You had to be around at the turn of the ‘60s into the ‘70s to understand how great he was. Johnny Cash singing “Sunday Morning Coming Down”: what honesty; what verbal precision. Kristofferson wrote like a Rhodes scholar who’d worked as a janitor at a Nashville record company office — which was exactly what he was.
The problem was when he started making his own records: he couldn’t sing. But who wouldn’t love to have written “Me and Bobby McGee”? There were other people who could sing it
And if he wanted to be a movie star, well, who wouldn’t have wanted THAT?