Wanted: Kris Kristofferson

JM: Your early songs talk a lot about loneliness and freedom and living in the moment. They seemed to speak to a generation adjusting to their own revolution.

KK: Yeah, what I was going through myself at the time was sort of a free fall away from the security of my background. Christ, I'd been a student all my life. I'd been in the army, and would have been a major in a year and a half had I stayed in. I had a secure direction that I could have gone in, and I alienated a lot of my family and friends when I abandoned that. So, loneliness wasn't just an abstract notion. But there was also a freedom in being alone that was exhilarating; it gave me a creative impulse.

JM: Didn't you find that young people were all calling for freedom at the same time, rebelling against authority, and that they were looking not just to music, but also to movies, books, art, and journalism, trying to make sense of what was happening to them?

KK: I was looking at it from a different perspective because I was about ten years older than all my peers. Also, I came into it from the military background. I wasn't part of the antiwar movement; I'd become radicalized by my experience in the army. But I definitely felt a link to the people that I was meeting when I was out there - Janis [Joplin] and those people.

JM: You didn't start performing yourself until you were in your thirties.

KK: My first gig was in June 1970, at the Troubadour [in Los Angeles]. One of the people who worked on The Johnny Cash Show knew somebody there and talked me up, and they asked if I wanted to Open for Linda Ronstadt. I said,"Is that a trick question?" But it went well, and from then on, I was sort of on the roller coaster of performing. Within a few months, Harry Dean Stanton brought me a script and I got an offer to do my first film, Cisco Pike [1972].

JM: You got to work with Stanton again on Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid [1973] for director Sam Peckinpah. in fact, you did two other movies with Peckinpah in the '70s [Convoy (1978) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)]. Tell me about working with him. The stories of his drinking on the set are legendary.

KK: They're true, too. I had to take a pistol away from Sam once: He was lying sick in bed and took a shot at Harry Dean Stanton and my piano player, Donnie Fritts. I got a call about it and went over there and said, "All right, where is it?" He was heavily anesthetized with Mescal or something. Sam was a good man; he just needed turmoil around him.

JM: The '70s was a pretty heady time to be suddenly rich and famous and hanging out with excessive people. How did you discipline yourself against the temptations? Or did you?

KK: It was just a process of facing the temptations and trying them out, trying the different directions. For years, I was thinking of William Blake's quote "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." That leaves you a lot of room for error. I'm sure that I drank too much, smoked too much, and did a lot of things too much, but if you are going to survive, you eventually learn what you can handle.