In the summer of 2019, Kris Kristofferson was about to turn 83 and still touring, this time with a small band behind him. His guitarist, Scott Joss, who had once played with Dwight Yoakam and Merle Haggard, told Scotland’s Herald what those nights looked like from a few feet away. Kris would stand up, sing, play the guitar and smile at everybody.
“It’s like nothing’s wrong.” — Scott Joss, 2019
Then came the part fans in the seats never saw. The next day, Joss said, Kris didn’t remember much of the show at all, only bits and pieces. And the guitarist admitted there were two or three songs every night when he had to fight to keep from crying on stage.
“I Can Remember My Songs”
Kris Kristofferson first spoke openly about it in November 2013, after a screening of his film The Motel Life. He was 77. He told Fox News his memory had started going a couple of years earlier, and that doctors blamed the football, boxing and concussions of his younger days.
“But I can remember my songs, so I can perform, but other than that…” — Kris Kristofferson, 2013
In another interview, with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, he said much the same thing, with a laugh about how damaged his brain was. “I can remember all the songs,” he said. His wife, Lisa, handled nearly everything else.
The memory loss even reached his own writing. Rolling Stone reported in 2016 that he had started a new song about it, built around noticing an empty chair and a glass of wine and slowly realizing they were his. Then he forgot the song. His daughter Kelly finished it. It has never been recorded.
It Wasn’t Alzheimer’s
For years, doctors told the family his decline was Alzheimer’s disease, or dementia caused by all those blows to the head. He was put on medication for Alzheimer’s and for depression. Lisa later said one early clue had been a fibromyalgia diagnosis about a dozen years before, which she came to believe should have prompted a Lyme test much sooner.
Early in 2016, a doctor finally tested him for Lyme disease. It came back positive. Lisa believes he picked up the tick while crawling around the forest floor in Vermont for about six weeks during the filming of the movie Disappearances.
He came off the Alzheimer’s and depression pills and went through three weeks of Lyme treatment. Lisa told Rolling Stone she was stunned by the change.
“All of a sudden he was back.” — Lisa Kristofferson, 2016
It was a real comeback, but not a complete one. A No Depression review of a January 2018 show in Solana Beach, California, noted that he still suffered short-term memory loss, while his songs and his own history remained sharp. That was the Kris Kristofferson of his final tours: unsure of yesterday, steady on “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”
What the Shows Were Really Like
Not every night was perfect, and his longtime fans knew it. The Star Tribune‘s Jon Bream remembered a 2015 Minnesota State Fair show with Merle Haggard where Kris struggled with lyrics and focus. But at the Pantages Theatre in Minneapolis in November 2019, Bream called the 100-minute concert unexpectedly excellent. Kris didn’t flub a lyric, with the help of a teleprompter, and he seemed fully engaged with his band, his audience and his songs.
He didn’t say much between numbers. The songs did the talking, the way they always had.
The Songs That Cost Him Everything Once
Those songs had a price long before illness came along. Kris Kristofferson was a Rhodes Scholar who studied English literature at Merton College, Oxford, and an Army captain who trained as a Ranger and flew helicopters. His father, Henry Kristofferson, rose to major general in the Air Force. In 1965 the Army assigned Kris to teach English at West Point.
He resigned instead and went to Nashville. His parents all but disowned him. Years later he told Pomona College Magazine that his mother had said nobody over 14 listened to that kind of music anyway. He described being virtually disowned as “kind of liberating,” because he had nothing left to lose.
His first job in the business was as a janitor at Columbia’s studio on Music Row, sweeping floors and emptying ashtrays while stars like Bob Dylan recorded. To pay the bills he also flew helicopters, including trips to offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. He once landed one on Johnny Cash’s property to deliver a tape. Cash loved telling that story, beer in hand and all. Kris later set the record straight.
“He wasn’t even in the house.” — Kris Kristofferson, on Johnny Cash
The songs got through anyway. Cash’s version of “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” won Kris the CMA Song of the Year, and in 2004 he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
The Last Show
Kris Kristofferson played his final full concert on January 30, 2020, aboard the Norwegian Pearl during the Outlaw Country Cruise. He opened with “Shipwrecked in the Eighties,” and “Me and Bobby McGee” came fourth. He was booked to play Willie Nelson’s Luck Reunion in Texas that March, but the pandemic shut it down. In early 2021, he quietly retired.
He died on September 28, 2024, at his home on Maui, surrounded by family. He was 88. Years earlier, he had guessed that the songs would be the last thing to go.