Kris Kristofferson – To beat the devil: intimations of immortality

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.”