Kris Kristofferson – Freedom’s still the most important thing for me

III. THERE WERE VARIOUS DEGREES OF CONFIDENCE

ND: In “To Beat The Devil”, you wrote about a barroom with “friendly shadows.” You’re not in bars anymore. Do you miss friendly shadows?

KK: I miss the times where you’re sitting around just hearing new stuff from people you’ve never heard before. But I kind of got OD’d on it. Once I made it and went on the road, I was listening nonstop; from the time I got offstage to the time I went to bed, I’d be hearing other people’s songs. I got to where I didn’t want to hear ’em anymore.

ND: Are there some great Kristofferson songs that were never written because you were so into the acting?

KK: I don’t feel like that’s the case. I know that before I made films, Ray Price tried to talk me out of performing. He said, “Look what happened to Willie. Willie used to be a great songwriter, and now he isn’t worth a shit.” I can remind him of that today. But the thing is I was doing so well and I didn’t think it was getting in the way of my writing.

ND: Tom T. used to get in a car and drive out into the middle of nowhere, meet people and write songs about them. Then he got so famous he was always recognized, and it didn’t work anymore.

KK: I can remember that Tom T. once said, “One of my favorite songwriters died of overexposure.” He meant me. I took offense to it at the time. Because I thought I was alive and kicking. But I think whether it had been the movies or just the reality of being on the road and gearing everything to these big shows, it would have cut in on some of the creative experiences that are in “To Beat The Devil” or “Sunday Morning Coming Down”. I wasn’t living in that place anymore. And so I tried to write about what I was feeling about different things. I know a lot of that stuff wasn’t commercial; it was about what was going on down in Nicaragua.

ND: You were trying to prove the point of “To Beat The Devil”: “I don’t believe that no one wants to know.” Were there times you thought the devil was right, though? Times when you thought it was true that no one wants to know?

KK: There were many times, when I’d get to the last line and sing, “I don’t believe that no one wants to know,” but I was thinking, “Well, I’ve had a lot of people that didn’t want to know.”

ND: You pushed friendships with your political views. You and Waylon clashed in the Highwaymen years — on a monumentally important tour for you, because it put you back in the good graces of country radio and of the country music listeners.

KK: We’d go at it, but we were like brothers, too. With people that I love, like Waylon, I can disagree with them. I didn’t always agree with Johnny Cash. He didn’t always agree with me. He did in one of his last phone calls. We were talking about Iraq, and he said, “I’m with you on this one. We’re bombing a tribal people.” But I pissed off people, even in our band on the Highwaymen tour. There were guys in the band holding up signs that said, “That doesn’t go for me.” [Guitarist] Reggie Young came to my bus and said, “You sing anything you want up there. We’re backing you up.”

ND: On one of the Mercury records, you sing about thinking “of the last thing you believed in.” Was there ever a time when you lost belief in things?

KK: No. I never stopped believing. But there were various degrees of confidence.

ND: Are there disappointments? Places where you wish you could change what had happened?

KK: I’m sure there are. I think there are songs that got lost. But I think, looking back over my career, there was something taking care of me. Back when things would look the darkest, like when I lost my job in the Gulf over misbehaving and breaking rules about drinking, I thought I had hit the bottom. I had a lot of expenses at the time. I owed child support, and my son had just gone in the hospital. I had a big nut to cover. And everything turned around right then. Johnny Cash had his TV show, and Mickey Newbury says, “Come on and hang out with me and we’ll go see Johnny Cash and pitch songs.” It wasn’t all over.

ND: All your career, you’ve been writing about freedom. Has your notion of freedom changed since the beginning?

KK: Freedom’s still the most important thing for me, but now I’m more aware that it extends to freedom for everybody. Not just freedom for me to do what I do.

IV: I WAS ONE OF THE PEOPLE WORKING TO BRING RESPECT TO COUNTRY MUSIC

ND: In those early years, I’ve heard you used to hang out at Sue Brewer’s house. Vince Matthews wrote about that place in a song that Gordon Lightfoot and Hank Jr. recorded, called “On Susan’s Floor”. What was that house like?

KK: We called that place the Boar’s Nest. It was either Webb Pierce or Faron Young that paid the rent on it for her. It was a hangout for the people who were hip but who were kind of the underground, you know. Waylon’s band used to hang around. You had to kind of earn your way into it. If you were a heavy songwriter you could get invited in, and you’d sit there on the floor in one of these empty rooms. There were other rooms with beds in them, and I think there were some girls in there. But it was really about music.