Kristofferson : Kris Kristofferson : Review : Rolling Stone

After a two-year stint as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, where he studied the visionary poetry of William Blake, and a tour as a captain in the United States Army, during which he sang at bases throughout Germany, Kris Kristofferson settled in Nashville in 1965. Working as a janitor at the Columbia Recording Studios and as a helicopter pilot, Kristofferson trained his sights on the Nashville establishment and began composing one of the great songbooks in modern popular music.

By the time his debut album, Kristofferson, arrived in the spring of 1970, he had established himself as one of Nashville's most inventively literate tunesmiths, and several of his songs had already been made famous by the likes of Johnny Cash ("Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down") and Roger Miller ("Me and Bobby McGee" - after Janis Joplin's 1971 hit version, Kristofferson was reissued under the name Me and Bobby McGee). Kristofferson's compositions made it clear that one could think like a bona fide intellectual and feel like a genuine country musician, paving the way for the alternative-country sound of Butch Hancock, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Robbie Fulks, among others. Though he was only thirty-three when Kristofferson was released, he sings with the melancholy passion of a man who has lived long enough to know a good deal of pain.

If rock & roll is the music of youth, with all its sexual promise, rock's cranky uncle - country - has always been a music for grown-ups who have, as they say, loved and lost. While Kristofferson's voice is not in and of itself a great instrument, its gravelly sweetness, a la Leonard Cohen, seduces the listener. With "Blame It on the Stones," an anthemic romp that thumbs its nose at "Mr. Marvin Middle Class" and the pooh-bahs of Nashville, and "The Law Is for the Protection of the People," an acerbic account of police authority run amok, Kristofferson wears its counterculture credentials proudly on its sleeve. Songs such as "Darby's Castle" and "To Beat the Devil" showcase the songwriter's flair for extended metaphor, just as chestnuts such as "Bobby McGee" and "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down" feature his remarkable capacity to craft memorable one-liners that encapsulate a novel's worth of feeling. Kristofferson is one of the great lost records of the hippie era, a country masterpiece packed with tales of drifters and dreamers recounted in rough-hewn poetry worthy of the best honky-tonk songwriters.