My route into the work of Kris Kristofferson, who died this week, was an unusual one – an album by left-field California rock trio Acetone.

Released in 1995, I Guess I Would was short (very) and consisted entirely of covers of songs by artists such as Gram Parsons and John Prine. But over a third of the running time was taken up by an 11 minute version of Border Lord, the title track from Kristofferson’s 1972 album.

I loved the fuzz-drenched, three chord riff it ran on – even taught myself to play it – but it was the gravity of the opening line that dragged me into the orbit of Planet Kristofferson and has kept me there ever since: “Darkness had us covered when we split from Minnesota in the morning, in the rain.” And then the refrain: “Tapping time and thinking of the time we never had the time to take.”

‘Wow,’ I thought. ‘There’s a storyteller. Let’s go where he’s going.’ So I did.

I found a copy of the original album on vinyl – Kristofferson’s version is even better, of course, though shorter – and then grabbed at anything else of his I could find, like Jesus Was A Capricorn (also 1972) and Spooky Lady’s Sideshow, from 1974.

The very definition of a man of parts – Rhodes scholar, Oxford University boxing blue, helicopter pilot in the US Air........

© Herald Scotland