Bonus Scenes 
A Star Is Reborn
Kris Kristofferson’s powerful performance in last year’s Lone Star still has Hollywood buzzing. But after more than two decades of highs and lows, the Brownsville native knows better than to let success go to his head—again.
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After graduation he got a deferment from the Army to accept a prestigious Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University in England. At Oxford Kris wrote a novel, but it was rejected, and he was writing his dissertation on Blake when he decided to leave academic life. He married his high school sweetheart, Fran Beer, and entered the Army with his ROTC commission. He volunteered for every hard job the Army had—�ight school, jump school, ranger school. He started drinking. Like everything he did, Kris drank hard. “‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,’ Blake wrote,” Kris tells me now, smiling at the contradiction at the heart of this perceived truth.
He was a helicopter pilot in Germany for three years before he volunteered for Vietnam. “I was looking for something that would put some meaning in my life, something that was real,” he says. “I didn’t know anything except what I read in Stars and Stripes or got through military channels. I believed we were fighting for freedom over there.” Instead of sending him to Vietnam, the Army assigned him to West Point to teach English. That was 1965, and he was nearly thirty. But Captain Kristofferson’s first life was about to be abducted by aliens.
Before reporting to West Point, he took a leave and visited a friend in Nashville, bringing along tapes of some songs he had written in Germany. Nashville was exciting, intoxicating, potentially lethal. “I was still in uniform the first time I met Johnny Cash,” Kris tells me. “He was backstage at the Grand Ole Opry, dressed all in black and pilled up—electric, dangerous, and unpredictable. And, frankly, it looked very attractive to me!” Kris resigned his commission, moved his wife and two children to Nashville, and got a job at Columbia Records as a janitor. “I accepted that it was a leap of faith, leaving home to do what I loved,” Kris says, “but I knew from the minute I started doing it that I was right.”
Not surprisingly, his marriage collapsed a few years later. Heavily in debt and facing $500 a month in child support, Kris took a job �ying helicopters to offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. He commuted between Baton Rouge and Nashville, consumed more than ever with making it as a songwriter, but increasingly confused about reality. “A lot of my pilot buddies from the Army were coming back from Vietnam telling horror stories,” he remembers. “Some really good career officers went over there believing in what our country was doing and came back sickened by what they saw—throwing people out of choppers, killing civilians. It wasn’t like a sudden change of mind, but the more I read, the more the scales fell away from my eyes. It was disturbing for a kid who grew up in Brownsville believing that God was on our side and our country stood for justice and freedom.”
Kristofferson’s first recorded song was “Vietnam Blues,” which made fun of anti-war protesters. After that his lyrics turned to the left. Having grown up believing in justice and freedom, he began demanding them. “Nashville was a real Rubicon in my life,” Kris tells me. “Joseph Campbell talks of following your bliss; that’s what I did when I went to Nashville.” His heroes were Willie, Cash, and Roger Miller. When he was a janitor at Columbia, Kris passed along tapes of his music to Cash, who threw them into a lake. Nevertheless, Cash encouraged Kris to keep writing.
Pills and booze were the drugs of choice. “I thought the function of an artist was to burn, not rust,” Kris recalls. They stayed up for days and nights and weeks, Kris and pals like Mickey Newbury, writing songs and playing them for each other. Country musicians were considered trash by the Nashville business establishment, and songwriters were the lowest of the low. Music City in 1965 consisted of just two streets, Sixteenth and Seventeenth avenues. “The people I knew thought songwriting was a serious and worthwhile business, and I agreed with them,” he remembers. “I’ll tell you, it was like Paris in the twenties.”
One morning in 1967 Kristofferson landed a helicopter in Johnny Cash’s back yard. “He came stumbling out with a beer in one hand and a tape in the other,” Cash recalled last year during an interview for a BBC documentary on Kristofferson. One of the songs on the tape was “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” which Cash performed on his television show. Cash and Kristofferson had bonded into a sort of brotherhood of the damned. “Kris said I looked like a black snake,” Cash remembered. “He looked in my face and saw I was dying and wondered why. Then he wrote me a song.” The song was “To Beat the Devil,” a story about a poet who meets the devil in a bar, drinks his beer, then steals his song. It’s the kind of thing that William Blake might have written if he’d had Kristofferson’s sense of humor.
The seventies were a golden age for songwriters, much like the thirties, when the Gershwins and Hoagy Carmichael emerged not merely as songwriters but as trendsetters and celebrities. Writers like Willie and Kris forever changed country music, elevated it to an art. Kristofferson didn’t just write about love, he wrote about sex. “Take the ribbon from your hair / shake it loose and let it fall,” from “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” is out-and-out foreplay. “It was the first time anyone in Nashville had taken this direct approach to sex,” Willie says. Record producer Don Was once observed that Kristofferson was the most intelligent person he’d ever met. “That kind of enhanced consciousness can be a psychic burden to the poor soul who has got to live with it twenty-four hours a day,” Was said, “but it sure makes for some great music.”
KRISTOFFERSON HAS ALWAYS THOUGHT OF HIMSELF as a songwriter, not an actor and certainly not a singer. “I sing like a bullfrog,” he told Combine Music founder Fred Foster, who replied, “Yeah, but a bullfrog who communicates.” Two songs in particular sealed Kristofferson’s reputation as a writer and indirectly led to his screen career—“Me and Bobby McGee” and “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” Dennis Hopper heard Kris’s tape of “Bobby McGee” and invited him to Peru to play a bit part in and write some songs for the cocaine-induced epic The Last Movie. Director Sam Peckinpah went wild for “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” Janis Joplin learned the words and music to “Bobby McGee” from a mutual friend, Bobby Neuwirth, and started performing the number in concert. And that led to her much publicized affair with Kristofferson.
Contrary to popular myth, the real Bobby McGee wasn’t Joplin but a secretary named Bobby McKee who worked at Combine Music. Kris wrote the song on assignment for Fred Foster, who came up with the title. Flying a helicopter over the Gulf, Kris decided that it should be a road song and wrote: “Busted �at in Baton Rouge, heading for the trains.” Listening to the rhythm of the helicopter and remembering one of Mickey Newbury’s songs, he wrote, “Bobby thumbed a diesel down, just before it rained …” Later he remembered the final scene of La Strada, Federico Fellini’s magnificent road movie, when Anthony Quinn realizes that he has dumped the only woman he truly loves, and that became the inspiration for the line, “Somewhere near Salinas, I let her slip away.” Kris explains, “It was that double-edged nature of freedom, when the pain of the loss more than equals the pleasure of the gain.”
Kristofferson’s meeting with Joplin came at the end of a drug-inspired journey that started as something else—a party at a New York penthouse in 1969. The merrymakers were a cast of characters emblematic of that psychedelic period: Odetta (an enormously gifted black folk singer), Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Mickey Newbury, Bobby Neuwirth, Michael J. Pollard, Kris, and others. “There was much tequila and coke,” Kris remembers, “and in the middle of the night Neuwirth says to me, ‘Hey, Range
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