ADIOS AMIGO: WAVING GOODBYE TO KINKY FRIEDMAN
Here's my tribute to the late Texan maverick - with a previously unpublished interview I conducted with the Kinkster.
Here’s Kinky speaking then singing. He has a fascinating tale to tell.
Having survived the heavy showers that drenched Maverick Festival, I returned to London with a head cold. Shows what a city boy I am that 10 days in the countryside leave me ruined… Thinking about Maverick reminded me that Kinky Friedman, the venerated country singer/songwriter/satirist, would have suited the festival – but it was not to be, the Kinkster having died on June 24 of Parkinson’s disease aged 79.
I’m guessing only a few of my readers will be familiar with Kinky – he started releasing albums half a century ago and wrote 18 satiric mystery novels plus a few nonfiction books – and maintained a cult following in the US (President Bill Clinton was a fan, endorsing the novels and inviting Friedman to visit the White House). Cult artists always hope to broaden their following but this wasn’t to be the case for Friedman: his songs aren’t venerated/sung in the way those of his Texan contemporaries Guy Clark, Billy Joe Shaver and Townes Van Zandt are. While his novels appealed largely to fans of his music/humour. Which isn’t too surprising, Kinky was offbeat and abrasive both in approach and his art. This noted, Friedman wanted to be accepted – he ran for Governor of Texas in 2006 (as an independent - not as a novelty candidate) – and was disappointed when he came fourth.
Anyway, I interviewed Kinky when he was in London – either late-2005/early 2006. I didn’t note the date down but do recall his mind was focused on his campaign. I think he had likely been sent to Europe to have a break, earn some money. I’ve no recall of who offered me the interview – I imagine I took it purely because Friedman struck me as part of a remarkable time in US country/folk music in the mid-1970s when genuine mavericks like the aforementioned Townes, Billy Joe and Guy were following Willie and Waylon’s lead so really taking the genre places it never had been before. Kinky was something of the jester of that scene. Not as gifted a songwriter or singer as his more famous contemporaries but one whose lyrics were often designed to affront. I didn’t place the interview anywhere – perhaps I thought I’d wait until the campaign heated up and see if any publication was interested (I might have approached a few publications and been rejected, typical Brit arts editor mindset wants safe, household names) – so Yakety Yak readers have it as an exclusive.
First up, an obituary: Kinky Friedman was country music’s most prominent satirist. His 1973 debut album Sold American won him much critical acclaim and admiration from the likes of Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson. In the mid-1980s he began publishing mystery novels – again offbeat and droll – and these initially enjoyed positive reviews. Friedman would later run for elected office in Texas several times. Friedman saw himself as part of a Jewish comic tradition, yet unlike Don Rickles or Groucho Marx he was too quirky and abrasive to appeal to mainstream America. He was closer perhaps to Lenny Bruce in the sense he was interested in testing the limits of free speech and provoking his audiences. This noted, he wrote several outstanding songs and loved being Kinky, the gruff Texan Jewish cowboy who mocked everyone.
This is a parody of Merle Haggard’s Okie From Muskogee, a song that was vaguely satirical while trading as a reactionary anthem. I’m guessing this song didn’t win Kinky many votes.
Born Richard Samet Friedman in Chicago to Dr S. Thomas Friedman and his wife Minnie (nee Samet) Friedman, the family moved to the Texas Hill Country when Richard was four. Here his parents opened a summer camp called Echo Hill. A bright child, Richard demonstrated a passion for chess and would, in 1951, be included as the youngest player of a team of fifty to challenge U.S. grandmaster Samuel Reshevsky in Houston. Friedman (and his 49 team mates) all lost but he later recalled enjoying his first taste of media attention.
Friedman graduated from Austin High School in Austin, Texas, in 1962 and would earn a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Texas, Austin, in 1966. It was here his curly hair won him the nickname “Kinky”. Friedman formed his first band while at university and they released one 45, which satirised the then popular surf music. He served two years with the US Peace Corps in Borneo, Indonesia, and upon returning to Texas, set up a sanctuary for stray dogs at Echo Hill. At the start of the 1970s Austin, Texas, had a developing counterculture which allowed left-field country singers like Jerry Jeff Walker to flourish and, when Willie Nelson relocated from Nashville to Austin, it became one of the US’s hot music hubs. Friedman began developing his vision of a country singer unlike any the world had previously known.
Leading Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys (named in mocking homage to Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys – Wills being a legend of Western Swing, the jazz inflected country dance music) he impressed audiences but record labels found Friedman’s brand of satiric country far too savage for their mainstream agendas. Commander Cody – vocalist of the then popular hippie country rock band Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen – introduced Friedman to Vanguard Records, an independent label that had launched Joan Baez, and this resulted in 1973’s Sold American, a country album like none before. The title track describes an old, down-on-his-luck country singer, while Ride ‘Em, Jewboy is a meditation on the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. If these songs were serious, The Ballad Of Charles Whitman and Get Your Biscuits In The Oven And Your Buns In The Bed were designed to offend – the former concerned a Texan mass murderer, the latter a refutation of feminist demands for equality - and they did: popular US comedy show Saturday Night Live refused to let Friedman sing Charles Whitman when he appeared as its musical guest, while a concert in Buffalo, New York, in 1973 saw a group of angry women invading the stage so forcing Friedman and band to curtail playing.
The critical praise and publicity Sold American received saw ABC signing Friedman for 1974’s eponymous album – it reached No 132 in the US charts, a career best for Friedman and contained They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore, a song based on a barroom encounter with a drunken racist that became a Kinky staple. Reviews were lukewarm – Friedman himself was disparaging of the producer ABC forced on the album after Willie Nelson proved unavailable – and he left ABC. An admiring Bob Dylan hired Friedman as a support act for his US tours and then engaged him as part of 1976 leg of his Rolling Thunder Revue tour.
Friedman’s third album, Lasso From El Paso, was recorded during the tour and issued on Epic. It would be his last album of largely original material for decades. Friedman spent considerable time based in Nashville, including performing at The Grand Ole Opry (he claimed he was the first Jewish artist to grace the stage of country music’s most revered building) where he worked as a professional songwriter, enjoying the camaraderie if finding his songs were rarely in demand by country’s most popular singers. Shifting to New York, Friedman’s barbed stage spiel won him a loyal audience and this encouraged Kinky to move into writing books and performing stand-up comedy. In public Friedman always wore a large Stetson hat and cowboy boots, while smoking huge cigars - this was how he presented Kinky to the world.
Here’s young Kinky at his most brilliantly acerbic.
His 1986 debut novel Greenwich Killing Time was the first of eighteen Kinky Friedman Mysteries and found the main character “the Kinkster” a Sherlock Holmes-inspired detective. As with many of his songs, Friedman’s novels were wry satires that poked fun at US taboos. Initially they won Friedman good reviews – when Bill Clinton endorsed Friedman as a novelist and invited him to the White House it gave Kinky his greatest prominence – but, by this century, with sales declining, he returned his focus to music, regularly touring while publishing nonfiction collections that found him musing on Texas, the USA, country music and “political correctness” (he hated it).
The Kinky I encountered in London almost 20 years ago was a small, compact man with worn features and dark, thoughtful eyes. He determined that we conduct the interview in a park behind Euston Station as Kinky wanted to smoke his cigars. There we sat on an overcast afternoon and everyone that walked past stared at the man in dark cowboy clothing and a Stetson hat. Even a police van slowed down to have a look. Kinky waved his cigar at them just in case they were wondering what he was puffing on. The years on stage and the effort put into running for political office were immediately felt as Kinky spoke in a mix of dry one liners and soundbites – and his campaign for governor was the foremost thing on his mind.
As a journalist its never much fun when your interviewee is simply pumping out the same spiel he’s given everyone else, seeing you only as a medium to promote their schtick, so Friedman wasn’t the most engaging of men. Then, at one point, I caught him looking at me, considering me as an individual rather than just an audience. Perhaps he realised that I appreciated the Texan music scene he hailed from. Or, quite possibly, his natural decency – which many who encountered him spoke of – started to outweigh his hucksterisms.
I asked about what Austin was like to live in when it first became a music capital in the mid-1970s.
“When Willie Nelson came down there and jumped in front of that parade and brought the rednecks and the hippies together, well, something magical happened,” said Kinky. “Before that Austin was known as a wild kind of place. I recall Austin had a football coach and he was trying to convince this young guy from outside Austin to sign with the team and his parents were pretty religious so they were against him going. What the coach said that convinced them to let their son sign was ‘you send us a good one, we send you back a good one.’ That’s true of Austin and why it attracts people. It’s always been an innovative place but it’s changing rapidly and for the worse.
“What you have now is all these software and internet companies and they have no concept of, no feeling for, Texas beyond Austin. They sure as hell don’t care about rural Texas. And rural Texas is what children all around the world dream about. They look to Texas. One of the main reasons I’m running for governor is to preserve that emotional heritage of Texas. Children around the world need that to dream about.
“There are some liberal Democrats but I grew up believing that politicians should not be for sale. That politicians should be held to a higher level than your average citizen. There’s a lot of things I don’t understand – why does Spain own our roads? We’re one of the world’s largest economies yet the Spanish own our highways! If I become Governor I’m going to legalise casinos. Because at present Texans pay for Louisiana’s public schools and roads by gambling across the border in Louisiana.
“I think there’s a great chance of winning the primary. My slogan is ‘power to the people’. My aim is to retake power from the politicians and the lobbyists and give it back to the people. Power to the people may be a 1960s slogan but it’s worth reviving right now as it’s more relevant today than ever. Texas is a very rich state. See, Texas has oil. And if you’ve got oil you’re going to have people queuing up to give you money. So why are teachers in Texan state schools paid below the national average wage? The slogan for Texas is ‘don’t mess with Texas’. Well, my campaign slogan is ‘I’m going to continue messing with Texas until we the people get it right.’”
Here’s a 2012 interview with Kinky - if you want to hear his views on US politics this isn’t a bad way of being introduced to the self-proclaimed “defender of strays”.
Which all sounds great and I wish Friedman had won – Texans tend to vote for rightwing Republican creeps and Rick Perry (who beat Kinky) was just plain nasty – but I was more interested in his music than his campaign promises. I pushed in a question on the late Townes Van Zandt.
“Townes was a spirit. Townes lived in the present all the time. I live in the future. We both learned Fraulein at the same age in Houston. He lived in the present and that made him very accessible to an audience and that could create a problem. I was watching him play in Austin one night and he was singing Ira Hayes and that’s got quite a complex lyric and Townes got lost so I got up there to help him finish the song. He squatted there watching me, looking just like an Indian himself. He had the magic and the tragic. Died the same day as Hank Williams and Billy Joe Shaver’s son. I got to know Hank’s great steel player Jerry Byrd and he told me how Hank appeared to have a total disdain for the audience. He would just get fucked up and go on stage.”
Aware that Friedman had spent some time in Nashville trying to succeed as a songwriter, I asked his thoughts on Music City.
“I had a love/hate relationship with Austin back then. I went to Nashville when Kris Kristofferson was the most talented janitor in town. I loved Nashville back then – it was full of hardcore songwriters staying up all night. Waylon and Tompall Glaser were my buddies. We’d party together and continually come up with new ideas. These days Nashville’s swung the other way. When I got my foot in the door the city was open to new artists. Black and Chicano artists were succeeding singing country music and I got invited onto the Grand Ole Opry. I know they were worried about us but we went down fine.”
Friedman didn’t settle long in Nashville for the reason that his songs failed to find many takers. In some ways he’s the classic case of the artist who wrote his most celebrated songs in obscurity and then, once having won the spotlight, failed to write anything as strong again.
“I’m not sure of the derivation but a lot of the songs on my first album were written while I was in the Peace Corp in the jungles of Borneo. Distance lends perspective. I’ve written seventeen mystery novels set in New York while living in Texas. I can see things more clearly once I step outside something. Sold American wasn’t a commercially great album but it showed that I was a pure songwriter. Why haven’t I written any songs to match those initial ones? Willie and Bob haven’t written great songs for decades either. Ken Kesey observed that fame distances you from your art. It’s very true.”
Here’s Kinky singing a song by his late pal Warren Zevon.
Kinky certainly enjoyed a degree of fame but I doubt it made him wealthy – the three albums he released in the 1970s failed to make any commercial impact and, unlike Van Zandt and Clark, he never had mainstream country artists singing his songs. Even his mystery novels had, he told me, stopped selling – thus his return to singing. Not that he appeared very enthused about this: his concert that evening, at the Jazz Cafe in Camden Town, was only half full. And Friedman appeared less than fully engaged in his performance – he was an intelligent man and I doubt ever desired to spend his entire life singing songs he wrote in his youth. Thus the attempts to win political office (he also ran for two local government offices – losing both).
“Success is so much about timing,” he replied when I asked him why he felt he had never experienced a real commercial breakthrough. “I was with Lowell George when he was given a gold album for Waiting For Columbus. I was like ‘wow, Lowell, you’ve got a gold album! You’ve really made it!’ He replied ‘yeah, but it came ten minutes too late.’ That’s a very good line. Very true. We were close friends, hung out a lot. Both of us were really fucked up.”
I now wish I’d pressed him for more detail on Lowell George – the doomed, gifted leader of Little Feat, an LA band whose ebullient mix of blues-country-soul-rock shone brightest on their 1972 Sailin’ Shoes album – as I think Kinky would have had some interesting observations. Then again, he wasn’t a particularly forthcoming interviewee, so he might simply have gone on about how Lowell would have supported his bid to be governor.
I had to ask him about Bob Dylan, another Jewish American singer-songwriter whose original way with a song had captivated the world – I’m sure Kinky had, like many songwriters, come of age enamoured with Dylan.
“I think Bob had this ruthless, Woody Guthrie driven spirit that got him through his first records. A close friend of Bob’s once said to me ‘inside the head of an icon is a little Jewish man who wants money and pussy’. And that’s close to what I’ve seen of Bob. Whenever I see Bob he wants me to sing Ride ‘Em Jewboy – he’s fascinated by that song!”
He returned to politics when the subject of the smoking ban was raised.
“It’s the hall monitors run amuck. They always say ‘we’re doing it for your health, Kinky.’ If that’s so then how come nations like Spain, Greece and France, nations with a higher percentage of smokers than the US, live so much longer than Americans? If I get elected governor I will rip up every smoking law that’s been passed.”
Kinky mellowed when I asked him about an animal sanctuary I was aware he supported.
“I’m the pitchman. It’s been running for eleven years and we’ve had thousands and thousands of animals adopted. I’m interested in making Texas a no-kill state. I’d like to not kill cats, dogs and people.”
His anti-death penalty stance likely cost him plenty of votes in the state that enthusiastically executes more prisoners than any other in the US. Still, I’m pleased he took this stance and that I got to spend some time with him – Kinky wasn’t a major talent but he was a one-off, the culturally Jewish country singer with a skewed vision of America. At the time we met he wasn’t promoting a new album and he didn’t release one until 2015. From then on he self-released several albums of new songs, his final release being 2019’s Resurrection, an album that demonstrated a more mature, if still caustic, worldview.
“I live in the future. Only a little in the past,” he said to me and I think that reflects well on him. Ride easy, Kinky.
Here’s one of Kinky’s last great songs - its heartfelt, about ageing, and he’s helped by his old pal and mentor, Willie.
Beautifully done, Garth. You quadrupled what I knew about him in this single work of journalism. I met Kinky Friedman circa 1972 when he performed at Max's Kansas City, when I was a waiter there. Often the wait-staff got to hang out a bit, if the stars allowed it, with the many top-flight artists appearing upstairs at Max's, but Friedman wasn't as engaging and forthcoming -- as you point out -- as some other artists I met at the same time -- like Iggy Pop and Bob Marley, for instance, who seemed unaffected by their fame and genius and engaged folks they encountered as equals. Your article profiles the singer marvelously. I think he played Max's two or three days and I was a bit uncomfortable with his brazen use of the phrase "Jew boy" -- my tender lefty ears did not permit such excesses.