The Wild West is dying, civilization bursts in on freight trains, gunmen perish before the rule of law. The legendary bandit Billy The Kidcornered by justice, flees to Mexico. He is pursued to kill by his old friend Pat Garrett, a former outlaw tamed by the new world who has become a sheriff. One era dies overwhelmed, another is about to be born.
Sam Peckinpah, teacher of western crepuscular, the filmmaker of violence and melancholy, shoots his classic Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid at the foot of the Sierra Madre in Durango, northern Mexico. It’s 1973 and in the world of cinema there isn’t much room left for outlaws and hustlers. Taking refuge in the mountains, Peckinpah surrounds himself with another group of nostalgia sufferers, late prophets of a time that no longer exists. Songwriter Kris Kristofferson plays Billy, actor James Coburn plays Garret, Bob Dylan plays a mysterious gunslinger named Alias.
The tension has permeated the filming. They are behind schedule and over budget. An increasingly irascible Peckinpah faces dismissal. As if that were not enough, the local journalists suffocate Dylan like the dry heat of the desert. The team needs to unwind and Kristofferson, Coburn and Dylan fly to Mexico City for the weekend. Also the journalist of the Rolling Stone Chet Flippo that documents the journey.
Dylan has to record the soundtrack for the movie, with that sad song in which he knocks without anyone listening at the gates of heaven. In the studio he will be accompanied by Kristofferson’s band. After weeks of collective psychosis, they can finally have fun. Coburn lights joints of local weed the size of a newborn’s arm, Dylan drinks vodka and directs the musicians, Kristofferson guzzles whiskey while trying to get two out-of-tune Mexican trumpet players to hit the right note. Dawn finds them there.
Peckinpah would die a decade later; Coburn, in 2002; Kristofferson, a week ago. Of that wild group only Dylan remains alive. One era dies overwhelmed, another is about to be born.
The promised land and purgatory
The anecdote from that filming has all the elements that make up this story. A group of American country, folk and blues musicians, with commercial success and fame, but who deny the spotlight. The symbolism of western, that challenges them so much: they, deep down, feel like modern cowboys. Kristofferson and a handful of other singers—Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Townes Van Zandt—represent the outlaw country, a subgenre that literally translates as “outlaw.” The imaginary of the west, life on the road, the rejection of the values of capitalist society. A country closer to the flags of the counterculture than to the Republican Party.
In westerns like Peckinpah’s find a mirror in which to look at themselves: the outlaw life on both sides of the border, the stories of losers and misfits, the patriarchal archetype of the lone wolf. And, in Mexico, a lost paradise: the myth of the noble savage, the deceitful stereotype of the pre-capitalist world of traditional values attached to the land, the refuge in the indomitable south of bandits, like Billy The Kidpersecuted by the law. An imaginary that permeates the films in which they act, the songs they write.
Perhaps the song that best sums it up is Michoacancomposed by Kristofferson for the soundtrack of Cisco Pike (1972): the story of an imprisoned marijuana seller who dreams of fleeing and taking refuge in the Mexican State, with the only company of “his teenage girlfriend”, two dogs and a red guitar: “I woke up this morning with the border burning in my mind / I’ve seen things I couldn’t leave behind / in this hole in the ground there’s nothing to see / but down there in Michoacán paradise awaits me / north of the border, boy , bodies are bought and sold / my brother and I were arrested for turning green into gold / I will pay for my crime until the day I am free / but in Michoacán paradise awaits me”.
The coin has more sides. Sounds Blue and Lonesome by Duke Levineagonizing blues with screeching guitars. Sheriff Charlie Wade terrorizes a town in the Texas desert on the border with Mexico called, of course, Frontera. He is one of those dark characters that populate the margins between both worlds: a local leader, murderer, corrupt, extortionist. In essence, a community divided between cowboys whites and Mexicans who cross the Rio Grande, the Rio Grande, and cook their food, wash their houses, take care of their children. Kristofferson, like Wade, left in 1996 one of the most significant roles of his career. And the counterpoint to his idyllic lyrics: Mexico could be the promised land, but also a purgatory in the desert; Texas, a hell in which to find your bones if your steps come from the south.
Bandits and losers
Born in 1933, he grew up in bars honky tonk with a guitar hanging around his neck and almost a century later he is still standing. The white hair knotted in two braids, the red bandana on his forehead, the cowboy hat. At 91 years old he releases his 152nd album. In a smoky, drawling voice, he tells a story of border patrol agents, smugglers, hungry migrants, evil and good on both sides of the wall. The album, released this May, is called The Border, The Border. This is Willie Nelson, fireproof face of the outlaw country.
Nine decades behind him, thousands of performances. This summer he spent touring the United States with Bob Dylan, 26 concerts that have called the Outlaw Tour. With the death of Kristofferson he has become the last one standing of a lineage about to disappear (Dylan, more eclectic, always danced to different rhythms). The Bordercritics say, is one of his most three-dimensional approaches to the border and the chiaroscuro characters that inhabit it. It wasn’t the first.
Townes Van Zandt died early after a life of stumbles, alcohol and drugs. He wrote beautiful songs, he was a legend. In 1972 he composed Poncho & Leftyone of his most remembered works—among the 100 best country songs of all time in the Rolling Stone—, the story of a Mexican bandit who is betrayed and executed in the desert by the federals. It is one of the founding myths of the outlaw. In 1982, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard were putting the finishing touches on an album that was missing a hit. It came into your hands Poncho & Lefty. It impacted them so much that they re-recorded it—renamed as Pancho & Lefty— and they named the album after him. It was one of his greatest successes. Mexico, outlaws, betrayals, winners and losers. It never fails.
The backyard
On October 4, 1965, a man in a black suit, impeccable hair and sunglasses walks in handcuffs under the El Paso sun, escorted by two agents also dressed in black. The photograph appears in El Paso Times. Johnny Cash has been arrested in the Texas city when he tried to cross the border loaded with more than 1,000 pills that he had bought on the other side, in Ciudad Juárez, the lawless counterpoint to its American neighbor. Another facet of outlaw: Juárez, Tijuana, the south side of the wall as the gringos’ backyard, cities of wild parties without consequences, cheap drugs, prostitution.
The path was opened decades ago by the generation beat. Jack Kerouac recorded his adventures around the country in his canonical novel on the road (1957), where he travels to Mexico in search of strong emotions and that something “authentic”, so difficult to define, that the beatniksguided in the footsteps of his companion William Burroughs, who in junkie (1953) had already narrated his miseries as a heroin addict on the streets of Mexico City. Before, in 1951, he became the most famous feminicide in the Roma neighborhood after murdering his wife, Joan Vollmer, with a shot to the head, while he was playing William Tell while drinking alcohol. He was arrested and released shortly after, probably thanks to a bribe. He fled the country, back to the United States.
Under the rain and the night of Juárez, Dylan, who sang to him in Just like Tom Thumb’s Blues to his “hungry women”, he howled at the desert moon, he faced his law enforcement agents —”because the cops don’t need you, and man, they expect the same”—. All the parties end and at the end, party-sick and tired, he proclaims: “I’m going back to New York, I’ve had enough.”
The first musician to win the Nobel Prize in literature was never able to write about Mexico with the richness that his beloved Manhattan did. Well-written stereotypes, but stereotypes nonetheless. In another of the songs he dedicated to the country, Romance in Durango —composed, they say, during the filming of Peckinpah—, sings: “Hot peppers under the scorching sun / dust on my face and my cloak / Me and Magdalena on the run / I think we’re going to escape this time / I sold my guitar to the baker’s son / for a few crumbs and a place to hide / but I can get another / and I will play for Magdalena while we ride”.
Kristofferson’s death at age 88 is a reminder of the final days of an endangered species. The man they called “the last poet outlaw” leaves behind a legacy of songs that sounded more in the mouths of other artists, songs of support for the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and cries for the missing and the forgotten in Latin American dictatorships. Janis Joplin, ex-lover, extolled her great success for eternity, Me and Bobby McGee. Kristofferson first heard her story after an overdose took her down. They say he cried with rage. The song reached number one. These days, that hymn about the love of love, the road and freedom resonates like the requiem of a dying generation. The last bars of the border blues.
