Nov. 1, 1971 review: Kris Kristofferson in Kleinhans Music Hall

Ah, Kris Kristofferson! I suppose that for everybody like me who loved and admired him, there were things about him that were just downright annoying. Nevertheless, you were obliged to forgive because he was, well ... Kris.

In my case, I was a huge fan of his 1970 debut record on Monument Records and arranged to interview him in Toronto one Sunday afternoon in March 1971 before a club date in the Riverboat Coffee House, that beloved folk mecca on Yorkville Avenue in the days before Yorkville became impossibly gentrified.
Kris was a no-show. Instead, I sat around with his keyboard player, Donnie Fritts, a delightful guy, for a couple hours and then gave up. I heard later that he was down at the Horseshoe Tavern on Queen Street, hanging with some musicians there. Nevertheless, my admiration was back in place six months later when he came to Kleinhans Music Hall on Halloween night.

Nov. 1, 1971

A Great Little Turnout for Kris; 'Cat' Sells Out

Kris Kristofferson's brawny face unclenched as surprise disbelief wrestled with gratification in his deep-set eyes. "From the applause, it seems like there are a lot more of you out there than there are," he drawled deeply.
For a while at Kleinhans Music Hall, it looked like Sunday evening coming down. The place one-third full for the guy who's supposed to be the newest country music superstar, the guy who wrote "Me and Bobby McGee."
Maybe there's too much hippie in him for the country fans. Or maybe there's too much country in him for the kids. Those who showed up were somewhere in between.
And were they ever into Kristofferson's music, all that lazy, easygoing stuff with the words that reach up off the floor and get you.
Stuff about misguided junkies ("Billy Dee") and misguided justice ("The Law Is for Protection of the People"), but mostly about loneliness, that early morning loneliness that aches for better times.
Not to mention those finely written songs by young Chicagoan John Prine. Kris did three of them.
Behind that voice and its echoes of Johnny Cash and Roger Miller were nothing but essentials – Steven Bruton (he's just 19) on lead guitar, Jerry Bald on electric bass and old sidekick Donnie Fritts on piano, all throwing on some harmony. The results were as smooth and mellow as 25-year-old bourbon.
To start the second half, Kris brought out Space Opera, three transplanted fellow Texans now foraging the Buffalo area. They'd only planned on a dressing room visit and wound up doing one jittery song and two nice ones.
Just 24 hours earlier, Kleinhans was full with a much younger crowd, some in party costumes, all drinking in the charm and whimsey of Cat Stevens.
Last November he was here, an unknown leading off a show with Traffic and winning the audience with an then-unfamiliar song called "Wild World." Since then, the song conquered the whole U.S.A., and everybody knows the sweet-faced, dark-bearded Londoner.
Stardom has loosened him up. He's ecstatic, bobbing around his microphone like a bee circling a dandelion. Playing with inflections. A growl here. A little shout there.
His three sidemen could have taken tightness lessons from Kristofferson's. Second guitarist Alan Davis was well-integrated, but the electric bassist and drummer seemed like new arrivals.
Earlier yet, Mimi Farina and Tom Jans mixed new folk songs with early '60s spirit, then brought out "a trick-or-treater we met in New York City." It was none other than Mimi's sister, Joan Baez, radiant in a raspberry velvet pantsuit.
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IN THE PHOTO: Kris Kristofferson at the Riverboat Coffee House in Toronto, March 1971 (Getty Images).
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FOOTNOTE: Looks like I didn't review the Riverboat date for The News, although I vaguely recall how intimate and terrific it was. It doesn't show up either in that encyclopedia of gigs, setlist.fm. The Kleinhans show is mentioned there, but no songs. Here's an incomplete account of what he did a month earlier at the Troubadour in Los Angeles:

Okie From Muskogee (Merle Haggard cover)
Help Me Make It Through the Night
Sam Stone (John Prine cover)
Billy Dee
The Law Is for Protection of the People
Sunday Morning Coming Down
Me and Bobby McGee
For the Good Times

On earlier dates that year, setlist.fm reports he did Prine's "Donald and Lydia" and the title track from his 1971 album, "The Silver-Tongued Devil and I."
As for Space Opera, Frank Gutch Jr., writing for No Depression magazine in 2016, said he "considered Space Opera one of Canada's best rock exports." He then found out they were "not from Canada at all, but from Fort Worth, Texas."
In a long and hugely detailed interview, guitarist David Bullock talks about how a Canadian agent heard them in Fort Worth and thought they would go over well in Canada, so they moved into a big house in Williamsville, a convenient base for hopping back and forth across the border. They put a four-track studio in the basement.
The article notes that Space Opera already was friends with Kristofferson and he helped them get contacts at Columbia Records. Also pitching them to Columbia was folksinger Eric Andersen, another guy with Buffalo roots, who sent a telegram to label head Clive Davis urging him to hear them.
Gutch said Kris and Eric sat on either side of Davis when they played an audition showcase at Columbia's 30th Street Studio in New York City in December 1971. Davis passed on them – he didn't hear a hit – but they eventually got a deal with Columbia in Canada. They also got complete artistic control. "We never would have gotten that from Clive," Bullock said.