Kris Kristofferson: pop and country's semi-tough veteran

"How old were you when you started playing with me?" Kristofferson asks.

"Twenty," answers Bruton, now 60.

"You were the baby of the group," Kristofferson says.

"The funny thing is," Bruton adds, "I still am. Even though I don't look like it."

At one point, doctors told Bruton his chances of surviving much longer were pretty slim. On this day, Bruton's happy to be back in a studio, a guitar in his hands again.

"What are you gonna do?" he says to Kristofferson and Was, "just sit around till they throw dirt on you?"

Kristofferson tosses out the same phrase in reference to himself now and then, and he's clearly relieved about the upturn Bruton has taken. He's lost a lot of friends, not least among them two cohorts from the country supergroup the Highwaymen: Waylon Jennings and Cash.

His long and close relationship with the Man in Black crops up in "Good Morning, John," a song slated for the new album that he wrote in the '70s shortly after Cash had come out of a rehab program to deal with his substance abuse. He asks Was to add voices echoing the various greetings he sings in each verse: "Good morning, John," "You scared me, John," "I know you, John" and "I love you, John." That leads to an anecdote about an earlier attempt to record it with help from Willie Nelson, now the only other surviving Highwayman.

Nelson dutifully repeated after Kristofferson on the first three lines. "When I got to 'I love you, John,' I hear Willie sing, 'He loves you, John.' I broke up -- I couldn't finish the song. . . . But he wasn't about to sing 'I love you, John.' "

Cash was an early and ardent admirer of Kristofferson's literate songwriting, which married his early grounding in the music of Hank Williams with a passion for English literature -- in the '50s, Kristofferson won a Rhodes scholarship and studied at Oxford. Cash's recording of "Sunday Morning Coming Down" was part of a string of No. 1 country hits artists had in 1970 with Kristofferson songs; Janis Joplin took "Me and Bobby McGee" to the top of the pop chart the following year. Kristofferson's recordings appeared amid the decade's singer-songwriter explosion, and he found himself sharing the stage with major rock, pop and country figures.

Hollywood fell in love with his rugged looks and penchant for bringing characters to life, turning him into a sex symbol at the box office, most famously opposite Barbra Streisand in the 1976 remake of "A Star is Born." His starring role in Michael Cimino's commercially disastrous "Heaven's Gate," however, sent his acting career into the dumpster for years.