(editor’s note – no ex post facto proof for Janis Ian)

Kris performs vague life story

by Steve Webb, The Knickerbocker News, July 30, 1980

“Since every one of us up here is a writer, it’s all musical autobiography — I guess. Hope it makes as much sense to you as it does to us.”

Kris Kristofferson agonizes over his performance. At heart, he is a writer, and a good one. Since he writes songs, and since those songs are an intrinsic part of him, he has to perform them live. And after repeated performances at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center over the years, he has a willing audience. Tuesday night 2.465 came to see him.

Kristofferson’s songs pour out of his expressive voice in a vague, sometimes jumbled, fashion. The show opened with the 1971 hit “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)” and it sounded as if he was embarrassed about its fame, or the applause it received.

His crack band, including country and rock singer Billy Swan, whose “I Can Help” hit big in 1975, followed him through 26 songs in under two hours, several new and many from his “Silver-tongued Devil” days. Some of the new songs were quíte good, particularly a pair that related in a not particularly bitter way the dissolution of his marriage to Rita Coolidge and his bouts with alcohol and the Devil.

He inserts passages in several familiar songs, such as “I ain’t saying I beat the devil, but I drink his beer for nothing,” at one point, and following the line “me and the devil paid our dues” in “Silver-tongued Devil and I” with “We? I notice he’s been putting all his drinks on my tab these days, but at 44 it’s good to know I can pay somebody’s dues.”

The show’s highlights included “Starcrossed,” a story of the breakup, a pair of songs springing from quotations of “The Wild Side of Life,” a song about salvation he dedicated to Bob Dylan and a medley of “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and “Silver-Tongued Devil and I.” Several songs didn’t hit the mark because of the singer’s frequent mumbling or awkward phrasing, but on the whole the evening was a fascinating view of the artist.

The Post-Star, July 29, 1980

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