Kinky Friedman Didn’t Always Sell, But He Sure Could Write
I once trailed Kinky Friedman into a cigar store in midtown Manhattan. Few aromas in the world are more vile than cigar smoke, but few interview subjects were more engaging than Kinky, so it was a good call.
“With the Texas Jewboys,” he said, reflecting on his music career, “we appealed to very smart and to very stupid people.”
“After all my years on the road,” he said a few moments later, “I have come to hate the sound of the human voice.”
Very few artists say things like that.
Richard Friedman was born in Chicago, grew up in Texas, spent some time in New York and finally returned to Texas, where he died Thursday at the age of 79 from complications of Parkinson’s.
Kinky Friedman, Richard’s public persona since his debut Texas Jewboys album Sold American in 1973, was a clever and skilled songwriter who at first glance seemed to take nothing seriously.
“Get Your Biscuits In the Oven and Your Buns In the Bed” annoyed some feminists. Others heard it as a satire on male chauvinist pigs.
“The Ballad of Charles Whitman,” about the Eagle Scout and University of Texas student who climbed to the top of the Texas Tower one day in 1966 and shot dozens of people, was sprinkled with unexpected lines like “He was sittin’ up there with his .36 magnum / Laughin’ wildly as he bagged ’em / Who are we to say the boy’s insane?”
The song builds, however, to a more disquieting point: “Some folks couldn’t figure just why he did it / And them that could would not admit it / There’s still a lot of Eagle scouts around.”
As mass shootings have become almost a national pastime in recent years, the idea that sometimes we don’t know why they happen seems chillingly timeless.
Still, those kinds of songs go a long way to explaining why Friedman never transcended the relatively modest world of alt-country — though Glen Campbell did record “Sold American,” the melancholy reflections of a singer who used to be somebody (“Writin’ down your memoirs on some window in the frost / Roulette eyes reflect / Another mornin’ lost”).
While Friedman talked about how much he loved traditional artists, from Ernest Tubb to Jimmie Rodgers and Paul Robeson, many of his songs, to be charitable, fell outside the mainstream tradition.
“Ride ’Em Jewboy” is a melodic, reflective, wonderfully crafted reverie about the unspeakable, the Holocaust, with a single quiet allusion to the fact the Holocaust didn’t come out of nowhere: “How long will you be driven / Relentless / ‘Round the world?”
On the flip side of “Ride ’Em Jewboy,” Friedman also wrote a rollicking anthem called “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Any More.”
The protagonist there flattens a racist he encounters in a local bar: “You could hear that honky holler as he hit that hardwood floor, / ‘Lord, they sho’ ain’t makin’ Jews like Jesus any more’.”
Friedman’s skill at humor and wordplay won him impressive friends. Bob Dylan invited him on a leg of the 1976 Rolling Thunder tour and for years he was a regular guest of radio host Don Imus.
Friedman shared Imus’s view of the world as theater of the absurd, so it’s probably no surprise he got Imus into trouble by singing “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Any More” on an Imus broadcast. The lyrics include a string of ethnic and racial slurs as part of the setup to ridicule the racist character, and the Imus team took flak for laughing after one of those racist lines.
“A lot of bigoted people talk that way,” Friedman said when asked about that backlash. “I’ve had people tell me n — — — jokes backstage. For a while it depressed me.”
So he wrote a song lampooning bigots.
Not that he considered himself a moral crusader. Kinky Friedman saw life as material and people as marks.
He was a good friend of Imus, for instance, back to the days when Imus did standup shows and Friedman would open for him. That didn’t stop him from remarking that “I just did three hours on the air with Imus, which is about as long as any human being oughta be around Imus.”
By the measure of commercial success, Friedman’s legacy would tilt more to crime novels than country-ish songs. His 18 books about a Texas gumshoe named Kinky Friedman who keeps encountering bizarre crimes in New York sold more than six million copies.
The writing tone mirrors his songwriting, albeit at greater length. Friedman said the process was a lot different.
“Writing novels is a lonely, monastic experience,” he said. “Very different from singing songs, where you get applause.”
He did, however, find a bright side to writing novels, particularly after he ran unsuccessfully for governor of Texas in 2006.
“Politics is not a good place for the truth,” he said. “Fiction is a great place for the truth.”
In the end, Kinky Friedman may be best remembered as a character, one of those artists who delighted many of those who discovered him.
“I fought as hard as I could to mainstream this stuff,” he said. “I might be a little off-center, but all great people are off-center. Emily Dickinson died in 1886, unpublished and unknown.”
The world, he mused, is a crazy place, with just a few random oases of what he’d call sanity.
“In England,” he said, “you can smoke a cigar in an elevator.”
