talks to Spencer Leigh
This interview with Kris Kristofferson was
arranged for the time of his soundcheck at the Palace Theatre, Manchester on 28
June 2004. Kris Kristofferson was born in
Brownsville, Texas on 22 June 1936 and he came to the UK in the Fifties to study
as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University.
SL: You’re noted for being a Rhodes scholar at Oxford
University. Did studying Blake help with your songwriting?
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: Any exposure
that you have to good literature whether it is Blake or Shakespeare is going to
help your writing and I should imagine that it helped me to express myself. The
way Blake helped me the most was that he was such a committed, creative artist:
he was determined that if you were organised by God to be a creative person,
then it was duty to do it. That is what kept me going for a long time when the
rest of the world said that I was insane to do it.
SL: Yes, ’cause you were over 30 before you made an
album.
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: I was about
30 before I even went to Nashville! I was 29 when I went there and hell, Hank
Williams died at that age. He’d already made his legend by that age. I didn’t
make a record until I was 33. I was ten years older than my peers, all the
people that was I was hanging out with, all the people who were trying to be
writers at the time. It was a very exciting time.
SL: Is your first album so strong because it contains a
collection of songs that you had built up over the years?
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: It was
probably because I paid my dues in Nashville. For at least four years I was
hanging out with other writers and the good thing was that people helped each
other out. The established writers like Harlan Howard and Willie Nelson would be
encouraging new writers that they liked.
SL: Felice Bryant told me that you brought the bedroom onto
the Opry stage.
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: (Laughs)
Felice and Boudleaux were awfully nice to me and their secretary gave me the
title for the breakthrough song. They had a secretary named Bobbie McFee, and
Fred Foster who owned the building where they had an office called me. At the
time I was flying helicopters on the off-shore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico
every other week and trying to be a songwriter the rest of the time. He said,
‘I’ve got a song title for you’ and it was Me And Bobbie McFee. Since he owned
the publishing company that I was writing for, I felt obliged to try and write
it. I have never written a song on assignment before or since. But it worked,
after about three months of hiding from him. (Laughs)
SL: What about the wonderful line in that song, ‘Freedom’s
just another word for nothing left to lose’? Does that mean if you’ve got
nothing, there’s nothing you can lose, so you’re free.
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: Yeah, there
is a freedom to it but it is a two-edged sword. Some of my songwriting friends
wanted me to take it out of the song. (Laughs) They said, ‘You got these great
concrete images and then you change to this philosophical statement in the
chorus.’ I was looking for the feeling that Fellini got in the end of La Strada,
and I love that film. Anthony Quinn has let that little Giulietta Masina slip
away from him. He left her on the road when she was asleep. He had killed the
fool in the travelling circus and she couldn’t handle that and he couldn’t
handle her grief. He let her slip away and later he heard a woman who was
hanging washing on the line humming the tune that this little girl used to play
in the circus. He asked her about it and she said it was sung that by this
little strange girl who passed through here and she died. Nobody knew where she
came from and Anthony Quinn goes off and gets drunk and gets in a fight and he
ends up on a beach howling at the stars in his grief. That was the rough edge of
the freedom. He was free from her but he was miserable.
SL: Felice Bryant meant that your songs went inside the
bedroom whereas the country songs before that didn’t. Songs like For The Good
Times and Help Me Make It Through The Night are bedroom songs.
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: They were
both controversial when they came out. The guy that recorded them first couldn’t
get them played on the air, but I always felt that they were in the tradition.
Country music was more real than pop music at the time. The songs spoke about
cheating and getting drunk and maybe they didn’t talk about sex quite as
directly as that, but they certainly have since!
SL: Well, that’s down to you!
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: Okay, and
Felice didn’t like it! (Laughs)
SL: You love using the word ‘body’ and it is very
erotic.
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: One of my
songwriting buddies in the underground said to me that if they took all the
Devils, bodies, shadows and sidewalks out of my songs, they’d be nothing left.
(Laughs)
SL: I’m going to play For The Good Times by Aaron Neville.
Is that one you particularly like?
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: Yeah, in fact
I got to sing it with him on Ricky Skaggs’ TV show. I harmonised with him and he
did a great job on it. Of course a lot of people did. Ray Price made it a big
record.
SL: The line I love in Sunday Morning Coming Down is ‘Your
cleanest dirty shirt’.
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: You’re
looking at it! (Laughs) I was more or less describing what my room looked like,
you know. My life at the time was pretty much like that and it was
autobiographical.
SL: It has some funny lines but it is also very
tragic.
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: Well, that’s
life: half comedy and half tragedy. It continues to be that way the older you
get. The first guy that cut it was Ray Stevens. He cut a great version but they
didn’t know how to market him with that kind of a record. He had done those
novelty songs like Guitarzan and The Streak. Johnny Cash said that I flew up to
his house in a helicopter with the song, but I don’t believe I did. I was
surprised when he did it on his TV show and that is the version that they used
for the record. He stood up for the lyrics as that was another song that was
controversial. The television networks didn’t want him to say ‘Wishing Lord that
I was stoned’ and I remember being advised that I could change it to ‘Wishing
Lord that I was home’ which was not the same thing. John didn’t tell me one way
or the other which one he was going to do. I would have lived with whatever he
did because I idolised Johnny Cash: anything he did was okay with me. I was
watching the show from the balcony in the Ryman where they were filming. When he
got to that line, he looked up at me and sang, ‘Wishing Lord that I was stoned.’
It offended a lot of people, but it saved the song for me. The song wouldn’t
have been nearly as strong without it.
SL: You came over to this country and appeared at the Isle
of Wight festival. What went wrong that day?
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: It would be
easier to say what went right. (Laughs) Nothing went right! They hated me and it
was my third gig in show business. The Algerians were tearing down the outer
wall and making so much noise they couldn’t even hear us. Billy Swan was on the
stage and he thought that they were going to shoot us.
SL: He told me that nothing short of rifle fire would make
you leave the stage.
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: That’s what I
said, and Billy came over and said, ‘Don’t say that.’ (Laughs) They hated Jimi
Hendrix, they hated everybody, except on the last night when Leonard Cohen
charmed them at four o’clock in the morning. They burning down the concession
stands and burning trucks and he went out on stage in his pyjamas and took 20
minutes to tune up. I said, ‘They’re gonna kill him.’ They were brutal to Jimi
Hendrix, to Joan Baez, to Tiny Tim for crying out loud, and he won them over.
SL: At the same time you were making albums, you making
films. One that is now regarded as a classic although it wasn’t at the time is
Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid.
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: One of Sam
Peckinpah’s regular stunt men put it very well. He said, ‘Sam likes to be
surrounded by chaos.’ In my experience he was surrounded by turmoil the whole
time: usually it was fighting with the studio and in Pat Garrett he was fighting
with them all the time. He was fighting the good fight as he was trying to make
a good piece of art. I saw it on TV the night before last.
SL: I liked Bob Dylan’s soundtrack.
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: I loved it.
Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door was in that scene where Slim Pickens was dying and it
was the strongest use of music that I had ever seen in a film. Unfortunately Sam
didn’t include it in his Director’s Cut. Sam had a blind spot there. He thought
that the producer had forced Bob on him to make the film commercial and I don’t
think he appreciated who Bob was. I thought Dylan was great in the film, he
looked great and you couldn’t take your eyes off him, and his music was
fantastic.
SL: You have made a lot of films but you rarely write music
for them.
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: I could have
played my own music in A Star Is Born as I was playing a musician but my
publisher wouldn’t split the publishing with Barbra’s company. Barbra and Jon
Peters required that and so I ended up just doing the music that they had.
SL: Getting the script for that film must have been a bit
terrifying when you saw that you had to do a duet with Barbra Streisand.
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: There were a
number of scenes that looked terrifying, Getting in the bathtub with her was one
although that got to be one of the most fun scenes that I ever got to play.
(Laughs) The film was on such a big scale compared to anything that I had done
before and it was pretty audacious for a guy who hadn’t any more experience than
me. I thought we pulled it off and it came off well.
SL: But I meant having to make a record with her where she
has such a remarkable range.
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: Yes, she
wanted me to sign harmony with her on Evergreen and yes, I was terrified. I
thought I was going to ruin it, but she was great. At one point I was pulling
away from the microphone and she pulled me back in there and she did a great job
on that film.
SL: The one song that topped the UK charts is a song you
have never recorded One Day At A Time.
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: I don’t
consider that my song, that was Marijohn Wilkin’s. I was in the room when she
was writing it and I might have given her a line or two. That was her song. I
never sing it and I appreciate her giving me a part writers on it because I have
given part writers to a lot of people who have never written a word in my songs
but happened to be in the room when it was going on. (Laughs) She was my first
publisher and maybe she was paying me back for some of the songs that I had
written for her like For The Good Times and Darby’s Castle. She introduced me to
everybody in the business. For about three years I worked for her and then she
wanted to take a break from publishing and I went over to Combine Music and
eventually got my songs cut.
SL: Can you remember which bit of One Day At A Time is
yours?
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: No, I can’t.
I really can’t. If I studied the lyrics, I might be able to find it but I
thought she wrote the whole song. I remember her singing it. To be honest, I
have been kind of embarrassed that she did put my name on it.
SL: What’s the story of Lovin’ Her Was Easier.
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: The imagery
comes from Peru, where I was making The Last Movie with Dennis Hopper. You have
the image of the mountains and the condors and that inspired the first part of
the lyric, but it was a work of imagination. I wasn’t writing about anybody.
SL: Yet The Pilgrim was written for Dennis Hopper.
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: Well, I
started writing it about Chris Gantry – he’s a real good songwriter and he also
wrote for Marijohn – and I started using him and a bunch of the rest of us who
are cut from the same cloth. We were walking contradictions. Johnny Cash swore
to the end that I wrote it about him. He said in some magazine that he accepted
Kris’ description of me
as a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction. Rambling Jack
Elliott and a few of my friends like Dennis Hopper were in there too. I called
it The Pilgrim – Chapter 33 because it seemed that a lot of us who were down
there in Peru – Dennis, myself - were 33 years old, and everytime you say you
are 33, they go ‘Oh, the age of Christ.’ I figured it was a good title.
SL: That leads us onto Jesus Was A Capricorn. I wasn’t sure
what point you were making there.
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: I was trying
to point that he would have as a hard a time today with conservative people as
he had in his own hard time. Everybody has to have somebody to look down on. The
whites hate the blacks, who hate the Klan and so on. Jesus was eating organic
food, which was a typical image of the long-haired hippie. Everybody in
Nashville was down on them. ‘Reckon we’d just nail him up if he came down
again.’
SL: The songs today have a more political bent.
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: I have always
written what I have felt strongly about. Nowadays that seems to be what is going
on in the world and the songs that I have written recently have been that way.
They are about human rights or anti-war or complaints about what my government
is doing round the world.
SL: And what about A Moment Of Forever?
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: The best love
songs that I have written are songs that work on two or three different levels
whether it is between you and the girl you are singing to, or me and the
audience. If I say that ‘I was so glad that I was close to you for a moment of
forever’ at the end of a concert, it means something. I am a 68 year old man
looking at people that I might not see again. I feel blessed to have danced with
as many as I did: ‘I’m glad that I danced with you for a moment of forever’.
SL:Kris Kristofferson, thank
you very much indeed.
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: Thanks. I’m
still thinking of my plane trip from Ireland today – we hit a bird and we also
had to wait for an hour for President Bush to get off the ground.
