Music: Grooving with Kris and Rita

Grooving with Kris and Rita

Happiness is a marriage on the road

Backstate at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, the Kris and Rita show was already in progress. Bursting out of his dressing room, he knocked anxiously on her door. “What should I do with all this fruit?” Glancing at the gift basket, she replied, “We’ll take it home to the kids.” He nodded happily and left. A moment later, he knocked again. “What time is it?” She told him. A third knock. “Why is the phone in my room ringing?” At that, Rita rolled her eyes and smiled sweetly: Kris Kristofferson is one superstar you take exactly as he is, even if you are a newly emerged superstar named Rita Coolidge and are married to him.

Throughout their four-year marriage, Kris and Rita have led a not-so-private life that would have a soap scenarist sudsing with envy. Can Kris deal with his drinking? Can Rita deal with his drinking? Can she accept his fame as a songwriter, singer and movie actor? Is she furious because he restaged some torrid love scenes from the film The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea with Actress Sarah Miles for a Playboy photographer? What’s this? Rita has a hit album and a smash single, Higher and Higher. What will her success do to his ego? Last week everybody in the pop world was tuning in to find out as Kris and Rita took to the road for a two-month, 23-concert joint tour of the U.S.

No problems. Once out there in the spotlight, Kris and Rita behaved like a couple of newlyweds having an easy, relaxed time with their friends. That was essentially the case. A year ago, when he last played Los Angeles, he was drinking and down enough to be thoroughly believable as he sang his own Help Me Make It Through the Night. Now, sober as a choirboy (he has been on the wagon since last September), he held Rita’s hand, whispered to her and blended his deep, friendly baritone with her voice of amber and honey. The capacity crowd of 3,700 roared back cheers and bravos.

Kristofferson, who is 41 and nine years older than Rita, thinks of himself as world weary and is more entitled to that opinion than many. He has at various times been a short-story writer, Golden Gloves boxer, top-ranked college football player, bartender, janitor, helicopter pilot, Army captain and scholar. He was graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Pomona College and went on to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar where, as Kris Carson, he dabbled in pop music. After quitting both academe and the Army, he began drifting. At 29 he found himself in Nashville, and he began writing songs like The Silver-Tongued Devil, Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down and Me and Bobby McGee.

The songs moved easily over a variety of country rhythms. The words could be both bittersweet and low on the subjects of loneliness and love: “And there’s nothin’ short of dyin’/ Half as lonesome as a sound/ On the sleeping city sidewalk;/ Sunday mornin’ comin’ down.” And blunt about sex: “There ain’t nothing sweeter than naked emotions/ So you show me yours, hon, and I’ll show you mine.”

Kristofferson likes to disparage his own singing ability. Says he: “Good God, anyone who sings my songs sings them better than me.” In truth, he caught on quickly as a performer. Lean and bearded, he radiated both a searing sexuality and a boyish vulnerability. That combination was translated into a fast rise in movies. His first, Cisco Pike (1971), about a pop idol down on his luck, merely suggested his film potential. Several more —Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Blume in Love, Alice Doesn ‘t Live Here Anymore —followed. Last year’s A Star Is Born, in which he played Barbra Streisand’s aging, self-destructive mentor, made Kristofferson a superstar.

Just before the concert tour, he completed the trucker movie Convoy (TIME July 4). No more films are on his agenda —at least for now. Like his Texas buddies Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, he wants to “get back to the basics”—of music, mixing with the musicians, jamming a little and hearing other groups. The other day he liked a song on the radio, but had not the slightest idea what it was or who was singing it (he later learned that it was the Swedish group ABBA). Kristofferson does not like being that far out of touch. Like any pop composer, he feeds on what is going on around him. And so he looks on the tour with Rita as a time to rev up: “My circuits are almost on overload. I need a groove, any groove.”

Right now Kris is grooving on Rita’s Higher and Higher fame. No longer are the marquees likely to read KRIS KRISTOFFERSON, FEATURING RITA COOLIDGE. Even though he has been through it all himself—the crowds, the lights, the adulation—he knows as well as anyone when to seize an advantage. Says he: “Because Rita has a hit, it would be crazy not to goout now. It is not the time to lag behind. It is the time to work.”