The song that “changed everything” for Kris Kristofferson
For aspiring writers, songs often become like cherished offspring. While it may require the perfect timing and chords to weave a melody, the greatest artists recognise the instant they pick up a guitar and realise they’ve crafted something enduring, destined to outlast them. Kris Kristofferson may have experienced such a revelation while writing ‘Me and Bobby McGee’, but he understood that everything changed the moment Janis Joplin embraced the song.
Serving time in the Army before moving to California to become a songwriter, Kristofferson was writing the kind of earnest tracks that made him look like a rough-and-tumble version of James Taylor, albeit with a little bit more country flair under his boots. Initially written and made to order from one of Kristofferson’s friends, ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ is the kind of wayward song about a girl who went through a whirlwind romance only to be given the boot.
Considering how the piece sounds, though, it feels like Joplin should have been the antithesis of what Kristofferson’s song was looking for. For years, Joplin had already been working as one of the foundations of Big Brother and The Holding Company, with a voice that had the capacity to scare you half to death and fall in love at the same time. Although Joplin may have already been known as the blues belter behind classic tracks like ‘Piece of My Heart’, she was already looking for new material when she came across Kristofferson’s tune.
Shedding her skin as a caustic rocker, Joplin practically sounds like she wrote every word of the track herself, remembering those times with Bobby with a teardrop in her voice. Although Kristofferson didn’t even know that Joplin had recorded it before her death, he credits her version of the tune for getting him a job in the business.
When speaking to Uncut, Kristofferson credited Joplin with his career, saying, “Janis having a hit with ‘Me And Bobby McGee’ changed everything. I think it probably got me in the movies, too, because Dennis Hopper loved that song so much, and he cast me in The Last Movie. Everything just seemed to fall into place. From then on, it was all a big blur.”
Even though Kristofferson was a much different singer than Joplin, his way of writing about crumbling romance struck a nerve with anyone who signed or cast him. Since the entire song is based around the heartache that comes with being free from a lover, Kristofferson practically wrote the kind of track that would define the character in A Star is Born before he even got the role.
While the song is an emotional powerhouse from beginning to end, Kristofferson said that he couldn’t bring himself to listen during its golden age. Reminding him too much of Joplin’s tragic story, Kristofferson would normally not listen to his own work, writing ‘Epitaph’ as a way to memorialise Joplin instead.
Most songwriters can tell compelling stories within the span of a few minutes, but Kristofferson’s career didn’t come from his way of writing fiction. If ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ was just another story song, Joplin was the one singer who seemed like she lived every single lyric that she sang.
