The Pilgrim/Chapter 34

“Tell the truth. Sing with passion. Work with laughter. Love with heart. 'Cause that's all that matters in the end.” - Kris Kristofferson

The only time I ever spoke to him in person I thought that his voice had the sound of rocks tumbling down a talus slide in a western mountain range. Poets and artists with the depth and capability of Kris Kristofferson are often not good interview subjects, however. Try asking Willie Nelson to explain where melodies come from. No time is available for them to refine complicated concepts into insightful phrases or understanding. They are compelled simply to talk with much the same facility as the mortals moved by their work.

“Listen,” Kristofferson told me. “I’ve been there. I was in the military. I know the destruction we can do, the people who will die, and it’s not usually in the name of freedom. It tends to be about something else. We’re making a big mistake if we go over there.”

I wondered why he was struggling to communicate. A man who had such a command of language offered a halting delivery and seemed to stare past me into a distance that was occupied by some disturbing vision. Maybe, he teetered a bit with faltering balance. I am not certain. There was no smell of alcohol, but there was always an abundance of methods for altering consciousness at the disposal of the famous and wealthy, and Kris was no stranger to that allure.

“What’s the importance of all this?” He seemed to have recaptured a train of thought that had evaded him for a minute. “Why do we have to tear up families, ours and theirs? It’s just about oil. Everybody knows that. Is that worth anyone’s son or daughter? Hell, no, and we all know that, too.”

Kristofferson that afternoon in Austin made me think again of a nine-year-old little girl up at Fort Hood. We had been reporting on departure ceremonies of troops saying good-bye to their families before boarding flights to Kuwait and a confrontation with Saddam Hussein. While American youth were gearing up for battle, and confronting their own mortality, the sons of Kuwaiti sheiks were partying at Paris discos. No such facts landed in the U.S. media, though, and our soldiers were framed as heroes defending a small, mostly helpless ally, one, coincidentally, with lots of oil reserves. Without thinking, while we were recording video in the gymnasium where departing troops had gathered, I saw that little girl hug her daddy just before he walked away toward the giant airplane, and we approached her with the camera rolling as she sobbed.

“Do you know what’s happening?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s a war. A stupid war.”

“Well, don’t you think the country needs your daddy?”

“No! I think I need my daddy.”

I felt horrible, and apologized, profusely, as the girl’s mother wrapped her arms around her crying child. The native emotional brilliance of the girl might have made her a character in one of Kristofferson’s songs. He clearly felt the same way about the father’s departure for war. In January of 1991, the Texas musician and songwriter had joined Willie Nelson and other artists at the Palmer Auditorium in Austin for a concert billed as, “Peace for All.” The elder Bush, George H.W., had warned a few weeks earlier in Waco that a failure to act and allow Iraq to invade Kuwait laid the predicate for what he described as “world war tomorrow.” Kris was not buying H.W.’s bullshit and was trying to broaden the resistance to the marketing of “Operation Desert Storm.” The fact that Kristofferson had served in the military as a helicopter pilot, was a graduate of West Point, and a Rhodes Scholar, made him the perfect anti-war partner for the more quotidian Willie.

We had been standing outside of Willie’s bus waiting for him or Kris to step out for an interview. I had been attending Willie’s Fourth of July concerts since the late seventies and had interviewed him several times. Kris, however, I had always wanted to meet, though I was not motivated by journalism; I just wanted to talk about writing and music, which were both enduring mysteries to me. A beer or two in a rundown roadside tavern would have been perfect. Instead, I had to ask him about politics and imperialism.

“One more thing, quickly,” I said. “You surely know enough about your home state to be aware this is a conservative-as-hell place and very supportive of the military. I assume you expect some criticism for doing this in the midst of what’s being considered almost a national emergency.”

“Goddamnit,” he said. “Nobody has more respect for our military than me, and my family. Damn sure nobody can question my patriotism, either. But what we are about to do is wrong, and I’ve got a conscience and a right to express it, regardless of what these politicians think, and that’s what we are all doing here today, hoping to stop this nonsense.”

His delivery was not fluid speech and I decided there were chemicals coursing through his brain. I might have been wrong but I found myself agonizing over this gifted and fortunate man’s circumstances. What did I know? Hell, I had wanted to be him. I had seen friends and acquaintances balancing on the edge of the emotional cracker during my two decades of TV journalism, and while wandering the country with my backpack, and I began to think of the opening monologue of Kristofferson’s great ballad, “To Beat the Devil.”

“A couple of years back I come across a
Great and wasted friend of mine in the hallway of a recording studio,
And while he was reciting some poetry to me that he had written,
I saw that he was about a step away from dyin’,
And I couldn’t help but wonderin’ why.”

The description was of Johnny Cash, who fought his own demons with drugs, and was obviously not yet recovered during that encounter. Cash helped Kris launch his career after the determined Texan landed a helicopter in the backyard of Cash’s Nashville home to present him with tapes of songs he had written and recorded. The lyrics of that first album in 1970 caught my attention more than any music. There is not a musical cell in my frame but I love the sound of words properly arranged as if they, too, can deliver melodies. Although I had no record player in my college dormitory, I bought the eponymous album, “Kristofferson,” and let a friend on my floor, who had a turntable, take possession of the LP. We played “Me and Bobby McGee” and “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” to the point where everyone living along our hallway learned the lyrics.

Even in my youth, I thought “Bobby McGee” was a song suffused with immortality. The story seemed to define America, two lovers wandering the roads and rails trying to discover their country and each other. I wanted that life, writing and drifting, and I let Kristofferson become the thematic soundtrack of my dreams, and then my actions. When I met the girl who was to become my partner for life, Kris’ “Lovin’ Her Was Easier” frequently popped up when we were together as background music, and it still does. His songs, initially, were only marginally political, and I wondered if that was because he was considered “country,” a genre, during the Vietnam Era, which was certain to offer disdain to political protestors. Merle Haggard’s, “The Fightin’ Side of Me” seemed to express the sentiments of country music at that time.

Never mind, though, that the Vietnam War had no more to do with American freedom than did the battle H.W. Bush was about to start in Kuwait. Kristofferson’s politics, a tad more progressive than Merle’s, began to emerge in his writing with songs like “Sandinista,” which was produced in 1986 during the U.S.-backed Contra war in Nicaragua. The song contravened U.S. policy in the conflict and was undoubtedly penned as the songwriter, and the rest of America was oblivious to the secret Iran Contra drugs and guns operations being managed by then Vice President H.W. Bush. “Sandinista,” Kristofferson sang, “You can hold your head up high. You have given back their Freedom. You have lived up to your name.”

Sitting in a conference room in Washington, D.C., as I was waiting for a copy of the “Tower Report” on the Iran Contra scandal, I found myself wondering if Kristofferson ever questioned his work’s focus. Music had power, of course, but was it politically influential enough to foster change? And if it could not, what was the point of political protest songs? Texas U.S. Senator John Tower’s report on the Iran Contra Scandal was little more than a whitewash that found the appropriate fall guy in Marine Oliver North and kept the responsibility for the scam away from H.W Bush, who had authorized the clandestine endeavor. The true evil actors in American politics always seem above the law. I got in a bit of trouble later that night in my live television broadcast back to Houston when I described Tower’s findings as, “A number two Mexican dinner with one taco missing.”

My sense was that Kristofferson was always at his political best with more nuanced lyricism. In his 1972, “Jesus Was A Capricorn,” he offered a subtle critique of hypocrisy and social intolerance by mocking how we often marginalize people who do not fit conventional profiles and might just look different. “Everybody’s gotta have somebody to look down on,” he wrote. “Who they can feel better than any time they please.” The song began with a bald concession that humans never seem to change, regardless of inspiring examples.

“Jesus was a Capricorn, he ate organic foods,
He believed in love and peace and never wore no shoes.
Long hair beard and sandals and a funky bunch of friends,
Reckon they’d just nail him up if he came down again.”

When a soul can reduce the entirety of the human condition down to a few couplets, there seems no reason for the rest of us to bother writing. The urge to create, though, does not simply vanish. Kristofferson’s linguistic skills inspired writers like me even though we could have reasonably been intimidated. I have tried to write and think at the intersection of art and politics because I do not believe there is much in life that is unaffected by the political. His ability to make the poetic into the political only ensures his legend will grow over time. History will likely consider him the songwriting equal of Bob Dylan, and, to paraphrase Steve Earle’s praise of Townes Van Zandt, "I’d stand on Guy Clark’s glass coffee table in my cowboy boots and shout that to the world." I have heard musicians say that their music comes through them, not from them, as if the universe were its source and they were the ciphers. I am inclined to think that might be true of Kristofferson’s lyrics, too.

All writers, of course, however they do it, are chasing the truth, and no one spoke better to the frustration and importance of that challenge than Kris in his song, “To Beat the Devil.” He describes being a musician down on his luck having an encounter with an old man in a bar, “cigarette smoke in the ceiling, saw dust on the floor,” who turns out to be the devil. Kristofferson agrees to give the man his guitar and listens as he sings a refrain that ought to echo down through the millennia for every sentient being on board our little green and blue rock.

"If you waste your time a-talkin'
To the people who don't listen
To the things that you are sayin'
Who do you think's gonna hear?
And if you should die explainin' how
The things that they complain about
Are things they could be changin'
Who do you think's gonna care?"
There were other lonely singers in a world turned deaf and blind
Who were crucified for what they tried to show
And their voices have been scattered by the swirlin' winds of time
'Cause the truth remains that no one wants to know."

Adios, Kris. I’m glad I was walking in the world the same time as you.