As the hostile crowd threatened to drown out O’Connor’s performance that night, the concert’s organizers had asked Kristofferson to escort her off the stage. He refused, and instead went out and told her, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” To which, he said, she responded: “I’m not down.”
In her 2021 memoir, “Rememberings,” O’Connor had a slightly less rosy telling of events. She wrote that when she saw Kristofferson approaching her, she thought: I don’t need a man to rescue me, thanks. As they went offstage, she added, she almost threw up on him.
“It just seemed to me wrong, booing that little girl out there,” Kristofferson added all those years later. “She’s always had courage.”
Or, as he sang in “Sister Sinead”:
And maybe she’s crazy and maybe she ain’t
But so was Picasso and so were the saints
And she’s never been partial to shackles or chains
She’s too old for breaking and too young to tame
