Kris Kristofferson, musical rebel and film star, has died at the age of 88

Kris Kristofferson, who wrote indelible songs about lovers, loners, drunks and an out-of-control hitchhiker couple – and who later became a screen star, appearing in dozens of films – has died at an old age 88.

According to his representative, the singer, songwriter and actor died peacefully at his home in Maui, Hawaii, surrounded by his family on Saturday, September 28th. No cause of death was given.

Kristofferson made a name for himself as a songwriter in Nashville beginning in the late 1960s, writing songs such as “Me and Bobby McGee,” “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” which featured other singers (Janis Joplin, Johnny Cash and Sammi Smith respectively) made it to the top of the charts.

His fame and status as a sex symbol grew through his film roles, most notably when he co-starred with Barbra Streisand in the 1976 remake of ” A star is born.

“I envisioned a pretty full life,” Kristofferson told NPR Fresh air in 1999. “I certainly wasn’t equipped by God to be a football player, but I was allowed to be one. And I got to be a ranger, a paratrooper, a helicopter pilot and a boxer.” And a lot of things that I don’t think I’m cut out for, I just imagined.

Kristofferson won three Grammy Awards, two of them for duets with his then-wife Rita Coolidge, to whom he was married from 1973 to 1980. His appearance in A star is born earned him a Golden Globe in 1976.

In 2004, Kristofferson was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame and was honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014.

He found his calling as a writer early on

Kristofferson was born in Brownsville, Texas, to a military family; his father was a major general in the US Air Force. There he wrote his first song called “I Hate Your Ugly Face” at the age of 11. (He included this number as a bonus track on one of his last albums, Closer to the bonein 2009.)

Kristofferson studied creative literature at Pomona College in Southern California. His diverse talents caught the attention of Sports Illustratedwhich highlighted him as one of its “faces in the crowd” in 1954. “This dashing young man,” the magazine trumpeted, not only played rugby and varsity football and was a Golden Gloves boxer; He was also a sports editor of the college newspaper, a folk singer, an award-winning author and an “outstanding” ROTC cadet.

From Pomona, Kristofferson won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University, where he studied the works of Shakespeare and William Blake.

In a 1999 interview with NPR Morning editionHe explained that Blake was “a wonderful example of someone who wanted to be an artist because he believed that if you were cut out for it, it was your moral responsibility to be one, otherwise you would be persecuted all your life.” death – until eternity!”

Perhaps inspired by Blake’s admonition, Kristofferson harbored the dream of writing the Great American Novel. Instead, after Oxford, he followed his father into the military and joined the U.S. Army, where he became a helicopter pilot and achieved the rank of captain. When he was assigned to teach literature at West Point, Kristofferson decided to leave the Army and moved to Nashville to pursue his dream of songwriting.

For this decision he was disowned by his parents. “They thought I had gone crazy somewhere between Oxford and the Army,” Kristofferson told Pomona College Magazine in 2004. “My mother said that no one over 14 would hear anything like that anyway… But I became more and more determined to do it.” Going down this path was somehow liberating for me because I had nothing left to lose.

From janitor to hit songwriter

When Kristofferson arrived in Nashville in 1965, he got a job as a janitor at Columbia Studios, where he swept floors and emptied ashtrays while writing songs on the side.

He often compared the creative dynamic of Nashville in the ’60s to that of Paris in the ’20s. “When I got there,” he said in 1999 Fresh air Interview: “It was so different than any other life I had lived before; just hanging out with these people who stayed up three or four days and nights at a time and wrote songs the whole time.”

“I think I wrote four songs the first week I was there,” he continued. “And it was just so exciting for me. It was like a lifeboat, you know? It was like my salvation.”

The story goes that Kristofferson was so desperate to get his songs into the hands of Johnny Cash that he landed a helicopter on Cash’s lawn. In the version that Cash always told, Kristofferson showed up with a tape in one hand and a beer in the other.

“It’s a great story and a story that you have to believe even if it’s not true,” quips musician Rodney Crowell, who became Cash’s son-in-law when he married Rosanne Cash. “But according to John, that’s literally what happened.”

Johnny Cash was instrumental in launching Kristofferson’s career by introducing him at the 1969 Newport Folk Festival and inviting him to appear on his television variety show.

His songs were like short stories

Rodney Crowell was one of many young songwriters drawn to Nashville by the beacon of Kristofferson’s success. “A lot of songwriters flocked to Nashville because of Kris Kristofferson. And I was part of that wave,” he tells NPR.

What set Kristofferson’s music apart, according to Crowell, was the way he wove a story and maintained a narrative in his songs. Take “Sunday Morning Coming Down” for example – a vivid portrait of bleak, hungover loneliness. Crowell calls the song “a beautifully written short story.”

Musician Steve Earle remembers that when he first heard “Sunday Morning Coming Down” as a teenager in Texas, it made such an impression that he rushed to buy Kristofferson’s first two records.

“The imagery and the use of language is just taken to a higher level than really anything that’s ever existed in country music before,” says Earle.

Kristofferson, he says, “single-handedly raised the bar in country music lyrically to a point that writers still strive for, and I still strive for to this day.”.”

He was a master of seduction, both in song and on screen

For Nashville, Kristofferson’s 1970 song about naked, uncompromising desire, “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” was nothing short of revolutionary. “It was earth-shattering and a paradigm shift,” Crowell says. “It is literally a form of seduction. It is seduction with the bare tongue.”

In person and on screen, Kristofferson was magnetic: a beautiful movie star, with a mischievous grin and bright blue eyes.

“Women loved him, you know? I mean, they absolutely fell over,” Crowell says. “He was a sex symbol and a rock star.”

For a young, eager musician like Crowell, Kristofferson was an intoxicating role model.

“It was like, ‘Hmm, that’s what I want to be,'” Crowell says. “I asked myself, ‘How do you do this? How do you get that kind of boast?’”

Kristofferson brought the same sensual swagger to his film roles throughout his decades-long career. He starred in films, among other things Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Alice doesn’t live here anymore, A star is born, half-hard, Heaven’s Gate And Lonely starin collaboration with directors Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese, Alan Rudolph and John Sayles, among others.

For a time in the 1980s and 1990s, Kristofferson was part of a country outlaw supergroup, forming the Highwaymen along with Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. Recalls this time in an interview with the British magazine Classic rock Years later he said: “I just wish I was more aware of how lucky I was to share a stage with these people. I had no idea that two of them [Cash and Jennings] would be done so quickly. Hell, I was up there and I had all my heroes with me – these are guys whose ashtrays I used to clean. I’m kind of amazed I wasn’t even more amazed.

In the ’80s and ’90s, Kristofferson also became involved in a number of left-wing political causes. He protested the nuclear tests in Nevada and loudly opposed U.S. policy in Central America. He made several trips to Nicaragua to support the Sandinista government and criticized U.S. support for El Salvador’s military-run junta in that country’s brutal civil war. “I’m a songwriter,” he said in 1988 Fresh air Interview: “But I also care about my fellow human beings. And I really care about the soul of my country.” His 1990 album, Warriors of the Third World Waris full of songs that express his political views:

Music connected him with memory

In his later years, Kristofferson suffered from severe memory loss but continued to perform until 2020. Among those he shared the stage with was Margo Price. “Without a doubt,” she says, “he had the same charisma and sex appeal every time.”

On stage, Price says, Kristofferson was able to connect with his musical memories and “feel like he could be himself…There were times when I’d come off stage with Kris and think, ‘Great show, Kris!'” He says, “Oh, thanks. I wish I could have been there!” I mean, that was the powerful thing about seeing him play his songs, that he could remember songs that he had written so long ago, but remember something from five years ago Couldn’t remember minutes.

In a 2013 interview with NPR, Kristofferson reflected on his life and career. At 76, he had just released an album entitled Feeling mortal.

“To my surprise,” he told Rachel Martin, “I feel nothing but gratitude for being so old and still above the earth and living with the people I love. I’ve had a life full of experiences of all kinds, most of them.” Well, I have eight children and a wife who puts up with everything I do and keeps me out of trouble.

Kristofferson lived for many years on the island of Maui, in a house high on the slope of Haleakala Volcano with panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean. He told an interviewer in 2016: “I have had so many blessings, so much reward in my life, that I want to stay exactly where I am: on an island with no neighbors and a 180 degree empty horizon. It’s a beautiful view.”

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