With the release of
Spooky Lady’s Sideshow, Kristofferson would begin a commercial slide and never again attain the sales he had up to that point. Rather than record with longtime producer
Fred Foster in Nashville, the singer opted to record with Coolidge’s producer
David Anderle at
Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, and the resultant LP, sandwiched between two duet albums with wife Coolidge in 1973 and 1974, deals almost exclusively with dissipation and decline, to the point where it could be viewed as a concept album. As William Ruhlmann observed in his
AllMusic review of the LP, "Over and over, Kristofferson sang of characters and of himself (or, at any rate in the persona of a first-person narrator) going downhill while consuming liquor and drugs. From the back of the album cover, which was festooned with fictional negative reviews, to song titles like "Star-Spangled Bummer (Whores Die Hard)" and "Stairway to the Bottom", the album was a portrait of excess and deterioration." The utterly uncommercial nature of the subject matter left Monument groping for a potential hit, so the rowdy horn-driven "I May Smoke Too Much" was released as a single, but it bombed, and
Spooky Lady’s Sideshow became the singer's briefest charting LP of his career on the pop charts, although it did make the country Top 10. The album utilized top session players, who enabled Kristofferson and Anderle to try out an assortment of styles and inject the kind of variety that Kristofferson's vocal delivery fought against, while Mike Utley's organ playing contributed a loose
Dylanesque sound and, on occasion, an infectious jazzy-bluesy groove, as on "Late Again". The themes covered – freedom, the Devil, Jesus Christ – were not new in Kristofferson's songs, but the landscapes in these songs were unremittingly grim, as biographer Stephen Miller points out: Kristofferson covered "Lights of Magdala", a poetic Larry Murray composition which contained religious overtones, and co-wrote two of the album's tracks with
Roger McGuinn and
Bob Neuwirth, lending further credence to the album's penchant for celebrating the rock and roll lifestyle. Beginning with
Spooky Lady Sideshow, Kristofferson would blame his commercial downturn on Monument's lack of promotional support rather than his acting career, and he dismissed the notion that he ought to quit Hollywood, later quipping "I was doing movies, in a bathtub with
Barbra Streisand! I said, ‘What! Quit this?’" ==Reception==