Kris Kristofferson reflects on life, death, friendship

Editor's note: This profile of Kris Kristofferson was originally published on October 2, 2009, around the time the legendary country artists released his second to last album, Closer to the Bone. 

"Well, it all seemed to fit," said Kris Kristofferson, talking about the title track to his new Closer to the Bone album. "It's written from this end of the road. 'Ain't you getting better, running out of time?' "

It's hard to say whether Kristofferson is actually getting better at age 73, but he's at least toeing an exalted line. Kristofferson is already a Country Music Hall of Famer, a celebrated actor and one of a small club of folks — Tom T. Hall and Mickey Newbury among them — whose songs altered the language of country music in the 1970s. And now, he's released another remarkable album.

A testament to friendship

Closer to the Bone is dedicated to Stephen Bruton, Kristofferson's friend and former band mate, who played mandolin, guitar and backing vocals on the album, months before his death in May 2009 from throat cancer.

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"He was walking with a cane in the studio, but I was able to convince myself that he was getting better," Kristofferson said. "It was a comfort to have him there. We'd looked death in the face together before, you know? Back in the early days, at a rough river up in Idaho where we were riding on these rubber rafts. I was drinking a beer and looked and saw Stephen's head going down the river, and he had no idea how fast he was going. He looked at me with terror, and I jumped in with him, and the next thing you knew we were out in the river together, going with the flow because it was flowing too fast to go against it."

The two young musicians would have been goners, save for some guys in wet suits — frogmen, Kristofferson figures — who happened to be on the river that day.

"It was like a miracle to me," Kristofferson said. "We hadn't seen another person on the river, and then here were these guys. They pulled us out. Stephen and I made eye contact after that. We knew we'd passed a test of friendship, one that I was glad I didn't have time to think about before I acted."

Bruton was known for ace musicianship and oddly endearing humor: Once, he figured the band should cheer up a morose Canadian hotel clerk by putting on fish costumes and securing two cans of spray paint, though he never crystallized a plan in which the costumes and the paint worked together to make things happier for the clerk.

"He was something else," Kristofferson said. "He hung on long enough for me to be able to come back and see him one last time. I was doing a movie in North Carolina, got out a day early and went straight to the hospital in L.A. to see him. We were able to talk. I said, 'I'll be seeing you down the road, sooner rather than later.' He smiled and said, 'I've got to go to sleep.' He'd been afraid to sleep . . . afraid he wouldn't wake up. And he didn't. Man, he fought all the way to the end. I'll never work with another guitar player like I did with him. He'd been with me so many years that every time he played it was exactly the groove I wanted but my picking didn't allow."

He tells his truth

Kristofferson's picking has never been the selling point, and his voice was best described by producer Fred Foster when Foster offered Kristofferson a record deal in the early 1970s. Kristofferson demurred, saying, "I sing like a frog." Foster countered, "Yes, but a frog that can communicate."

"If I'd had to break in through American Idol or something, I'd still be emptying ashtrays," said Kristofferson, who once emptied ashtrays, made coffee and swept up at the Columbia Records studio known as The Quonset Hut. Never an ace player, he forged a career based on charisma matched only by his friend Johnny Cash and songwriting acumen that set him apart from anyone. Like his peer Tom T. Hall, Kristofferson reserved judgment in his songs, condemning only those who would condemn.

On the new album, his philosophy may best be communicated on "Sister Sinead." He wrote the song in 1992, immediately after singer Sinead O'Connor was booed at a Bob Dylan tribute concert, weeks after she'd torn up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live as a protest of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church.

"I'm singing this song for my sister, Sinead," he sings. "Concerning the Godawful mess that she made/ When she told 'em her truth just as hard as she could/ Her message profoundly was misunderstood." Later, he sang, "Maybe she's crazy, and maybe she ain't/ But so was Picasso and so were the saints."

"It's so amazing that she was booed at a Bob Dylan concert, where you'd think there'd be the most open audience you could get," Kristofferson said. "But the same thing happened to the Dixie Chicks, and they survived, too. Anyway, I think it's a good song about someone who told her truth in a way that a lot of people didn't understand."

Kristofferson has done his fair share of telling misunderstood truths. He also has been booed by audiences for actions he considered moral imperatives but that were received as political grandstands. He's been criticized for writing songs in support of Jesse Jackson and for writing songs in opposition to the United States' foreign policy in Central America and Vietnam.

"I've been called unpatriotic and a Communist," said Kristofferson, who served in the U.S. Army and who volunteered to fight in Vietnam. "But nowadays, it seems like the reactions are better. I get such positive feelings now. Maybe that's part of getting older. I show up in a town, and we're filling up the halls with just me and the guitar and a harmonica. It feels positive to me. It's great to still be alive, but the longer you are, the closer you are to the end. Everybody dies. I'll probably even die."

And then Kristofferson laughed. He's at peace, though happily not at rest.