Kris Kristofferson Told Rosanne Cash to ‘Write About It.’ So She Did

I dreamed about him. I got up at 5 a.m. to go downstairs and have a private cry. There was a Kris-shaped mantra running through my head, right in the center of the deep sadness: “Do better. Be bigger. Speak truth. Don’t let the bastards get you down. Write about it.”

The space he left is filled with more than grief. It has a sense of urgency.

Time is a thief.

I’ve never known anyone as authentically themselves as Kris. His very thoughts had an armament of courage. His time in the military and the discipline he cultivated there, coupled with his native kindness and deep sensitivity made for an unusual kind of poet. He kept a wide-open heart yet took shit from no one. No one. Didn’t matter if you were a big star strutting your stuff around, or the entire press corp, or a good friend: Shit would not be taken, but he gave it back with a sense of moral authority and lack of insult that was both humbling and educational. It refreshed the spirit to be put in one’s place by Kris. He never did it to me, but I was teachable and had the good sense to listen and learn.

He didn’t do small talk. He knew how to protect his art and his energy. His wife Lisa told me that he wouldn’t do a meet and greet after a show, even if it was a friend. He knew how to prioritize.

He was preternaturally curious. He seemed always to be pushing at the edges of any situation to find the underbelly of wisdom and poetry. He looked for the truth of a person, a situation, a moment, a song, a scene, a question, an artifact of nature, an action. More often than not, he found it, and offered it back to the rest of us transformed into sublime jewels of rhymes and melodies and ideas that pushed far past the edge of convention. Even as an actor, he rhymed his movements, found melody in the scene.

He was spiritually rigorous. He carried his wounds with dignity. I cannot imagine anyone less self-pitying or more noble than Kris.

He loved William Blake. Years ago, I went to an exhibit of Blake’s paintings and drawings in New York, because I knew Kris was artistically devoted to Blake, and I figured I should know more about a poet who inspired him so deeply. I bought the program book from the exhibit with the colored illustrations and sent it to him at his home in Hawaii. I can’t remember if I thanked him for introducing me to Blake. I hope I did.

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That story about him landing a helicopter in my dad’s yard to deliver a demo tape of his songs? True. He adored my dad, and deferred to him in every instance. He thought Dad could do no wrong, even when he did wrong. He forgave his bad behavior, instantly.

“He’s a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he’s stoned.”

Weren’t we all.

Not long after Dad died, Barry Gibb bought his house on the lake, and a tragic mistake by a construction worker burnt the house entirely to the ground in minutes. Not long after the fire, I went out to the ruined house with Kris, Lisa, and my daughter Chelsea, and we wandered through the cinders for a good hour without speaking. He was comfortable wandering through cinders without speaking.

We did a lot of shows together over the years and once, at a show in Basel, Switzerland, I gently pointed out to him at sound check that his guitar was out of tune. He looked a little alarmed, but didn’t say anything.  Before we went onstage that night, he turned to me and said “I’m nervous because you’re sensitive to tuning.” That was 2009, and I’m still laughing about it.

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As courageous as he was about his values, and as unafraid to state them publicly, he had a funny insecurity about his performances. He told me he would look around at the audience and find the one guy who wasn’t paying attention or who was scowling or seemed bored, and that’s the guy he would anxiously sing to all night.

Kris was my firewall of love and personal history. He was one of the few people left on the planet who knew me as a kid, and one of the few people I knew who loved me without me having to earn it. Mom, Dad, my husband John, my kids, Kris. I can’t let myself believe he is gone. The firewall crumbles and so does my own history, the one that was tied to him as hero and family, the one where I was a young songwriter and revered his every word, the one where I learned that devotion to craft was the highest form of prayer, the one where he was my dad’s best friend, the one where being a seeker of truth and beauty was a vocation of the highest calling. I practice devotion, I pray through craft, but the rebel sage no longer protects the space.

Lisa held it all together in the last years. His memory was gone, and she said cheerfully, “We are just in every moment. There’s no past or future. Just this moment right here.” But I’m still back in other moments: when he saw me and my sister backstage as teenagers lean over to push our breasts up to get a little more cleavage, not realizing he was standing there. We saw him and giggled and he turned away, shaking his head and said under his breath, “You girls…” 

His last solo performance: Willie’s 90th-birthday bash, a two-night concert at the Hollywood Bowl. It brings me to my knees that he sang with me. I planned to sing ‘Loving Her Was Easier’ and it was unclear whether Kris would be able to join me, but if he was, we wanted him to walk out right after I sang the first verse, and surprise the audience. Right before I went out, Lisa and Kris were standing in the wings, and Lisa said to me, “Once he hears the song start, I don’t know if I can stop him from walking out before it’s time for his verse.”

“He can come out whenever he wants. We’ll figure it out,” I said.

It’s all there on film. At the end of the song, he stood beaming his own light back into the spotlight and basked in the applause. I was overcome with the feeling that he was home. This was a home, this was sustenance and protection, on the floorboards, under the lights and with the full blast of love from several thousand people. Maybe they knew. I sort of knew. I wept when I got off stage. He had forgotten about our performance by the time we got to the green room.

Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore, but it mattered that night.

What matters now is the behest he lived: Do better. Be bigger. Speak truth. Don’t let the bastards get you down. Write about it.

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I’ll write about it. This is how it begins:

Time is a thief.