DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. Today we remember singer-songwriter and actor Kris Kristofferson. He died Saturday at the age of 88. He was known for his evocative songwriting. Here's a sampling.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ME AND BOBBY MCGEE")
JANIS JOPLIN: (Singing) I pulled my harpoon out of my dirty, red bandana. I was playing soft while Bobby sang the blues. Windshield wipers slapping time, I was holding Bobby's hand in mine. We sang every song that driver knew. Yeah. Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. Nothing don't mean nothing, honey, if it ain't...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SUNDAY MORNING COMING DOWN")
JOHNNY CASH: (Singing) On a Sunday morning sidewalk, I'm wishing, Lord, that I was stoned 'cause there's something in a Sunday that makes the body feel alone.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HELP ME MAKE IT THROUGH THE NIGHT")
SAMMI SMITH: (Singing) Come and lay down by my side till the early morning light. All I'm taking is your time. Help me make it through the night. I don't care what's right or wrong.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE PILGRIM: CHAPTER 33")
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: (Singing) He's a poet. He's a picker. He's a prophet. He's a pusher. He's a pilgrim and a preacher and a problem when he's stoned. He's a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction, taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home.
DAVIES: Some noted songs by Kris Kristofferson. Art critic Christine Arnold once wrote of Kristofferson, he's the Marlboro Man with a tender heart. Kristofferson's life took many colorful turns. Born in Brownsville, Texas, in a military family, he became a promising boxer in his 20s, then a Rhodes scholar in England and later a U.S. Army Rangers helicopter pilot in Germany. He turned down an appointment to teach literature at West Point to take a chance at songwriting.
Kristofferson went to Nashville in the '60s, and his first job in the music industry was working as a janitor at Columbia Records. There he met Johnny Cash, who became his good friend, recorded songs Kristofferson had written and convinced him to start recording himself. Kristofferson's rugged good looks and easy manner made him a natural for films. He acted in more than 50 movies, including Martin Scorsese's "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," John Sayles' "Lone Star" and the 1976 remake of "A Star Is Born" opposite Barbara Streisand.
In the 1980s, he was part of the outlaw country supergroup that included Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash. Kristofferson was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1985 and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2004. Terry spoke with Kris Kristofferson in 1999. At the time, he'd released an album titled "The Austin Sessions," which included new versions of his best-known older songs. They began with the song "Me And Bobby McGee."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ME AND BOBBY MCGEE")
KRISTOFFERSON: (Singing) Busted flat in Baton Rouge - heading for the trains, feeling nearly faded as my jeans. Bobby thumbed a diesel down just before it rained - took us all the way to New Orleans. I pulled my harpoon out of my dirty, red bandana. I was blowing sad while Bobby sang the blues. With them windshield wipers slapping time and Bobby clapping hands, we finally sang up every song that driver knew. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. Nothing ain't worth nothing, but it's free. Feeling good was easy, Lord, when Bobby sang the blues. Feeling good was good enough for me, good enough for me and Bobby McGee.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
TERRY GROSS: Kris Kristofferson, welcome to FRESH AIR.
KRISTOFFERSON: Thanks, Terry.
GROSS: Well, let me ask you a little bit about the song that we just heard, "Me And Bobby McGee." What first inspired that song?
KRISTOFFERSON: Fred Foster, who owned Monument Records and Combine called me up, said he had a song title for me. It was "Me And Bobbie McKee." I thought he said McGee, but actually, there was a girl named Bobbie McKee, who was Boudleaux Bryant's secretary, and they were in the same building.
GROSS: Boudleaux Bryant wrote a lot of songs for The Everly Brothers.
KRISTOFFERSON: Yes, he did. You're right on. And anyway, he said, the hook is Bobbie McKee is a she, you know? And I thought that sounded like the worst idea I'd ever heard of. But I wanted to write for - write something for him. I had not had anything recorded since I'd gone to work for his company. And so I set out to write the song and hid from him for a few months. And I went back into the - our studio up there at Combine with Billy Swan and made a demo of it. And everybody liked the song.
GROSS: The most famous line from the song is, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. What inspired that line?
KRISTOFFERSON: Well, that's what the song was really about to me - was the double-edged sword, you know, that freedom is. And when I wrote that, some of my songwriter friends in Nashville told me to take it out of the song, said it was - that it didn't fit, that the rest of the imagery was so real and concrete that it was out of place to put a little philosophical line in there.
GROSS: Tell me if I remember correctly. Did you have a house that burned down at about the time you wrote this song?
KRISTOFFERSON: No. No. I had - I tell you what I had. I was living in a condemned building at the time, and, you know, the thing cost me, I think, $50 a month. And somebody had broken into it during the week that I was down in the Gulf of Mexico and trashed the place and stole what little I had to steal. I remember it was a very liberating feeling to me because everything was gone, and there was nowhere to go but up. I had also alienated my family at the time. My wife had left me, and I was separated, you know, from my kids. And I think I'd been disowned by my parents by that time. And it was pretty liberating not having any expectations or anything to live up to.
GROSS: How did Janis Joplin end up recording this song?
KRISTOFFERSON: Bobby Neuwirth taught Janis the song, I believe, and I think he'd heard it when Roger Miller had recorded it. I first heard that she had sung the song when I came back from - I'd been down in Peru making a movie with Dennis Hopper singing "Bob McGee," as a matter of fact, in the film. And somebody told me she had sung it in a concert. I think it was in Nashville. And then later, Bobby introduced me to her, and we lived out of her house for about a month or so. And we became close friends, but I never did hear her sing it. I never heard her tape of it till the day after she died.
DAVIES: Kris Kristofferson speaking with Terry Gross, recorded in 1999. We'll hear more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF RODNEY CROWELL SONG, "COME SUNDOWN")
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. We're remembering singer-songwriter and actor Kris Kristofferson by listening back to his 1999 interview. He died on Saturday.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
GROSS: What year did you first get to Nashville, and what was it like when you got there?
KRISTOFFERSON: I first went there in June of 1965 and was on my way back from a three-year tour in the Army in Germany - and was on my way to the career course down at Fort Benning and from there to supposedly to teach English, literature, at West Point. And since my military obligation was already fulfilled, I decided I was going to get out of the Army and be a songwriter. I had spent a couple of weeks there just on tour. I mean, just, you know, I was on leave and got shown around to some of the songwriter sessions and got a glimpse of the life. I've always felt like I was really lucky to have been exposed to Nashville at that time because I'm sure it's different now.
GROSS: There must've been some kind of life-changing thought that happened to you, since you'd been on this military career track. Your father had been a military career man. Was it a sudden change of heart or what that made you think I'm not going to teach at West Point, I'm going to try writing songs in Nashville?
KRISTOFFERSON: Well, I had never intended to make the military a career or the academic life. I always thought that I would - I hoped that I would be a writer and be able to have a creative life, you know? And then, well, after I graduated from college - I went to Oxford for a couple of years, and then I went in the military for almost five years. And by that time, I had a family and, you know, a wife and a daughter. And I think I sort of despaired of ever making my living as an artist until I went to Nashville. I went there because in my last year in the Army, or in Germany, I formed a band and started writing songs again. I'd been writing songs all my life but started really escaping into it during the last year I was over there in Germany - and went to Nashville to try to pedal the songs.
And then when I got there, it was so different from any life that I'd been in before, just hanging out with these people who stayed up for three or four days at a time, you know, and nights and were writing songs all the time. I think I wrote four songs during the first week I was there. And it was just so exciting to me. It was like a lifeboat, you know? It was like my salvation.
GROSS: How did you start making movies? Did you think, one day, I'm going to act?
KRISTOFFERSON: When I started performing my own songs, the first place I ever played was at the Troubadour club in Los Angeles. It was kind of a hangout like The Bitter End in New York. And I think at the time there was more people looking for new blood because I got a lot of offers just off of performing there. And eventually, Harry Dean Stanton gave me a script. I didn't even know he was an actor at the time (laughter). I thought he just sang in the bar there at the Troubadour. But he helped me do a screen test for a film that was called "Cisco Pike." And I got to put my music in it. And I was the lead in it, in a film with Gene Hackman and Karen Black and Harry Dean. And I just went on from there.
GROSS: Well, I'd like to close with another song from your new CD, "The Austin Sessions." And this is a song called "The Pilgrim: Chapter 33." Now, this song is quoted in "Taxi Driver." The Cybill Shepherd character, Betsy, buys the record for Travis, the taxi driver played by Robert De Niro. And she says that he reminds her of the character in the song, and she quotes the line, he's a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction. How did the song end up in "Taxi Driver"?
KRISTOFFERSON: I don't know. I always felt like that was the nicest thing that Marty Scorsese ever did to me, you know?
GROSS: I guess you had already worked with him in "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore."
KRISTOFFERSON: I worked - yeah. Yeah, but I didn't know it was going to be in that one. And, God, he had - there's De Niro holding up my album.
GROSS: (Laughter).
KRISTOFFERSON: And they're quoting me like Bob Dylan or something. It was - I still think that's one of the sweetest things I've ever seen anybody do for anybody in the business.
GROSS: And who did you write the song about?
KRISTOFFERSON: Well, I wrote it about myself and about a lot of friends of mine that I thought were, you know - Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Chris Gantry and Johnny Cash and everybody I knew at the time. And a lot of us were 33 at the time. That's why it's called "Chapter 33" - and Dennis Hopper. I remember when we were down in Peru, every time that you would tell somebody you were 33 years old, they'd say, oh, the age of Christ. So that sort of fit the pattern of it.
GROSS: So were you referring at all to how you and a lot of people you knew were kind of self-invented?
KRISTOFFERSON: Ooh, yes, yes - partly truth and partly fiction. You know, I've always felt that I and many of the people I admire are figments of our own imagination. I always felt that Willie Nelson, Muhammad Ali were particularly successful at that, at imagining themselves and living up to what they imagined themselves to be.
GROSS: And you're...
KRISTOFFERSON: I remember when I first saw Muhammad Ali, he was Cassius Clay. He was a little, skinny, light heavyweight over in Rome, and he was telling everybody he was going to be the biggest, the best. You know, he was the next Joe Louis. And he imagined himself right up into that.
GROSS: Do you feel you did that, too?
KRISTOFFERSON: I think I did. When I think back to when I first was writing my first songs - you know, like, when I was 11 years old, down in Brownsville, Texas - I think that I imagined myself into a pretty full life after that. I was certainly not equipped by God to be a football player, but I got to be one. And I got to be a ranger and a paratrooper and a helicopter pilot, you know, and a boxer and a lot of things that I don't think I was built to do. I just imagined them.
GROSS: Kris Kristofferson. His new CD, "The Austin Sessions," features new versions of his best-known songs, including the song that's quoted in "Taxi Driver."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TAXI DRIVER")
ROBERT DE NIRO: (As Travis Bickle) You want to go to a movie with me?
CYBILL SHEPHERD: (As Betsy) I have to go back to work now.
DE NIRO: (As Travis Bickle) I don't mean now. I mean, like, another time, though.
SHEPHERD: (As Betsy) Sure. You know what you remind me of?
DE NIRO: (As Travis Bickle) What?
SHEPHERD: (As Betsy) That song by Kris Kristofferson.
DE NIRO: (As Travis Bickle) Who's that?
SHEPHERD: (As Betsy) The songwriter. He's a prophet and a pusher, partly truth, partly fiction, a walking contradiction.
DE NIRO: (As Travis Bickle) You saying that about me?
SHEPHERD: (As Betsy) Who else would I be talking about?
DE NIRO: (As Travis Bickle) I'm no pusher. I never have pushed.
SHEPHERD: (As Betsy) No, no, just the part about the contradiction. You are that.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE PILGRIM: CHAPTER 33")
KRISTOFFERSON: (Singing) He's a fool, and he's a liar. He's a prophet. He's a dreamer. He's a pilgrim and a preacher and a problem when he's stoned. He's a walking contradiction, partly true, mostly fiction, picking out the wrong direction on his lonely way back home.
DAVIES: Kris Kristofferson on his song "The Pilgrim: Chapter 33." He spoke with Terry Gross in 1999. He died Saturday at the age of 88. Coming up, John Powers reviews the new Apple TV+ film "Wolfs," starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF RAMSEY LEWIS TRIO'S "THE IN CROWD") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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