RIP, Kris Kristofferson

A star is dead.

Kris Kristofferson has passed away at the appropriate-feeling age of 88 — straight down to the bitter end, but gone before it became uncool. 

He was a little older than the first hippie guys — a little skeptical. He reminds me of my father, because they were about the same age and both served in the military and my father loved old westerns and Kristofferson was in them.

A tweet I wrote:

Many will mention, but I will add to the pile, his acting as a pulling guard for Sinéad O'Connor, facing a hostile audience at the epochal-seeming-at-the-time-but- obviously-ludicrous-in-retrospect superstar extravaganza that nevertheless was the celebration of Bob Dylan's thirty-year anniversary in the recording business with a collection of various songs by various friends and rivals and admirers. When the audience shouts her down, it's so damn awful. When Kristofferson ushers her off you feel some relief. The show goes on. Lou Reed performs "Foot of Pride." Eventually Bob Dylan shows up and everyone sings "My Back Pages," which thirty-plus years later feels like a taunt from a generation that had so very, very, very much more to teach us from back then, and was only teasing their second phase. It's all so perverse. The lesson I learned from that day? Don’t let the bastards get you down.

I will miss Kristofferson. I suspect he’d get a chuckle out of being missed.