This story originally ran in an April 1974 issue of Rolling Stone . I n Peru, one kept a daily journal; now Kristofferson bends grinning over its pages, on which, in the winter of ’70, Andes mud spilled and dried like blood spots. “Hell,” he offers rurally, “wouldn’t surprise me none you said it was blood.
” One had gone there to write about the making, or rather, wresting from the soil, of Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie ; Kris, totally unknown then, was doing the film’s score. Rain hung over the Andes like an apathetic fate; we were unanimously weakened and distracted by the paranoia and diarrhea induced by Hopper’s inferior coke and an oppressive intuition we shared, about a movie whose title would turn out inadvertently ironical. Yet now Kris happily basks in the journal’s glum notes as though they were yearbook inscriptions, or baby pictures: Hopper attracts, or surrounds himself with, two types: troubled, abrasive specters and gentle heroes holding to concepts of pleasantness and goodness.
The latter includes a composer named Kris, with a K . . .
though he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, his speech is Brownsville bowling alley. Amid the cabin-fever hostility here, he takes elaborate pains to placate, to not challenge; he appears to sleepwalk hung over through some good dream, yet yesterday, when the horses rented for the movie panicked on the set, K. stepped instantly from us cowering bystanders to a wild-eyed black mare .
. . before he calmed her, she.
