 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