has fueled Kristofferson's quest to discover and define himself from the beginning. On his new album, he gives most explicit voice to it in "Holy Creation", a song steeped in a sense of the sacred inspired by Blake's contention that "Everything that lives is holy." Yet it's only with another song on This Old Road, "The Last Thing To Go", that Kristofferson, by way of a wry nod to his boxing past, links this mystery, which he ultimately identifies with love, to the burden and promise of freedom. "Love is the reason we happened at all," he sings, accompanied by harmonica and acoustic guitar. "It paid for the damage we'd done, and it bought us the freedom to fall into grace."
Kristofferson isn't talking about love as if it were just another emotion like lust or boredom that comes and goes with our moods. He's talking about love as a more pervasive -- and maybe everlasting -- force. A healing power that, more than just helping people make it through the night, makes freedom possible in the first place.
"Love to me is the only answer to what's going on with the world today," he said in December. "The kind of love I'm talking about is the kind that you feel unconditionally for your children. And if you work at it, you can get to where it includes others too. Which isn't as easy as it is with your children, but I think it should work there.
"In the people we've been talking about, like John and June," he went on to say, referring to the Cashes' preternatural gift for embracing strangers and people on the margins, "it worked from there outward to where they could feel love for people they weren't even related to. If you were to attain the highest state, I guess you would love everybody."
The idea of reaching such an elevated state -- yet another way of talking about soul-making -- likewise derives from Blake. "He wasn't, like, into organized religion," Kristofferson is quick to point out, referring to Blake. "But he believed that if you didn't do your duty as a creative person to promote spiritual communion, your soul was lost for eternity."
In "Final Attraction", the track that serves as the benediction on This Old Road, Kristofferson refers to the pursuit of this higher state as "approaching perfection" -- an "intimation of immortality," as Wordsworth put it. Kristofferson was inspired to write the song while waiting in the wings as Willie Nelson went back onstage to close a show:
Well, here you are
The final attraction
Awaiting direction
From somewhere above
Your final performance
Approaching perfection
I know what you're making
Is some kinda love.
"Somewhere in your lifetime," he goes on, now singing the song of himself -- and others -- to dusky filigrees of dobro and acoustic guitar, "You were dared into feeling/So many emotions/That tear you apart/But they love so badly/For sharing their sorrows/So pick up that guitar/And go break a heart."
This process of breaking a heart, one's own and those of others, is harrowing, and not just because it can be terrifying to dwell in the shadows -- as Kristofferson, trying to beat his devils, so often has done. This practice of breaking a heart, of being torn apart by painful emotions, is also harrowing in the more pregnant sense of the verb "to harrow" that has fallen out of usage -- that of the often violent process of breaking into the ground and opening it up to prepare for new growth and eventual harvest. Or, in Kristofferson's case, the process of breaking into the cold, dark recesses of the heart to cultivate a soul.
Kristofferson goes on, in "Final Attraction", to enumerate some of the other pilgrims he's known, from Waylon Jennings to Mickey Newbury, who submitted to this harrowing process of soul-making. It's a gesture reminiscent of how he sometimes introduces his old standby "The Pilgrim: Chapter 33", the famous chorus of which begins, "He's a poet, he's a picker/He's a prophet, he's a pusher."
Kristofferson has said that this song began as a study of Dennis Hopper, only to become associated with Johnny Cash. And yet "The Pilgrim" also describes Kristofferson himself -- indeed, any of his fellow sojourners who took every wrong direction on their often lonely way back home. Evocative of the overriding journey to consciousness at the heart of Kristofferson's life and work, "The Pilgrim: Chapter 33" has become something of a meta-narrative -- words for living for all who go in the dark without sight to find that the dark, too, blooms and sings.
ND senior editor Bill Friskics-Warren is the author of a book about soul-making called I'll Take You There: Pop Music And The Urge For Transcendence.
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