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Forged in patience and courage, his songbook captured life and death in staggering detail.
Column by Chris RichardsInstantly, your body feels everything his body feels. The dull agony of simply waking up. The relief of dousing a headache with two beers — one for breakfast and “one more for dessert.” The cool tingle of that “cleanest dirty shirt” on your back. The sound of your shoes plodding down an empty sidewalk, their forsaken rhythm mingling with the laughter of children, and the clang of church bells, and the smell of home cooking as it twists out of a kitchen window in Looney Tunes contours. If you’re really listening to all this, you’ll feel desolation, then wonderment. How does a song about falling apart feel this sturdy, this colossal, this magnificent?
When people use words like “magic” and “genius” to explain the provenance of great art, what they’re usually talking about is “experience,” which is something Kris Kristofferson had loads of. The Texas-born singer-songwriter, who died Saturday at 88, seems to have lived nearly half a dozen lives before he even got to Nashville. In college, he was a Golden Gloves boxer who wrote short stories that were published in the Atlantic. In 1958, he went overseas on a Rhodes Scholarship to study literature at Oxford but left before earning his degree to become a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Army. He finally relocated to Nashville in the mid-’60s, patiently waiting for the perfect moment to make the impossible leap from janitor to professional songwriter.
He was good at everything, which was a strange way of being lost. Fortunately, he touched down in Tennessee when the minds of Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson were approaching full bloom, when the songwriters of Music Row were beginning to think more like poets, when the listening public had decided to broaden its notions of how much life and death a country song could convey. Also fortuitous: The mop that Kristofferson pushed for a living had been sloshing across the floors of the Columbia Studios. This reportedly allowed him to float a demo in the direction of Cash, who eventually recorded “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” in 1970. In Cash’s godly baritone, the song sounded indestructible. More like the pyramids at Giza than some bridge. But when Kristofferson recorded his existentially lonesome rendition for a self-titled debut that same year, God was nowhere to be found.
Loneliness and togetherness, living and dying. These are common paradoxes in country music. But very few songwriters explored their symbiotic balance with greater nuance than Kristofferson. Yes, “freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” he sang, plain-voiced and righteous, on his signature hit, “Me and Bobby McGee” — but why does that line sometimes sound silver medal profound compared with “them windshield wipers slappin’ time,” their soggy friction so perfectly capturing our messy, mundane journey through existence? Forget about freedom for a second. Is death when it stops raining?
All these layers of philosophical detail made Kristofferson a songwriting giant in country music, just as his onstage charisma quickly caught the attention of various Hollywood directors (Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese) who cast him in their films throughout the 1970s. So his big life somehow grew wider. In the ’80s, he began pushing his political beliefs to the fore, speaking out against U.S. involvement in Central America both in the press and in song. In 1985, he settled into legend status as a member of the Highwaymen, the storied outlaw supergroup with Cash, Nelson and Waylon Jennings, in which Kristofferson emerged as the most outspoken pacifist of the four. In a 1991 Highwaymen interview, when asked about the state of the nation on the brink of the Iraq War, Kristofferson said, “It reminds me a lot of the flag-waving and choreographed patriotism that we had back in Nazi Germany a half a century ago … [with a] lap dog media that’s cranking out propaganda for the administration that’d make a Nazi blush.” Nuance was a resource he saved for his songs.
Inside his music, though, his fearlessness felt delicate, even when he seemed to be facing down death. Kristofferson spent the final decades of his life touring through various health problems, and at a concert in 2017, upon finding his “cleanest dirty shirt” for the thousandth time while strumming the aching chords of “Sunday Mornin’,” he flashed an intimate grin and told the audience, “I’m wearin’ it.”
This was a laugh line, a tether for us to grab onto as we circled the darkness, and most certainly a lie. There’s no way this beautiful man had retrieved that beautiful shirt out of his hamper. But what’s really clean in this dirty world? Where does our living end and our dying begin? Are we ever truly alone, or are we always? If you can’t hear the answers in a Kris Kristofferson song, try the windshield wipers.
PORTLAND — A couple of decades ago, something weird started happening in Maine: Restaurants suddenly became good — like, award-winning, national-recognition good.
Attracted by a combination of low overhead costs, ample local seafood, and farm-fresh produce, big city chefs packed their knives and set up shop in Portland. And lo and behold, a foodie town was born.
Now, Maine is hoping to strike gold a second time, once again drawing on the promise of comparatively low costs and local resources — this time, in the climate tech sector.
This corner of the tech world, focusing on advancements to combat climate change, is well established in Silicon Valley, Boston, greater Denver, and New York. But Maine officials and experts say the state has something unique to offer, including its vast forests and history of forest industries, a large network of shuttered former mills, and a lengthy coastline in a part of the country considered ideal for offshore wind development.
This enthusiasm for Maine was on display on a recent weeknight in downtown Portland, as a hundred or so young-to-middle-aged entrepreneurs huddled around high-top tables and charcuterie spreads for the launch of the Roux Institute’s ClimateTech incubator. It’s an initiative of Northeastern University that will focus on breakthrough technologies to address the climate crisis. Among the companies cropping up here are SeaDeep, which uses advanced computer vision and machine learning to map, explore, and monitor underwater resources; Elipsa, which is using artificial intelligence to make industrial equipment more efficient and less carbon-intensive; and RoamR, a micromobility platform for management of electric fleets.
The “special sauce,” says Warren Adams, director of the new incubator, is providing a physical space for innovators, investors, and policy makers to toss ideas around and support each other’s businesses. Up until now, he said, local innovators have been working out of coffee shops and home offices, with little support. “We think the whole clean tech ecosystem is going to ignite, in a good way,” Adams said.
So far, the 12 startups at the incubator have garnered a total of $24 million in investments, from groups including the Grantham Foundation, Maine Technology Institute, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, and Lowercarbon Capital.
Joseph Curtatone, president of the Alliance for Climate Transition (formerly known as the Northeast Clean Energy Council), said the growth in Maine is something the entire region is watching. “Maine has been a leader on things like offshore wind, energy efficiency, and so forth,” he said, suggesting that the state was ready to take the next step forward.
As mayor of Somerville from 2004 to 2022, Curtatone helped lay the groundwork for the successful climate tech incubator Greentown Labs. For startups today, especially smaller ones, Maine’s “low cost of entry” and proximity to the well-established network and funding center of Boston are attractive, he said.
“You have this huge ecosystem in Boston that is doing really well,” said Monique Guimond, vice president of capital formation at Engine Ventures, a Boston-based tech investment firm. “There’s billions of dollars of private capital going into companies that are in a really critical moment of scaling.”
But when those companies are looking to scale, whether a demonstration project or a manufacturing plant, they’re not necessarily going to do that in a major downtown, she said.
“And so Maine has a lot going for it, in that it’s in that two-, three-, four-hour radius from Boston,” she said. “These companies need physical space.”
It won’t all be easy. Privately, some express something between skepticism and cautious optimism, noting that Maine’s climate tech ecosystem could be limited by its lack of access to venture capital funding, and the fact that it can take decades to create a leading research community.
But momentum in Maine is building.
In August, the startup Form Energy was awarded $147 million from the federal Department of Energy to build an 85-megawatt battery system that can hold enough energy from wind and solar to last days. It was constructed at the site of a former paper and pulp mill in Lincoln, Maine.
At another former mill, in Madison, Maine, TimberHP is producing building insulation from wood chips, which, according to the company’s website, are renewable, recyclable and “carbon negative” because they can store the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
The University of Maine, meanwhile, has developed the first 3D-printed house made entirely with bio-based materials, and is innovating floating offshore wind technologies.
And last year, the Biden administration designated Maine as a federal “tech hub” for forest bioproducts. That step is expected to accelerate research and development of wood bioproducts that can sequester carbon while replacing plastics, while opening the door for significant federal investment in the future.
This momentum is thanks, in part, to significant policy changes under Governor Janet Mills, a Democrat who succeeded Republican Paul LePage, who was openly antagonistic to energy reforms, said Brian Deese, former director of the National Economic Council and a mentor in residence at the Roux Institute’s incubator. “For both investors and for companies looking around the region to say, ‘Where are the most interesting places to locate?’ I think it’s gone from being a headwind to a tailwind,” Deese said.
The incubator, launched with support from the Maine Governor’s Energy Office, aims to initially bring in a dozen climate- and energy-focused startups, before growing to 50 by the end of 2027. Many of the startups will lean on artificial intelligence, a specialty of the Roux Institute, while creating products that run the gamut from reducing greenhouse gas emissions in aviation to developing a supercapacitor-enabled lithium-ion battery pack.
Eric Fitz, who runs his startup Amply Energy out of his home in Cumberland, Maine, some 20 minutes north of Portland, is among those whose companies will call the Roux home. His AI-enabled software helps contractors create 3D models of buildings in real time, allowing them to more quickly design properly sized heat pump systems.
“Distributors are saying nine out of 10 issues with heat pumps are related to oversizing the equipment or mis-sizing the equipment,” Fitz said. This technology aims to fix that, and help speed up the rate at which building owners can ditch fossil fuel heating systems for electric heat pumps.
Born and raised in Maine, Fitz, 42, is among the droves of people who historically left the state after high school. He built up his career in California and Massachusetts before moving back to Maine in 2015. “I always knew I was going to come back,” he said.
Hannah Pingree, director of Maine’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future, said that “boomerang” effect among returning native-born Mainers is something lawmakers had long hoped for because for years, Maine was known as a state that young people left for good.
COVID helped change that. In 2022, Maine’s population growth was more than twice the national rate.
“People came to our state during the pandemic, and people came home during the pandemic and realized what a wonderful place it is to live,” Pingree said. And, if all goes to plan, a wonderful place to work on cutting-edge climate technologies.
Sabrina Shankman can be reached at sabrina.shankman@globe.com. Follow her @shankman.
