Kris Kristofferson: Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down

He’s a walkin’ contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction / Takin’ ev’ry wrong direction on his lonely way back home. -- Kris Kristofferson lyric from “The Pilgrim” Sometimes we dive so deep into Jim’s archive to uncover the rare and hardly seen that we miss the redwood amongst the junipers.  Which is to say that I was rather shocked to realize the other day that, after producing nearly two years' worth of JMPLLC blogs, we had yet to run one of Jim’s favorite portraits: a moody, sexy shot of Kris Kristofferson in a Los Angeles hotel on a long-forgotten Sunday in 1970.

Or, as Jim would always say when he looked at it: “That was literally ‘Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down, Michie …” and then just shake his head ruefully at the memory of the hard partying that had evidently gone down the night before. I’ve talked about Kristofferson before from the standpoint of his relationship to Johnny Cash and the Outlaw movement in country music, but always as a tangential figure.  However, Jim seemed to have known Kristofferson was going to be a huge star from the moment he laid eyes on him, certainly once he heard him put his own songs across onstage.

Jim held Kristofferson in the highest regard, he thought of him as a true renaissance man – Rhodes scholar, star athlete, helicopter pilot, the list goes on and on – and especially admired his songwriting and easy charisma. Jim told me more than once, with no small amount of pride, that he had played a small but pivotal role in helping Kristofferson break through to major festival audiences back when that was still the key way to make it.  Jim didn’t seem boastful when he remembered those times, but rather he had a kind of beaming expression … this only child who always hated the fact ... he looked to me like a big brother looks when he makes sure his little brother gets the chance he deserves and then goes out and kicks ass.

In fact, less than a year after Jim met Kristofferson, Johnny Cash’s recording of “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” was released on his album, “The Johnny Cash Show,” and it won the Country Music Association Award for Song of the Year in 1970 and hit No. 1 on the country charts. But I prefer to let Jim tell the tale in his own way.  Here’s the caption that ran with the shot of Kristofferson in that LA hotel room (or as Jim always said, his “studio,” since so very many of his greatest portraits were shot in hotel rooms and he abhored the set-up, artificial feel of studios with their props and lighting): From Jim Marshall’s “Not Fade Away,” published in 1997:

“This photograph of Kris Kristofferson was taken in late 1970 or early 1971 in Los Angeles at the Continental Hyatt House on Sunset Boulevard, which was owned at the time by Gene Autry. I met Kris in early 1969, before his first album had come out and I came back to San Francisco from Nashville shell-shocked after hearing songs like “Me and Bobby McGee,” “Sunday Morning Coming Down” “For the Good Times,” and “Jody and the Kid.”  The guy was brilliant.  Since then we’ve been good friends, and I’ve done two or three of the jackets for Kris’s albums. “The year Kris came on the scene, nobody knew who he was, and I remember talking to Barry Olivier, who ran the Berkeley Folk Festival, about putting Kris on between sets.  I was telling my then wife-to-be, Rebecca, and everyone I knew to come out and hear this guy! Kris did three songs at Berkeley, and at the end the audience was just stunned and then went nuts with applause.  Later I spoke to Johnny Cash and one of the organizers about getting Kris onstage at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island in 1969.  During that same year he wasn’t allowed to play between the set changes at the Big Sur Folk Festival, but the next year, in 1970, he was a headliner when Big Sur moved to the Monterey County Fair grounds.

“[The lead photo for this blog] was shot on a Sunday morning.  It’s a very personal picture.  I’ve got maybe one hundred rolls on Kris, and the motherfucker doesn’t take a bad shot.  From every angle this guy is such a good-looking man, he’s got such charm about him.  It’s really hard to take a bad picture of Kris.” We think this sampling of shots from the start of Kristofferson’s pivotal climb from Columbia studio janitor to center stage makes that point quite nicely. Enjoy!

Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down
By Kris Kristofferson

Well I woke up Sunday morning,
With no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt.
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad,
So I had one more for dessert.
Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes,
And found my cleanest dirty shirt.
An’ I shaved my face and combed my hair,
An’ stumbled down the stairs to meet the day.

I’d smoked my brain the night before,
On cigarettes and songs I’d been pickin’.
But I lit my first and watched a small kid,
Cussin’ at a can that he was kicking.
Then I crossed the empty street,
‘n caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin’ chicken.
And it took me back to somethin’,
That I’d lost somehow, somewhere along the way.

On the Sunday morning sidewalk,
Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned.
‘Cos there’s something in a Sunday,
Makes a body feel alone.
And there’s nothin’ short of dyin’,
Half as lonesome as the sound,
On the sleepin’ city sidewalks:
Sunday mornin’ comin’ down.

In the park I saw a daddy,
With a laughin’ little girl who he was swingin’.
And I stopped beside a Sunday school,
And listened to the song they were singin’.
Then I headed back for home,
And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringin’.
And it echoed through the canyons,
Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday.

On the Sunday morning sidewalk,
Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned.
‘Cos there’s something in a Sunday,
Makes a body feel alone.
And there’s nothin’ short of dyin’,
Half as lonesome as the sound,
On the sleepin’ city sidewalks:
Sunday mornin’ comin’ down.