How Kinky Friedman Conquered Texas

“When you get big, you become a joke,” Kinky Friedman told an interviewer in 1974. “I started as a joke, and that’s a pretty good way to start.”

This was near the beginning of Friedman’s career arc from enfant terrible to beloved old crank, and he was playing the punk-kid part beautifully, dropping one caustic aside after another—from “I don’t really view hippies as people” to “I hate intellectuals, and I am one.” The interviewer, Jan Reid, put the highlights in The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, his great book about the Austin music scene of the ’70s, where Kinky came off as a witty wiseass who liked shocking people and was a bit ambivalent about the Austin experience, partly because he saw the place as his home, not as a destination. “I lived in this city for 17 years,” he told Reid. “I went to high school here, I did the whole trip. I didn’t suddenly become a guru with long hair.” He even sneered at the Armadillo World Headquarters, the town’s legendary music venue: “A lot of people think it’s a very warm place, but to me it’s an airplane hangar.”

Well, maybe it was; I wasn’t there, and I can’t say. But 50 years later, it’s hard to imagine a city better suited for a talent like Friedman, who died this week at age 79. Don’t get me wrong: There were plenty of places in 1970s America where you could sing songs about gas chambers and mass shooters and boogers. That’s why God gave us punk rock. But to sing country songs about gas chambers and mass shooters and boogers—and I mean serious country music, not some novelty pastiche—you’d probably wanted to spend some time in Austin, even if you kept a foot in Nashville and New York as well. There was a whole new style of countercultural country-western emerging there, which some people called “outlaw country” and some people called “progressive country” and some people called “redneck rock” (which sounded like the exact opposite of “progressive country”) and some people called “cosmic cowboy music.” And Kinky Friedman may have been the most outrageous, eccentric, and funny man to sing it.

Richard “Kinky” Friedman was born in Chicago in 1944, but his parents moved to Houston just a year later. When he was seven they moved further west, to the Texas Hill Country, where they founded a summer camp called Echo Hill Ranch. (One old camper told Friedman’s biographer, Mary Lou Sullivan, that this “was the Jewish camp for Reform Jews and Jews that weren’t that observant.”) The family eventually made their way to Austin, and Kinky went to college there too, getting involved with Students for a Democratic Society while the New Left group’s decentralist and anti-authoritarian “Prairie Power” wing was ascendant. (During the Prairie Power period, some members of the organization took to remarking that the “Texas anarchists” were taking over.)

When he started playing professionally, Friedman called his band the Texas Jewboys—not just to troll people but because he was, in fact, both very Texan and very Jewish, even if he didn’t fit the old stereotypes of either Texas or Judaism. The man had grown up listening to Hank Williams records at a Jewish summer camp near San Antonio. He earned that band name.

And he wasn’t just out to shock folks: He was a gifted songwriter too. Sure, he could be sophomoric sometimes—he had gotten his start singing for the children at camp, a background that led to lyrics like “Ol’ Ben Lucas/Had a lot of mucus/Comin’ right out of his nose.” (When my brother and I first heard that song on the radio when we were little kids, we thought it was the funniest thing ever.) But his writing could be more subtly witty, could give you pyrotechnic wordplay, could even be evocative and poetic. My favorite Kinky Friedman song, “We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to You,” is a virtuoso display, dropping the title phrase into one context after another: a redneck kicking Kinky out of his restaurant for being Jewish, a rabbi kicking Kinky out of synagogue services for being a hippie, Kinky himself refusing to fight in a war, and then God Himself kicking Kinky out of heaven because “our quota’s filled for this year on singing Texas Jews.” Along the way, the singer manages to rhyme “Baruch atah Adonai” with “What the hell you doin’ back there, boy?” It’s one of the best things I’ve ever heard.

And somehow the man who wrote it—and “Asshole From El Paso,” and “The Ballad of Charles Whitman,” and “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore“—became a venerated symbol of the Lone Star State. That was the real magic trick of Kinky’s career. You start out singing satiric songs about the rednecks you grew up with, you end up somehow symbolizing the same people, and it comes off not as a reversal or a betrayal but as a fulfillment of something inside you all along.

Friedman’s career path may have been odd and crooked, but it’s not hard to summarize. When it became clear that he wasn’t going to be more than a cult act as a musician, he disappeared into a cocaine haze for a few years, then cleaned up and started writing comic mystery novels. (In the ’90s my brother went to one of his signings and got him to inscribe a book for me. He wrote: “Dear Jesse—Any brother of Andrew’s is a brother of mine!”) Texas Monthly brought him on as a columnist. At some point he got the notion that he should run for governor—maybe it was when Doug Sahm started talking up the idea at a Texas Tornados concert in 1992—and in 2006 he threw his hat into the ring. His campaign slogans: “Why the hell not?” and “How hard can it be?”

He was still kind of disreputable when he entered that gubernatorial race, or at least too disreputable to be elected. His critics brought up his drug history (Friedman responded that Sam Houston himself “was an opium addict and a drunkard”), and they brought up the fact that his jokes making fun of racists and antisemites often included the crude language that racists and antisemites have been known to use. But when he talked about his vision for the state, the man who in the ’70s had sometimes exuded hostility toward his own audience was now coming across as a populist. His platform transcended left and right, sounding instead like the sort of ideological hodgepodge you might hear if you asked someone who isn’t addicted to cable news to share his views: He was for gay marriage, school prayer, alternative energy, border control, lower taxes, lower spending, higher teacher salaries, drug decriminalization, and putting Willie Nelson in charge of the state energy commission.

I didn’t agree with everything the candidate said, but I appreciated the spirit of the show. I appreciated it even more a decade later. At some point in the aftermath of Election Day 2016, I said to someone or the other: “You know, if we had timed this ‘Fuck it, I’ll vote for him‘ moment a little bit better, we could have had Kinky Friedman as president.”

Friedman’s half-serious political campaign didn’t make him governor, let alone president, but when it was over he had become some sort of an elder statesman. Or at least an elder jester-sage, and that’s not a bad thing to be. As a fella once said: “When you get big, you become a joke. I started as a joke, and that’s a pretty good way to start.”

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