Project Description
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON
@ Ballarat Civic Hall
23/09/19
(Live Review)
Reviewer: Benjamin Smith
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Kris Kristofferson is one of the great songwriters. Having recorded dozens of albums, written countless songs for other artists and collaborated with a most impressive list of contemporaries, Kristofferson has earned himself a place amongst the most important musicians of the last 50 years.
The man is now eighty-three and wears every day of it proudly. Looking weathered, but not frail; worn but not worn out, Kristofferson is touring with The Strangers, the band best known for backing Merle Haggard for a great portion of his career.
Kristofferson and Haggard, along with Waylon Jennings, Willy Nelson and longtime friend and muse Johnny Cash formed the core of what might best be called the outlaw country genre. Most of them are gone now, with only Kristofferson and Nelson still alive and working.
Kristofferson brings his show tonight to the newly renovated Civic Hall in Ballarat and the history of the man and his music hangs in the air. There isn’t any support act and nobody announces the band. They simply walk on without fanfare and begin to play. The strength of the material is where the value of the show is to be found. Songs like Sunday Morning Coming Down and The Pilgrim are unquestionably among the great depictions of hard living, and songs like Loving Her is Easier than Anything I’ll Ever do Again have aged with their composer, evolving with his impossibly rasped vocals into something approaching wistful melancholy.
Of course, he plays the song Janis Joplin made a hit, Me and Bobby McGee, to the delight of everyone in the room. He also takes the opportunity to play some of Haggard’s songs, like Okie from Muskogee, Daddy Frank (the guitar man) and prison ballad Sing Me Back Home. Doing so is both a worthy tribute to the man’s music and a painful reminder of just how much we’ve lost in the last few years.
The music is deceptively simple in its construction, but within the confines of picked chords and some fiddle accompaniment the songs are so evocative, so suggestive of a time and an era that will soon be all but forgotten, that its hard not to get lost in them.
The audience are, as to be expected, older and a little more reserved than most. That, however, does nothing to diminish the sense that something very special is taking place as Kristofferson and the band work their way through two sets of about 50 minutes each. There isn’t a lot of interaction with the crowd, but also, there doesn’t really need to be- the songs speak for themselves.
When its over the audience files out, unsure how to feel about the knowledge that we’ve just seen something we’re unlikely to ever get the chance to see again. That’s the thing about looking at living history, you’re never quite sure how much time you’ve got. You just have to savour it for as long as it lasts.
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Check out KRIS KRISTOFFERSON below
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