"He was always the rainbow...."

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“Sunday was the worst day of the week if you didn’t have a family”

— Kris Kristofferson

“Everything was all right until Kristofferson came to town. "Oh, they ain’t seen anybody like him. He came into town like a wildcat that he was, flew a helicopter into Johnny Cash’s backyard, not your typical songwriter. And he went for the throat. You can look at Nashville pre-Kris and post-Kris, because he changed everything.”

—Bob Dylan

Kris Kristofferson was the guy guys wanted to be. One of the best songwriters ever. Impossibly good looking (The greatest beard EVER, and it’s not even close). An IQ in the stratosphere. A man who could quote William Blake and Johnny Cash while landing his military helicopter in your backyard. A mystic with a whiskey bottle. Utterly fearless, he was never afraid to take sides, even if his wasn’t the most popular one. He was lovably cranky. If somebody told him to “have a nice day” he’d respond with “don’t tell me what to do…” About the only thing he wasn’t blessed with was a superior singing voice (when asked about it, Willie Nelson laughed and said “thank God he can write”), but his songs were so lyrically stunning and musically simple that it never mattered. Listening to him sing was like sitting cross-legged at the foot of Mount Rushmore, and watching the mouths start to move.

He did for country music what Bob Dylan did for rock and roll. He broke it into a million pieces. The old rules didn’t mean all that much anymore. Nearly 500 different artists have covered his songs. So far.

Think about how badass you have to be to be invited into a band that includes Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Waylon Jennings? What Kristofferson could do with his songs was articulate the vulnerability behind such a wall of badassery. “These are guys whose ashtrays I used to clean”, is how Kristofferson referred to his bandmates. The fact that he now had enough outlaw cred to stand toe-to-toe with them seemed forever a sense of wonder to him. But then again, not. He knew how good he was. He could out-fight and out-fuck and out-drink and out-write the entire city of Nashville, and do it with a hangover. And in his spare time he became a movie star. “A Star is Born” might not have been “Citizen Kane”, but for every dude that had a Farrah poster on his wall, a girl had the chiseled promo poster of Kristofferson lip smacking his co-star Barbara Streisand hanging on hers. He was now a bona fide sex symbol on top of everything else, surely the only time a Oxford University Rhodes Scholar was so labeled.

But to me it would always come down to words like this….

The scene was a small roadside café
The waitress was sweepin' the floor
Two truck drivers drinkin' their coffee
And two okie kids by the door

"How much are them candies?" They asked her
"How much have you got?" She replied
"We've only a penny between us"
"Them's two for a penny, " she lied

And the daylight grew heavy with thunder
With the smell of the rain on the wind
Ain't it just like a human?
Here comes that rainbow again

One truck driver called to the waitress
After the kids went outside
"Them candies ain't two for a penny"
"So what's it to you?" She replied
In silence they finished their coffee
Then got up and nodded goodbye
She called, "Hey, you left too much money"
"So what's it to you?" They replied

And the daylight was heavy with thunder
With the smell of the rain on the wind
Ain't it just like a human?
Here comes that rainbow again

Read that again. Johnny Cash himself called “Here Comes That Rainbow Again” one of the greatest songs in modern history. Its two simple verses actually contain what Lincoln meant when he called upon “the better angels of our nature.” Inside this sort of quiet empathy is where Kristofferson worked all his life. He’d seen way too much of the world to turn his back on it. He knew the waitress. He knew the truck driver. He knew the kids with the penny between them. He was an well acquainted with these people as he was with the restless loneliness that drove “Sunday Morning Coming Down”.

Which brings us to what I consider his greatest moment. In 1992 Sinead O’Connor sparked a global outcry when she tore up a photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live, protesting the Catholic Church’s appalling record on child sexual abuse. All the predictable meatheads went ballistic, including Frank Sinatra, who famously threated to beat her up. Two weeks later when O’Connor took the stage at a Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden, she was met with a torrent of abuse. Kristofferson was recruited to get her off the stage. He refused, and instead came out and put his arm around her and whispered in her ear “don’t let the bastards get you down”. Sinead, temporarily emboldened, responded with “I’m not down” and proceeded to sing a bit of Bob Marley’s song “War” before becoming overwhelmed. She ran off stage and collapsed into the only arms there to greet her. Kris Kristofferson’s.

He was always the rainbow.

“God protects fools and songwriters…”

—Kris Kristofferson

In a bit….

—tf