Bream: Remembering Kris Kristofferson, a poet with the presence of a movie star

Back in the day, the old Guthrie Theater was renowned for presenting the coolest and often hippest of music acts. They’d sell out concerts by Led Zeppelin, the Who, James Taylor and Elton John long before they became household names.

For a particular show in May 1971, after packing the place for Neil Young, Miles Davis and Laura Nyro earlier that year, the Guthrie drew a sparse crowd for Kris Kristofferson. Too few people were aware of the Nashville songwriter with a burgeoning reputation thanks to his album “The Silver Tongued Devil and I.” John Denver, then a resident of Edina (remember his then-wife Annie was a Minnesotan), was there, sitting in front of me. Because if you knew, you knew: Kristofferson was something special.

He didn’t have much in the way of stage manner or dynamism. But his lyrics penetrated like the poetry of Charles Bukowski — vivid stories of everyday people often hard on their luck, delivered in a lived-in voice.

Mr. “Take Me Home, Country Roads” at Mr. “Help Me Make It Through the Night”?

“I remember [Denver] in my dressing room at halftime and he was just kind of staring at me and he didn’t say a word,” Kristofferson told me in 2009. “He looked like he was just shaking his head and wondering what this was all about.”

Far out.

Kristofferson, who died Saturday at the age of 88, was on the Mount Rushmore of country songwriters.

On Sunday night, Jimmy Webb, a fellow member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, took the stage at the Parkway Theater in Minneapolis and immediately announced, “I’m feeling weird tonight.” He spoke of the loss of Kristofferson, who, with Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash, recorded his tune, “The Highwayman,” as a country supergroup known as the Highwaymen. Webb opened his concert with that selection.

Throughout his nearly two hours onstage, Webb spoke of Kristofferson. “He was the finest gentleman I ever met,” said the raconteur, best known for writing “MacArthur Park” and several Glen Campbell hits, including “Wichita Lineman.” “A very special, gentle soul. An Oxford scholar who wrote country music and slept with Barbra Streisand. He was the sweetest guy.”

Yes, Kristofferson was a Rhodes Scholar who became a movie star, opposite Streisand in “A Star Is Born,” Ali MacGraw in “Convoy” and Ellen Burstyn in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” He also performed in the “Blade” series and with Bob Dylan in “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” and with Willie Nelson in “Songwriter.” Kristofferson appeared in more than 80 movies — or more than four times as many albums as he recorded.

His music is where he made his mark, writing “Me and Bobby McGee” for Janis Joplin and “For the Good Times” for Ray Price. His “Help Me Make It Through the Night” defines make-up sex. His “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down” captures the loneliness of a hangover on the morning after.

He crafted one of the most quoted lyrics in popular music: “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” in “Me and Bobby McGee.” It’s been quoted in speeches and essays; I remember a Twin Cities DJ using it as a sign-off line on his final day in the 1970s.

Kristofferson literally got his foot in the door in Nashville as a janitor at Columbia Records. Dylan, one of Kristofferson’s idols, came into the Columbia recording studio in the winter of 1966 and started writing at the piano while his highly paid session musicians went off to play pool and ping-pong.

“This was unheard of in Nashville at the time,” Kristofferson told me. “And it went all night long. He was sitting at that piano with those dark glasses on. I didn’t even talk to him. It would be like interrupting Einstein.”

Kristofferson had a way with words. His singing voice was as dry and desolate as the plains of his native Texas but he communicated with his poetry and presence. When he and then-wife Rita Coolidge sang face-to-face at Northrop auditorium in the mid-1970s, things got so steamy onstage I thought someone was going to have to turn out the lights.

By the next century, Kristofferson was touring with Merle Haggard, another giant country songwriter and a world-class singer, as well. At Mystic Lake Casino in 2011, Hag had to carry the show because his buddy had a cold and could barely talk-sing his lyrics. At the Minnesota State Fair in 2015, Kristofferson seemed tentative and almost disoriented, needing a lyric sheet on a music stand to help him make it through the night with Haggard.

Four years later, Kristofferson did a solo show with his band at the Pantages Theatre, his last Twin Cities concert. Turns out that Lyme disease, not Parkinson’s or dementia, had been the culprit at the fair. On this night, with the aid of a teleprompter, he was focused, determined and steady. He offered a generous 29 numbers over two sets in his soft, rumbling rasp of a voice — all songs in the key of Kristofferson, which meant a three-note range and the truth.