Morph Clint Eastwood with the Marlboro Man, and you'll end up with a mug only half as chiseled, weathered and leathery as Kris Kristofferson's. It's a good looking face -- belonging as it does to a man who thirty years ago gave country music its first genuine sex symbol -- but it's a stern, frightening visage as well. Even in the neutral environment of an Atlantic Records conference room in Manhattan, where a relatively mellow Kristofferson sits sucking intently on a piece of hard candy, something about that face tells you the last thing on earth you want to do is bear witness to this man in a dark mood. Look into his eyes, and it's easier to trick yourself into thinking you're sitting across from the murderous sheriff he portrayed in John Sayles' Lone Star than a Rhodes Scholar and poet.

But a poet he is, a songwriter's songwriter comparable to no one less than Bob Dylan or Townes Van Zandt. Unlike those two giants, however, Kristofferson deals not in obtuse, double-edged metaphors, but in hard truths laid down with the matter-of-fact directness of Hemingway: "There's something in a Sunday / makes a body feel alone," ("Sunday Morning Coming Down"); "I ain't saying I beat the devil, but I drank his beer for nothing. Then I stole his song." ("To Beat the Devil.") Like Dylan and Van Zandt, Kristofferson's songs have often been best appreciated when delivered by better singers (Janis Joplin, Johnny Cash), but there's a ragged beauty to his own plainspoken renditions that somehow spells definitive. For proof, look no farther than The Austin Sessions, a collection of Kristofferson's best compositions newly recorded with an ear toward stark, rugged honesty and maximum character. Come to think of it, that remarkable face fits the poet just fine.

It's been four years since your last album (A Moment of Forever). How did The Austin Sessions come about?

The people that contacted me were from Canada. Fred Mollin was the producer. They were making a songwriter series for Angel Records. That deal fell through, but they liked the sessions enough that they shopped it, and Atlantic picked it up. So it was kind of an accident. Really, this album more or less just happened. We cut it in three nights I think while I was getting ready for this film that I was doing down there [in Texas].

The songs sound much more sparse than the original versions.

Yeah. When I first did these, they were for the first records I ever made. I didn't really know what I was doing. That was pretty much the way they made records in Nashville back then -- lot of strings, stuff like that. I like it better like this. I kind of like it stripped down like that. But it isn't just the arrangements. My own performances were better. I've had thirty years more experience than the first time.

You've been more active in film than in music during the Nineties. Are you still writing?

I'll be writing forever, but I don't write as much as I used to. I had about an album's worth of songs that I was getting ready to do with Don Was, who I did the last album with, but then I just kind of ran out of gas. That was when I left the road for about three years. I just got tired of beating my head against the wall. I had been out for so long without any support from the record company that I was barely breaking even on the road. And I've got a bunch of little kids now, so I hate to be away from home. I used to just love the road, but it's harder for me to be away now.

Do you remember what were you doing when you wrote "Bobby McGee"?

I was flying helicopters down in the Gulf of Mexico. I had a job down there for almost two years, where I would work a week in the Gulf, and then spend a week back in Nashville trying to peddle songs that I wrote when I was down there. I'd live out on the platform for a week. No wine, women or song out there, so it was a good place to write. In fact my publisher, after I went out on the road for a while and wasn't writing as much, he said, "Maybe you were better out there in the Gulf!" I said, "Maybe I'd be better in Alcatraz, as far as writing songs go, but I don't want to go there."

You spent a short spell teaching English at West Point. Can you see yourself being content had your life continued in that direction?

No. I never intended to stay in the army, or to have an academic life. But for a while, after I was in the army, I was married and I had a daughter, and I didn't see how I was ever going to make a living for them if I went out and tried to make it as a writer. But when I went to Nashville, while I was still in the army -- I was on leave -- I was so turned on by the life, the excitement of that whole lifestyle that seemed so free to me. I decided to go back there and try and make it as a writer. I thought if I couldn't make it as a songwriter I could at least have some experience that I could draw on to write about in my fiction, or whatever. So I committed myself to it heart and soul. It was hard on my family because it took me about four or five years to break through.

How did your break finally come about?

Johnny Cash liked my stuff. He wasn't recording any of my stuff, but he carried a song lyric of mine around in his wallet and showed it to me months after I had given it to him. And then he got this TV show that was very important down in Nashville; Bob Dylan came down to do it, and Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Buffy Saint Marie. I hung out at the headquarters and just pitched songs to everybody. And within about two or three months, I had about four songs cut. One of them John did on the show -- "Sunday Morning Coming Down."

Legend has it that you landed a helicopter in his backyard to give him a tape.

I did that. I went over there in a helicopter. But I had known John for about a year and a half before that. I was a janitor at Columbia for about a year and a half, and pitched him every song I ever wrote through Luther Perkins, his guitar player, and June Carter. He didn't cut any of them, but he liked them, which was enough to keep me going.

You mentioned fiction as something you figured you'd fall back on if you didn't make it as a songwriter. Have you pursued that much since?

No. I'm thinking of it more now, because I always thought I would do that when I wasn't moving so fast, when I wasn't on the road as much, when I got old. All of a sudden I realized, I am old. If I don't write soon, I'm not gonna. I would like to think that I could write some fiction before I hang it up. I think about it all the time. I always thought that's what I would be when I grew up.

What about screenwriting?

I wrote a forty-page treatment of a thing I thought could have been a film, but I don't know that it ever will. I kind of hate having to depend on anybody else. For that reason, I'd rather write a book, do it all myself. A film is such a collaborative thing, I don't know if I want to do that. I don't want to depend on agents or managers or anybody anymore.

RICHARD SKANSE
(November 5, 1999)