The silver-tongued devil
Singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson has lived through hits and hard times.

By Derk Richardson

KRIS KRISTOFFERSON WROTE what could someday be his own epitaph in the chorus to his 1971 single "The Pilgrim: Chapter 33":

He's a poet, he's a picker.

He's a prophet, he's a pusher.

He's a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he's stoned.

He's a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,

Taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home.

He probably wasn't thinking about his headstone at the time. He'd come back from hanging out with Dennis Hopper on location in Peru for the filming of The Last Movie, and he was tripping on the cosmic significance of 33 – his and Hopper's age in early 1970, the age of Jesus Christ when he was crucified. So he simply folded that and a dollop of self-reflection into a strong melody and came up with a great song to add to a catalog that already included "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down," "For the Good Times," "Help Me Make It Through the Night," and "Me and Bobby McGee."

Three decades down the highway, Kristofferson is still a walking contradiction – a prolific singer-songwriter whose songs are best known through other people's versions; a Grammy-winning composer who's had only one number-one hit of his own and whose records haven't been noticed much for more than 20 years; a movie star who garnered a Golden Globe when he played opposite Barbra Streisand but never felt at ease in Hollywood; and a legendary carouser, with 25 years of hard living on the road behind him, who is the proud father of eight children and has settled down in Hawaii with his third wife and their five kids.

And now the prospect of running out of road is definitely on his mind. He underwent multiple-bypass surgery on his overtaxed heart three years ago. And he's just reached another temporal milestone: "I'll be 66 here in a few days," he said by phone from his home on Maui about a week before his June 22 birthday. "I guess I've got to double up on 'The Pilgrim: Chapter 33.' " And putting a little more shoulder behind those thoughts of mortality pounding on the door is the recent release of Don't Let the Bastards Get You Down: A Tribute to Kris Kristofferson (Jackpine Social Club), a collection of Kristofferson compositions as performed by a variety of indie artists, including Tom Verlaine, Chuck Prophet, John Doe, Tom Heyman, Mother Hips, Mover, Oranger, Polara, Kelly Hogan, Jon Langford (of the Mekons) and Chip Taylor, and Hanna Marcus and Mark Kozelek. "That gives me mixed feelings," Kristofferson says of the homage, punctuating his sentences with the raspy laughter of a man uneasy with the truth of what he's saying. "It feels kind of like you're dead and buried. On the other hand, it's nice they even know the material."

It's appropriate that his songs – the above-named classics as well as "Loving Her Was Easier," "Nobody Wins," "Why Me," "Jesus Was a Capricorn," and "Jody and the Kid" – should provide the bridge between Kristofferson and a younger generation of musicians. Whether or not they share his left-leaning, antiestablishment convictions, they operate as virtual outlaws on the same margins of the mainstream music industry where Kristofferson has operated for more than a decade. And although his rugged, weathered face reached its highest profile in the string of movies he made in the 1970s, including Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Blume in Love, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, A Star Is Born, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, and Semi-Tough, when the sun finally sets on Kristofferson, it's the songs he cares about most. "When I committed myself to being a songwriter, I just threw myself into it totally," he explains. "It was my whole reason for being around, to make music, to make songs, to be what I thought a songwriter was. I started getting successful at it in 1970. Before that I had to have a whole bunch of different odd jobs, but once I started doing it, I just kept doing it. I felt like that's what I do, you know?"

Outlaw ambassador

Whether or not you'd call them contradictions, Kristofferson's résumé bristles with juicy details that compete for space with "songwriter." A native of Brownsville, Texas, and eldest child of an Air Force major general who, after retiring from the military, led air operations for the Saudi Arabian company Aramco, Kristofferson went to high school in San Mateo and studied creative writing at Pomona College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. He won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, where he studied Shakespeare and William Blake, writing songs and boxing on the side. Feinting in the direction of his father's footsteps, he enlisted in the army and became a helicopter pilot in Germany. But he continued pursuing music as an avocation, and in 1965, instead of accepting reassignment to teach English at West Point, he migrated to Nashville, where, through a friend, he had made a connection with songwriter turned publisher Marijohn Wilkin (who had cowritten "The Long Black Veil").

During his first five years in Music City, Kristofferson managed to get several of his songs recorded by established Nashville stars: "Vietnam Blues" by Dave Dudley, "Jody and the Kid" by Roy Drusky, "From the Bottle to the Bottom" by Billy Walker, "Me and Bobby McGee" by Roger Miller, "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down" by both Ray Stevens and Johnny Cash, "For the Good Times" by Ray Price, and "Help Me Make It Through the Night" by Sammi Smith. But he made his living as a janitor in the Columbia studios where Cash, Lefty Frizzell, Simon and Garfunkel, and Bob Dylan recorded. He also worked as a bartender and a chopper pilot servicing oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

Although he cut a single for Epic in 1967, it wasn't until Johnny Cash featured him onstage at the 1969 Newport Folk Festival and on his television show that Kristofferson gained recognition as a performer. In April 1970, Monument Records released his debut album, Kristofferson, followed the next year by The Silver Tongued Devil and I. By then Kristofferson was in his mid 30s, which goes a long way toward explaining why so many baby boomers have reacted with surprise when I've told them Kristofferson is turning 66. Because he got such a relatively late start as a performer, it always seemed like Kristofferson should be the same age as other emerging songwriters of the period, such as John Prine, Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Joe Ely. "I'd already been to Oxford and had spent almost five years in the army before I went to Nashville," he says. "I was 10 years older than all my peers when I started performing."

Kristofferson's late blooming also helps explain his unique position at the interface between mainstream country and rock and roll. Unlike that of Gram Parsons, who was pivotal in bringing a country twang to psychedelic rock in the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, or even Bob Dylan, whose Nashville Skyline came out a year before Kristofferson and featured a duet with Johnny Cash, this peripatetic Texan's musical direction was determined by his early-adolescent enthrallment with Hank Williams. He loved folk music (Josh White), R&B (the Coasters), and rock and roll (Elvis), but traditional country song forms shaped his songwriting aesthetic. As he wrote in one of his mid-'70s songs, covered successfully by Hank Williams Jr., "I dig Bobby Dylan and I dig Johnny Cash / And I think Waylon Jennings is a table thumpin' smash / And hearing Joni Mitchell feels as good as smokin' grass / And if you don't like Hank Williams / Honey, you can kiss my ass."

When Kristofferson reset his compass, away from academia and the Army (much to the chagrin of his unforgiving parents), he focused his ambitions on Nashville, not New York or Los Angeles. Yet his literary bent and time spent abroad gave his songwriting certain qualities – gritty realism, poetically stated existential angst, and overt sensuality – that separated his work from the standard "countrypolitan" fare coming out of Nashville's Music Row. The lyrics of "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down," for instance, read more like something written by a Beatle on a bender ("Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes / And found my cleanest dirty shirt / It's the one I'm wearin' / And I shaved my face and combed my hair / And stumbled down the stairs to meet the day") or an economical Bob Dylan ("There's nothin' short of dyin' / Half as lonesome as the sound / On the sleepin' city sidewalks / Sunday mornin' comin' down") than by Harlan Howard. When performed by mainstream country singers such as Ray Price and Johnny Cash, Kristofferson's songs often soared to the top of the country charts (four times within eight months in 1970-71), but as Janis Joplin proved with her posthumous number-one pop cover of "Me and Bobby McGee," and as Gladys Knight demonstrated with her soulful version of "Help Me Make It Through the Night," Kristofferson's songs spoke to a large and variegated audience.

Another sign of Kristofferson's link to the baby boom generation was his need to sing his own songs, to be not just a tremendously successful songwriter but a singer-songwriter. "It just worked better that way," is all he says on the subject, although he admits to not having a voice anything close to that of the "real" country singers, such as George Jones and Merle Haggard. (In his liner notes to Kristofferson's 1982 joint recording with Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, and Brenda Lee, The Winning Hand, Johnny Cash recalls the first time he heard Kristofferson on tape: "When the song ended, I said, 'That man's a poet, pity he can't sing.' ")

Nonetheless, when Kristofferson was released in 1970, his record label sensed potential pop appeal and sent the singer out on the road to support the album. He went where the rockers were, including the Isle of Wight Festival. In a sense, he was paving the way for the "outlaw" crossover that would come several years later. "All the clubs I worked in from the time I started were like the Troubadour and the Bitter End," he says. "They weren't country. I tried to get Waylon's agent to get him in there, because I thought, 'Jeez, if they like me, they're gonna love Willie and Waylon.' Willie once said, 'Kris was out there like John the Baptist, getting them ready for us.' "

Kristofferson's fortunes as a singer-songwriter (he recorded and toured for much of the 1970s with his second wife, Rita Coolidge) were compromised by several factors. One was his drinking, which took its toll on his concert performances and his marriage. Another was his demanding acting career. Until the grandiose 1980 flop of Heaven's Gate downgraded his Hollywood standing, Kristofferson appeared in at least one major film a year. He has maintained that his movie career never really distracted him from his songwriting. In terms of quantity, that's probably true. He continued to put out a record a year throughout the '70s. But such albums as Spooky Lady's Sideshow, Who's to Bless and Who's to Blame, Surreal Thing, Easter Island, and Shake Hands with the Devil had little if any pop impact (especially compared with the soundtrack album A Star Is Born). Kristofferson was in a rut.

Classic sounds

During the 1980s, Kristofferson's stock plummeted on both the recording and motion picture fronts. Other than The Winning Hand and the popular all-star Highwaymen collaborations with Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Waylon Jennings, he was practically invisible as a recording artist during much of the decade. He attributes his commercial slide largely to his Nashville-based label's lack of support after he shifted his base of operations to the West Coast. "I started recording in Los Angeles with David Anderle, and since it was my own band and he was a great producer, I felt like we were making real good music," he says. "I can understand why the company back in Nashville had their feelings hurt and didn't care much for the product that came back from me. So from 1973 on it was "YOYO – you're on your own.' "

Kristofferson's determination to infuse his songs with a radical political perspective, critical of U.S. policies in El Salvador and Nicaragua, didn't help. The 1986 album Repossessed, which featured the song "They Killed Him" (covered by Bob Dylan), spent six months on the country charts, but 1990's Third World Warrior, with paeans to Nelson Mandela and the Sandinistas, for lack of a better word, bombed. He even faced the prospect of pickets at a Midwestern concert because he had sung a song in Nicaragua during the celebration of their revolution. "I'm sure that it helped put me out of the loop," Kristofferson says of his outspokenness. "I'm sure it didn't help me when I put out a couple of albums at Polygram, and there were songs on there about Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson. They had expected to market me as a country singer, which I've never been. I mean, I wasn't good enough to be a country singer. I didn't know what slot I was supposed to fit into, and I'm sure they didn't either. I can understand how they couldn't market it if they thought I was a country act."

But even if a record company had grasped and enthusiastically supported his anti-imperialism, the fact was Kristofferson didn't write much inspiring and enduring agitprop. One of the most telling indictments of his later work is that all but two of the songs on Don't Let the Bastards Get You Down appeared on Kristofferson's first four albums. Verlaine zeroed in on "The Hawk," from the 1986 Alan Rudolph film Trouble in Mind, and Marcus and Kozelek dug up "Lights of Magdala" from Spooky Lady's Sideshow. Maybe the others just didn't look hard enough (most of Kristofferson's later catalog is out of print); maybe they just found the pickings slim after 1972.

Kristofferson implicitly endorsed the superior quality of his early material when he rerecorded his "classics" on 1999's The Austin Sessions, featuring guest appearances by Jackson Browne, Steve Earle, Alison Krauss, Mark Knopfler, and others. Even his last album of new material, A Moment of Forever, produced by Don Was and released after a two-year delay in 1995, featured renditions of four older songs amid the fresher compositions. "I don't write as fast or as often as I used to," he admits. "I don't feel the hunger to get out and do something new for somebody to hear. But I'll probably be writing them as long as I'm conscious. I think I just organize my experience that way."

Shifting gears

Dissolution and loneliness don't figure as prominently in Kristofferson's current writing, but politics still does. A Moment of Forever's "Under the Gun" attacks "swollen men, blind with power" who "break the rules, one by one / With their lies, raising the danger / Of their games under the gun." Another recent song, "The Circle," available only on a Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize-inspired compilation, starts with a condemnation of a Clinton missile attack on Baghdad that killed a revered Iraqi female artist and folds her story into that of Argentine mothers of the disappeared. Among the texts Kristofferson consults is Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

When it comes to the big picture, Kristofferson isn't hopeful. "It's worse than ever," he says of the current U.S. war on terrorism. "It makes the Gulf War, which was the most cold-blooded piece of business I'd seen since I was an adult on the planet, it makes it look like nothing. We're getting sucked into a cycle of violence now that we're not gonna be able to pull out of. It really is ironic when you see Eisenhower's old warning about the growing power of the military-industrial complex, and my god, today they've got a blank check."

Kristofferson's blood still boils at the mention of Kissinger, Rumsfeld, or either George Bush, but it no longer races in time to the frenetic pace of an overdriven professional career. The quality of feature-film projects offered him generally improved after John Sayles cast him in Lone Star in 1996, and Kristofferson has stayed active in front of the camera. But he measures his moves much more carefully than before. Indeed, he hasn't been out on the road to play his music on a regular basis for six or seven years. "I guess I got tired of the fast life when I got a new family," he says. "I got more focused on 'em. What my kids are doing seems more important than getting out and spreading the word. From 1970 until 1995, if I wasn't doing a film, I was on the road with my band. It was my whole life for about 25 years. And when you look back, that's a long time. Then I came home when my daughter Casey was gonna have a baby, a little girl, and I never went back out. Back when I started, it was a lot easier for me to leave my kids behind, I guess 'cause I was still fighting to be who I could be, find out who it was."

"I have never sought serenity," Kristofferson says, laughing again. "To me that always sounded boring. But it's not. I'm surrounded by my kids and their kittens and their dogs, and it's so beautiful, and I am just amazed that life has left me here and not on some highway out there still, or really hungry for the things in the business that you aren't gonna get when you're older. Now all I can think of is, goddamn, I'm still here, and look how neat it is. So I've been able to resist going back out, but I do feel kind of like the guy in the old western movies who was part of the gang that used to rob banks, and they're saying 'Come on, let's do one more gig.' I'm the sodbuster who doesn't want to go. Willie's view of it is much less glamorous. I told him I was out there on my tractor and going around with my chain saw, and he just said, 'How domestic!' "

When Kristofferson makes a rare appearance in San Francisco later this month, it will be a one-shot deal unless all the cards fall into place. "This show will be interesting, to see if I feel like I ought to be out there," he says. "If it works, if it still feels like a creative experience, and if it feels like my work is moving people in the direction I always hoped it might, toward brotherhood and caring about injustice, then I'll probably do it again. If not, then I'm gonna stay around the house and find another way to express myself. Like maybe write a book."

Kris Kristofferson performs (with Stephen Bruton on guitar and Keith Harper on bass), with Paul Williams opening, Sat/20, 8 p.m., Gershwin Theater, University of San Francisco, 2350 Turk, S.F. $45-$75. 1-866-468-3399, www.ticketweb.com.