Kinky Friedman, the cigar-chomping, mustachioed Texan country singer and mystery novelist whose body of work often seemed like the un-kosher marriage of the Borscht Belt and the Bible Belt, died June 27 from complications of Parkinson’s disease. He was 79.
As frontman for the flamboyant 1970s country group Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, he was notorious for satirical songs such as “They Don’t Make Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” a raucous sendup of racism, and “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in Bed,” which poked fun at feminism.
He could also turn serious, with songs dealing with social issues such as abortion and commercialism. His 1973 song “Ride ’em Jewboy” is a haunting elegy on the Holocaust, recorded by Willie Nelson and sung in concert by Bob Dylan. The lyrics transform cowboy cliches into a rumination on Hitler’s victims:
Now the smoke from camps a-rising
See the helpless creatures on their way
Hey, old pal, ain’t it surprising
How far you can go before you stay?
The Jewboys broke up in the mid-1970s and Friedman spent much of the next decade in a haze of drugs. In the mid-1980s he cleaned up and began writing a series of successful, raunchy, comic mystery novels whose main character is himself. He wrote more than 20 books, all on a manual typewriter.
One reviewer, the actress and author Fannie Flagg, described his writing as “Raymond Chandler on drugs, if Chandler had possessed a tremendous sense of humor.”
In 2006 he ran for governor of Texas, looking to unseat incumbent Republican Rick Perry in a bid that went from joking to serious. His campaign material included a 13-inch talking action figure and bumper stickers that read, “My governor is a Jewish cowboy.” His official campaign slogan was “Why the hell not?” He considered himself tough on immigration, pro-choice, anti-capital punishment and a proponent of alternative fuels.
In time, his campaign gathered force as a serious quest to shake up Texas politics, break down traditional party machines and reach out to a dramatically disaffected electorate.
“In the last election for governor, only 29% of eligible voters went to the polls,” Friedman, known as “the Kinkster,” told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that year. “Seventy-one percent didn’t vote — they didn’t like the choice between paper and plastic.”
In the end, Friedman placed fourth in the six-person race, receiving 12.6% of the vote.
Born Richard Samet Friedman in Chicago in 1944, he moved with his parents to Texas as a baby and earned his nickname in college from his curly hair. His parents were educators who ran a summer camp for mainly Jewish children at Echo Hill Ranch, the 400-acre spread where Friedman would come to live in a small but rambling lodge.
“We had services every Friday night, and Kinky would play the guitar,” Ellen St. Clair, who spent four summers at Echo Hill, told JTA in 2006.
The property is also home to the Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch, a home and adoption center for abused and abandoned dogs that Friedman helped found.
He attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he majored in psychology. Friedman proudly recalled that during their time as members of the Jewish Tau Delta Phi fraternity he and a friend, Nathan “Chinga” Chavin, tried to admit African-American students, an effort that was ultimately thwarted.
After graduating in 1966, he served in the Peace Corps in Borneo. After returning from the Peace Corps, he formed Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, at a time when hybrid “country rock” bands — including The Band, the Eagles and Buffalo Springfield — were rising up the charts. The Jewboys drew a cult following — and occasional protests, as when the National Organization for Women awarded Friedman its “Male Chauvinist Pig Award” in 1973.
In early 1976, he joined Dylan on the second leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue tour. Friedman claimed to have been the first “full-blooded” Jew to take the stage at the Grand Ole Opry.
Friedman would cite Mark Twain and the humorist Will Rogers as his heroes, and the inevitable comparisons were not far off.
“These days,” he once said, “there are many people around the world who listen to the songs that made me infamous and read the books that made me respectable.”
Kinky Friedman was a fan favorite in St. Louis, having played here many times over the years. Back in 2017, The Jewish Light’s Barry Gilbert interviewed the singer before his tour returned to St. Louis for his last show at Joe’s Cafe on May 11, 2017. Here is a look back at that story with Kinky Friedman.
“Is this a Jewish publication I’m talking to?” Kinky Friedman asked by phone from a casino in upstate New York.
My reply is that the Jewish Light is at least the fourth Jewish publication to have interviewed him since what he calls his “spiritual baton death march” of 33 shows in 34 days began on April 11th. The loquacious country music troubadour, author, political and animal rescue activist, and tequila and cigar pitchman reached me on his night off.
“I don’t know,” says Friedman, who rode to fame and notoriety with his band, the Texas Jewboys, in the early ’70s. “Maybe the Jewish publications are running out of Jews to interview.”
It is impossible to control a conversation with Friedman, whose songs include classics like “They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” “Ride ‘Em Jewboy” (about the Holocaust), “Wild Man of Borneo” (written during his time in the Peace Corps), and “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed.” Despite his tendency to veer from topic to topic, an interview with Friedman still managed to cover most of the questions one might have, spanning his many projects: music, spirituality, writing books and mystery novels, Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela, and of course, politics.
Friedman, who unsuccessfully ran for governor of Texas as an independent in 2006 under a slogan he credits to pal Willie Nelson, “Criticize him all you want, just don’t circumcise him anymore,” remarks, “I’m 72 years old, but I read at a 74-year-old level.”
This year saw an avalanche of Friedman projects, including three books: “Everything’s Bigger in Texas: The Life and Times of Kinky Friedman,” a 450-page biography by music writer Mary Lou Sullivan; “The Boys from the North Country: My Life with Robert Zimmerman and Bob Dylan” by Dylan’s boyhood friend Louis Kemp and ghostwriter Friedman, which includes a story about a Passover Seder in Los Angeles where the rabbi persuades Dylan to play “Blowin’ in the Wind” and Marlon Brando to read the Haggadah; and “The Tin Can Telephone,” a mystery novel starring a private eye named Kinky Friedman.
Other Friedman books, dare they be called nonfiction, include “Kinky Friedman’s Guide to Texas Etiquette: Or How to Get to Heaven or Hell Without Going Through Dallas-Fort Worth,” “Excuse Me While I Whip This Out: Reflections on Country Singers, Presidents and Other Troublemakers,” and “You Can Lead a Politician to Water, But You Can’t Make Him Think.”
A new CD was also planned, which included new songs to play at Joe’s Cafe with sideman Jim Sirota and CD producer Brian Molnar. Friedman was particularly partial to one of his new tunes, “Jesus in Pajamas.” “I just have a mild obsession with Jesus,” he says. “I think he was a good Jewish boy who got into a little trouble with the government. And he did ride in on a jackass and everybody mocked him. They didn’t know he was gonna be such a big player. The Sisters of the Poor in Scranton, Pennsylvania, have already contacted me about using that song.”
The record followed his 2015 album, “The Loneliest Man I Ever Met,” which was his first album in decades but featured only three Friedman originals. He credited Nelson again for reigniting his creative spark. “One night at 3 in the morning, Willie calls and asks me what I was doing, watching ‘Matlock.’ And Willie said, ‘That’s a sure sign of depression. Turn it off and start writing, Kinky. Start writing.’ So I wrote this baker’s dozen, about 13 new songs. I kept peppering them into shows, and they’re really going down well. So we’re going to record those this summer.”
Kinky says Willie called him back to find out which channel “Matlock” was on. Friedman says Nelson has given him other advice as well. “He said, ‘Fortunately, we’re not in control,’ and ‘If you fail at something long enough, you become a legend.’ And his other piece of wisdom was, ‘If you’re gonna have sex with an animal, always make it a horse because that way, if things don’t work out, at least you know you’ve got a ride home.’ All of that has served me well.”
Friedman’s tour was titled “The Resurrected Tour” and referred to a kind of revival of the spirit. He said, oddly, it began during Passover and continued during Easter. When asked if anything should be read into this, he said, “I’m a deformed Jew, you know. We don’t give a damn about anything. So starting the tour on the second or third night of Passover, that’s not the way I planned it, but once the schedule is set, that’s what they do. So like a mule plowing the furrow or like Jesus riding in on a jackass, we kept with the tour.”
A critic of former President Barack Obama’s policies toward Israel, Friedman believed President Donald Trump had already been an improvement and hoped Trump would rise above his silver spoon upbringing and grow into the job like Friedman’s heroes Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, aristocrats who came to care for common people. “Everybody I really respect died broke in the gutter, usually, or someone like Nelson Mandela,” Friedman said, referring to the song “Ride ‘Em Jewboy.” “Every night, it was just the last song, his sign-off song in prison on Robben Island. Got it on, smuggled tape cassettes according to a guy in the next cell, Tokyo Sex Whale. This is the highest honor I could receive in country music.”
“Rich people, they think they made it, and the ones that inherited, they think they did it themselves by their wonderful behavior,” he said. “Jesus likes a guy like me, a skinny guy who travels around the countryside irritating people.”
Friedman was told that his travels around the countryside did have an effect. He was the inspiration for the annual Hanukkah Hullabaloo concerts that the Brothers Lazaroff and friends started as an after-party to the Hanukkah week show Friedman did at Off Broadway about six years ago.
“No kidding,” he asked, then started laughing. “That’s great. You know, everybody’s got to be something for something. You’ve got to be remembered for something. Maybe the Lord taking a liking to you.”
