Kristofferson celebrates a new 'mission in music'

When Kris Kristofferson hits the stage at The Diamond tonight for the first of two rare club performances in Toronto, he'll be responding to the call of the the times.
"There's a new sense of mission in music," he told me yesterday, prior to rehearsing with his band for the first time in more than two months. He hasn't seen his "wild bunch," the band he has retained "through thick and thin" for the past 16 years, since he started shooting a futuristic TV mini-series, Amerika, in Nebraska in March.
"There are things that need saying. Since I worked with Willie Nelson on the movie Songwriter I've been writing songs - lots of songs - and every time I play I have fun. It's like the old days, like I was playin' 'Me And Bobby McGee' and 'The Pilgrim' for the first time."
Don't get him wrong. Kristofferson, 50, isn't heading down the protest trail. He's still the tough and tender-hearted Great American Male, the flint-eyed new-age cowboy star of director Alan Rudolph's "surrealistic" film noir, Trouble In Mind, which opened at Canada Square and Market Square cinemas last week. A little resistance
But he has taken stock of the timbre of the times and he figures it could benefit from a little resistance, from a little human reason.
"One of the few good things to happen at this end of the century is the way artists are responding to their consciences," said Kristofferson, an Oxford graduate, Rhodes Scholar and former U.S. Army helicopter pilot. "It doesn't sit well with the new conservatives, I know, when America is forced to face the ugly realities of its history. That's why I figure they buried Heaven's Gate."
The $40 million Michael Cimino movie - which starred Kristofferson - dealt with racism in the old west. It was withdrawn from theatres after a disastrous premiere in New York and at the Toronto Festival of Festivals in 1980. For the following two years Kristofferson wasn't offered a movie role.
"Now artists and performers are finding ways of supporting the veterans of Viet Nam without condoning the war," he went on. "They're beginning to speak the truth about poverty in America and the government's disturbing foreign policy.
"What America is doing in Nicaragua is retarded. It's time we said so.
"And people are listening again. That's one reason I'm back in the clubs." New songs
Toronto is a particularly suitable city in which to celebrate his rekindled passion for songwriting and performing. "Toronto never really forgot about me," Kristofferson said. "Success swamped me like a big wave after those early days in the late 1960s (when he wrote the classic country ballads 'Me And Bobby McGee,' 'Help Me Make It Through The Night' and 'Sunday Morning Coming Down'), and I was makin' movies before I really knew it. To Americans I'm a movie star. I didn't have a record deal for most of the past 10 years and I couldn't have filled a decent-sized club in most cities, yet just about every year at Ontario Place there were 17,000 Torontonians who helped me keep that part of my career alive."
Now he's on a roll again. He has enough new songs to fill three albums and will release the first - as yet untitled - on the PolyGram label later this summer. "There was a time when I wasn't comfortable doin' what I was doin'," he said, his husky drawl trailing away. "I was drinkin' more and enjoyin' it less and I got tangled up on the road.
"Now I'm an old man with five kids (by three wives) and I figure I've hung in long enough to be able to handle the ups and downs of the music business, even though it's like the movie business now - run by lawyers, not by people with real creative instincts."
Nevertheless, Kristofferson's comfortable with his movies. They've supported his musical endeavors through some rough times, he said. "With few exceptions, I'm reasonably cautious about choosing films. I'm concerned with what they say and with what I say through my characters. And I'm fortunate enough to have been given some great parts, even though I never had any real training."
His training came from real life, he said. "As a teenager I set out to be a writer. Like Hemingway and Jack London I travelled around the world and worked at whatever I could, as a firefighter in Alaska, a janitor, a newspaper reporter, a boxer, a bartender and a pilot. I haven't written fiction in years (one piece, The Rock, won the Atlantic Short Story contest while he was still in college), but all that action helped me fall into films.
"I may write again one day, but I figure I'll be singin' and pickin' till they throw dirt on me." Best work
He did his best movie work, he believes, in A Star Is Born "because it gave me an audience and it's a film I can still watch today," and in Alan Rudolph's Songwriter "because it combined all the things I love - my band, my songs and Willie," and Trouble In Mind.
"Alan told me he wrote that part for me," Kristofferson said. "And I think it's my best work. That movie has a real ensemble feel about it. Everyone was encouraged to bring something to the party, everyone was involved for the right reasons.
"And none of them was money."

-Greg Quill, Toronto Star, 1986