How do you market a rebel?

During the second day of his recent two-night, two-gig tour of Britain, Kris Kristofferson is so keen to get in touch with Vanessa Redgrave that I lend him my portable phone.
To his delight, he gets through and she says she'll try to make it to this evening's concert.
''I respect her so much,'' says Kristofferson, ''and part of what I respect is that she is willing to jeopardize her career for her political beliefs.''
Kristofferson's career has gone beyond being jeopardized. In the 1970s, if we weren't playing his records, we were watching his films. ''Me And Bobbie McGee,'' ''Help Me Make It Through The Night'' and ''Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down'' are just about as good as songs on the pop-country borderline can get.
Many of his movies bear repetition, too: ''Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore,'' ''Convoy,'' ''Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid'' although it would take something to get me to sit through ''A Star Is Born'' again (my sister as a teenager paid to see it three times, but even that didn't quite prepare me).
However, since the all-comers flop of ''Heaven's Gate,'' Kristofferson hasn't starred in a major movie, and those parts he has taken have not been lauded. Of one of them a critic said there was ''very little difference between Kristofferson comatose and conscious.''
''Aw, that's just nit-picking, ain't it?'' Kristofferson replies, when I remind him.
As for his music, he no longer even has a recording contract. He is, as he puts it, ''out of the loop.'' Could it be that his politics are responsible? In the last few years he has backed every liberal cause, from Artists Against Racism to Farm Aid. He has come out for the Sandinistas and against the Persian Gulf War. He records songs titled ''Third World Warrior,'' ''Love Of Money'' and even ''Jesse Jackson.''
''It made it difficult to market my work,'' he admits. ''The market they perceived for me was a fairly conservative, country market, and they felt it was absurd to try and sell songs about Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson to these people. Reviewers mostly flatly ignored them, and those who didn't said surely I must know pigs will fly before they play that on the radio.
''But by the time you get to my age, if you can't live what you believe, what's the point? You've got to simplify things, and I find it easier just to tell the truth.''
The songs we loved him for elevated our self-pity so high it almost became art. They sang of urban cowboys who loved too much and drank too much and found that freedom was just another word for nothing left to lose.
Just as the new songs emerge from a boiling fury about America, these came out of something close to despair. An Oxford Rhodes scholar and Army captain a good bet, in other words he married young. Then, in pursuit of his dream to be another Dylan, he dropped out and became a Nashville janitor and part-time helicopter pilot in the Gulf of Mexico.
''April 15, 1969, was probably the darkest hour,'' he says. ''It looked to me and to all my friends, I am sure, as if I had been on a downhill slide from the day I got out of the Army. My wife and I separated. I had two children, one of whom had just been born with a birth defect that cost $ 10,000 to put right. The night before I was to see the boss who was going to fire me from my pilot's job, I was staying in an old hotel in Louisiana so bad it looked like a horror show.
''I felt, 'I have finally just trashed it just as much as I can. My family is gone. I haven't had any song recorded that's done anything. I'm going to be thrown in jail because I owe $ 500 a month in child support.'
''Then I went home to this slum tenement in Nashville and I had been robbed. I felt the freedom then of nothing left to lose. I was a failure and it was a very liberating thing. It was lonesome, but I was free and it allowed me to be out all night, every night, pitching songs.''
The songs made it, but his second marriage, to singer Rita Coolidge, didn't. He says he's amazed they stayed together for as long as they did, which was nine years.
''It is difficult for two performers to live together and perform together. You start off with one dream and end up with two different ones. Then one day I am away making a film, and she says she wants to go off and be Donna Summer or something. She now refers to that as her 'disco queen from hell' stage. Our marriage ended in '79, when I was doing 'Heaven's Gate' not a good year for me, or for Somoza, who was thrown out in Nicaragua, or for the Shah of Iran.
''Some girl said the other day, was it my drinking? Well, it wasn't my drinking. It may have been my sobering up.''
The drinking a bottle and a half of whisky a day stopped after he watched his own death on ''A Star Is Born'' and a film clip of one wrecked performance too many.
Now single and a ''bachelor father,'' he took a new attitude to his body. It was in the gym, after his separation from Coolidge, that a law student asked if he cared to join her for a run. Married for 11 years, Lisa is now expecting their fifth child, which will bring Kristofferson's count to eight. They live in Hawaii in a village that reminds him of his folksy childhood in Texas.
Although his beard, grown in a hospital while being treated for pneumonia in 1970 and kept because it faked some years on to his young features, is now white, he looks good.

-Andrew Billen, London Observer, 1994