Kinky Friedman. Image from Wikipedia.
By Thorne Dreyer | The Rag Blog | July 4, 2024
Kinky Friedman, a singer, songwriter, humorist and sometime politician who with his band, the Texas Jewboys, developed an ardent following among alt-country music fans with songs like “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” — and whose biting cultural commentary earned him comparisons with Will Rogers and Mark Twain — died on Thursday at his ranch near Austin, Texas. He was 79. — New York Times
I first met Richard (Kinky) Friedman, when my father, then an editor at the Houston Chronicle, drafted his son in the mid-’60s to interview the Kinkster for the Chronicle‘s Sunday Texas Magazine. We sprawled out by the Shamrock Hotel’s massive swimming pool, and talked about Friedman’s Peace Corps trek to Borneo where he introduced the populace to the art of throwing the frisbee.
Or so the legend goes.
Over the years I saw Kinky perform many times and interviewed him for various publications and on both KPFT-FM, Houston’s Pacifica radio station, and on KOOP-FM in Austin. Despite his raucous side, Kinky Friedman was a sweet, warm guy whose artistry will continue to be appreciated in the future. He will truly be missed.
He was a world-class songwriter and never failed to entertain with his Texas Jewboys whose satirical lyrics delighted many and shocked others. He was a columnist for Texas Monthly and wrote some 16 books, many of which featured a fictionalized version of himself as a detective in New York City. He also ran a rescue ranch for animals. And, for boot, he ran for governor of Texas!
With a thick mustache, sideburns, a Honduran cigar and a broad-brimmed cowboy hat, he played his own version of Texas-inflected country music, poking provocative fun at Jewish culture, American politics and a wide range of sacred cows, including feminism — the National Organization for Women once gave him a “Male Chauvinist Pig Award.” — New York Times
With my Rag Radio mailing Friday I’m sending out a vintage Rag Radio interview with Kinky from October 19, 2012. You can listen to it here anytime.
And, I’m including below an even more vintage interview — with commentary — that I did on my Briarpatch show on KPFT in Houston in May of 1975. It was published in the Mighty Ninety News, publication of KPFT, and later, in expanded version, in the Austin Sun.
I’m reprinting it below.
From left: Thorne Dreyer, Kinky Friedman, Mac Hofheinz, Houston Mayor Fred Hofheinz, and Tracy Hofheinz at Liberty Hall in Houston in the mid-’70s. Photographer unknown.
Kinky Friedman: Jewboy Gets a Facelift
[This article by Thorne Dreyer first appeared in the Mighty Ninety News, publication of Pacifica Radio, Houston, and later in an expanded version in the Austin Sun.]
The Wild Man from Borneo entered Avalon Drug Store — Houston’s cheeseburger country club — for a late Sunday breakfast. The Wild Man mumbled Yiddish obscenities at the lackluster service while we engaged in droll discourse over the state of the universe and the problematic future of the human species.
Peace Corpsman Richard Friedman was busy tossing frisbees in Borneo while the writer — nee dropout — was offering fancy rhetoric to the winds of change. Our spiritual paths had intersected in the hope-drugged mania of Mid-Sixties Austin.
Actually, the Friedmans and the Hofheinzes needed no introduction. Fred’s precocious offspring — Paul and Tracy — spent more than one summer at the Friedman’s summer camp at Rio Duckworth, Texas, where Richard Friedman and Jeff Shelby counseled them in the ways of the semi-wild.
Far from uncomfortable with such juxtapositions, Kinky himself is a complex and piercingly intelligent young man. Having early-on established an image as an iconoclastic poet of the outrageous, he was written off by many as little more than a passing novelty act— the class clown of the cosmic cowboys, if you will. Now under the management of Jerry Weintraub — whose clients include John Denver — Kinky is making a run at pop stardom.
His recent tour was received with gusto by fans and critics alike (Billboard called him “one of the finest new talents to pass this way in a long time”), and his second album — on ABC — has garnered high ratings from such prestigious rags as Rolling Stone and is doing well in the record shops.
Kinky has pulled together an exciting, talented group of musicians for his current band and they put on a stage show that is a pure delight. Though Kinky lacks transcendent vocal skills and is not — as he puts it —“in your virtuoso guitar area,” he pulls it off with finesse. Finally, he is one of the most promising songwriters in America today — capable of brewing a unique blend of satire and pathos into a tragicomic broth.
During his Houston visit, Kinky dropped by KPFT’s new studios where he and the writer (/broadcaster) taped a conversation that was aired on the April 6 “Briarpatch.” The following is an edited and slightly rearranged version of that discussion.
The interview began with mention of an article by Chet Flippo in the April Texas Monthly, in which Flippo places Kinky among four song-stylists “who may hold the key to the new sound” of the Seventies. He suggests that “Kinky’s transition from cult hero to pop star is one of the more intriguing experiments in music of late…”
It is in response to such commentary that the Wild Man begins:
Historically, people are slow coming out of the chute, you know. I mean, they pick up on things after the fact. That’s the main reason that I justify possibly and exaggerated move — like on our new album on ABC — toward musical legitimacy and credibility. It’s a move into the musical casino, you know, from the Firesign Theater casino.
Well, the response that I have heard concerning the new album is that it’s a quantum leap, that musically it’s excellent, that it’s got some really beautiful songs on it, that it’s smoother… The first one — “Sold American’ — sort of grabbed you, and I liked it. I thought there were some fine songs on it…
Well, the new album will sneak up on ya. It wears very well. There’s songs on there that really become… well, you can listen to them a lot. “Popeye the Sailor Man” is one that’s getting an awful lot of airplay in some wiggy places, now, that they’ve never played us before… like Chicago, and St. Louis and Dallas.
But the whole thing is changing right now. The whole ethnic thing is in, man — you know, like Mel Brooks and Lenny Bruce… Mel Brooks has been around for 20 years and now he is personally hitting it very big all across America.
The ethnic thing of course was what people keyed on in the beginning, and I noticed the current album doesn’t even mention “Texas Jewboys” at all, even though in your stage act you still have the Jewboy backdrop. But I know when you first surfaced, that there were a lot of people in the Jewish community here in Houston…
Of the Jewish persuasion, yes…
…folks of the Jewish persuasion were a bit upset, found the term “Jewboy” to be insulting, and thought the whole act was insulting…
Well, I think that served its function. It obfuscates the act now. It’s like Jimmy Durante might have gotten into show business because of his nose, which is a clever gimmick, but if every single subject that he talked about was his nose, it would become very tedious.
But I don’t think any person with any quantum of Jewish awareness at all — I use “Jewish” in a very, uh… I’m not a practicing Jew myself, you know. I mean, I think I’m already good enough now… But any heebie-jeebies that have any quantum of cool at all… well I think they ought to be over in your Israeli area fighting A-rabs now if they want to do something.
Does it bother you sometimes when the racial stuff that you do — the ethnic slur trip which is obviously done from a removed ironic perspective — when people take it straight on? How does that affect you?.
Bigots need to be entertained also, their lives are just as dreary as us enlightened folk. Nothing is more boring than a bunch of graduate students in Marin County, totally tolerant human beings who have no ethnic taint whatsoever and love everyone of the Negro persuasion and A-rabs and Indians you know… That’s a real drag. Anyone that’s been around A-rabs or Indians or Jews or anybody very well knows their strengths and knows their weaknesses…
It’s the compartmentalization that I despise… the fact that you’ve got to get a Wop comic to tell a Wop joke is insane. If I want to tell a coon joke at the moment I’ll tell a coon joke… In San Francisco there was a whole slew of Indians there, ‘cause Buffy St. Marie was on the bill with us, you know.
Yeah, you had an incident, didn’t you, with Buffy ripping off the headdresses in the Indian number?
Right. Which is so ridiculous. It moderately backfired on Buffy — no, it completely backfired. She came right out on the stage and she started looking around at the audience, and she was wearing all these weird feathers and voodoo eyes and everything, and the audience didn’t relate to that real well ‘cause most of them were in an up mood anyway.
Buffy’s quite inconsistent herself, you know. I’ve always liked Buffy. I believe she’s legitimate, I believe she believes what she’s saying… Then she had a press conference and said, “Well, I know Kinky likes to poke fun at Jews, that’s alright, or Negroes, that’s fine, but leave the Indians alone.”
Buffy’s deadly serious, you know. But I think, becasee we took the light approach, we emerged as the people’s choice. I’ll tell you why: because it’s 10 years too late for that, maybe more. And her act hasn’t significantly changed in that period of time.
In that sense it becomes a question of how you really affect people. I think it’s a time right now where people certainly don’t turn on to folks who are, as you say, deadly serious.
People are tired. People are dragged out, people have been hit over the head for too long — literally and figuratively. People are numb, and don’t respond anymore to that. You have to sort of sneak up on them and tickle their funny bone or something…
Yes, that’s where I think the Seventies are going to be at. I think we have got a shot at some significant television action, something that could influence people in a good way. We’ve got several shows in the works now, pilot type things that we’ve drawn up.
We’ve talked about a “Kinky Friedman Irritation Hour,” kind of a show where things happen as they really happen, you know. You bring on Iggy Pop and Ernest Tubb or whoever — Truman Capote… Johnny Winter… Waylon Jennings on the same show.
Like Dylan. If we have Dylan on the show, I don’t want him to play his guitar, I want to see where the cat’s at in some other areas…
What about Bob Dylan? You met with him recently on the Coast, right?
Yeah. One thing we talked about was doing a tour, kind of a “Ride ‘em Jewboy” sort of a tour, possibly with Mike Bloomfield or Lou Reed or something like that, and us and Dylan.
‘Cause Dylan needs something that is less than heavy right now. I think he’d like to do something that the full onus of carrying the torch wouldn’t be on himself. It would be a crazy sort of thing that could hit Texas and Tel Aviv and London…
How did you happen to get together with Dylan?
Actually, Jewford and Dennis Hopper became very thick, and one day they were out at Roger McGuinn’s house in Malibu and Dylan was there. So Jewford called me, and Dylan got on the phone and started telling me to come on out there. And I thought it was Jewford fooling around. I didn’t think it was Dylan, so I I was rather curt with the cat, and he kept telling me, “Come to Alice’s Restaurant and we’ll have this car waiting for you here, a little pale blue Cadillac…”
It was tedious, you know. And I think I told him this sounded like some fraternity stunt or something. So I went out there and they had this car, and McGuinn has all these electronic gates… Kristofferson was there, and Dylan and Hopper and Jewford and a couple of other people.
Dylan was very sold on the past. Like his big point was, “I believe in what went down. I believe in the New York thing that was there and I want to introduce you to all these people that I’ve known.” And he wanted me to stay, talked about me spending the summer with him and we hit it off off very well — guardedly, you know.
He knows that I’ve been less than flattering to him. I mean, I used to always dig Dylan, always. I always have dug him actually. But professionally I’ve slandered him every chance I get, you know. Like, he can produce Stevie Goodman’s album or somebody, but I don’t want him burping on my album or playing guitar in the background. I don’t need that particularly.
I really feel that he feels what he’s done is associated with yesterday and that his heart is there. And this album, “Blood on the Tracks,” indicates to me — as good as parts of it are — that it’s a man that’s been living in his house for 10 years with his family, listening to phonograph records or something. It seems like he’s had no real human association, no real heavy experiences in the past years. He’s thinking back, you know… he’s thinking of how much fun he had in high school or something like that…
The cat is like anybody else in like… for instance, he sang “Ride ‘em Jewboy,” we did a duet of it. And he knows all the words to the booger, and I was laughing I was. I was saying, “Well, this is nigger heaven, this is wonderful, I love it.”
Dylan’s very down on the Texas trip. He was telling me not to be influenced by this Willie Nelson-Waylon Jennings type of thing. You know, he likes them personally, but he didn’t see any magic or electricity in all this. He says a lot of people are waiting for me or him or somebody to do something that will reach into Minnesota and Tel Aviv and Texas. I was surprised how he felt about the Texas thing.
And of course there were rumors that Dylan was into the Texas scene and was thinking of moving to Austin. Of course, they’ve said that about everyone from Neil Diamond to Bebe Rebozo, I don’t know… Coming to Texas, coming to Austin. Is Austin the center of the universe?
I think it’s a nice area, now. Nice place. I like Texas very much. I find I like it more when I’m here, you know — like certain people you love when you’re not with them. But, it’s so easy to write stuff and to do things that please people. That’s what I’m trying to avoid. It’s very easy to write a whole album about Lone Star Beer and about this type of thing — armadillos and stuff.
That becomes painfully predictable, eh?
It does, and it doesn’t seem to be getting us anywhere particularly. To tell you the truth, the people who have reached outside of Texas have not been the ones who have been preoccupied with Texas. Like, Janis Joplin despised the area she came from and was despised by all the people there. Johnny Winter, how can you be more of a leper than that?
Whereas people who are the embodiment of Texas will be regional because they are the embodiment of Texas. I don’t think that Willie Nelson will be the Will Rogers for the people in Vermont and the people in Oregon.
A regional guru.
You know, that’s a choice that I think Willie has made and I think probably wisely. I mean, who wants to bang your head against the wall playing for people in Buttocks, Texas, and South Dakota, and everywhere else. That would just destroy you, meeting all these damn promotional types everywhere you go… it drives you bonkers. You’ve got be somebody like a Ben Barnes to do it. It’s just tedious.
Maybe that Austin kind of scene could serve as an incubator to shoot out something out that’s larger and that has more magic to it…
Yeah… I have always liked Willie and Waylon and I always will like those guys. But it’s almost like, for all the people they have reached… still, Graham Parsons brought more country music to more pop people than either one of them did… with less credit for it, of course.
Is that what you want to do right now, to bring more…
No, I’m not in any evangelistically particular mood to bring any religion or…
…because that would be one of the justifications for reaching a lot more people with what might be construed by some as a watered-down message.
That’’s what Flippo’s apparently coming in from. The bid for putting some Texas style in the music of the Seventies… To me, Texas is very important. I just think there’s more to Texas than “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother” — which I like, you know, but which is a limiter, the whole area is.
Well, Austin itself is an isolated place… and it has a tendency to become its own little trip and not have much contact with anything else.
I feel a keener understanding of the act in other places than here… I don’t know why that is… Maybe it’s too close to the truth here. There’s routines we do that just go by the board here which knock their dicks through their watch pockets in L.A. and San Francisco and New York. And a lot of places I didn’t think it would carry so well, like in Chicago, Washington, Boston.
See, the audiences we drew the first tour were hip audiences and small audiences. This tour we had big crowds every place we played. And people were understanding the act much better. They weren’t pissed off, confused about it.
This time the humor carried beautifully, the personalities came across very well, and the crowd… in Atlanta and Nashville it was the… it was the blond-haired, blue-eyed, you know— the quarterbacks and the cheerleader from the local college were there. And people would say stuff — I remember a guy in Nashville said “Kinky… Snakebite… Jewford… too much!” And when you get people like that that are really turned on, you’re reaching somewhere.
You get kind of tired talking to yourself, don’t you?
Ain’t whistlin’ Dixie, I tell you…
And then suddenly, when you feel like a lot more people are relating to what you’re doing. I guess that’s a good response to the people who say, “Well, you’re watering down your trip.”
Again, we’re bucking kind of a Texas thing right now in that we’re very professional. I mean, there are people who say, “You’re too slick, you’re too professional, you’re actors.” Because they’re used to seeing dogs and little children and stuff on stage. Our guys are entertainers, they’re like showmen. Being laid back is not where it’s at for us.
Our first fans, you know were a weird cult of real wiggos who immediately snap up something like the “Ballad of Charles Whitman.” And they’re good people. These are the people that sustained the act when we were traveling around the country in our station wagon and our U-haul trailer, you know. For these people, anything short of a complete blasphemy is going to be disappointing.
But even if you’re dealing in the casino of satire, there has to be some growth. And basically, our move has been — and some people may disagree with me — has been away from satire into comedy. And in doing so, we’re right in tune with a major trend of the times, which are so bleak. Most of the point of the act now is one of general enjoyment on stage; we like what we’re doing a lot, man, and it comes off.
What’s gonna happen next? You say you’re looking towards television… basically it seems like what you’re looking to do is expand on lots of levels, to move out into other fields, to get a larger audience, to…
Your multi-media approach now…
…to build your trip. Are you working on another album?
Right. This one will be done in Jamaica. We’re gonna have some Ubangi drumming on the thing, in your reggae area, but it’s not like a reggae album. It’s gonna involve some songs that I have had in the can that we didn’t release before because the architecture of the material is so particularly repellent, you know, that these go beyond good or bad taste.
We may take some very old — some country songs — and try some reggae stuff with them and just see what happens there. The tentative title of the album is “Bermuda Schwartz,” and it’s a cute album. It’s light and it’s uptempo and it’s lively. It’s a happy kind of a thing. And the band is going to be on it very strongly, which wasn’t the case on the last album. It will reflect more of what you see in the stage act. Plus some wiggy guests that are going to be down there with us.
What after that?
After that we’ll probably be playing the Electric Matzohball in Jerusalem. I don’t know after that. If we can get the Jewboy national tour organized, we’ll do that booger. I’m working on a book that’s about halfway through right now. The television thing is in the works. And that’s about the extent of it.
Well that sounds like a lot for a Jewboy from Texas.
We want to wish everybody a long and a prosperous nose, now. We hope the baby Jesus smiles upon all of you.
[At the time of this interview Thorne Dreyer could be heard on “The Briarpatch” each Sunday night from 9 to 10 p.m. on KPFT, Pacifica Radio in Houston.]
