Nice. Kris Kristofferson has built a career on lines like that, or, more precisely, those lines. Since Bob Dylan, the notion has grown up that it is not necessary to be a good singer, tunesmith or instrumentalist to merit an audience's ears. This was predicated on the mistaken perception that Bob Dylan was none of the three. Dylan's voice was not conventionally pleasing to some, but it cannot be denied that through his musical resources he was able to dramatize a lyric.

But, for the moment, let's be charitable and set aside examining Kris' musical talents. He is better known as a lyricist, and so any consideration of his latest album, Border Lord (Monument KZ31302), ought to begin there. At regular intervals, I was confronted with lines ranging from the confusion of "Their lonely frustration, descending to laughter/Erase the footprints I leave in the sand ..." to the inanity of "She'll feed your hungry ego till you think you're quite a man/But you better count your fingers when she turns loose of your hand ..." to the hyperbole of "And her body set the smokes of hell to boiling in my skull ..." to the kind of pseudo-poeticizing which should have gone out with Bob Lind and the Electric Prunes: "But there's darkness in the shadows/In the canyons of my soul."

This recitation merely conveys the artlessness of Kris' work. We must look further to discover the man and the world view behind the works. He's a fast-livin', hard lovin' dude who has just enough time between ballin' and brawlin' to jot down a tune or two. He's a cracker-barrel philosopher, able to spout truisms grown from a life rooted in unadorned reality. He spars with the devil (re: "The Silver Tongued Devil and I") and he and his women are forever falling into his snares.

Kris' celebration of machismo are his most patently stupid entries. When Jagger works with the form, it's endearing because basically Jagger's assertiveness is compensating for failure. With Kris, it's sheer one-dimensional braggadocio. From "Smokey Put the Sweat On Me":

"Smokey," "Border Lord" ("Good lookin' women every time you stumble/Waitin' there to catch you when you fall") and "Gettin' By High and Strange" ("I'll keep living till the day I die/As long as I can get it up for one more try") are the "love" songs least ambiguous in their intent. But when Kris attempts to shade in the emotional side of his affairs, he really steps in it. In "Little Girl Lost," for example, the stanzas alternate between objective consideration of his "little girl," bitterness at the way he was treated by her, and a melting forgiveness addressed to a third party who is about to "take her." The transitions are abrupt and irrational.

Kris is equally indigestible when he waxes reflective. "New ain't nothing but a state of mind," he muses in "Gettin' By" in the cadences of "Freedom's just another word ..." and one is asked to consider so barren a thought. On "Burden of Freedom," Kris plays his namesake, Christ–"Lord, help me forgive them, they don't understand"–but proves his obtuseness and egocentricity in the last stanza when he "cleverly" turns the tables: "And when I have wounded the last one who loved me/God, help her forgive me, I don't understand." Asking for forgiveness of your enemies is indeed Christ-like; to ask for forgiveness of your own transgressions, with the implications that the person who would refuse it is morally unenlightened, is grossly self-indulgent.

Kris has a fondness for dualities–"the bitter for the sweet," "the laughter and the tears"–which includes a backwoods Calvinist sense of right and wrong. He also has a taste for cheap irony ("... that body she'll let anybody hold, but the devil's got her soul ...") as well as the ability to make the tautological sound striking: "Just a jump ahead of what I'd left behind." His sentences are very long, clauses and prepositional phrases Latinately balanced, and betray this country and western singer's Oxford education.

Enough textual analysis of the Rhodes scholar. These lyrics are supported by melodies which are graceless and derivative, and delivered in a torpid, beer-sodden monotone which is regrettably appropriate to the material yet nonetheless painful to listen to. A quiver of emotion is ventured on "Somebody Nobody Knows" (Kris' "Eleanor Rigby" to the tune of "The Tennessee Waltz"), and he tries to convey a rollicking good time on the rockabilly "Smokey" and "Gettin' By," sowing homilies as he goes. There's a hint of twang on the banjo and fiddle - embroidered "Stagger Mountain Tragedy," while "Border Lord" could be called vaguely bluesy, only that would be to flatter it. "Josie" has a chorus out of "Me and Bobby McGee," and "Kiss the World Good-Bye," Kris' swan song, is reminiscent of Gale Garnett's "We'll Sing in the Sunshine." "When She's Wrong" is a touch of Memphis soul, whereas "Little Girl Lost" has a waft of Venetian mandolins.

But this is to note differences which effectively do not matter. The tone of Border Lord is one of unrelieved boredom, broken only by Charlie McCoy's harp and organ work, and the guitar break on "Gettin' By." As a special treat, just as Joan Baez made a cameo appearance on Kris' last album, Rita Coolidge does a guest spot on this one. But what predominates is the crippling dullness of a man who has expended all his energy contriving an image which is itself tight-assed and constricting. Kris' toughness simply leaves him no room to perform.

Kris may or may not be a poet, a picker, a prophet, a pusher, a pilgrim and a preacher, as his song "The Pilgrim–Chapter 33" enumerates, but he certainly is "a walking contradiction." By appealing to the more cosmopolitan urges among C&W listeners, as well as the more provincial yearnings among the rock audience, Kris has won a sizable following in both camps. But what makes him commercial condemns him artistically. He has neither the intensity and originality of vision of the solo artist (Neil Young or Joni Mitchell), nor the simple integrity and force of personality of the more restricted country and western artist (e.g., his mentor, Johnny Cash). What is left is a strange hybrid: a C&W Jim Morrison, or a Bobby Goldsboro with sex appeal.

Not that a kind of self-conscious bumpkinism lacks precedent in rock. But when the Band, say, sing about King Harvest, they're employing dramatic irony–they're really not farmers–while Kris, by taking his role completely seriously, gets too close for comfort. Kris enacts pseudo - autobiographies, never quite convincing us that there's such a place as Stagger Mountain or a girl like Smokey, and never approaching the realism of the Band's fictions.

In the final analysis, Kris is no more a good old boy from Nashville than Neil Young is a rancher, George Harrison a mystic, or Frank Zappa a freak. He's just as rootless as the rest of us, creating his identity not out of family, work, religion, geography, but wishes, fantasies and the need for a sense of place.

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BEN GERSON

(Posted: Apr 27, 1972)