A country boy can survive

KRIS KRISTOFFERSON found himself with a lot to think about in the last couple of years.

“Just the news, the role that we’re playing around the world,” he says. “And reflecting on the lives and deaths of close friends -- some of my heroes and friends.”

He starts a list, with names just rushing out, in particular those whom Kristofferson admired and worked with when he was first establishing himself as one of the most poignant songwriters of country music’s “outlaw” community about 35 years ago: Johnny Cash and June Carter ... Waylon Jennings ... Roger Miller ... songwriter Harlan Howard ... sometimes collaborator Shel Silverstein ... singer-songwriter Mickey Newbury. All have died in a fairly short stretch of time.

“It’s only going to get worse,” says Kristofferson, himself now 69, with a gruff little chuckle.

But when Kristofferson thinks, he writes songs.

“I don’t write as much as I did back when I was writing songs every day,” says Kristofferson, who for much of the last three decades has been at least as prominent as an actor as he was as a songwriter. “But when current events and world situations get in your brain, that’s the way I sort it out.”

Don’t get the wrong idea. Kristofferson is hardly grim. In fact, he’s feeling quite recharged and renewed as a songwriter. His first album of new songs in a decade, produced by Don Was, will be released in early 2006 by roots-oriented New West Records. The new material drawing on his current political and personal observations joins an impressive body of work including such late-’60s and early-’70s hits as “Me and Bobby McGee,” “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night” -- most familiar in versions by Janis Joplin, Johnny Cash and Sammi Smith, respectively.

But few if any songs of his have entered the mainstream consciousness since the ‘70s -- something he in part attributes to the left-wing takes of his most political material, anathema to country radio in particular. So he’s had to wonder if anyone would be hearing his new songs.

“If I get out there and sing them, they are,” he says.

So with that in mind, he has launched a new career phase. He has picked up his guitar and hit the road as a solo troubadour. He’ll be at UCLA Royce Hall on Sunday in a double bill with Steve Earle, a younger performer whose political activism and barbed musical approach makes him a country music outsider as well.

“It started about a year or so ago when I was doing a film in Scotland,” Kristofferson says of his belated move to solo performing. “I got some offers to play in Ireland and didn’t have time to mobilize a band or anything, so I played them by myself. It put the focus on the songs; that’s nice. And it wasn’t as scary as I thought it was going to be. In Ireland, playing for thousands of people, selling out huge places, but I didn’t have to worry about causing a train wreck if I made a mistake. I could correct it myself.”

THE Texas-born Kristofferson was never a polished performer. He started fairly late in life, after stints as a Rhodes scholar, Golden Gloves boxer and in the Army, entering music purely as a songwriter before finally starting doing concerts in 1970 well into his 30s.

And since that time he’d almost always performed within the safety of a band, either his own or with the Highwaymen, the teaming of him, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings that released three hit country albums between 1985 and ’95. As a musician in his own right, he’d become discouraged -- tying diminished interest in his work to his own increased focus on politics, with many songs drawn from his activism against U.S. involvement in Central America in the ‘80s.

“My record company sank into the sunset, and I wasn’t as marketable with my music because of the activism; work I was doing in Nicaragua protesting my government’s role made me less marketable as a country artist anyway,” he says.

At that point he became more a presence in film than in music. Almost parallel with launching a music performance career in the early ‘70s, he became a regular on movie screens, particularly as rough-edged characters in such films as “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” (as Billy), “A Star Is Born” (costarring Barbara Streisand) and the ill-fated “Heaven’s Gate.”

Starting in the mid-’80s, though, he took film and TV work at a furious pace, tallying more than 60 roles in the last 20 years, including “Big Top Pee-wee,” the three “Blade” movies and the “Planet of the Apes” remake. He just attended the Toronto film festival in conjunction with his parts in new films “Dreamer” (with Kurt Russell and Dakota Fanning) and the country “mockumentary” satire “The Life and Hard Times of Guy Terrifico.”

“The films kind of picked up the slack for me,” he says. “I know they supported me and the band on the road for many years.”

Now, though, he says it’s the other way around: He’s getting more offers to play music. And in his new musical incarnation, he’s found a warm reception for the full range of his material -- at least in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, where most of his shows have been thus far.

“I’ve got an audience [in the U.S.] too,” says Kristofferson, who lives in Hawaii with wife Lisa and their two children, ages 11 and 14 (he has six other children from previous marriages). “Maybe people are becoming aware of some of the things I’m singing about, or that Steve Earle’s singing about. Or maybe if you hang around long enough you get good at what you’re doing and people appreciate [it].”

In any case, he’s hoping to plunge into a full touring schedule next year.

“I feel like I’ve been really lucky,” he says. “I’ve made a good living doing what I love to do. I support all my kids, get their respect. A lot of people I’ve really admired I came to be close friends with and worked with. True, a bunch of them are dying, but we’re all going to be there.”

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Kris Kristofferson and Steve Earle

Where: Royce Hall, UCLA, Westwood

When: 7 p.m. Sunday

Price: $35 to $55

Info: (310) 825-2101 or www.uclalive.org