WILLIE SOARED IN the same updraft. His core audience in Texas, which had sustained him for so long, now merely became part of a wild national following. “Now he rules country music,” proclaimed Chet Flippo in Rolling Stone.
But he more than ruled. He became something of a symbol to Americans still holding on to the hippie dream. His mellow demeanor, scruffy beard, and ubiquitous red bandana idealized the off-the-grid look that the college class of 1973, now on the job market, was fast abandoning for the polyester leisure suits and broad neckties of suburban America. On the other hand, the older set equated the look with cowboy style, a throwback to Gene Autry, although Willie often looked more like Gabby Hayes. Ultimately, as he had in Texas, the shopworn troubadour embodied the American crossroads where hippie, hillbilly, and, now, suburbia all met. Traveling with a band he called “family,” the music flowing through him, he seemed to be living in a late-1960s, early 1970s place that America was fast leaving behind.
“There’s just something real about Willie Nelson,” adds Gordon Payne. “Yeah, he knows he’s Willie Nelson, but he’s still really, really kind. And he’s a sweetheart of a guy. And I think that comes up. He’s a real caring fellow. I think all of that comes across. The biggest thing about Willie was the music. He’d say, ‘They’ve come to hear the music, so I’m going to play as much of it till I get tired!’ Nobody’d ever done that! Willie’s a character offstage. But the one thing you realize is he’s just a nice guy. He doesn’t fit the standard—he’s not in your face. He knows who he is and he . . . just cares. Not that Waylon didn’t! But Waylon was affected by his stardom. He was. I’ve never seen that out of Willie. Willie was just always Willie.”
Willie earned Payne’s undying affection in 1976, after his wedding. Waylon’s guitarist and his new bride planned a ten-day honeymoon and told everybody to leave him alone. But on their wedding night, Waylon called. Payne recalls the conversation: “And he says, ‘I know you’re getting married tonight. I hate to make this call, but Willie called. He’s out on the road with [the band] Poco. Their lead singer got laryngitis. He wants to know if we can come and substitute for Poco. I don’t want to do it without you. I know I’m asking too much. I promise I’ll make it up to you.’ So we go, we get on the plane and go do the show. After the show, Willie comes over with his guitar. We’re having a big party in the room, everybody comes by to say congratulations. Willie brings a bottle of champagne—about three feet tall and a foot across at the bottom. So we’re drinking that champagne and having a nice party. Finally, about twelve-thirty or one, Willie ran everybody off and got him a little stool, and said, ‘Now. What would you like to hear? I want to serenade you on your honeymoon.’ So he sat there for about forty-five minutes, singing about every song he could pull out of the hat, just taking requests from my wife and me. That’s the kind of guy Willie Nelson was. He wanted to say thank you.”
Waylon and Willie with Jessi. Drummer Paul English is partially obscured behind Willie.
Photograph by Art Maillet, courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment
THE OUTLAW MOVEMENT offered little to fuel Kristofferson’s record sales, although his name reverberated right alongside Waylon’s and Willie’s and he dependably showed up at the July Fourth picnics and toured with both of them from time to time. He had already accomplished an outlaw status independent of the industry’s promotional engine by carving out a place for the earnest singer-songwriter in Nashville and introducing mature themes to country music. Perhaps if he’d been around town more often he might have shown up on the Wanted! album, but he had relocated to Malibu, where he spent more time in front of a movie camera than a studio microphone. “That was a good move for him, though,” says Rosanne Cash. “Nashville was too small for him. He had a much bigger spirit.”
Kris recalls artists who had big hits with his songs urging him to quit Hollywood. The implication, of course, was that his well had run dry. When Bob Beckham cracked that Kris might want to get back behind the throttle of a Gulf Coast helicopter, where he had strung together a lot of profitable verse, Kris replied that those days were long behind him. “But I’m sure that there were people that really started getting critical of what I was doing,” says Kristofferson. “It was as if I were spending so much creative energy on the wrong thing, performing and movies, that my songwriting was suffering. I don’t think it was. I don’t think I’d have done any better if I’d been down there in the Gulf still. And certainly, the rest of my life was an exciting thing. I was doing movies, in the bathtub with Barbra Streisand! I said, ‘What! Quit this?’ I feel pretty blessed.”
Kris as a truck driver in Convoy.
Courtesy of Maryland Room, University of Maryland
Indeed, Kris fashioned a new life in California. He had divorced Frances and married singer Rita Coolidge, who, like Jessi Colter, jostled with her husband on the pop charts, and together they were raising their daughter Casey. Journalists who visited with him juxtaposed a relatively stable family life with the demands of touring and starring in big films such as Lewis John Carlino’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea and Frank Pierson’s A Star Is Born. Between the lines, they suggested that Kristofferson’s top billing in performing, acting, and songwriting was tenuous. In fact, at the first real flicker of Kris’s film career in 1972, Rolling Stone’s Ben Gerson plunged a knife into his songwriting. “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 sprout truisms grown from a life rooted in unadorned reality. He spars with the devil . . . and he and his women are forever falling into his snares. Kris’ celebrations of machismo are his most patently stupid observations.”
Gerson also complained that Kristofferson’s music lacked a sense of place, an easy conclusion to draw when your target appears on the movie screen in all kinds of settings. But, to the contrary, his music remained very much anchored in the West End. His two albums released in 1972—Border Lord and Jesus Was a Capricorn (which contained the number-one pop hit “Why Me Lord”)—included original band members, guitarist Bucky Wilkin (his old chauffer from the first day in town), and young Nashville cats like Charlie McCoy, Kenneth Buttrey, Mac Gayden, and David Briggs. Of course, Fred Foster produced.
The lyrical themes on both albums remained strongly individualistic and never failed to challenge Nashville’s sensibilities. In addition, he remained true to his own definition of the singer-songwriter. By 1972, singer-songwriter meant James Taylor and Carole King, whose soft sounds and safe lyrics appealed to radio, while Kristofferson’s music continued to mine the oil-stained streets for inspiration, producing ruminations on prostitution, dissipation, and getting high that proved too thorny for the broadcast airwaves.
His fellow recording artists continued to endorse his artistry by covering his songs. From the two 1972 albums, Johnny Cash plucked “Burden of Freedom” for his Gospel Road film and soundtrack, while no less than nine artists—including Elvis Presley—took Kristofferson’s inspirational classic “Why Me” to the country charts during the course of the 1970s. Outside Nashville, Frank Sinatra picked “Nobody Wins” for his 1973 comeback album Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back.
The most arresting song from the two albums nobody picked: “Sugar Man,” a noirish study of a woman prowling the streets, selling her body, and injecting heroin. Cast in a languid arrangement worthy of the incidental music in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, it remains one of Kristofferson’s hidden treasures, dissecting the excesses of liberated culture when Sunday morning really does come down. But it was ignored. Critic Chet Flippo could only muster that it sounded like the blues standard “St. James Infirmary.”
Musically, Kristofferson soldiered on through the 1970s, moving most of his sessions out to Los Angeles and making room for duets with Rita Coolidge, whose heavenly vocals softened his rugged edge. Despite shrinking sales and blistering reviews, he doggedly pursued his vision, exploring street life in verse and
indulging his love of sprawling ballads that featured a colorful cast of characters embroiled in classic narrative conflict. “Silver (The Hunger),” from 1975’s Who’s to Bless and Who’s to Blame, seemed inspired by William Blake’s poetry or a Thomas Hardy novel, portraying in eight minutes a caddish buccaneer who confronts the awakening sensibilities of his naïve lover. Appealing characters had always populated Kristofferson’s songwriting—think “Me and Bobby McGee” and “To Beat the Devil”—but Hollywood, not to mention the retreat of Fred Foster’s influence, appears to have inspired him to let in more characters and extend his plotlines. Those songs became their own movies.
Kristofferson’s freewheeling lyricism and mostly sparse instrumentation had inspired in one way or another Waylon’s Honky Tonk Heroes and Willie’s Red Headed Stranger. “He taught us how to write great poems,” observed Waylon. “He changed the way I thought about lyrics, and he said one time that I was the only one that really understood his songs.” But few connected Waylon’s and Willie’s celebrated new albums with Kristofferson. A review in Country Music of Who’s to Bless and Who’s to Blame that appeared just as RCA’s Wanted! hit the market revealed the thick line between Kristofferson and his old friends, accusing him of retreading old ideas and weaving stilted social critiques. “What’s sad and disturbing about this album is that it confirms that Kristofferson is no longer a force to be dealt with and that he has become, at least for the moment, irrelevant.”
Kris’s defection to Hollywood dominated the conversation about him in Nashville. He was always welcomed back cheerfully, but the town wondered why he’d ever left in the first place. “If he hadn’t went to Hollywood, no telling how many songs he would have written,” speculates Hazel Smith. “The only person Hollywood never ruined was Willie. But the rest of them . . . Mac Davis and Roger Miller . . . every last one of our wonderful songwriters. You just don’t go to Hollywood. So Kris’s stuff that was so great was written in Nashville, before Hollywood ever took a bite out of him.”
A return trip to the South in the mid-1970s underscored the distance between Kris and the land where he had first struck prosperity. Explaining that the audiences were more in tune with his music than ever before, Kristofferson had persuaded Billy Swan to rejoin the band after a year or two away, during which time Swan scored a big pop-country hit with “I Can Help.” But the first show with Swan back on board was a disaster. It was staged in Cumming, Georgia. “That’s a mean-ass town,” says Donnie Fritts, who was still playing piano for Kristofferson.
Folks with their picnic lunches had come out after church, but the sound system threatened to ruin the idyllic Sunday gathering. It coughed and wheezed, which irritated the band and drew an outburst of army vernacular from Kris. Behind the keyboard, Fritts winced. “When he said it,” he recalls, “I knew we was in trouble.” The males in the crowd, protective of their wives’ and children’s sensibilities, lay down their paper cups and sandwiches. Kris recalls infuriated men clambering up to the stage.
After the show, the scene in the dressing room was charged. The mayor of Cumming barged in screaming about Kris’s language, and he wasn’t alone. A group of snarling guys followed, who—Fritts’s Alabama raising told him—were capable of trouble. Kris says guns appeared, but Swan merely recalls loud and heated language. In any case, the Georgians were not to be soothed, but neither was Kris backing down.
With the confrontation on the brink of turning physically violent, the band members were ushered to a police cruiser waiting outside to take them to safety. “We ended up getting in the car,” says Kris. “We’re driving away, and Billy said to me, ‘Well, I can see what you mean about it being different now.’ It’s probably the roughest gig we ever had.”
The constant bustle, the coming and going, the sudden appearance and disappearance of strangers who had tarried there a few days, gave the town the air of being a city.
—Allen Tate
Eleven
* * *
Third Coast
ON THE BIG screen, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver of 1976 found a New York City not unlike Altman’s Nashville. A tale of disaffection in a town whose romantic past is wilting in the shadows of post-Vietnam psychosis, the film bore into the heart of America’s new self-doubt and arguably marked the high point of New Hollywood productions, garnering four Academy Award nominations. In a film sense, it was the place to be in 1976.
And Kristofferson was there. Not as part of the cast—he was keeping up with Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born—but on the lips of Taxi Driver’s characters. Cybil Shepherd’s Betsy tells Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickel that he’s a curious sort, like something out of Kristofferson’s “The Pilgrim-Chapter 33.”
“Sure, you know what you remind me of,” she purrs.
“What?” he grunts.
“That song . . . by Kris Kristofferson.”
“Who’s that?’
“The songwriter. . . . He’s a prophet and a pusher. Partly truth, partly fiction. A walking contradiction.”
“Are you saying that about me?”
“Who else would I be talking about?”
“I’m no pusher. I never have pushed. . . .”
The scene cuts to the squirrely Bickel choosing The Silver Tongued Devil and I from a record bin, a gift for the sultry Betsy that she ultimately rejects.
In Malibu, Kristofferson appreciated Scorsese’s tip of the hat. Forget the New York Times profiles or Rolling Stone record reviews; this was like Tom Wolfe quoting your poetry in a nonfiction novel. “I thought it was such a nice thing to do,” says Kristofferson. “For him to give me a testimonial, that was very sweet. Everybody that does something nice like Scorsese did, the next thing you know, they’ve made you into something.”
The sight of Silver Tongued Devil and I bobbing in Bickel’s arms was more of a tribute to Kris’s stature in the singer-songwriter community at large than a nod to Nashville’s influence on his career. But anybody watching the film in Music City must have grinned like a proud papa: at least the prodigal son remained on the streets of popular culture, if not the West End.
Chet Atkins, far left, with Paul and Linda McCartney in Nashville, 1974.
Photograph by Alan Mayor
By 1976, discerning Nashville’s impact on popular culture was as easy as peeling open an issue of Time or Newsweek. What began with The Johnny Cash Show in 1969 and all of his guests who hung around and came back to record in the Nashville studios had grown into full-blown cultural influence. Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, France’s Johnny Hallyday, and others led a new wave of artists tapping the city’s recording magic and pointing the world to its door. Kristofferson’s film career fueled the aura and so did Altman’s Nashville, despite its indictment of the city’s values. Following Altman’s lead and enchanted by the new outlaw movement, filmmakers set their productions in contexts that involved country music and crime, though none rose to the level of Altman’s classic. Outlaw Blues (1977), starring Peter Fonda, jostled with Lynda Carter’s cheesecake debut in Bobbie Joe and the Outlaw (1976), which featured a Bobby Bare song and, in deference to the Burger Boy, a half-baked pinball machine competition. It didn’t get much better than that: films such as Nashville Girl (1976) and Smokey and the Good Time Outlaws (1978) hewed to thin plots and poor production values that would be scrapped and reshaped for the hopeless Smokey and the Bandit franchise and television’s Dukes of Hazzard, for which Waylon would sing the theme song.
Nashville’s music and culture came off considerably better in the national press, which had needled the city so unmercifully in the 1960s. Big newspapers and magazines, impressed by the rock-influenced outlaw hits, found that country music had finally grown up. “The outlaws and the redneck rockers, dealing with new mores and formerly taboo subjects, have won powerful cults who fill up the halls to hear them perform—and who buy their records even if they receive fewer deejay spins than the old country traditionalists,” wrote Larry L. King in 1976. “There is a grand mixture now of styl
es and content, and while it may lead to disputes among modernists and traditionalists over matters of purity, there’s an overall higher degree of tolerance for musical diversity.”
Chet Flippo of Rolling Stone, Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Carr, who contributed to the New York Times and was an editor at Country Music, and a host of other national journalists reported on the big names and developments in Nashville, stirring the city’s Third Coast aura. Closer to home, the Nashville press finally splashed the music industry with deserving ink after years of treating it with aristocratic disdain. Writers such as the Tennessean’s Laura Eipper and Jerry Bailey as well as the Banner’s Bill Hance revealed that the country music beat demanded more than stories about, say, Willie Nelson’s pig farming; it was now necessary to cover the industry’s links to the economy, crime, fashion, and politics.
However, the beacon of such writing was Country Music magazine, which combined celebrity glitter with more-than-capable reporting and satire. Debuting in the fall of 1972, the magazine was based in New York, but you’d never know it by the editorial content’s strong Nashville flavor and relentless coverage of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and Willie Nelson. And so well documented was the interplay between Nashville and Austin that the publication might as well have been the outlaw movement’s very own house organ. Writers Dave Hickey (who dated Marshall Chapman), Bob Allen, Michael Bane, Martha Hume (who was married to Chet Flippo), and others burrowed so deeply into country music’s inner sanctums that one could almost smell the dirty fryer at the Burger Boy or the smoldering weed at Dripping Springs. Hazel Smith, while working at the Glaser Brothers Studio, dished gossip in her “Hillbilly Central” column, and the inimitable Nick Tosches banged out lively record reviews. In the space of one issue, Country Music could communicate the clamminess of the Ryman Auditurium’s backstage or the flash of the Exit/In. At its best, it lampooned the conservatism of Nashville or the hype of the outlaw movement without giving its readers reason to be ashamed of the music they loved.
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