Page 11 - Songwriters Workshop issue 2

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SO Kris Kristofferson

Hopper’s calamitous The Last Movie, in 1971. “We
They are dropping like flies these days, his old pals; were down in Peru in this old Inca village, and
Jennings and Cash in just the last couple of years. Dennis was as crazy as he ever was. I mean, I see the
“And it’s only gonna get worse!” he laughs. He and guy he’s mellowed into now, doing his
Willie Nelson are still standing, though. retirement-fund commercials on TV, and I ove
Dennis, but back then he was” - and here his voice
“He was my hero when I came into town in 65, and assumes an awed tone - “the most self-destruc-
he’s probably my closest friend right now - saw him tive guy I had ever seen! He got a priest defrocked,
last night. You know, he didn’t even have a beard because he got him involved in some kind of weird
back then. I had the very first beard in all of country mass for James Dean. He antagonised the military
music. And he used to give me a lot of shit for it!” and all the politicians. It was crazy.”

The beard was an accident, Kristofferson says. “I had Cisco Pike, a year later, was easier. Kristofferson
pneumonia and I had to go into hospital for a week, played a paroled folk singer blackmailed by Gene
didn’t shave the whole time. And when I came out, Hackman’s narcotics cop. Lost to posterity for 30
some magazine took a picture of me and called it ‘the years, it’s the best movie he ever made. The only
new face of country music’. Ever since then Willie, acting lesson he ever took, Kristofferson says, came
too, has just looked as wild as heck.” from his old friend Anthony Zerbe: “’Enjoy yourself.
Ignore the camera.’ That was it.”
Kristofferson was not to the Nashville manner born.
Born in 1936, he grew up in a conservative Texas
military family, the eldest son of an army pilot, and
he excelled at the things soldiers’ sons are expected
to excel at before they, too, join up. He was a fine
athlete, a college fratboy, and he won a Rhodes
scholarship to Oxford, where he read English at
Merton College.

The move to Nashville didn’t please his parents:
he had reached the rank of captain by then, with a
pilot’s licence and the prospect of a teaching post at
West Point military academy. Turning all that down
prompted a 25-year period in which he exchanged
not a word with his mother. “The general
[Kristofferson Sr] wasn’t as shocked by it as the
general’s wife,” he says. “Country music at that time
was held in very low esteem outside of the south -
‘shitkicker music’ - but I bought every one of those
old Hank Williams singles, old 78s, when they first
came out. I’m old enough that his death was a real
blow to me.”

If becoming a sought-after Nashville songwriter was Movies, music, and marriage to Rita Coolidge in
hard, becoming a movie star proved easy. 1973 - they recorded four albums together - kept
Kristofferson’s first experience was on Dennis him busy for the rest of the decade. The apogee of his

SONGWRITERS WORKSHOP 11