Kris Kristofferson’s Talking Blues
In Peru, one kept a daily journal; now Kristofferson bends grinning over its pages, on which, in the winter of ’70, Andes mud spilled and dried like blood spots. “Hell,” he offers rurally, “wouldn’t surprise me none you said it was blood.”
One had gone there to write about the making, or rather, wresting from the soil, of Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie; Kris, totally unknown then, was doing the film’s score. Rain hung over the Andes like an apathetic fate; we were unanimously weakened and distracted by the paranoia and diarrhea induced by Hopper’s inferior coke and an oppressive intuition we shared, about a movie whose title would turn out inadvertently ironical. Yet now Kris happily basks in the journal’s glum notes as though they were yearbook inscriptions, or baby pictures:
Hopper attracts, or surrounds himself with, two types: troubled, abrasive specters and gentle heroes holding to concepts of pleasantness and goodness. The latter includes a composer named Kris, with a K . . . though he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, his speech is Brownsville bowling alley. Amid the cabin-fever hostility here, he takes elaborate pains to placate, to not challenge; he appears to sleepwalk hung over through some good dream, yet yesterday, when the horses rented for the movie panicked on the set, K. stepped instantly from us cowering bystanders to a wild-eyed black mare . . . before he calmed her, she’d stepped on his hand.
“Man, I didn’t even think when I grabbed that bridle,” and he laughs down at the page. “I didn’t know shit about horses; if I’d thought I’d never ‘a done it.” He’s lit another brown Bull Durham cigarette; he more or less chain-smokes.
Here is Rita Coolidge’s house, a dim, warm, overstuffed cottage on the wrong side of the Hollywood freeway. Until now, we haven’t really talked since the Peruvian debacle, when the idea of him as music celebrity or movie star was as remote as canonization. “But you gotta understand, Tom, the whole trip down there, it was my first time near anything that bizarre. Hell, I was straight outa Nashville with shit on my boots.” His voice is as it was then, scratching warmly from a rusty-iron larynx, his smile is the same, and yet not — darker, or it occurs less easily, less often, except when he thinks about Peru:
. . . dawn, Monday. With a lady photographer and a foxy actress named, incredibly, Poupee Bocar, K. & I sneak aboard the People’s Train for a day at Machu Picchu. (Dennis hates even short-term defections and probably has the railroad station watched.) K.’s hand still bandaged from horse incident; he insists, though, in carrying along his guitar. Ten miles into the mountains, the train, which smells of llamas, malfunctions; instantly Kris herds us off and over the muddy ties in antic procession to the luxurious tourist train, paused ahead for its Retired Shriners, or whatever, to snap Polaroids. Funky, unshaven, we are not welcome among the barbered burghers, but K. of course charms us on . . .
The whole trip home, very stoned, Kris plays and sings songs he’s written: “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” “Help Me Make It through the Night,” and one about Dennis called “The Pilgrim” . . . “I’m a joker, I’m a smoker, I’m a midnight toker.” All lonely songs but humorous…. He’s had almost no success peddling them; why does it seem, sadly, that he won’t? Because there’s about him the good, gentle loser? . . . Good lines in a song about Bobby McGee (Bobby a girl? Ask K.) “Feelin’ near as faded as my jeans,” “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” etc. . . .
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