This evening I opened my browser to write something here but glanced first at the news and saw that Kris Kristofferson, despite seeming immortal, was dead at 88. Cranky readers might recall my fascination with his performance in A Star is Born, and excessive linking to “Watch Closely Now,” but his legend was infinitely larger than that. One of the last times Joe and I discussed Kristofferson, who we both admired as a musician and actor, I mentioned an old Rolling Stone account of the Toby Keith incident.
Joe wasn’t familiar with that story, which some fans believe is apocryphal, and refused to read the article after seeing Ethan Hawke’s byline due to a personal animus he never completely explained other than to say their paths had briefly crossed years prior and he’d found Hawke’s literary pretensions ‘predictably hilarious.’ (That detail isn’t relevant to anything in this post, it just amused me because it was similar to Papa’s vendetta against Bob Costas.)
Those of us who’ve made peace with Hawke as a novelist (something I’ve done by not reading his novels) can enjoy his story about Kristofferson’s clash with Keith at a Willie Nelson birthday concert for its punchline, which quotes Waylon Jennings. While I can’t vouch for its authenticity, it’s indisputable that Kristofferson didn’t suffer fools gladly. The rest of the profile is worth reading as well, even if Hawke — whose acting I’ve appreciated in the Before Trilogy and First Reformed — was no Hunter S. Thompson.
Toby Keith, like ghosts, caused disagreements in my family in the early aughts, though only my maternal aunt listened to him. It went back to his feud with the Dixie Chicks, also musicians few of us listened to, though my dad went to school with an early Chick who was gone by the time Natalie Maines took them to the top of the charts. I don’t have time to address all the social upheaval and familial rancor caused by politics during that era, but I was the odd woman out and my bitterest disagreements were usually with my parents, especially my dad.
It was hard for him to let me have my own opinions back then and several times he threatened to kick me out of the house for opposing the war in Iraq. (There was nothing more to it than that; we had no disagreements other than politics. He was still a ‘my way or the highway’ guy in his early forties and felt his wife and children should parrot his beliefs.) But something in him began to shift when my aunt said she was going to toss her Dixie Chicks albums and my uncle, her brother, chimed in with several disgusting comments about Natalie Maines. No one else challenged him, so I did.
My thin-skinned uncle, who is 12 years my senior and already had a long history of taking inflammatory positions he struggled to defend, shouted some insults and accused me of anti-Americanism, which I told him I found pretty rich given the beliefs he’d just espoused. That made him angrier. According to my dad, witnessing our exchange prompted him to (slowly) start questioning his own positions. But this digression isn’t about that — my father was hardly alone in reevaluating his support for the invasion of Iraq — or about my uncle, who went from Nader voter to Tea Partier to our family’s only Jewish Trump supporter.
It’s not even about Kristofferson, who warrants a much better tribute than this. It goes back to Toby Keith. His career wasn’t one I’d followed prior to 2003 or afterward, though I was familiar with “Don’t Let the Old Man In,” a song he wrote for The Mule, a 2018 Clint Eastwood film.* In 2023, a few months before he died of stomach cancer, I watched an emaciated Keith perform it at the People’s Choice Country Awards and was quite moved by it.
Kristofferson, like Willie Nelson (now 91) and Eastwood (94), exemplified those lyrics better than most, while Keith passed at 62. That makes me hope the dustup Hawkes recounted really happened, because getting yelled at by Kris Kristofferson in front of Willie and Ray Charles is the sort of memory that would make anyone smile on their deathbed.
* To show my support for the Dixie Chicks circa 2003, I purchased the same albums my aunt vowed to throw out. But I preferred Taking the Long Way, which chronicled the aftermath of the controversy three years later.