Kris Kristofferson - Original Album Classics (2009) 5CD Box Set

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Kris Kristofferson - Original Album Classics (2009) 5CD Box Set

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Kris Kristofferson - Original Album Classics (2009) 5CD Box Set

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Kris Kristofferson - Original Album Classics (2009) 5CD Box Set

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Kris Kristofferson - Original Album Classics (2009) 5CD Box Set

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Kris Kristofferson was approaching his mid-thirties and had been kicking around Nashville for several years when he belatedly became an overnight success in 1969-1970. The impetus was "Me and Bobby McGee," which he co-wrote with Fred Foster, who ran Monument Records. Roger Miller cut the song, and his recording peaked in the country Top 20 in August 1969. By that time, Kristofferson had performed at the Newport Folk Festival at the behest of Johnny Cash, and Foster decided to sign him to Monument as a recording artist. Before this debut album was released in 1970, Ray Stevens had scored a pop and country chart entry with Kristofferson's "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down."

On the evidence of his first collection of songs, Kristofferson was ahead of his country music peers in realizing that, despite Nashville's conservative political tilt, there was a natural affinity between the country archetype of a hard-drinking, romantically independent loner and the rock & roll archetype of a drug-taking, romantically free hippie. (Of course, lots of rock musicians, especially in Los Angeles, had already noticed this similarity, and formed bands like Poco and the Flying Burrito Brothers to exploit it.) He opened the album with what sounded like an answer to the criticisms of the Rolling Stones in the wake of Altamont. "Blame It on the Stones" contrasted various conservative stereotypes, starting with "Mr. Marvin Middle Class," with the supposedly evil rock group, its chorus a parody of "Bringing in the Sheaves." Needless to say, that was not a typical way to open a country album in 1970 (or any other time), but Kristofferson quickly followed with the somewhat more reverent "To Beat the Devil," which he dedicated in a spoken introduction to Johnny Cash and June Carter, and in which he established a persona he would maintain through much of the album, the character of a poor songwriter struggling against despair. "Me and Bobby McGee," a classic on-the-road song, was next, with Kristofferson, despite the country grammar, displaying his background as an English teacher in its chorus, "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose/Nothin' ain't worth nothin', but it's free." Then came "The Best of All Possible Worlds," which used a reference to Voltaire to reflect wryly on the viewpoint of a drunken vagrant. (You could see what attracted Roger Miller to Kristofferson in a song like this, which clearly was influenced by Miller's "King of the Road," though Kristofferson's treatment of the subject was grittier.) Of course, the ultimate example of the subject was the album-closing "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down," which was basically a first-person description of a hangover. The romantic side of the hard-living drifter character was glimpsed in the album's two tenderest statements, "Help Me Make It Through the Night" and "For the Good Times," both of which were pleas by the narrator to sleep with the object of his affection.

A sleeve note suggested that Kristofferson had been reluctant to record, but while he didn't have much range as a singer, he brought a conviction to his vocals and a complete understanding of the nuances of the lyrics. The songs were so personal that they seemed to demand a personal interpretation. Nashville, as it turned out, didn't have much use for countercultural songs like "Blame It on the Stones" and "The Law Is for Protection of the People" (which had some choice words for the police), but the country music community could recognize a good love song with an erotic edge that was on the cusp of the era's changing mores, and Ray Price quickly cut "For the Good Times," which topped the country charts. Then, Johnny Cash covered "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down" for a number one country hit, leading to its winning the Country Music Association's Song of the Year award for 1970, and Sammi Smith gave a twist to "Help Me Make It Through the Night" by recording it as a woman's song for yet another country number one. The finishing touch to Kristofferson's sudden renown was Janis Joplin's cover of "Me and Bobby McGee," released shortly after her death, which topped the pop charts.

When it was released in 1970, Kristofferson did not reach the charts. By the following year, however, its creator was on his way to becoming a major star, and after his second album, The Silver Tongued Devil and I, broke into the pop charts in July 1971, Monument re-titled the first album Me and Bobby McGee and reissued it. This time around, it made the pop and country charts and went gold. (On February 6, 2001, Monument/Legacy reissued Kristofferson as part of its American Milestones series. Featuring 24-bit remastering, the CD added four previously unreleased tracks from the same sessions that produced the album, among them an early version of "Come Sundown," later recorded for a Top Ten country hit by Bobby Bare and re-cut by Kristofferson himself for his Shake Hands With the Devil album in 1979.)

William Ruhlmann, Allmusic.com

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Kris Kristofferson - Original Album Classics (2009) 5CD Box Set

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Kris Kristofferson is pictured smiling in sunglasses on the cover of Jesus Was a Capricorn, accompanied by his girlfriend and soon-to-be-wife Rita Coolidge. The album followed his previous LP, Border Lord, by only nine months and was his fourth album to be released within two-and-a-half years, which meant that a man who had struggled for half a decade to get anybody to listen to his songs was now writing and recording them as fast as he could. Not surprisingly, he was having trouble filling the pipeline; he borrowed the melody of John Prine's "Grandpa Was a Carpenter" for the title song and even recorded a cover song for the first time, performing a duet with Larry Gatlin on Gatlin's "Help Me." There was nothing here that matched his best songs, but the overall quality of the material was quite good, as Kristofferson went back over familiar ground, singing about religion, romance, and roughhousing with equal fervor. Especially impressive were the two duets with Coolidge, "It Sure Was (Love)" and "Give It Time to Be Tender," which looked forward to their duo albums. Commercially, Jesus Was a Capricorn can be seen either as a case of record company ineptitude or perseverance, or both. Border Lord had marked a falloff in sales from Kristofferson's first two albums, and initially Jesus Was a Capricorn looked like it was going to do even worse, as Monument Records couldn't seem to figure out what the right single was. The label started by releasing a single version of the title track, in which Kristofferson described Christ as a sandals-wearing hippie, and, despite the subject matter, pop radio gave it enough play to get it into the bottom of the charts for a few weeks. But the LP quickly peaked in the charts and started to fade, not helped by the second single, the medium-tempo rocker "Jesse Younger," which made no impression. (Meanwhile, Brenda Lee had no trouble locating the album's best song; she covered "Nobody Wins" and established herself in country music by taking it into the country top five.) Finally, four months after the album's release, Monument issued a third single, the slow-paced statement of faith that closed the LP, "Why Me." (Actually, a disc jockey had started playing the song, which Monument hadn't even wanted on the album. Though sometimes described as a spoof, "Why Me" sincerely reflects a religious experience, according to Kristofferson.) It quickly entered the country and pop charts, hitting number one in country in July 1973, and peaking in the pop Top 20 after a slow climb in November. That turned around the fortunes of Jesus Was a Capricorn, which marched back up the charts and reached number one on the country charts a full year after it had been released. Both album and single went gold, giving Kristofferson his greatest success as a recording artist.

William Ruhlmann, Allmusic.com

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Kris Kristofferson - Original Album Classics (2009) 5CD Box Set

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Kris Kristofferson has complained that no album he released after 1972's Jesus Was a Capricorn was given any promotion, and 1974's Spooky Lady's Sideshow is the first record that falls into that category. If his statement is true, it is understandable why Monument Records would have refrained from a major campaign on behalf of the album. Record companies tend to reserve their greatest promotional effort for developing artists who show commercial promise, expecting established artists to fend for themselves. And at the time of the release of Spooky Lady's Sideshow, the company probably considered Kristofferson an established artist; after all, two of his last three albums had gone gold, and he had hit number one in the country singles charts the year before with the gold-selling "Why Me" while at the same time topping the country albums charts twice, with Jesus Was a Capricorn and his duo album with Rita Coolidge, Full Moon. Also, in the interim between his last album and this one, he had become a movie star with his appearances in Blume in Love and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. But all that success masked a relatively fragile status as a recording artist. Kristofferson was actually more successful as a songwriter than as a singer; his third album, Border Lord, had been a commercial disappointment, and so had Jesus Was a Capricorn until "Why Me" belatedly became a fluke hit. He didn't really have as firm a fan base as the statistics indicated, and the movie stardom was a double-edged sword, suggesting that his commitment to music-making was compromised. But a second reason for Monument not to commit its resources to promoting Spooky Lady's Sideshow must have come from listening to the record itself. On paper, Kristofferson may have seemed to be at the top of his game, not only because of his record sales and box office appeal, but also because of his apparently successful marriage to Coolidge. And yet Spooky Lady's Sideshow was practically a concept album about dissipation and decline. Over and over, Kristofferson sang of characters and of himself (or, at any rate in the persona of a first-person narrator) going downhill while consuming liquor and drugs. From the back of the album cover, which was festooned with fictional negative reviews, to song titles like "Star-Spangled Bummer (Whores Die Hard)" and "Stairway to the Bottom," the album was a portrait of excess and deterioration. Monument was unable to locate a "Me and Bobby McGee" or even a "Why Me" to release as a single and settled for "I May Smoke Too Much," a Dixieland-style tribute to hedonism, which made no impact. With that, the album faded from its peak in the lower reaches of the pop Top 100, Kristofferson's lowest and briefest charting LP so far. It's hard to blame anyone but the artist himself for this. While he had been rushed in making his third and fourth albums, the belated success of "Why Me" afforded him a year-and-a-half to come up with the material for Spooky Lady's Sideshow. Its songs featured his usual wordplay and repeated many of his usual interests – freedom, the Devil, Jesus Christ. Leaving longtime producer Fred Foster and Nashville behind, Kristofferson worked with David Anderle and a team of Los Angeles session pros, but his country-rock sound remained much the same. The problem was that his songs were so saturated in controlled substances and so determinedly focused on self-destruction that they became a self-fulfilling prophecy. You might say that Spooky Lady's Sideshow is Kris Kristofferson's version of Neil Young's Tonight's the Night (which was recorded around the same time though released later). But Kristofferson lacked Young's humorous perspective on his wasted condition, and instead of reinvigorating his career, the album was a misstep from which he never recovered as a recording artist.

William Ruhlmann, Allmusic.com

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Kris Kristofferson - Original Album Classics (2009) 5CD Box Set

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By the time of Shake Hands With the Devil, the ninth album of Kris Kristofferson's ten-album contract with Monument Records, he must have considered his recording career an afterthought to his more prominent career in the movies. That's what's suggested by this album, to which he's given little thought. It consists mainly of old material: The title song is a previously unheard 1970 copyright; "Come Sundown" and "Once More With Feeling" are also 1970 songs, both of them country hits, one for Bobby Bare, the other for Jerry Lee Lewis; Atwood Allen and Kim Fowley's "Michoacan" was featured in Kristofferson's 1971 film Cisco Pike; Tom Ghent's "Whiskey, Whiskey," a 1970 country hit for Nat Stuckey, was in Kristofferson's concerts as far back as 1972; "Killer Barracuda" is a 1975 copyright; and Kristofferson wrote "Seadream" for his 1976 film The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea. Of the remaining three songs, "Lucky in Love" and "Fallen Angel" are co-compositions with Mike Utley and Stephen Bruton ("Fallen Angel" is also co-credited to Kristofferson's soon-to-be-ex-wife Rita Coolidge). So, the only new composition solely by Kristofferson is the regretful ballad "Prove It to You One More Time Again." The result is a patchy collection with no really unified feeling. "Prove It to You One More Time" and "Lucky in Love" both have a slight Caribbean feel, while "Michoacan" is in Tex-Mex style, and "Once More With Feeling" employs a horn section for a Dixieland effect. Kristofferson sounds unusually relaxed, though his wheezy vocals, augmented by Utley, Bruton, Coolidge, and Billy Swan, are no better than usual. Shake Hands With the Devil became Kristofferson's first album not to reach the charts at all, though surprisingly "Prove It to You One More Time Again" got into the lower reaches of the country singles charts.

William Ruhlmann, Allmusic.com

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Kris Kristofferson - Original Album Classics (2009) 5CD Box Set

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By the time Monument came to release Kristofferson's second album, The Silver Tongued Devil and I, in July 1971, he was the author of four songs that had topped the country or pop charts for others. Kristofferson himself had not yet reached the charts with a recording of his own, but his spectacular success as a songwriter made The Silver Tongued Devil and I a much-anticipated record. One consequence of this was that Monument was willing to spend more money; three of the album's songs boasted strings and another a horn section. But the key, of course, was still the songwriting, and though there were several excellent songs, the album could not live up to its predecessor, which was the culmination of years of writing. Typically for a second album, Kristofferson reached back into his catalog, presenting his own treatments of "Jody and the Kid" and "The Taker," which had been hits for Roy Drusky and Waylon Jennings, respectively. In his newly written material, Kristofferson continued to examine the lives of society's outcasts, but the antiestablishment tone of some of Kristofferson was gone along with much of the wry humor, and in their place were touches of morbidity and sentimentality. Kristofferson retained his gift for intimate love songs, and the album's most memorable selections turned out to be "Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I'll Ever Do Again)" (which became a semi-standard) and "When I Loved Her." And even if his observations seemed less acute, his talent for wordplay often rescued the songs from banality. On its way to becoming a gold record, The Silver Tongued Devil and I reached the pop Top 20, Kristofferson's career high on that chart, and the country Top Five; thus, Kristofferson made the transition from being a successful songwriter to a successful recording artist.

William Ruhlmann, Allmusic.com

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Kris Kristofferson - Original Album Classics (2009) 5CD Box Set

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