A Texas Highways Moment with Kris Kristofferson

In any properly illustrated dictionary of the English language there are—or at least there should be—two illustrations next to the definition of “Renaissance Man”…one of Leonardo da Vinci, and the other of Kris Kristofferson.

Da Vinci painted The Last Supper, merged art and anatomical science, and invented the helicopter. Kristofferson, for his part, injected literary allusion and unapologetic sexuality into country music, burned a hole through the movie screen in films as wildly diverse as A Star Is Born and Lone Star, and once—there’s a certain symmetry between him and ol’ Leo here—landed a helicopter on Johnny Cash’s lawn, the better to personally hand-deliver a tape of song demos to the Man in Black.

Along the way (take a deep breath here; as Bette Davis said, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride), the Brownsville native has knocked around as an Army pilot, an amateur boxer, a Rhodes Scholar, and an offshore oil-patch chopper pilot. He has also put in time as a night janitor in a Nashville studio where Cash and Bob Dylan cut some of their hits, as a struggling apprentice songwriter, and, finally, as the pen behind massive hits for Ray Price (“For the Good Times”), Sammi Smith (“Help Me Make It Through the Night”), Johnny Cash (“Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”), Janis Joplin (“Me and Bobby McGee”), and the Highwaymen, among others.

He has been, often simultaneously, a multimedia sex symbol and a left-wing political activist and a veterans’ advocate… A flamboyant, booze-and-dope-fueled symbol of burnout and excess… A thoughtful and passionate champion of the songwriter’s craft… The star of a series of comic-book vampire movies… And a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame (inducted in 2004), whose personal pantheon of heroes ranges from Wild Bunch filmmaker Sam Peckinpah to Mahatma Gandhi.

There is, seemingly, no paradox his life does not embrace, a sentiment echoed famously in his song “The Pilgrim: Chapter 33,” when he sings, “He’s a walking contradiction/Partly truth and partly fiction/Taking every wrong direction/On his lonely way back home.”

In the course of his life and his career, Kris Kristofferson has embodied the character of his native Texas—rough-hewn, ferociously loyal, outspoken, occasionally contrary (or even ornery), and ceaselessly iconoclastic.

“I’m not the leader,” he once exclaimed in Sam Peckinpah’s movie Convoy, “I’m just in front.” That might have been true for his character in the movie, but Kristofferson himself has lit out for the territory and forged new paths in songwriting, film, political activism, and the mercurial art of celebrity itself.

At age 70—and after many long years clean and sober—his is a uniquely American life that is both richly envisioned and passionately lived. His latest album, This Old Road, is gaining him some of his best notices in 30 years. Kristofferson has not only been there and back, he gives every sign of going around again.

If one dials his number out in Hawaii, where he has homesteaded for many years, he answers the phone himself in that famous gravelly voice that seems to simultaneously rasp and croon. On this particular day, his John Deere lawnmower has quit on him, so he’s got a little time to talk to a nosy journalist about the songwriter’s art, what Texas means to him, the impact of turning 70, and why, against all discernible odds, Hawaii reminds him fondly of Brownsville.

See the full article in the April 2007 issue.

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