“We weren’t prepared for what happened with Kris, and Kris was not prepared,” says Fritts. “We started performing in June of 1970; by August we were playing in front of six hundred thousand people at the Isle of Wight festival. We in no way were really prepared for that. If we had to fill out something that [asked about our profession], everyone of us would have said, ‘songwriter,’ even Kris. That’s what he is, he’s a songwriter. Everything happened because he was a songwriter.
“I loved the way he sang,” admires Fritts. “I loved the honesty of his singing. You know, you get ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’: hell, the best record you’re going to hear on that is Kris Kristofferson because he’s so honest and true. So no matter how bad the band sounded—and believe me, we were not that good—it didn’t matter because Kris Kristofferson was singing ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’ and all these absolutely brilliant songs. . . . Sometimes, if you get a hot band, people start listening to that shit more than they do the songs, but they weren’t listening to licks with us, because we couldn’t play any! We could play the melody, the chords.”
In October, Kris and the band had landed back in California and were playing a show in Carmel when word came down that Janis Joplin had died in Los Angeles at the Landmark Hotel after a night of hard partying. Either Joplin’s producer, Paul Rothchild, or her friend Bobby Neuwirth also told Kris that Janis had recorded “Me and Bobby McGee” shortly before she died. He was devastated. “I lived with her, slept with her, but it wasn’t a love affair,” he told an interviewer in 1997. “I loved her like a friend. She was very soulful, a passionate person but very childlike to me, a little girl in dress-up clothes. She was an unhappy person. Even though she was fun to be around, she felt that the only thing that made her attractive to the world was her art, her talent, her stardom. And she was intelligent enough to know that it was temporary.”
A few weeks later, he arrived back in Nashville from the road to find Joplin’s posthumously released Pearl album in his mailbox at Combine. It was night, and he had not yet heard her roof-raising treatment of “Me and Bobby McGee,” so he and Donnie Fritts found an empty turntable. “He listened to it over and over again,” says Fritts, “because he felt like this was going to be a real big record, you know. He was going to be hearing it, and he wanted to get used to hearing it just by himself. Well, we wrote a song with her in mind that night. ‘Why was she born so black and blue’ is how we started. Of course, ‘Epitaph’ is the name of the song. When we wrote the song, I did it with just very simple chord changes. But when I got home, I added all these R&B passing chords. It would not change the melody, but it would just put it a little bit somewhere else.
“The next morning we were in the studio, and I got Kris over to this piano. I’ll never forget, it was a Wurlitzer. And I showed him what I had done. Well, I didn’t know Fred Foster was in the control room. He said, ‘That is what I want to hear on this record, exactly the way you did it. I don’t want anything else on the record. I just want you two.’ Later on, I think they put strings on the last verse.”
The tribute to Joplin ended up on Kristofferson’s second album, The Silver Tongued Devil and I, which hit the country charts in October 1971. “There has never been, and probably never will be a better songwriter album,” raved the critic Dave Hickey in Country Music magazine. “I don’t see how Kristofferson is ever gonna write a better batch of songs; the material here will create such demands on him that he will never have the peace or the time again.”
Kristofferson turned country music on its ear: “That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine” of yore giving way to the Silver Tongued Devil, a Nashville jumping jack flash. Young fans of the album connected tracks such as “The Pilgrim-Chapter 33” and “Breakdown (A Long Way from Home)” with a general theme about the border between conformity and outlaw life. But Kristofferson doubts that he was building a concept album. “I can’t really remember,” he admits. “I know at the time, I was just trying to put together my best songs in a way that all made sense.” He suggests that life was moving too fast at the time to even contemplate a concept album. “It was like I had stepped onto a train or something, and it was going. And I was just going along, trying to stay ahead of it! Trying to do what I’d been doing for four years or whatever, trying to put together music that made sense and just keep doing what I was doing. I’m really kind of amazed by it all, looking back. I was doing things instinctually, and I’m glad it turned out as good as it did. It was like all of a sudden being treated like someone! It could have been easy for me to fall off of whatever wagon I was on there. Things kept breaking my way, getting in films—and all that happened when I was working at the Troubadour. Any one of those things would have been enough, but then it just kept going on and kept working.”
At the Troubadour—as Kris indicates—he encountered Hollywood, and met the actors Harry Dean Stanton and Dennis Hopper as well as the young director Bill Norton. Hopper engaged him to appear briefly in his film The Last Movie, while Norton immediately pegged his star potential, tallying up the singer’s rugged sensitivity, intelligence, and quarterback good looks.
Norton gave Kristofferson the title role in Cisco Pike, a movie about an ex-rock musician just out of prison who’s lured back into the underworld by a corrupt narcotics agent. His costars—Gene Hackman, Stanton, and the ubiquitous Karen Black—came highly recommended, but even so, the movie failed to capture the audiences who’d been attracted to such films as Easy Rider or Midnight Cowboy. Rolling Stone’s Ralph J. Gleason was a lonely voice in its corner. “Kris Kristofferson surprised me by turning out to be as good an actor as he is a singer, at least in this role. . . . Kristofferson has just the right touch of beat to him to play the role of Cisco, driving and driven inexorably to what we know from the moment we see him on screen to be a tragic end.”
Cisco Pike’s quick fade from theaters was of no consequence to Kristofferson, for soon film offers rained down. Over the next three years, he starred in three major productions: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Blume in Love, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. And he appeared as a biker in the 1974 thriller Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. What’s even more amazing is that these films were made by the leaders of the new director-centered Hollywood. Iconoclastic filmmakers Sam Peckinpah (Pat Garrett and Alfredo Garcia) and Martin Scorsese (Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore) apparently saw in Kristofferson the naturalism and intensity that their styles demanded.
Young musicians in Nashville could pick up the godhead pop music journal Rolling Stone and read about their hometown hero recruiting Bob Dylan to act in Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and then chiding Dylan in a Mexican studio as the folksinger haphazardly recorded the soundtrack music. Who recruited Dylan to do anything? And then chide him? It was too cool for words.
Kris was Nashville’s very own Dylan, a quiet balladeer whose quick connection with the hip big-city nightclubs and Hollywood directors somehow—like the Cash TV show—endorsed the city. Youth culture was afoot in the Western world, and Kris symbolized Nashville’s contribution to it. The city seemed poised to move past the Lefty Frizzells, Eddy Arnolds, and Porter Wagoners of the old guard and embrace a younger man with shoulder-length hair who wrote like a poet and charmed the northeastern media elite. “I’ll never forget seeing Look magazine,” says Donnie Fritts. “That’s when Look magazine was real big. And he was on the cover. Things really had changed. You don’t see Hank Snow and those other cats that’ve been there for years [in magazines]. You know what I mean? Ain’t nothing against them, but here was a new guy, young guy. Here was the new thing coming out of Nashville, and Kris was the head of it.”
Fred Foster had bet on Kristofferson pushing Monument to the vanguard of Nashville creativity, filling the void that Orbison had left five years earlier, and energizing his cash flow. It also gave him the satisfaction of rebuking his two partners in Monument—minority shareholders—who had protested the company’s deal with Kris. One partner, speaking for both, ha
d argued that the helicopter pilot would crash to the ground. “And it just dawned on me,” says Foster, “this is never going to work. I said, ‘I want to make you all a proposition. We’ll get a third party in and decide a fair market value of your stock, and I’ll buy you out. Or I will dissolve the company this afternoon and re-form it tomorrow without you in it. And you get nothing. But you no longer work here.’ They laughed and said, ‘Okay, fine. You’ll see. He’ll break your ass.’” Foster allowed that Kris might just do that, but he promptly bought out the partners anyway.
“And so the day rolled around when the Billboard story came out that Kristofferson was the first songwriter to have four Million-Air performance awards from BMI in one year. I clipped it out and photocopied it and sent it to them.”
As my country no longer requires my services, I have made up my mind to go to Texas.
—Davy Crockett
Five
* * *
With Purpose Down There
DESPITE WINNING THE Grammy for “MacArthur Park” in 1969, Waylon continued to grouse about RCA’s control over his recording activities. “Chet knew I wanted to make my own records,” complained Waylon in his autobiography. “He opposed that mainly because RCA had several producers, and if he started letting artists like myself and Bobby Bare produce themselves, he’d lose some people he was very fond of, like [producers] Bob Ferguson and Ray Pennington.”
In 1970, Chet actually lost producer Danny Davis, who left RCA to focus on his profitable Nashville Brass ensemble, which turned country songs into fodder for beautiful-music radio stations. At the same time, Felton Jarvis edged closer to an exclusive production arrangement with Elvis, which would pull him away from RCA-Nashville’s daily routine. Their replacements—Jerry Bradley and Ronny Light—would deeply alter Waylon’s course at the label. Bradley, particularly, would cook up the Grammy-winning Wanted!—The Outlaws album in 1976, which galvanized Waylon’s career and fueled the outlaw marketing machine.
When Chet hired Bradley, he tapped into Nashville’s royal family, choosing tradition over the new maverick impulse embodied by producers Fred Foster and Jack Clement. Jerry was the son of Owen Bradley and the nephew of session guitarist Harold Bradley. After attending Peabody College in the West End, he spent much of the 1960s running his father’s publishing company and mixing recordings at his studio, dashing away on weekends to race cars around the South. “I’d mix his sessions and I would hear him and the artist and the important people—his bosses and managers—get into discussions about business,” says Bradley. “I was always interested in the conclusions to what they were talking about, whether it was about a contract or a song. I could hear both sides of it.”
Anxious to stake out his own place among the A&R elite in Nashville, Jerry mentioned his availability to Chet one night in Printer’s Alley, where they’d gone to dinner with Harry Warner, a Peabody classmate of Jerry’s who worked at BMI. Chet just looked at the portly young man and dragged ponderously on his cigar. “About twelve o’clock at night,” says Bradley, “coming back, they let me out of the car and I thought, ‘I’m going to make one more pitch.’ I said, ‘Don’t forget about that now. If you ever get an opportunity, give me a call.’ He said, ‘You might make a good executive, Jerry.’
“About a month later, he called me, and I looked at the message. I picked up the phone and called my daddy and I said, ‘Chet Atkins is calling me.’ He said, ‘Well, call him back!’ I said, ‘I think he might be calling me about a job.’ He said, ‘Hell, son, you’ve got a damn job. If he’s got a damn opportunity, take it!’”
In the short term, Jerry assumed Danny Davis’s role, but Chet also served up a bigger opportunity than Jerry could have imagined. “The minute he came into the company, he was designated as the one who would become the heir apparent,” says Ronny Light, whom Chet had already hired. “Whether it was spoken or not, everybody knew. Chet didn’t want the day-to-day operations. He wanted somebody else to do it.”
It’s no wonder. Blustery managers, grumpy artists, and meddling RCA executives from New York burdened Atkins. Over drinks with friends, he mused about flying off to Mexico with his guitar. And he was also battling cancer.
“Chet used to have Monday morning meetings,” says Bradley. “I’ll never forget it. He was sitting behind the desk, and we were all in his office and he had a set of encyclopedias over on the table. I guess he wasn’t feeling well. We were discussing product, and he got up, went over to the encyclopedia, and took it back over to his desk. Looked up something, shut the encyclopedia, and put it back up and left. After the meeting, he left and went to his doctor. Next thing you know, he’s diagnosed with colon cancer.”
After surgery a few weeks later, Chet asked Ronny Light if he’d read an article about cancer in the new issue of Esquire. “I was hoping he didn’t see it,” says Light. “It was an article about different cancers and life expectancy for each cancer. I said, ‘Yeah, I read that.’ He said, ‘Do you see how long I got to live?’ I said, ‘No. I don’t think it said how long you got to live.’ It was about a year and a half. I knew that his health was bothering him. He told a bunch of people, ‘I guess if I ever get it, I’ll get it from smoking cigars.’”
His battles with Waylon couldn’t have helped, either. He burned hours lecturing him about his drug use, but Waylon ignored him, always steering the conversation back to his complaints about producers. Chet worried over an advance he’d given the singer for a new bus, which revenues weren’t justifying, and winced when promotion men complained that Waylon refused to make courtesy calls to radio disc jockeys and record distributors.
In the wake of Davis’s departure, Chet naturally was in no mood to reassume his studio work with Waylon, so he handed the singer’s production chores to Ronny Light, who came to producing from the performing world. He and his brother Larry appeared regularly on a music television show in Nashville during the 1960s and, with Eddy Arnold as their sponsor, recorded a single for Canadian American Records. Ronny also played guitar for Arnold on the road, wrote lead sheets for some of the big publishing houses in Nashville, and coproduced with Felton Jarvis RCA’s girl duo the Lonesome Rhodes. With Jarvis turning most of his attention to Elvis, Chet directed the twenty-four-year-old Light to cover for Jarvis.
Light’s deep Nashville pedigree appealed to Chet’s conservative bent, but, ironically, Light’s work, particularly with Waylon, pushed RCA up to the gates of the forward-thinking, Kristofferson-influenced Nashville. The Harlan Howard songs and covers of pop and folk songs in Waylon’s repertoire that had begun to fall away under Danny Davis’s reign continued to recede in favor of rock flavor and mature themes. “He had tons of cuts [in the can],” says Light, “so as his producer I listened to all the old cuts and found things we could release, including ‘Cedartown, Georgia.’ That was not in my best interests, but it was in Waylon’s best interests.” That song, produced by Davis, became the title track of Waylon’s first album with Light and won an unexpected write-up in Rolling Stone. “It’s this album that Waylon goes after everybody (including your mother) and intends to bring everybody over to his side. It’s all Dynamite stuff, as they say at Tower Records. Word is that if Waylon Jennings isn’t already a country superstar, he soon will be.”
Light and Jennings liberally tapped the young songwriting community and recorded the work of Lee Clayton, Mickey Newbury, and Billy Joe Shaver, which was reminiscent of Johnny Cash’s consumption of Kris Kristofferson, Vince Matthews, and Larry Gatlin. Jennings also sampled Matthews and continued to explore Kristofferson. And, some years after meeting Willie Nelson for the first time in Phoenix, he tried out Nelson’s “It Should Be Easier Now” and “Pretend I Never Happened.” The men’s relationship was cemented in 1971 when their names appeared together as songwriters on “Good Hearted Woman,” a hit for Waylon in 1972.
Despite the shared writing credit, “Good Hearted Woman” was Waylon’s song from the start, claims Billy Ray Reynolds. He had actually asked Billy
Ray to add some verses for a half share of the credit; however, the guitarist had refused, arguing that the song needed nothing but to be recorded. “The next day or so,” explains Reynolds, “he got into a poker game and he did the same thing to Willie. And Waylon even suggested the line that Willie is supposed to have written. It was Waylon’s line and Willie said, ‘Hey, I like that.’ So Willie wound up with half the song and half the publishing. I don’t want to make Willie mad at me, but Waylon already had that song written.”
On record, the rollicking Waylon-and-Willie number featured an unusual snare pattern on the choruses, mingled with a bold bass drum, a percussive style that marked Waylon’s sound on the road. Nashville producers could be squeamish about a heavy drum presence—no fewer than three drummers contributed parts on the “Good Hearted Woman” session—but Light approved.
Waylon and the young producer’s harmony in song selection notwithstanding, Waylon confessed in his autobiography that he badgered Light to distraction. “Ronny was young, one of the nicest people in the world, and didn’t deserve the misery I put him through. I got more freedom with him as a producer, although I was still using musicians who didn’t know what I was about.”
Light doesn’t remember Waylon’s concerns about musicians. Such conflict, he says, took root between Waylon and the top guys at RCA-Nashville. “When I produced Waylon, he never once asked to use one of his band members, except for [steel guitarist] Ralph Mooney, and we used Mooney. The issue never came up.” Bradley, who was taking more administrative responsibilities with each new day on the job, claims that he, too, never argued with Waylon about session musicians, that it was Chet who clung to the older ways.
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