Kris Krisofferson has died.
I knew I would have to write those words eventually, and probably sooner rather than later. Kris has not looked good the past few times I’ve seen him on the tube. His health has not been good for some years. Still, one can hope. The world was so much richer with Kristofferson in it, and it is poorer now that he is gone. But we still have his songs, and what songs they are.
I am no musician myself; that’s a gift I never had. I cannot sing, I cannot dance, I cannot read music. But that doesn’t mean I do not love music… or rather, songs. Instrumental music, classical music, operas, those are all great, no doubt, but they are not for me. I am a word guy. I want the lyrics. I want them to be audible, not drowned out by the instruments. I want them to be beautiful, I want them to touch me, to move me, to make me think, become a part of me. Some of you may have noticed that the word “song” keeps appearing in the titles of my books and stories. A SONG FOR LYA, SONGS OF STARS AND SHADOWS, SONGS THE DEAD MEN SING, DREAMSONGS, A SONG OF ICE & FIRE, SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH. There’s a would-be songwriter buried inside me, no doubt. Oh, I managed some to do “The Rains of Castamere” and “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” (part of it, anyway) and “The Dornishmen’s Wife” and “The Last of the Giants,” but damn, writing songs is hard, even if you’re only doing lyrics and leaving the actual music to the listeners.
I don’t know how Kris Kristofferson did it.
But he did it better than anyone else.
He has been my favorite singer/ songwriter ever since I first heard “Me and Bobby McGee,” back when I was in college.
It was the Janis Joplin version I first encountered, as with most people. Kristofferson was a songwriter then, but not yet established as a singer himself. The song was a huge huge hit, the biggest Joplin ever had. Sadly, it was a posthumous hit, since Janis had died shortly before it was released. In the days and years and decades that followed, many other people covered “Me and Bobby McGee; there was Roger Miller and Johnny Cash and Gordon Lightfoot and Reba McEntire and many many more.
I liked almost all of them, but the one I loved best was Kristofferson’s own version, when it was finally recorded and released.
On my recent visit to England, there were several instances where strangers came up to tell me how much they loved my books, how my writing spoke to them, moved them, even changed their lives. That’s a lovely thing to hear. I’ve been on the other end of that as well. There have been songs and stories and books and authors who have had profound effects on my own life. Sometimes it seems as if the writer is speaking only to you.
“Me and Bobby McGee” was like that for me. I’d had my own Bobby McGee not long before I heard the song. No, I did not pull my harpoon out of a dirty red bandana and she did not sing the blues, and we’d never rode a diesel from Baton Rouge to New Orleans… but we were good together, and then I’d let her slip away (not near Salinas). Afterwards, alone, I knew what Kris meant by “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” and like the singer, I would gladly have traded all of my tomorrows for a single yesterday.
Kristofferson was a poet. His best lines haunted me for years. Only a few years later, I wrote a story I titled “… for a single yesterday” for an anthology called EPOCH. A post holocaust story about a singer and a lost love, natch. I wanted it to be the best story I’d ever written. It wasn’t. Some folks liked it well enough, but as a tribute to Kristofferson, I would have liked it to be stronger.
Kris was no one hit wonder. In the years that followed, I bought every one of his albums as soon as they came out. (Albums were these big vinyl things we listened to then). And there were other great songs that I fell in love with, that spoke to me almost as deeply as “Me and Bobby McGee” had. There was “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and “Casey’s Last Ride” and “For the Good Times,” there was “Billy Dee” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night” and “The Taker,” there was “Silver Tongued Devil” and “From the Bottle to the Bottom” and “Loving Her Was Easier,” and “Silver: the Hunger” and “Darby’s Castle” and “Here Comes That Rainbow Again” and…
This one.
Half talking, half singing, Kris talking about his early days as a singer. It seemed deeply personal when I heard it; for him, but it sp0ke to me as well. Especially during the hard years, when my career crashed and burned (as it did from time to time).
Kristofferson was an amazing man, all in all. A Rhodes Scholar, Flew a helicopter in Vietnam. Swept floor as a janitor in Nashville trying to break in. Then he became an actor, and a damn good one. CISCO PIKE. BLUME IN LOVE. PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID. (Best Billy the Kid movie ever made). ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANY MORE. A STAR IS BORN (the Streisand version). LONE STAR. He was damned good at that too.
But it will be as a singer and songwriter that he will be remembered.
For “Me and Bobby McGee” and all those other songs… especially this one. He was singing about himself here, not just the friends he mentions in the opening. And he was singing about me and my writer friends as well, my collaborators and contemporaries and rivals, all of us struggling to tell our stories and make a living and survive in SF and fantasy in those bygone days. We were all pilgrims.
(I slipped a reference to this song in one of my stories as well).
I heard Kris live in concert once, back in the 1970s, when I was living in Chicago. I was never lucky enough to meet him in person. I wish I had gone backstage after that show and tried to introduce myself, but I was way too shy and I doubt I could have gotten in. I wish I had tried, though, if just to tell him how much his music meant to me. Assuming I just didn’t freeze up and lose my tongue.
If I could speak to him now, I know what I would say.
His going up was worth the coming down.
And he went up very high. We shall not hear his like again.
Current Mood: 
sad
