Kris and Merle, music legends at ease at Wells Fargo Center

<p>As afternoon traffic flies by on Highway 101, two of the greatest singer-songwriters in country music are winding through a sound check inside Santa Rosa’s Wells Fargo Center, getting the kinks out before their first-ever concert together.</p><p>With Merle Haggard to his right, Kris Kristofferson breaks into, “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” Reaching the line, “On the Sunday morning sidewalk,” he looks over and grins as his 71-year-old sidekick chimes in, “wishing, Lord, that I was stoned.”</p><p>After the song ends, Kristofferson shakes his head and says, “I don’t know if I can sing while I’m smiling the whole night.”</p><p>Wednesday night’s concert was originally billed as “Two Legends, Two Guitars,” just a pair of old friends sitting on stage swapping songs.</p><p>“But then Merle snuck in other players,” Kristofferson says backstage. “He’s such a musician and loves to hear all the guitars and the fiddle, he would have hated it if it was just me and him up there.”</p><p>Between them, the two Country Music Hall of Famers have enough hits — “Me and Bobby McGee,” “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” “Hungry Eyes,” “Sing Me Back Home,” “Today I Started Loving You Again,” just to name a handful — to fill any honky-tonk jukebox. The original “Outlaw,” Haggard alone has 40 No.1 hits.</p><p>“I tell you what, I’m so blown away that I’m on the same stage with him,” says Kristofferson, 72. “Back 40 years ago, he was the hero of the singer-songwriters in Nashville. Now, to be up singing with him on stage, was inconceivable at the time.”</p><p>So how does he think the ever-evolving show — one of only three Haggard-Kristofferson concerts in the country — will shape up?</p><p>“It’s gonna be interesting,” says Kristofferson, who owns a ranch in Elk and graduated from San Mateo High School. “I think he’s probably just as scared as I am.”</p><p>At rehearsals the night before, Haggard “was kinda reluctant” to roll out his classic “Okie from Muskogee” — the one that rails on “the hippies out in San Francisco,” says Kristofferson, who “thinks” he’s talked him into playing it.</p><p>“I worked a lot of construction jobs in California back in the ‘50s, and ‘Okie’ was a dirty word. And for a guy to say, ‘I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee’ and have a hit song out of it, was a brave thing to do. And he said it cost him some airplay.”</p><p>Back on stage, as they come to the end of “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again),” Kristofferson leans in to show Haggard the chord changes. They go over it a few times. And then he takes a step back, pauses and says to everyone, “I just told Merle Haggard what to do!”</p><p>The whole band laughs, Haggard shaking his head, obviously uneasy with all the adoration, and they move on to the next number.</p>