Kinky Rides Again
Kinky Friedman makes his first appearance in the South Bay in more than two decades Monday night at Saint Rocke.
When he ran for governor in Texas five years ago, for example, the outlaw songwriter Billy Joe Shaver – who shot a man in the face after a barroom dispute (the man had attacked him with a knife, proving the adage, “Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight”) – served as his highly unofficial spiritual adviser.
Politically, Friedman turns mostly to dead people, including former Texas governors Anne Richards and Sam Houston. “My platform is to remember that when they went out searching for Sam Houston to try to persuade him to be the governor – and he was the greatest governor this state has ever had – rumor has it that they found him drunk, sleeping under a bridge with the Indians,” Friedman wrote at the outset of his gubernatorial campaign.
Musically, he takes inspiration from his friend Bob Dylan, with who he toured in the carnivalesque Rolling Thunder Review back in 1975. “Bob is the one that said art should not reflect culture,” Friedman said in an interview this week. “It should subvert it.”
Friedman just finished a narrowly unsuccessful run for agricultural commissioner in Texas in which he ran ran on a “No Cow Left Behind” promise and won 48 percent of the vote. Now, he has finally left politics behind and gone back to what he first became known for in the 1970s, touring as Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, singing deceptively profound songs guised in outlandishness (such as the rare pro-choice country song “Rapid City, South Dakota” and the first, last, and only cowboy-inspired Holocaust elegy, “Ride Em, Jewboy”).
As he prepared to leave his Texas ranch, Friedman turned for road-going advice to his great friend Willie Nelson (with whom he is co-authoring a forthcoming book, which will bring Friedman’s literary output to over 30 books, mostly detective novels featuring a former country singer turned sleuth named Kinky Friedman).
“If Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan can do this, I guess I can keep doing it,” Friedman said. “They are both older and I look up to both of them for wisdom and advice – though they are both shorter than me. In fact, Willie gave me some good advice before this tour. He said, ‘If you are going to have sex with an animal, always make it a horse – because that way, even if things don’t work out, at least you’ve got a ride home.’”
In all seriousness – well, maybe not, in Kinky’s case – he feels liberated to be back out of politics and back in music.
“I guess politics has kept me from performing, and that’s too bad, because I think this is what I need to be doing,” Friedman said. “I think musicians could better run this country than politicians. You know, we may not get a lot done in the morning, but we’d work late and we’d be honest….It really is a step down, from musician to politician. These guys are the worst of the worst, the worst our country has to offer, and it is true for almost all of them. That is why I recommend that we have term limits on all elected officials – limit them all to two terms, one in office, and one in prison.”
Friedman is a rarity in public life, at least in this century. He is a multi-dimensional polemicist, a musician, politician, author, columnist, purveyor of his own brand of cigars, and founder and chief benefactor of the Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch outsider Kerrville, Texas, where a large menagerie of animals have been saved from euthanasia (including 1,000 dogs, a few pigs, various cats, roosters, and an occasional turkey). He has been described as Texas’s Mark Twain, the Frank Zappa of Country Music, Utopia Ranch’s Gandhi, and one of the best deliverers of one-liners since Will Rogers.
Kinky is as Kinky does: he is his own brand, his own man, a crazily giggling tobacco-scented wisp on the western wind. He’s coming to play Saint Rocke this Monday night, along with two of the original members of his band, the Texas Jewboys – Little Jewford (a classically trained multi-instrumentalist who Kinky has known since childhood who variously serves as his vaudevillian straight-man, political aide-de-camp, and, as the New Yorker noted, “voice of reason….or profound unreason”) and Washington Ratso (a bluegrass-tinged multi-instrumentalist, photojournalist, and character in Kinky’s detective novels).
He’s bringing books, cigars, stories, and songs, and he promises to sign anything. He famously signed a woman’s breast at a campaign rally in Texas, which he said didn’t help his candidacy one bit.
“That’s one of the problems,” Friedman said. “You can do a little thing like sign a woman’s breast, and boy, by the time it hits YouTube, a lot of people are not voting for you. And that’s a shame. You should be able to be a politician and a man of the people, to be a human being. But boy, it doesn’t work that way, and we are paying the price now.”
“I’ve done worse,” Friedman added. “I once signed a man’s scrotum in Scotland. I say I’ll sign anything but bad legislation. I’m a man of my word.”
Friedman’s run for governor actually was remarkably successful. He attracted an army of more than 40,000 volunteers and won 12 percent of the vote.
“We got 600,000 votes, and let me tell you, in Texas, running as an independent, it hasn’t been done in over 160 years, and that’s why,” Friedman said. “Like Bob Dylan says, money doesn’t talk, it swears – if you had enough millions, you could make a run of it, but otherwise it’s pretty helpless. And I’m glad I did it. I think we won that race everywhere but Texas – everywhere else you go, Italy, Israel, Ireland, every place that starts with an ‘I’ supported me.”
Friedman is actually a scholar of sorts regarding the history of Texas, as well. He just published a book, titled Heroes of a Texas Childhood, that is a memoir and philosophical treatise regarding some of his favorite Texans, including Sam Houston, Davey Crockett, and Audie Murphy.
“I realized when I finished the book that what made them heroes was the failures and tragedies of their lives and how they dealt with those,” Friedman said. “Man, if you had people like that running the country today, we’d be in great shape. Because they had what Barbara Jordan had, which was moral clarity. The Democrats used to have that, but now they don’t. the Democrat and Republican have become the same guy admiring himself in the mirror. That is why I define politics – poli- means more than one, and tics are blood-sucking parasites. Politics.”
Friedman himself overcame a troubled time in New York City in which he survived an extended bout with cocaine addiction to emerge as a New York Times best-selling author (who counts among his biggest fans Bill Clinton). The turning point came when he saved a woman who was being robbed at an ATM in the Village.
“I was doing a lot of Peruvian marching powder and playing at the Lone Star Café and it was not a good time for the Kinkster, really,” he recalled. “And I think it’s desperation that fueled that first book, and it was that incident in the village with the woman at the bank being mugged. It was kind of an instinctive thing but I jumped in and grabbed the guy and she got away. It turned out, when the police caught up with her, she was the woman who was with John Belushi when he died….Belushi was my friend when I first came to New York, and Tom Waits, later that week, told me that is God is telling me to get the hell out of New York – that out of 12 million people, the one I save is the one that may have killed Belushi, or helped out. You know? I did get out of New York pretty quickly after that.”
It gave him the idea to write a detective novel, which in turn brought him back to his family ranch in Texas, which in turn led him into his brief and oddly triumphant political career, and which finally has put him back on the road with his good friends, a guitar in his hand, and more stories to tell.
“We keep rolling,” Friedman said. “This is fun. I think we are really going to have some interesting shows – you never know who you are going to reach and who you are going to touch and that’s what makes music really interesting. It’s a pure vessel and it’s a healing art and being on the road is great – just like Willie says, I just can’t wait to get on the road again. And I’m ready. I’m tired of being in one place. And it’s no disgrace to come from Texas; it’s a disgrace to have to go back there, where the men are men, and the emus are nervous.”
Kinky Friedman plays Saint Rocke Aug. 2. For more info, see www.kinkycigars.com. ER