Kris Kristofferson @ Town Hall, Birmingham – Wednesday 5th December 2012
The Town Hall was sold out, with an almost exclusively older crowd, mostly couples and relatively conservatively dressed. The stage was almost empty (a music stand and two microphones) as the 76 year old Kris Kristofferson walked out to start the show.
Singing alone with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica, Kristofferson opened with the bleak, ‘Shipwrecked in the Eighties’.
“So you turn to your trusty old partner to share some old feelings,
And you find to your shock that your faithful companion is gone.
And the truth slowly dawns that you’re lost and alone in deep water
And you don’t even know how much longer there is to go on.”
And in many ways that set the tone for the show, although Kristofferson has recently released a new album, Feeling Mortal (the only album on sale at the merchandising stall), none of tonight’s songs came from the new album. That suited the audience just fine. It was the earliest songs, arguably from Kristofferson’s strongest song-writing period in the seventies and early eighties, that got the most recognition, the loudest applause and the whisper of voices singing along in the auditorium. ‘Me and Bobby McGee’, ‘Casey’s Last Ride’, ‘Help Me Make It Through The Night’ – Kristofferson’s classics just kept coming, one after the other.
Kristofferson is not a virtuoso musician. His guitar playing is adequate but not flashy; his voice is gravelly and showing signs of age. His songs have been covered frequently and probably better by a range of performers from Janis Joplin to Johnny Cash. But it’s Kristofferson’s ability to write lyrics that has been the backbone of his 55 year career and that can still hold an audience spellbound. A consummate wordsmith and storyteller, it is the songs themselves that are the real draw.
Many of the evening’s songs told entire stories in three-minutes. There was ‘Darby’s Castle’ with its tale of the older man betrayed by his neglected young wife; ‘Here Comes that Rainbow Again’ (one of my personal favourites) with the kids, the waitress and the truckdrivers; the superb portrayal of aching loneliness in ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’; and the true story of John Trudell, Native American activist, whose wife and children were murdered, sung by Kristofferson as ‘Johnny Lobo’.
Others were tender, ‘For the Good Times’ remains one of the best end-of-relationship songs I know and the sparse imagery of ‘Loving Her Was Easier Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again’ never fails to move me.
Kristofferson’s delivery was straightforward and songs ended with a simple “Thank you” each time. I appreciated the fact that every word could be heard distinctly, for a singer whose strength is in his lyrics, that’s essential. He responded with good humour to a heckler who shouted out at intervals (unfortunately the heckler was too far away for me to hear what he was saying, but Kristofferson generally laughed and carried on).
He didn’t speak much on-stage, generally focusing on the songs rather than chatting to the audience. Just occasionally he threw in a seemingly off-the-cuff comment, usually about ageing or about having a cold (he blew his nose frequently throughout the gig). He was at pains to point out which songs were ‘true’. There were a few political references and Kristofferson, like Johnny Cash, has politics which are more left-wing than is often true in Nashville. ‘The Hero’ name-checked Jesus, Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and at the end of ‘Nobody Wins’ he added ‘Well, somebody won …. Obama won … So the whole world won’. Beyond that, though, the political songs were absent, possibly he assumed that a UK audience would not respond to his take on the political scene. (He was probably right, judging by the decidedly understated applause when he mentioned Obama.)
Perhaps the most unexpected part of the show was the appearance of Kelly Kristofferson, Kris’s youngest daughter during the second half of the show. He has been bringing her on-stage to duet with him since the second show of his 2012 European tour. Although someone in the audience shouted, “You should record an album with her”, Kelly is clearly an inexperienced performer, who often seemed to be holding her banjo rather than playing it and demurely substituted the word ‘heck’ for the word ‘hell’ in their opening duet, ‘Good Love (Shouldn’t Feel So Bad)’. But her voice was sweet and clear with a strong US southern twang, and the two voices complemented each other, sometimes evoking echoes of Southern gospel music, particularly on ‘The Hero’ and ‘The Wonder’. Father and daughter obviously enjoyed working together, especially in the dialogue sections of ‘The Pilgrim, Chapter 33’. She sang five songs with him and then left the stage (“Well, it will all be a let-down after that”, quipped Kristofferson), returning for the final song of the encore.
Despite the lack of songs from Feeling Mortal, there were reminders of mortality and ageing throughout the show, in references to now-dead fellow performers, in quips about ageing and in the poignancy of lyrics about young men running wild sung by an old man. He ignored the audience’s shouted suggestions for encores, and sang a pair of relationship-ending songs, ‘A Moment of Forever’ and ‘Please Don’t Tell Me How the Story Ends’, finishing (with Kelly) with the prayer, ‘Why Me, Lord?’, an interesting and brave choice of a final song.
Kris Kristofferson has travelled a long way from the days when he felt immortal. “Nothing could kill me”, he says, recalling his 1960s days in Nashville, when he roared for years on end, somehow finding time amidst the chaos to change the language of country music. “I was rolling cars and wrecking motorcycles, drinking and doing everything I could to die early. But it didn’t work.” He seems more contented now, the older man on the stage referring at frequent intervals to his children (he now lives with his third wife and three of the five children from that relationship; he also has three other adult children from earlier marriages).
And in the same way, the show tonight, while it may have lacked the edginess and danger of some of his younger performances, left his audience (most of whom are dealing with their own ageing and mortality) satisfied.
Review by Betty Haglund
Photographs by Katja Ogrin