Kris Kristoffersen's Kraft
CMT's Chet Flippo recently put Kris Kristoffersen on the witness stand for a fascinating two-part Q&A focusing on the stories behind many of his best-known songs. Kristoffersen rises to the occasion with great honesty about his creative process and the real-life events that have inspired him. A few highlights from part one and part two:
On "Sunday Morning Coming Down": "[P]robably the most directly autobiographical thing I'd written. In those days, I was living in a slum tenement that was torn down afterwards, but it was $25 a month in a condemned building, and "Sunday Morning Coming Down" was more or less looking around me and writing about what I was doing....There were holes in the wall bigger than I was....I guess it was depressing, I don't know, but the chorus was kind of uplifting....Ray Stevens cut it first, and he cut a great version of it. I remember I just wept when I first heard it."
On Johnny Cash: "Cowboy Jack Clement had showed him a letter I got from home where my mother had basically disowned me and said don't come and visit my relatives, you're an embarrassment to us, you know. And this tickled John to death, I guess, because when I was working over at Columbia as a studio setup guy, he came up to me and said, 'It's always nice to get a letter from home, isn't it?' I gave him every song I ever wrote after that."
On "Shipwrecked in the Eighties": "It started out from a personal place where I was. I had just come out of [the film] Heaven's Gate, the biggest bomb of all time. My manager died, my agent died, and the company I was recording for, Monument, went under. I was feeling kind of adrift—and my marriage was over and my little girl was gone, and I felt pretty shipwrecked."
On "Help Me Make It Through the Night": "I was actually sitting in a helicopter tied down on top of an oil rig 50 miles south of New Orleans out in the Gulf and just thinking about asking someone to just help me through the night."