Would you fly with this man to see Johnny Cash?
Photo: DPA/AP/Mark Humphrey
“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” – what a line! At a time when the (supposed?) success of musicians is measured by hits and click numbers, it is difficult to imagine the influence that musicians had in the 1960s and 70s, the importance of a song, an album , had a personality for the consciousness of the listeners.
I will never forget the moment I first heard Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee” with that wonderful and heart-opening line. Of course it was hippiesque and utopian – but that’s exactly why it was a statement that we could passionately throw at our performance and consumption-oriented economic miracle parents. »Feeling good was good enough for me and my Bobby McGee«. Being instead of appearing…
The Janis Joplin album played up and down the floor of my teenage room and later in the shared apartment, and to this day I still stop when I hear this song. This story about two people who get to know each other while hitchhiking, singing all the songs with the truck driver that he knows (so it must have been a lot of country and maybe a little blues too) and on the journey from the coal mines of Kentucky to… Sun of California share the secrets of their souls and protect each other from the cold. Then one day they lose each other almost by chance, “I let him slip away,” and all that remains is the memory of an amour fou.
It wasn’t until many years later that I realized that it wasn’t Janis Joplin who wrote this song, but rather Kris Kristofferson (and “Mercedes Benz” was by Bob Neuwirth). The Kris Kristofferson, who I had already seen in a number of great films: in Dennis Hopper’s “The Last Movie”, in Sam Peckinpah’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” and “Convoy”, in Martin Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” or in “A Star is Born” alongside Barbra Streisand.
The grandson of Swedish immigrants was born in Brownsville in South Texas in 1936. He studied at Oxford on a scholarship for the gifted and planned to become a writer, but failed. So he learned to fly helicopters in the US Army (he was also stationed in Bad Kreuznach) and later worked as a helicopter pilot on an oil platform. When Johnny Cash didn’t respond to a Kristofferson demo tape, he landed a helicopter at Cash’s property to see what Cash thought of his song. Good anecdote, of course, but what is usually not mentioned is that Cash wasn’t even at home, so the campaign simply fizzled out.
Anyway, Johnny Cash scored a big hit in 1971 with a Kristofferson song: “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” a song against the “Happy America” that Nashville loved to romanticize. For Kristofferson, Sunday is the day of loneliness, of the hangover after a drunken night, of the headache that is caused not only by all the drinks, but also by the circumstances. Kristofferson became one of the legendary outlaws of country music, one of America’s most important singer/songwriters, and like few others he embodies the spirit and attitude to life of the American working class in the 20th century: these hard-working, sometimes hard-hitting, People in rural America who are stricken by “fate” and who, despite everything and everything, have their hearts in the right place, as they say. Together with Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, he played the “white man’s blues”, or country, in the group The Highwaymen since the mid-1980s. He campaigned against the Vietnam War and for the freedom struggles in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Kris Kristofferson died on Saturday in Hawaii at the age of 88. A committed artist and fascinating person – or vice versa: “But I’d trade all of my tomorrows, for one single yesterday.”
Become a member of the nd.Genossenschaft!
Since January 1, 2022, the »nd« will be published as an independent left-wing newspaper owned by the staff and readers. Be there and support media diversity and visible left-wing positions as a cooperative member. Fill out the membership form now.
More information on www.dasnd.de/genossenschaft