Actor, supporter of the arts, country star: he wanted everything but to avoid life. On the death of the magnificent Kris Kristofferson.
Wide awake and feeling mortalwide awake with the feeling of being mortal. This is how Kris Kristofferson described his state of mind on his penultimate record in 2013. He was 77 at the time. When he played at the Circus Krone in Munich in September 2013, you felt mortal in a pleasant way. Kristofferson's voice had suffered from his life; it was rough, sometimes brittle. On the stage stood a white-haired, still bearded old man who was blowing a harmonica and dressed in black like Johnny Cash, who some people still consider to be just a country musician. Kristofferson was, like Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan, one of those few distant friends, those singing poets, practical poets and everyday philosophers who in 1972 were thought to never grow old. Since this weekend, since he died at the age of 88, Kristofferson has also been living in the Tower of Songwhich Leonard Cohen invented, and which takes place in a country where age doesn't matter and nobody cares except death itself mortal must feel.
