Kris Kristofferson on Iraq, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, and life as a red state outlaw

Ask Kris Kristofferson how he feels about being typecast as a cowboy, and he'll tell you, "Every time I read about a Western being made, and I'm not in it, I feel a keen sense of personal loss." Director Richard Linklater did not disappoint, casting the 70-year-old grizzled, gravely-voiced actor as a rancher in the upcoming Fast Food Nation. It's the latest role in a film career that spans 35 years. But Kristofferson is no Hollywood cowboy. A 2004 inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame, he is one of the original singer-songwriters of Nashville's Outlaw Country movement, having penned such classics as "Me and Bobby McGee" and "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down." Following a tour stop at Carnegie Hall to promote his new album, This Old Road, the reluctant icon took a break to talk to Radar about getting his start as a janitor at Columbia Records, landing a helicopter on Johnny Cash's lawn, and the "hood ornament" currently occupying the White House.

RADAR: You just played Carnegie Hall. That's quite an honor.
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON: I played there once years ago, but yes, it is an honor. Maybe it's a sign of the apocalypse.

You once said that Dennis Hopper playing golf is a sign of the apocalypse. He's a pretty big duffer these days.
He also has lunch with Newt Gingrich. If you had known Dennis back in the day, all this would have seemed impossible. Dennis was crazy. I met him when he and Peter Fonda were coming off Easy Rider, and it was quite an experience for me. Later, I was hired to do the music for Dennis's film, The Last Movie. One of the stuntmen quit, and I took over since I could ride a horse—my first acting job. It was a crazy scene down there in Peru. Dennis even got a priest defrocked in one town where we were filming.

He seems to have transformed into an upstanding citizen.
Well, if he hadn't changed he'd be a dead man by now.

What about yourself? At 70, here you are with a new album, a world tour, and a couple new movies coming out. You're not exactly living the staid life of a Boca Raton retiree.
I do still have eight kids to support. I think I'll do concerts until they throw dirt on me.

Let's go back to the beginning. You were a Rhodes Scholar, a military man, and a prose writer who was supposed to teach English literature at West Point. How'd you end up a country legend?
I got out of Oxford and went into the army for five years. On my way back from Europe in '65, I went to Nashville to visit a relative of my platoon leader, who happened to be a songwriter. And she showed me around town for a couple of weeks. I was totally infatuated with the whole life, so I resigned from the army and went to Nashville, much to the horror of my family and friends, and started at the bottom.

As a janitor at Columbia Records, right?
Yes. And as such, I was the only songwriter in Nashville that could be in the studio when Bob Dylan was recording Blonde on Blonde, because there were police around the building. He was there in the studio all by himself, sitting at a piano with those dark glasses on, writing songs. At the time, they were business-like about the sessions. You were expected to record three songs in three hours, and he just went all night long. The band was off playing ping-pong and cards, waiting for him. In the morning, he'd call them in and they would record another smash.

Johnny Cash is another person you met as a janitor.
That's right, and I pitched him every song I wrote, but he never cut one. So, I hatched a plan to get his attention. I was briefly in the National Guard, so I knew how to fly helicopters, and I landed one on his lawn. If I hadn't known him he'd have probably shot me out of the sky.

You've always been very outspoken about politics, and this new album is no exception. On one song you refer to a "billion dollar bombing of a nation on its knees." Another asks, "Am I young enough to believe in revolution?" Are you?
Well, I think if I can ask the question, then I am. I'm shocked by where our country is compared to where we were when I grew up, during and after the second World War. We've become what Eisenhower warned against, which is a military industrial complex, where we can unilaterally attack a defenseless nation unprovoked. There are 650,000 Iraqis who have died, and we can never make it up to those people. It's a whole different place from the land of the free and the home of the brave. Even if it was working, it would be indefensible to do this to people.

Do you feel conflicted about being a Texan, given that you're so vehemently opposed to Mr. Bush, the Lone Star State's favorite son?
He's just the hood ornament. It's the machine under him that's really scary. What bothers me about all of this is that none of them ever served in the military. Do I feel a conflict? I have been booed in Texas, but I still love Texas.

You have blue state leanings, but you've spent a lot of time in red state territory. How do you reconcile those two parts of your persona?
Well, I've pissed people off in both of them, so I don't know. In the red states, I'm getting booed less these days, so maybe people are actually being transformed by what's going on. It takes a real blind mentality not to see how we are acting.

You also sing about the burden of freedom on the new record. How has this notion changed from the definition put forth in your song, "Me and Bobby McGee"?
[Singing] Freedom's just another word.

That's the one.
Well, freedom is a double-edged sword. Absolute freedom would be no emotional ties to anything. That's what I was talking about in "Bobby McGee," thinking about how the guy was free, but how it also cost him. And that's still true. I have the freedom to say what I want, but it can cost me. And the burden of freedom is still the same.

The song is one of the most played songs in the history of modern music. It's been covered by everybody from Gordon Lightfoot to the Grateful Dead to Jennifer Love Hewitt.
Really?

Yes, it appears on Hewitt's fourth album, which is entitled BareNaked. I'm surprised you don't have a signed copy.
Well, I'm a little out of the loop.

Do you have a favorite version?
I've got a bunch. I was glad that Roger Miller cut it first. I love Janis's version. I love Jerry Lee Lewis's and Willie's. I haven't heard every version of it.

But you obviously get a residual every time it's played. Someone must keep track of all the various versions, right?
Well, yeah, they're supposed to be. I hope they are, for my children's sake.

Was "Bobby McGee" based on a real woman in your life?
No. It was an idea that was given to me by Fred Foster, who owned the record company and the publishing house I worked for. I've never written a song on assignment, except for this one. I wish I could say it was based on a true story, but what I was thinking about most of all was a scene in the Fellini film, La Strada.

You were at the crossroads of the outlaw country movement. Of the members, who was the most outlaw?

I might have been the first they called that, but the first one who was an outlaw was Willie Nelson.

Willie seems to be keeping the flame lit, so to speak, having recently been busted for possession of marijuana in Louisiana.
God, I laughed when I read what he said about being glad they were not carrying a pound of spinach or they'd all be dead. It was also funny when they listed the ages of all the people who were on the bus. Willie has always gone his own way. I don't think there is a person in law enforcement that isn't aware he smokes. I wouldn't be surprised if his recent anti-war songs moved him even higher up on the watch list. But Willie will survive.

You seem to lament the loss of the old days on the new record. Does that outlaw spirit live on anywhere in country music today?
I'm sure it does, but, as with anything that gets marketed to a bigger audience, it gets watered down. Country music has gotten very popular, and that's the price it's paid. It might have been harder for Johnny Cash to make it today. But any place that has such a strong tradition of songwriters, as Nashville does, has the ones that are fighting to be like Willie and Johnny. And, as I said before, Willie will survive.

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