Kris Kristofferson feels strong after bypass surgery

Kris Kristofferson is taping a TV segment when the music begins to break up in his stage monitor. "In a studio, we shouldn't be having this problem," Kristofferson mildly tells the technician. "What would you suggest doing?"
Remove the monitor. Kristofferson nods, makes a little joke about "my wonderful disposition," and with guitar in hand and harmonica around his neck launches into "Me and Bobby McGee," one of those heart-stopping songs that defined an age.
Kristofferson had written the lyrics of "Bobby McGee" in 1969. The song was recorded by Janis Joplin, and became a huge hit for the whiskey-voiced blues rocker following her death in 1970. Kristofferson had gotten to know Joplin after he heard her sing his tune in a concert.
"After we'd been together a couple of months, she went on a tour by train. ... I got a call Janis had died. I flew to Los Angeles.
"Paul Rothchild, who produced her last album, asked me to come by the studio the next day. He played 'Me and Bobby McGee.' It was profoundly moving to me.
"Every time I sing the line 'somewhere near Salinas I let her slip away,' I think about her."
And every time Kris Kristofferson sings, "Freedom's just another word for 'nothing left to lose,"' a generation fondly remembers that man with the rugged looks, power-drill eyes and lawnmower voice.
"Bobby McGee," along with two other hits of his, "Sunday Morning Coming Down" and "Help Me Make It Through the Night," are on his new CD, "The Austin Sessions." The arrangements on this first Kristofferson album in four years feature simpler arrangements than his original versions.
"I'd been working the songs all these years on the road. I sort of got them down to the core, cut the fat away," he says later during an interview at the offices of his record label, Atlantic. "I was pleased to see how well the songs held up. They seemed as vital as when I first wrote them."
Kristofferson was always hard to pigeonhole. He ran with Nashville, but wasn't quite part of it. A Rhodes Scholar, he was something of an intellectual among the good ol' boys of Nashville. He was the disillusioned soldier, his songs suffused with a a boozy, wounded yet indomitable spirit.
Like Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash, Kristofferson was also a hard-living rebel and was considered an outsider by the country music establishment. The four men became known as "outlaws," and united in 1985 to make their first "Highwaymen" album. But he could be a bit too far beyond Nashville's law. He would infuriate industry execs by showing up stoned or drunk to recording sessions. Once while drinking, he even landed a helicopter in Cash's yard to deliver a song.
When he was making "A Star Is Born" with Barbra Streisand, he was drinking two bottles of whiskey a day. Later, when he finally screened the movie, there were scenes he couldn't remember shooting. After "A Star Is Born," he says he quit heavy drinking.
Kristofferson's songs often were autobiographical, with lyrics about coming down from a hangover, loneliness, despair and being in the clutches of the devil.
In "The Pilgrim: Chapter 33," for example, he sings: "He's a poet, he's a picker/he's a prophet, he's a pusher/He's a pilgrim and a preacher/and a problem when he's stoned. ..."
"I'm glad the songs didn't kill him - they came close," says folk singer Tom Rush. "He seems to have got his feet under him now. I'd say he's done quite well for a college boy. He sure has written some wonderful songs."
Kristofferson last toured in 1996, following the release of "Moment of Forever," which didn't sell. So he took time off. "I think I must have been burned out. I just felt like I was beating my head against a wall.
"I felt I had put out a record that was my best work. If I couldn't do it with that one, maybe God was trying to tell me something. Quit. I stayed home. The more I was around the house, the more I wanted to be around the house."
"The Austin Sessions" came out of the blue, he says. "I was contacted by people from Canada who were doing a series of songwriter albums. They wanted songs that were representative of me as a songwriter. It just turned out real good."
Wearing a black sweater and jeans and tan cowboy boots, Kristofferson looks thin but fit as he talks about his life and career.
In May, a month before his 63rd birthday, he had triple bypass surgery. He came off the operating table feeling "like I'd been hit by a truck. But I feel stronger now than I've felt in many years. I'm running again and swinging a weed-cutter on my property in Hawaii."
Kristofferson lives in Maui with his third wife, Lisa, and their five children, ages 5 to 15. He also has two children from his first marriage and one from his second.
"It's probably the closest thing to where I grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, Brownsville, Texas, to anything I could find for the kids today," he says about Maui. "They can go to school barefooted. I didn't want to raise them in a city."
The youngest child, Blake, walks around making up songs and singing them. "The first song I can remember making up, I was 11," Kristofferson says. "He's going to be light years ahead of me."
Kristofferson majored in creative literature at Pomona College in California. His Rhodes Scholarship took him to Oxford University, England, where he studied the poet William Blake.
Then he joined the Army where he drank heavily and wrecked two cars and four motorcycles. He resigned his commission in 1965 and moved to Nashville, where he was quickly dubbed "Capt. Kris" because he wore a captain's uniform.
"I wanted to be just a Nashville songwriter," he says. "Country music always had emphasis on lyrics and talked about real things, which were pretty believable to me. I was trying to follow in that tradition."
So at 30, he took a job at Columbia Records as a janitor. He emptied ashtrays in the studio where Bob Dylan was cutting "Blonde on Blonde." "I was going to three or four recording sessions a day. It was like a crash course in music. ... I had no real background in music or professional music making."
Still, his age troubled him.
"I felt sort of over the hill," he recalls. "Hank Williams died at 29. I was kind of this guy who had to be crazy to be coming in that old."
His songs didn't fit the country mold any more than "Blonde on Blonde" did. But Kristofferson never regretted the move. "I was following my heart and it worked out."
He wrote his biggest hits during his janitor stint and the two years that followed. "I was flying helicopters, taking men and equipment around to different offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, living on a platform for a week, then going back and pitching songs for a week in Nashville.
"I wrote 'Me and Bobby McGee' and 'Help Me Make It Through the Night' sitting on an oil platform in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico."
Around this time, his movie career began to take off. He first won notice as a dramatic actor in 1974 in Martin Scorsese's "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore." But he is especially proud of his work in last year's "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries," in which he played author James Jones.
His film career did well through the 1970s until "Heaven's Gate," the 1980 epic that helped sink United Artists. Kristofferson starred. "I went from being one of the most marketable people in the business to out of work," he says.
"I never have come back to where I was before that. The role in 'Lone Star' (1996) helped me a lot. It was so different from any roles I had played."
Kristofferson appeared in "Payback" earlier this year with Mel Gibson, and will play a detective in a CBS miniseries about the killing of JonBenet Ramsey. He's also shooting a new cops and robbers movie called "Bait."
And he continues to write songs. "I'll probably be writing as long as I'm breathing."

-Mary Campbell, The Associated Press