Kris Kristofferson – To beat the devil: intimations of immortality
“I’d be crazy,” he goes on, rounding out the chorus of “Pilgrim’s Progress”, “not to wonder if I’m worthy of the part I play in this dream that’s coming true.” Once again — and with lines that echo his early ’70s number “Why Me” — Kristofferson isn’t referring to the dream in question as if it’s some passive fantasy that’s happening to him. He’s talking about the formation of something real that he has labored, by dint of folly and imagination, his entire life to create. A dream incredibly vivid and intense, and one that has encompassed so much. The triumphs and disappointments of a lifetime; a staggering array of collaborators and friends; the flowering of a radical political consciousness; a family once lost, now found; and lately, some heady recognition, including induction into the Country Music Hall Of Fame in 2004 and a retrospective of his movies at Austin’s South By Southwest festival in March.
“Look at that old photograph, is it really you?” he marvels to open This Old Road. Set off by Don Was’ roomy production, the track’s rustic strains of piano, harmonica, and mandolin lend a suitably hymnal cast to the mix of wonder and weariness in Kristofferson’s craggy, pitch-indifferent whisper. It’s the lassitude that lingers, especially when, after remarking to himself, “Ain’t you come a long way down this old road,” he sings of “running out of time,” of “holy night…falling,” and of “faces that [he’s] passed along the way.”
Many of those faces are now gone, including those of peers and running buddies such as Miller, Newbury, Howard, and Shel Silverstein — and, more recently, Waylon Jennings. Easily the toughest goodbyes that Kristofferson has had to say of late, however, were those he bid Johnny and June Carter Cash, just four months apart, in 2003.
“God, I miss them,” he said when the Cashes came up in our conversation, and they often did. “I look back on all that time that we spent together. I just wish that I had cherished every moment even more. But I feel so grateful to have known them as well as I did.
“That’s kind of a presumptuous thing to say, you know? But to be close to them…,” he went on, before pausing, maybe thinking the better of going too far down so intimate a path.
“Coming to town, you know, John was my idol,” he began again, tracing a still personal yet ultimately more public arc. “I was just thinking the other day. One of the things that I like best about my life is looking at some of these people who were my heroes who became my friends. Like Willie and Waylon, and Muhammad Ali. But John was really special.”
Cash, after all, befriended Kristofferson when he was still just a wannabe songwriter emptying ashtrays and running errands at Columbia Studios on Music Row. And it was the Cashes who, after inviting him to a dinner party at their home, asked Kristofferson to join them onstage at the Newport Folk Festival in 1967 — and who practically had to drag him up there with them after he’d hitchhiked all the way from Nashville to get there.
Cash, in an interview I did with him at the Carter Fold for No Depression a year before he died, still had vivid memories of his protege’s Newport debut. “When it came time for him to go onstage, I said, ‘Kris, you go out and do whatever you feel like doing, then call me back out and I’ll come back on,'” Cash began. “So it came time for him to go on and he stood there frozen. He couldn’t move. I said, ‘Kris, the emcee’s calling you,’ and he still couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. He was petrified. Well, finally, June walked up to him, kicked him in the seat of the pants, and said, ‘Get out there.’
“So he went out and he did ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’ and ‘Me And Bobby McGee’. I forget what else he did, but the next day, on the front page of The New York Times, it said, ‘Kris Kristofferson Takes Newport’. I was really proud of that for Kris. He really needed that break; it was a great leap forward, and he got a really good one there.”
Maybe not as big a break, though, as the one Kristofferson got from appearing on Cash’s prime-time variety TV show two years later. Or from Cash scoring a #1 country hit with the unexpurgated version of “Sunday Morning Coming Down” that he performed on his show in 1970.
That record would become Kristofferson’s first chart-topping cut as a songwriter and would win him the award for Song of the Year at the CMAs. It also opened the door, as has been widely chronicled, to his shaggy, inebriated reception of the honor at the Ryman Auditorium, ensuring him Outlaw status a few years before anyone thought to give the iconoclastic persona he helped create a name.
THE BURDEN OF FREEDOM
The scene that Kristofferson made at the 1970 CMA Awards was hardly an anomaly. In many ways he had been crossing lines and taking risks, even to the point of self-sabotage, for much of his life. And maybe as a matter of course.
Along the way he had lettered in football and soccer at Pomona College and been a Golden Gloves boxer. He’d been inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He’d won fiction contests sponsored by The Atlantic Monthly, and, as a young military officer, trained as a member of the Army’s elite Airborne Rangers. The pressure — as an athlete, student, writer, and serviceman — to perpetually surpass himself must have been overwhelming at times.
Kristofferson’s accomplishments were a great boon, to be sure. Yet being blessed with such a profusion of gifts, and with the privilege to pursue them so freely — his father was a two-star general in the Air Force — must also have been a burden. It was a legacy that had to be lived down or shrugged on occasion, or at least be put in jeopardy every now and then for it to mean or be worth anything at all.
Why else would Kristofferson, with the constitutional impulsivity of someone with attention deficit disorder (how, in hindsight, could he have focused on any one thing?), discard the innumerable opportunities his many gifts afforded him? Why, at times, would he go so far as to risk his life to feel more fully alive?
The most unforgettable and perilous cases of this habitual risk-taking were those when, while stationed in Germany, Kristofferson and his fellow pilots would get bombed and fly into the hollows of the Rhine River Valley, skidding along the surface of the water.