Kris Kristofferson, who became one of the most influential American singer-songwriters of his time with works such as “Me and Bobby McGee,” as well as a successful actor, died Saturday at the age of 88, Rolling Stone reported, citing his spokesperson.
Kristofferson had been suffering from memory loss since his 70s.
Kristofferson was a Renaissance man — an athlete with a poet’s sensibilities, a former Army officer and helicopter pilot, a Rhodes scholar who took a job as a janitor in what turned out to be a brilliant career move.
Kristofferson first established himself in the music world as a songwriter in the country music capital of Nashville — writing hits such as the Grammy-winning “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” “For the Good Times,” and one-time girlfriend Janis Joplin’s plaintive No. 1 hit, “Me and Bobby McGee.”
In the early 1970s he became well-known as a performer with a rumbling, unpolished baritone, as well as an in-demand actor, notably opposite Barbra Streisand in “A Star Is Born,” one of the most popular films of 1976.
Kristofferson was born in Brownsville, Texas, on June 22, 1936, and moved frequently because his father was a general in the Air Force. After graduating from Pomona College in California, where he played football and rugby, Kristofferson attended Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship and then fulfilled the family tradition by joining the Army.
He went through the Army’s elite Ranger School, learned to pilot helicopters and reached the rank of captain. In 1965 Kristofferson was offered a position teaching English — he was enthralled by the works of poet William Blake — at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, but he turned it down in order to head to Nashville.
Kristofferson became a janitor at the Columbia Records studio because it would give him a chance to offer his songs to the big-name stars recording there. He also worked as helicopter pilot ferrying workers between Louisiana oilfields and offshore drilling rigs.
During that time Kristofferson wrote some of his most memorable songs, including “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” which he said he penned atop an oil platform.
His most audacious song pitch came when he landed his helicopter on Johnny Cash’s lawn. Cash would later have a No. 1 hit with Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down” lament.
“Nothing left to lose”
Kristofferson’s best songs were filled with seekers, wastrels and broken souls trying to find love, redemption or relief from the hangover that life had given them. The broken-hearted narrator of “Bobby McGee,” a song Kristofferson said was inspired by the Federico Fellini film “La Strada,” summed it up with the line “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
“Kris brought (country music) kind of from the dark ages up to the present-day time, made it acceptable and brought great lyrics — I mean, the best possible lyrics,” Willie Nelson, an early role model for Kristofferson, told CBS’s “60 Minutes” in a 1999 interview. “Simple but profound.”
Kristofferson recorded four albums with Rita Coolidge, the second of his three wives, in the 1970s and joined Nelson, Cash and Waylon Jennings in the country music super group the Highwaymen in the 1980s and ’90s.
Kristofferson lived hard during his heyday. There was a long line of girlfriends and performances he could not remember because he was drunk. He gave up drinking — but not marijuana — when a doctor told him he was killing himself.
“It was fun,” Kristofferson told “60 Minutes.” “It was the way that I thought an artist was supposed to live. I always agreed with Blake when he said that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom … I think God protects fools and songwriters.”
After his initial stardom, Kristofferson took on causes such as the United Farm Workers.
Kristofferson and his third wife, Lisa, whom he married in 1983, lived on Maui for more than 30 years. He had eight children.