Kris by Dale Williams Barrigar
In 2006 and 2009, at the ages of 70 and 73, Kris Kristofferson released two classic American folk albums that remain virtually invisible to the population at large, the mainstream media, and the general American culture, much like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, who’s THERE but largely un-talked of, or Herman Melville, who half-invisibly spent the last decades of his life haunting the New York streets as a striking, but “unknown,” individual who looked half like a bearded mystic in a rumpled suit, half wandering minstrel just in from the sea. How strange it is to think that he was also probably passing bearded, informally dressed Walt Whitman on the street many times during those days, as writer Harold Bloom has pointed out. One wonders if they nodded to each other.
These two albums, “This Old Road,” and “Closer to the Bone,” are so deeply old in form, and totally new in content and relevance, that their importance in American musical history is beyond question. And yet, except to a few handfuls of musicians and diehard fans here and there across the land, almost no one seems to know of, much less appreciate, these very American, universal creations. The mainstream media continuously writes Kristofferson off as a musician and songwriter by saying that his best work was finished in the 1970s. This is a widespread critical ignorance that matches so many other of the endless media cliches that surround absolutely any of the true artistic figures the mainstream media touches with its impersonal hands. A great poet said that fame is only the endless lies that collect around a new name.
“This Old Road” and “Closer to the Bone” are extremely close to spoken word poetry in many places, and in many more places they ARE the genuine article itself. The quiet, serious, complex, understated, and profound, jolting nature of these albums are part of what makes them such nonentities to the culture at large, a culture designed to manufacture mindless consumer drones through insidious personality-control machines who do nothing but buy, buy, buy, or dream of buying if your ability to actually do so doesn’t exist at the moment. Utter easiness and a total lack of complexity is demanded in all forms of storytelling, including film, TV, books, and music. Anything complex, different, complicated, or difficult is not only frowned upon when encountered, it’s also, usually, totally rejected and ignored, turned away from so fast it never even has a chance.
These two late albums by Kristofferson should, by rights, be common currency among many of us in the United States and the English speaking nations, if not the entire world. Instead, they remain extremely far back in the cultural shadows, unknown. But they exist, and will continue to exist for a very long time. One way you can tell how unknown they are is by the dearth of Wikipedia articles about them. Turn to your favorite music source right now and listen to the brief, granitic, deeply true poem-songs “Wild American,” “Final Attraction,” “Starlight and Stone,” and/or “Let the Walls Come Down” by Kristofferson as proof of these assertions for the quality, integrity, and value of this severely neglected work.
These pieces can be compared, without exaggeration, to the best of Robert Burns, one of the most quoted and memorable writers in the English language after Shakespeare, a man who, like Kristofferson, worked with and through both poems and songs. These are short songs like short stories, or lyrics like poems, or poems set to music. Paeans to other artists, like mini-essays, also abound, one a defense of Sinead O’Connor called “Sister Sinead,” one for Johnny Cash, and many others. Kris’s mysterious, Hemingwayesque writing style infuses all the pieces on both these albums with a zest, gusto, grit, wit and newness that’s completely unique and could have come from none other than Kristofferson.
One of my most vivid early memories is of seeing Kristofferson on TV performing one of his songs. This was in the 1970s. I was watching it with my father. Kris had long hair and a beard like Jesus. He was singing about Jesus, too, in such a quiet, strong, under-the-radar way that I couldn’t peel my eyes from the screen, because he seemed so different from the endless clowns who were always appearing there, whether they be grinning and emptily chatting talk show hosts and fawning guests, silly, smiling variety show people, game show jokes, or extremely fake dramatic actors who were seriously guilty of trying to pass their ridiculous work off as realism.
Dad told me, in so many words, that here was a great artist, as he pointed at Kris in the little box, but one that the world couldn’t come close to fully understanding. Because of that, Dad said, this man must suffer. Then wise, strong, businessman dad turned away, shaking his head sadly, and walked out of the room leaving me alone with the little screen. Kristofferson finished his song, and the screen went essentially blank, i.e. back to its usual vacuous madness filled with all the unfunny, well-paid clowns.
Kristofferson was a Texas cowboy persona who also studied William Blake at Oxford, as sure as he flew helicopters and was a movie star who appeared as a marquee name with the likes of Barbara Streisand at one point. He continued to study and revere William Blake his whole life, and the direct, simple, sometimes even childlike, vastly mysterious, deeply complex, protesting, sympathizing, and reaching-out nature of Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience” infuses much of Kristofferson’s best work, as do the characters and words of Walt Whitman and Woody Guthrie.
I saw Kristofferson live three times in my life before he passed out of this world four days ago.
The first time was in September, 1985, in Champaign, Illinois, when I was 18 years old, exactly one month after I moved out of my parents’ house and into my college dorm room at the University of Illinois. It was at the very first Farm Aid Concert, which was founded by Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young, all of whom have continued to appear every single year since then in a new Farm Aid for almost forty years. I was blasted on acid at the time and having problems with the crowd when Kris appeared on stage, so I don’t remember much of his set, but I do remember seeing him, and staring in tripped-out awe for a few moments as I remembered seeing him on TV with Dad those many years ago.
The second time was at some point in the first half of the 1990s, when Kris was touring with the band called The Highwaymen. They were playing in a small town in rural Illinois about an hour and a half outside of Chicago. The venue was a high school football field. It was mind-blowing to think that these four titans, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson, were playing at a venue this small and humble, but so it was. These four figures were such towering icons in my mind that they damn near dwarfed Mount Rushmore. Yet there they were, on the small stage, and here I was, with one of my best friends from college, both of us sitting in the high school bleachers looking out over the heads of all the people standing down in the field leading up to the stage.
My friend and I were both wasted and blasted on hard liquor and a few other substances when we arrived at the show, in honor of the hard-partying history of all four outlaw heroes on the stage, and we continued to become even more blasted via the flasks in our pockets as the show went on. As I remember, my friend had to half-carry me back out to the parking lot when the festivities were over, which was like putting the bank robber in charge of the bank. But I had seen them. I didn’t, and don’t, remember a lot of it in a detailed way. But I remember being in their presence.
The next time I saw Kristofferson live was around fifteen years later. He was playing with Merle Haggard at some sort of small venue near O’Hare Airport in Chicago, a small auditorium attached to a motel or conference center. It was winter and my brother and I rode the Blue Line train out to the airport area from Logan Square in Chicago. We surreptitiously shared a blunt with a friendly brother on the train, then we walked out into the cold, snowy night where we promptly got lost so that we made it to the show late.
Kris and Merle were already on stage by the time we got there. We had smoked some more outside the doors before coming in, because both of us had recently given up alcohol and hard drugs and were replacing these things with the much kinder and gentler sacred weed, ganja, which was a trick Kris, Merle, Willie, and others had also pulled, and in many senses we’d learned it from them.
Marijuana was (and is) a far more effective and less painful way to give up drinking, opioids or too much nicotine as compared to traditional rehab or other methods. Millions of alcoholics and hard drug addicts have testified to the way the sacred herb has saved their lives, because it gives you something to do that lifts your spirits and provides the buzz but doesn’t send you to the gutter afterward. It’s possible to overdo this too, like anything, but “medical marijuana” is no joke and is truly an absolute life-saver for many. Weed can be a gateway drug at the beginning, but it can also become a healthy escape hatch (in comparison) after you’ve gotten addicted to everything else and need to find a way out. Kris knew this, and he was a promoter of weed for this reason, like Willie and others.
The audience was small, but they were also intensely interested in and respectful of Merle and Kris on the stage. The two legends were probably high on marijuana themselves at the time, or so we believed, and they played many songs together that broke our hearts, a few that made us laugh out loud in solidarity, and some that were such absolute classics that a mortal hush went over everyone in the auditorium.
At one point, Kris’s knee went out on him as he was about to start another song. He was such a handsome and graceful man that even in awkward pain in front of hundreds of people he was able to instantly pull it together and make his temporary limp seem like a red badge of courage somehow. It was like the time I saw Ray Charles led out to his piano by a friendly assistant on another stage outside another conference center in Indiana.
But my most intimate moments with Kris were me and him totally alone in the fall and winter of 2001, via my CD player in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Chicago. I was temporarily staying in another sublet, largely unfurnished apartment, and the word TROUBLE had come to my doorstep in such a big way that I wondered, truly, many times, whether I would ever get out of it, and how.
My wife and I were separated, a recent girlfriend had broken my heart by moving away, and a more recent girlfriend had gotten pregnant by another man and was leaving me for him. In short, I was deeply in love with all three of these women at once and together with none of them, and seemingly unable to break the cycles of love, mutual rejection, separation, reunion, separation again. “She had a face that I knew would haunt me for the rest of my life,” Carson McCullers said in a letter.
My mother had recently been diagnosed with dementia, which explained her increasingly bizarre behavior, and my novel, which I had spent much sweat, blood, and tears on for three years, had been neglected by seven publishers so far while I watched much lesser work get accepted and well paid ahead of me, or so I believed. I was teaching four classes per semester at the University of Illinois at Chicago for absurdly low pay, like many of my most talented colleagues, and this forced me to live on borrowed money, scrounging and scrambling to keep my head above water, like a rat in Lake Michigan. The bosses were hellish assholes, and as usual I was having tons of trouble with all these authority figures at the university.
9/11 had recently happened, and I had been in a bizarre knife incident where I’d fallen while drunk and accidentally stabbed myself in the back. My brother was drinking and smoking far too much and I was watching him half-destroy himself in this manner as I was myself drinking and smoking far too much on a daily basis while also battling what turned out to be none other than a wicked case of bipolar depression which is far more intense than the garden-variety version of depression and in my case included paranoia, physical pain, concentration problems, and periodic extreme apathy, the feeling of truly being depressed in the literal sense, or pressed down by some unstoppable, unseen hand, all compounded, created, and buttressed by regular, wicked hangovers, nicotine panic attacks, poor diet and regular sleep disturbances.
Recent, extended trips to New York City had led me to believe that it was a town full of posers, except for all the low-down real folk who also live everywhere. (To this day, the best poems I’ve ever written still haven’t been published, although they’ve been read by several near-genius and genius individuals.) Playing through pain was the name of the game, and the pain was as wide as the Great Plains, which I had also recently visited.
I had Kris’s album, “The Austin Sessions,” in hand, in CD form. I put it in the machine and listened to it over and over and over and over again, alone in the middle of the night lying across the couch in the dark with a bottle of whiskey in hand, a cigarette in mouth, and ashtray balanced on my chest. I hung on and listened as the yellow light from the kitchen and the city windows gently came in. My car was also broken down on the street with parking tickets piling up on it and there were bill collectors mailing nasty messages via the USPO, but I blocked it out of my mind.
I could tell from his music that he had been through it too, and survived. I was asking him to help me make it through the night, and he was doing it. Not every song mentioned Jesus or the Bible, but this was American religious music for the desperate among us, the truly authentic kind.
His music and words were rough, ready, ripped, raw, real, sometimes rumbling and raucous, run-down, run-through, nailed to the cross. It somehow seemed to partake of both the sacred and the subconscious, bringing them together, and was like the outstretched hand of a friend. Art that comes from an inner compulsion, a reaction to life, not from the profit motive or the desire to amuse a gossiping audience.
His writing is sweet and brief, like Dante’s sweet new style in the vernacular. Writing without artifice, he strips his words of ornament in order to keep them pure and free of the usual American B.S., so they can reveal the truth of the heart, mind, and soul beneath.
At one point in his life, Kristofferson was a janitor leaning on a broom in a Nashville studio watching Bob Dylan, who was five years younger, make a record. A few years later, he was starring as Billy the Kid in one of the greatest American movies ever made by far, directed by Sam Peckinpah. He had three wives and eight children he remained close with. He always planned to have lines about freedom from Leonard Cohen’s song “Bird on the Wire” carved on his tombstone, and he made this widely known. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” has entered the English language, like several other of his phrases have done.
His blue-eyed gaze when he performed as an old man was often almost Christ-like in its intensity and the way it seemed to be looking through, and beyond, this mortal, sin-filled, pain-filled world.
When Elvis died, I was ten years old and riding in the car with Dad when we heard about it on the radio. When I got the news that Kris had died, I was visiting my father at his house on a Sunday. I was writing the last paragraph of an essay on John Lennon in my head. I received a text from my cousin announcing the news, with a picture of Kris. The TV was on, and the same old clowns from fifty years ago were there on the flickering screen, doing their vacuous, ridiculous, shallow, well-paid acts. Just a few weeks earlier, I’d seen 91-year-old Willie Nelson perform his version of Tom Waits’ song “Last Leaf” at a concert here in Illinois.
Kris’s presence in a movie made it cooler just by him being in it at all. But at the same time, as stated at the beginning of this paper, his work was not known, or not known well enough, just like his hero William Blake, like Melville, like Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Kris wrote in one of his poem-songs, “If you’re looking for a miracle now, buddy, you better be one, all alone, on your own.”
End note: One of my fondest memories from childhood is watching my grandparents and their friends drinking and dancing together in their cabin in northern Michigan to “For the Good Times,” as performed by Ray Price playing on the stereo.
Image: A Pot Pourri of coloured leaves, petals and pods in pink, orange, white and brown from Pixabay.com
literally stories 
Hi Dale
Excellent essay “Kris.” One of my all time favorite actors. I’m one that doesn’t really know much of his music, either. I liked the song he did in “A Star is Born.” “Watch Me Now.” It might not even be called that.
I like the way you described the fickle trappings of fame. Emily Dickinson wrote a four line poem called “Fame.”
You make the media out to be a bright shining monster of sorts and I think that’s the way it is. They get you in their spaceship and fly you around in the stars, even make you one, until there’s a new kid in town. Then they drop you at the dump. Like your art never existed. A great thing about the Internet–the individual can easily educate themselves about these forgotten artists. But they also need a guide and you are a fine guide!
That’s quite an image of H. Melville and Whitman passing each other in the night.
“Personality-control machines” Wow that is insidious (great description)! And with AI at the helm of the beast it’s even worse. You know I’ve sat around and dreamed of buying things. The Idolater of desire that is frowned upon in the Bible. Of-course they know how to push these buttons. Sex sells–all of that.
I saw a Jimmy Johns or one of those Subway Commercials and this woman was eating a giant sub like she was getting ready for John Holmes and the white cheese look like he was blowing a load. lol. The commercials are more disgusting and pornographic by the minute. It was totally erotic and gross.
Great how you described Kris on the tiny screen and your father’s proclamation on him as a suffering artist.
The episodes of drugs, booze, and concerts are like a kind of passage of youth. I saw AC/DC on acid. Or I think I was on acid–long time ago–I was on something.
I really like your gritty and at the same time highly educational writing that compels and educates at the same time! Your words are a journey!
Christopher
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Christopher
Thanks so much for all this awesomely rereadable epistolary commentary as good as the source material, or better!
It rises to the challenge and creates a dialogue. Great insights worded wonderfully. And a hilarious description of the John Holmes sandwich lady. Hope she was well paid!
Took a day trip road trip yesterday to Starved Rock State Park, 90 miles from Chicago on the Illinois River in Lincolnland.
Hung out with the ghost of Chief Blackhawk in an old native American cave over the river, like all the times he was hiding from the US Army. He agrees with you about the wild creatures.
Babel’s RED CALVARY was one of those books I read once and once only so far. Parts of it reminded me of Homer’s ILIAD.
The blind, wandering-from-here-to-there (and drifting) poet who describes things like a spear through the eye and out the back of the skull and makes it sound beautiful. And the whole poem overflows like this. But it isn’t titillating or even suspenseful like a cookie-cutter horror movie. The gore is like it is in Nature, both animal and human animals. And the more you read it, the stronger you become!
And I realized that I always accidentally spell CAVALRY as CALVARY, which seems very fitting in a way.
It’s my theory that Jesus was familiar with Homer. Which may be an original contribution to biblical scholarship.
Thanks again for this ongoing High Art Dialogue upon art and life! Your comments are so well-written they’re like separate essays, fun to read and full of wisdom.
Dale
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Hi Dale
Thank you!
Starved Rock sounds like the place to be! Such a powerful name. It must be an Indian name. They have the best names for the natural world. Like “Wounded Knee.” (sad). Thanks to blue coats.
You know it’s funny I ran into the same problem with cavalry. I think I’ve been not only spelling it wrong, but also mispronouncing it. Yes “Calvary” is the way I’ve always heard or misheard it and said it. too. It doesn’t sound right to have the L on the horse end of it, lol.
Christopher
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Dale
This is a new height for you. Utterly brilliant. Kristofferson entered my knowledge a bit earlier simply because I am older than you. He and Willie and the wonderful usual suspects, too few in spirit, too many to type with one thumb, got the Outlaw Country going in the late 60’s. My mother had a brief marriage to a working country musician (five live tavern nights a week), and he was huge on Kris, Merle, Waylon, Jesse Colter Young. They were (and still are) great poets imitated by many. They spoke/speak of life, and your life sounds like they knew you.
The worst thing to happen to a musician is the age demographic. Actors (but not actresses) can avoid it if big enough, but most are gone by 40. We are trained to think performers are done early. And although that is bullshit, brainwashing by any name still works if it is on you the full 24.
Yet in a way it’s better, classier even, to fight unwinnable wars.
And although it is a plug as old as show biz, I hope readers here will check out your Sunday Drifter work at Saragun Springs.
Thank you!
Leila
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Hi Leila!
Writers can usually tell when they’re going good and producing decent material; and on the other hand, it’s almost impossible to tell which of one’s own work is “the best of the best,” and this especially when the work is still “new,” as in written within the last year or so as this was, but also, any time, even many years afterward. (This is one of the best things editors and literary critics are for, the good ones, I mean.)
So it’s great to know that this hits a new height.
One reason for that could be that I put more of myself into this piece, and by that I mean directly inserted autobiographical details.
A more autobiographical focus is also “the draw” for my Saragun Springs column (usually) as well so I, too, invite readers to explore that weekly Sunday exploration, where I try to turn my own personal struggles into exempla for the overall struggle of a writer’s life. Not a famous and rich writer’s life; just a writer’s life (a human writer, that is). I actually find the second kind of writer far more interesting (with very rare exceptions: maybe…).
It can be difficult to reread one’s own material after it’s “finished,” and sometimes that feeling can be cringe-inducing and one can’t read one’s own work at all.
But since you say this is a new height I’m going to go ahead and truly believe you because I always trust your judgement in such matters!
Thank you!
Dale
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Fascinating as always, Dale. I love how you weave in others, like Melville and Whitman this time, as well as glimpses into your own life. Kristofferson’s death is a big loss. Thank goodness his music lives on…and there are people like you to promote it.
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David
Thanks as always for reading, appreciating, and commenting.
KK was a one-of-a-kind hybrid artist: part country singer, part folk singer, part nineteenth-century(-throw-back) Romantic poet.
Thanks again!
Dale
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If we are wise and watchful, can we see who is walking among us now? Thanks for making me wonder.
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Hideoutobservant
First let me say thanks very much for commenting on my work again.
Secondly, I love your name!
Thirdly, thank you very much for this specific comment.
This is, bar none, one of the best comments I’ve ever received on any of my work from anyone ever. And I never say this kind of thing lightly.
Thanks again!
D
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I adore the depth and thought you put into these essays, Dale. You make a subject I embarrassingly know little about, Kris Kristofferson in this case, and make me want to know much more and enjoy and relish his music and poetry in the same way you clearly have. Your mix of expertise and the personal make his such a good, rich read.
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Paul
Thanks as always for reading and commenting. It’s truly a joy to have an expert Reader such as yourself giving your time to my work: it makes all of the work worth it.
Congrats again, too, on your recent story. The way you mix past, present and future in this piece is truly excellent. So subtle and true it has a lifelikeness about it achieved by few other story-writers these days. An honest emphasis on family without any sensationalization or cheap tricks is a rare thing these days.
I have an aunt who’s 90 and preparing to leave this place, which I just found out about yesterday. It reminds me of your story.
Dale
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Hi Dale,
I believe that if something catches your interest you are one of life’s natural thinkers. You are curious, you study and you reason. You put your own thoughts and reasoning into songs, writings and life but also think on original and any non-said meaning. And in saying life, also other folks lives, those that catch your interest.
That all takes a lot of time and probably more empathy than anyone else I have ever had the pleasure to ‘meet’.
Your study of Kris is exemplary. I have very little knowledge of the man. What I do have, I like.
You have touched on the way that I look at music – Not ever even being close to so in-depth, music, to me, is all about memories. I reckon any song that I know, I can tell you where and when I first heard it. That means that I have never studied the music as much but what I do is be over-come with emotion and taken back to those initial times.
Here’s a weird example – I can’t listen to ‘I Won’t Let The Show Go On’ by Leo Sayer without feeling physically sick. I think I was around seven year old when this was over played on the radio and I was conscious of going to school and what that meant for me. The feelings of those days are still left in that song when I hear it fifty odd years later!
I have said many times that I adore music but I’m not sure the music is what I adore, I am humbled at being transported back to happy and more un-happy times that have made me human(ish!!) and more importantly made me me. With all the music that I know, I can’t hide. I am a bit of a masochist as, for whatever reason, I love all those songs and continually play them!!!!
Brilliant my fine friend – Not only do you enlighten and share, you instigate thought in those that read this type of your work.
All the very best.
Hugh
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Hi, Hugh!
Thanks for singing my praises! I probably don’t deserve most of it, but I do appreciate your appreciation! You have a fine-tuned sense of what I’m trying to achieve (I don’t say I do achieve it) in my work.
Also fascinating to hear how you experience music. The fact that you experience it in this unique and powerful way, and can express it so well too, is one-of-a-kind. I can sympathize with the seven-year-old you describe. It is described in very spare language, and no more is needed for the empathetic reader.
Thanks again!
Dale
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Hi Dale, I do enjoy your essays very much. I always wondered if his name was a stage name – but it’s real! We always loved him. Although, I have to admit my favorite version of Bobby McGhee is by Janis…
So I had to play your Austin Sessions album and write this! Nice, remembering the music and the poetry. Thank you for doing the research and for sharing and revealing personal elements in your life and the role music played for you.
And just as an aside, you might enjoy my favorite unsung musician -cowboy – poet, Townes Van Zandt, for me his voice and guitar playing just pierce the light and the air! ( “For the Sake of the Song”, “None but the Rain”, “Lungs”, “I’ll be here in the Morning,” just some of many… ).
my best, Maria
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Hello, Maria!
The way you respond to my work is always so fun and wonderful, and totally unique, it’s always great to hear from you! I would’ve gotten back to you sooner, but I was having keyboard troubles. And I just have to say thanks again for what I think of as the “Emily Dickinson Picture,” too. That face is her face in my mind, now.
And thanks for mentioning Townes! He deserves more attention. This makes me want to write an essay about him. And I am planning on it (he’s on my list now). I haven’t thought about him much for the last however many years, for whatever reasons, but there was a time when I listened to several of his songs over and over again.
Three of my favorites are “To Live is to Fly” and his version of the Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers,” along with “Sanitarium Blues.”
I didn’t know the songs you mentioned, but I’ve listened to them the last couple of days and they are great! Thanks for letting me know. Excellent suggestions and perfect choices.
Dale
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In October of 1985, I turned on our 13 inch black and white television and saw the living image of my father, who had died two years earlier. I stood there transfixed. The way he moved. The way he twisted his head when he spoke. The way he grabbed the lectern and leaned into it. The voice was the same. Not similar, but exactly the same. Same accent. Same cadence. Same semi-gravelly voice punctuated by exhaled bursts through his nose.
It was Kris. I knew his music by then and had seen a few of his movies. But from that moment, I hungered for more. My father was no where near as talented as Kris, and he lived his life in obscurity, singing for beer in honky tonks. I listened to the words Kris wrote, though, and I could hear my father’s whisper across the years.
Losing Kris was like losing my father again, and I wept that day before taking refuge in my guitar and a few of his songs. I listen to him often, and I know the recordings you name. Closer to the Bone is hauntingly beautiful, all the more so because I was actually listening to it when I heard he’d left the building forever.
Thank you for reminding me of all that, and for putting in such a lovely framework.
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Thurman
This comment is like (or is) a truly profound flash- or micro-essay, all unto itself; or a prose poem. Three vivid characters are brought to life for the reader.
Beautifully written, beautifully affecting, and this will not soon be forgotten by me.
I’m glad my writing was able to reach out and create this kind of connection. More glad than I can say!
Thank you for feeling so much and writing so well!
Dale
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What I knew of K.K. could’ve been printed on a postage stamp. Not any longer. But then it’s what you so often do, Dale: put new eyes in old heads – new ears too, needless to say. That piquant mix of critical appraisal & personal reminiscence is in fact irresistible.
Geraint
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Thank you, Geraint!
Your enthusiasm for the Word is an example for all.
Your commentary always blooms with exuberance, like flowers of goodness.
You are a reader, artist, and critic of impeccable uniqueness!
Dale
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Absorbing essay on Kris Kristofferson. Intriguing, reading about the author’s life in relation to the music, lyrics and the concerts. Sounds like the author had a wild but unforgettable youth. Music helps us remember where and when we heard it, and the whole mood and experience of then. That’s what I perceive re: the author’s story as he takes us back to the early 2000’s. Wow, seeing Kristofferson with Merle Haggard, that would’ve been great! I listen to Kristofferson because to me many of his songs reflect melancholy and sadness, which I identify with very much… these are the side effects of being an individual, going your own way, taking risks. Is the search for freedom and its side effects worth it? I hope so. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? Suffering, pain then a gruesome death, I guess, he he. Anyway, the tone of Kris’s voice was real, his songs were real. That’s the main thing. “For The Good Times,” “Me and Bobby McGee,” “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” “Why Me, Lord” etc. etc. all timeless songs for me. I’ll have to listen to those two later albums.
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Hi Harrison
Thanks for reading and commenting with these thoughtful and personal words. Yes, I have to say that my younger days were both wild and unforgettable. Much pain was involved, but I don’t regret any of it (although there may be a few people out there who do regret some of it; and to them, I say that I apologize (and am done with it)). LOL!
I love what you’ve said here about the side effects of going one’s own way and taking risks. Sounds like you know whereof you speak because you’ve been there yourself, which also comes through in your fiction.
Thanks again! Hope you enjoy the two late Kris albums; looking forward to your next story.
Dale
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