My Heroes are Crashing Down

 This story will only repeat.  A voice on early morning radio informs us of another musician’s death.  A musician whose life paralleled ours, whose music lives in your heart along with lyrics that name your fears and hopes, joy and sadness.  Gone. 

That morning, I pictured the cover of an album in a wooden crate in the shack.  On it is a picture of the long-haired singer/songwriter as a young man.  There is a shadow image beside him.  His thumbs are tucked behind his belt buckle, and between his fingers is a lit cigarette.  In my mind, he walked a path I also traveled.  Perhaps creating that feeling of familiarity was his gift.  I walk into our bedroom as my wife is waking up.

“Kris Kristofferson died.”

“I’m sorry.  I know how much you liked him.  Which of his songs was your favorite?”

“Want me to sing it for you?”

“Sure.”

I struck up an acapella version of “The Silver Tongued Devil and I” while putting on my socks.  It had been running through my mind since I heard the news.

              I took myself down to the Tally Ho tavern

              To buy me a bottle of beer.

              I sat me down by a tender young maiden

              With eyes just as dark as her hair.

              And as I was searching from bottle to bottle

              For something unfoolish to say.

              That silver tongued devil, just slipped from the shadows

              And smiling, stole her away.

              Chorus

              I said ‘Hey, little girl, don’t you know he’s a devil?

              He’s everything that I ain’t.

              Hiding intentions of evil, under the guise of a saint.

All he’s good for is gettin’ in trouble,

And shifting his share of the blame.

Some people swear he’s my double,

And some even say we’re the same.

But the silver-tongued devil’s got nothing on me

I’ll only live till I die.

We take our own chances, and pay our own dues,

The silver-tongued devil and I.

(In my head a spare dobro and a tinkling piano back his voice)

Like all the fair maidens who’ve laid down beside him

She knew in her heart that he lied

But nothing that I could have said

Could’ve have saved her

No matter how hard that she tried

Cause she’ll offer her soul to darkness and danger

Of something that she’s never known,

And open her arms at the smile of a stranger

Who’ll love her and leave her alone.

Repeat Chorus

@1971 Combine Music Corp.  Used without permission. Apologies to the Kristofferson estate.

 

“I’m amazed you still know the words.”

“I think I knew all the songs on that album at one time. “

“Which others?”

“When I Loved Her.  Jody and the Kid.  Black and Blue.  Loving Her Was Easier Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again.”

The Silver Tongued Devil and I was also the name of Kristofferson’s second album, recorded in 1971.  It was a bigger success than his first, both coming before he became Grammy winner, a movie star, and a legendary Nashville songwriter. 

But it was his life as much as his songs that drew me to Kristofferson.

He grew up in a military family, his father an Air Force pilot who retired as a major general.  His son followed in his footsteps though unlike his dad Kris first went to school as an English major at Pomona College, California.  At Pomona he studied creative writing and was named a Rhodes scholar, enabling him to complete his studies at Oxford University in England.  It was 1960.

In Europe, Kristofferson’s life expanded.  At Oxford, he continued to write and studied in detail the works of William Blake, a visionary English poet and visual artist of the late 1700’s and early 1800’s.  Kristofferson also used his time in Europe to travel.

In an interview with David Letterman, Kristofferson described a trip he made following the footsteps of Ernest Hemingway.  Kristofferson said “I figured if I wanted to become a writer I had to go out and live.  One of the ways I did that was trying to be as much like Hemingway as I could, doing all the wrong things he did except, you know, blowing my brains out.”

Kristofferson became an aficionado of bullfighting, running with the bulls in Pamplona, and attending bullfights throughout northern Spain.  As he recounted the trip to Letterman, he was young and “thought of myself as immortal, impossible to kill.”

In the Spanish town of Burgos, he and several friends gathered outside a hospital where matador Luis Miguel Dominguin was taken after a near fatal goring in the bull ring.  As they waited to receive word on his status, a car pulled up and from it emerged Ernest Hemingway.  He described their encounter to Letterman this way. 

“All of a sudden, Hemingway was standing beside me.  I looked him right in the face.  It was ravaged.  I had no idea of the awful shape he appeared to be in.  I don’t know if he reacted to the look on my face or what but without a word, he wheeled around, got back in his car and sped away.  He died within months of that day.”  Hemingway was 61.  The year was 1961.

After Oxford, Kristofferson enlisted in the United States Army.  Stationed in Germany, he completed Ranger School and went on to fly helicopters.  He volunteered to go to Vietnam as a pilot, but instead the Army ordered him to report to West Point to serve as an English Literature professor. 

When Kristofferson found out he would be required to turn in lesson plans as a West Point faculty member, he is reported to have said that the job “sounded like hell to me.”  He resigned his commission in the Army and moved to Nashville to pursue his interest in songwriting. The year was 1965.

That decision was not without consequences.  Upon learning their son gave up a promising military career, his parents, both veterans, disowned him.  Kristofferson claimed he had no regrets, believing William Blake was correct in asserting these words; “anyone divinely ordered for spiritual communion that buries his talent will be pursued by sorrow and desperation through life and by shame and confusion for eternity.”

Heavy stuff, even for an English major.  Kristofferson reframed Blake’s 200-year-old advice this way. “Blake is telling you you’ll be miserable if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do.”

Not that it was easy.  Kristofferson worked as a janitor at Columbia Studios in Nashville for years, writing songs that went unheard, hoping to make connections.  Unsuccessful, he began piloting commercial helicopters to make a living.  That led to his boldest move.

Kristofferson flew one of those helicopters to Johnny Cash’s home near Nashville, landed on his lawn, and personally delivered his idol a demo tape.  Cash listened to the tape and liked it so much he recorded it.  That song was “Sunday Morning Coming Down.”  And the rest, as they say, is history.  The year was 1969.  I was graduating from high school.

Johnny Cash believed Kris Kristofferson fundamentally changed songwriting and with it country music.  Kristofferson argues it was Bob Dylan, whose country album “Nashville Skyline” was recorded there.  He’s quoted as saying “the direction Bob Dylan was pointing made it (songwriting) a respectable thing to do.”  I credit them both.

When this happens, I sit in the shack and listen to the songs of my departed hero.  Unlike Hemingway, Kris Kristofferson was old when he died.  During his career, Kristofferson was generous to those around him.  In 1992, he risked and received criticism while publicly defending Sinead O’Connor.  The troubled artist had protested sexual abuse and its coverup within the Catholic Church by ripping up a photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live.  In 2009 he wrote a song “Sister Sinead” about her.

But Kristofferson’s most memorable good deed happened on a snowy night in Chicago.  He was performing in Chicago with Steve Goodman.  The conversation may have gone like this.

“Kris, I know you want to get out of town, but there’s this mailman you gotta hear.”

“Because?”

“He’s special.”

“Does he write like you?”

“Sort of.  More clever maybe.”

“Tell me a song of yours that compares to his.”

“Oh hell, I don’t know.”

“Come on Steve, give me something.”

“OK.  The Dutchman.”

“Really?  All right.  Let’s hear what he’s got to say.”

Soon they were knocking on the door of the Fifth Peg, a short-lived folk club in Lincoln Park on Armitage.  It was closed.  Prine was having a vodka and ginger ale at the bar when they let in Goodman and Kristofferson. He unpacked his guitar and played his songs to an empty house save for them.  Within months John Prine signed a record deal with the help of Kris Kristofferson.  The year was 1970.

And so it goes.  Steve Goodman left us way too early in 1994 at the age of 36.  Johnny Cash died in 2003 at age 71.  In 2020 the pandemic delivered a cruel blow when COVID took John Prine from us at age 73.  84-year-old Gordon Lightfoot left the stage last year.  And now 88-year-old Kris Kristofferson.  Like old trees in a forest, they come crashing down. 

Bob Dylan is 83.