“He’s a poet, He’s a picker, He’s a prophet, He’s a pusher
He’s a pilgrim and a preacher and a problem when he’s stoned.
He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,
Taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home.”
— Kris Kristofferson
These lyrics to “The Pilgrim: Chapter 33” from Kristofferson’s “Silver Tongue Devil and I” album immediately came to mind when I first heard that Merle Haggard and Kris were set to appear together in a solo acoustic format down at Kingsbury Hall at the University of Utah next Tuesday.
Although, on record, Kris dedicated the tune to fellow renegades like Billy Swan, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Funky Donnie Fritz, he could have done much worse than include “Hag” and himself on his list of cosmic cowpokes. Which is what makes next week’s musical pairing at Kingsbury so flat-out alluring.
I understand that with Hag’s early-’70s right-wing stature, spawned mostly by his ’60s classics “Okie From Muskogee” and “Fighting Side of Me,” that he might have seemed a strange bedfellow to those across the aisle in the “outlaw country” camp. But, no matter how much his publicists tried to make it appear otherwise, he was always anti-establishment.
His stance was always there, ready to be perceived by the more discerning listeners the immense body of work, with its striking singularity, in many respects the equal of Dylan and Willie. Thematically, I’ve always found Merle Haggard to be on a par with Whitman and Yeats. Let’s just say that, among contemporaries, he’s on my very top shelf.
Not that that’s going out on a limb. Hag’s also been recently inducted into the California Hall of Fame along with Barbra Streisand, Betty White and Mark Zuckerberg, and saluted at the Kennedy Center Honors with Oprah and Paul McCartney. The dude’s getting his due!
Where I’ve caught Hag a multitude of times and try never to miss him, it’s always been with his band, The Strangers. Not that that’s a bad thing by any stretch. To me, they have always been the keepers of the faith as the last remaining great swing band in the long honky-tonk jazz tradition of Bob Wills and Hank Williams. Nothing beats dancing to that bunch.
To see this “poet of the common man” bare bones, however, is, to quote Humphrey Bogart in “The Maltese Falcon,” “the stuff that dreams are made of.” And coupled with Kris Kristofferson in a “Two Legends Two Guitars” configuration, well, that’s got me on full adrenal alert.
I’ve only caught Kristofferson once in person and that played out in a similar solo-acoustic fashion when Teri Orr and the Park City Performing Arts Foundation brought him to town several years back at the Eccles Center. The show was off the charts with Kris’ gruff humor embellishing over two hours worth of original material from his staggering catalog.
Very few singer-songwriters ever arrived on the scene quite so self-contained as Kristofferson. That first album with “For the Good Times,” “Help Me Make it Through the Night,” “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” and “Me and Bobby McGee” significantly raised the bar. No doubt about it, in 1970 there was a new silver-tongued devil on the block!
Having Haggard, the San Quentin grad who once broke down the back door of a saloon while it was still open, juxtaposed with Kristofferson, the Rhodes Scholar with a bachelor of philosophy in English Lit from Oxford, should make for an interesting evening.
Then there’s Hag’s richly-nuanced vocal style alongside Kristofferson’s quite raspy “whiskey tenor.” I’m reminded of the time Kris told Willy that he’d lost his voice and Willie responded: “How can your tell?”
Actually, these two song-slingers are cut from quite similar cloth. They’re both musical radicals on the lam from the ordinary who, when things get rollin’ and rockin’, don’t shy from a view polar opposite from the mainstream. In that regard, they continue a grand tradition in American music.
But what would you expect from Hag and Kris? They’re poets and pickers and, no doubt, problems when they’re stoned.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and a free-lance writer with a background in commercial and community radio, among other pursuits. He has been a columnist and feature writer for various Park City publications going back to 1973.