After last night's Timberwolves' game (fourth win in a row) (though all against teams with losing records), I was flipping through the channels and saw there was a "Kris Kristofferson tribute" on public TV—musicians, including Alison Krauss, others likely of similar renown though unfamiliar to me, performing Kristofferson songs between pledge drive pitches. This reminded me that Kristofferson died last year and I missed the chance to recount the somewhat unusual aspects of his youthful biography.
He was born in Texas in 1936. His father was in the service. The family moved a lot, but eventually settled in San Mateo, California, where Kristofferson graduated from the public high school in 1954. He then enrolled at Pomona College, from which he graduated, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, in 1958: an English major, and a Crackerjack student. How good a student? He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and studied at Oxford, England, for the next two academic years. His first notice in the national press had come in 1958 when his athletic exploits at Pomona landed him a spot in Sports Illustrated's "Faces in the Crowd" feature. He played football and rugby, boxed in the Golden Gloves, and ran track. St. Augustine had a phrase he applied to people like Kristofferson: one of God's fit and fair.
It was around in here that his life turned. With his B. Phil. from Oxford, the proverbial ticket to ride, in hand, Kristofferson's next move was to enlist in the US Army. He trained as a Ranger and a helicopter pilot, then served in Germany as a pilot until, in 1965, he was offered a position teaching literature at West Point. He turned it down because he'd gradually gotten more and more interested in music and songwriting. Without any guarantee of success, or even much in the way of musical credentials of any kind, he left the Army and moved to Nashville.
There followed a somewhat extended period of scraping around as he struggled to gain a foothold in the music industry. He wasn't a kid—he'd turned 29 the year he quit the Army, was married, two kids. He wrote songs while working construction, and as a bartender, and, on weekends, in the Tennessee National Guard. He took a job as a janitor at a recording studio so that he could press his songs on musicians who came through. This is the context for one of the more memorable vignettes in Ken Burns's film on country music. At just about the time Kristofferson was to be plucked from obscurity, he got a letter from his mom, who was not pleased with his life choices. You can imagine why. Her Rhodes Scholar son bumping along, earning a precarious living, for several years—he'd better get down to business, she said, else he'd be cut out of the family forever. Kristofferson had recently made the acquaintance of Johnny Cash, to whom he read the letter aloud. When he came to the end, Cash said, "It's always nice to get mail from home."
As suggested by his connection to Cash, Kristofferson's music career was about to lift off. Some might think the point of the story about his mom's letter was to establish her as a Philistine, especially compared to her genius son, so I should say that I have some sympathy for her views. And what about his wife? She'd put up with more than his mother did. It's even possible that it was at least partly for her that mom wrote the letter. The couple divorced in 1969, which seems like it might have been bad timing for her. It was the same year that Roger Miller got to No. 12 on the country music chart with a song Kristofferson had written. Two years later, the song went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 when covered by a different artist:
The year before (1970), Kristofferson had released his debut album, called Kristofferson, which included, besides "Me and Bobby McGee," a song made famous when recorded by Cash: "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down." Kristofferson got good reviews but sold poorly—until, after Joplin's posthumous success, it was reissued in 1971 as Me and Bobby McGee. The rest of Kristofferson's career, with The Highwaymen and in the movies—being among the fit and fair, he looked like a movie star—must be pretty well known. My quirky opinion is that his best film role was not in A Star is Born (for which he won a Golden Globe for best actor) but in John Sayles's Lone Star. Possibly I just love Lone Star inordinately: great story, and an unforgettable cameo by Frances McDormand.
Comments