The strange life of Kinky Friedman
It includes advice from Willie and lots of drugs.
Kinky silver Friedman tour bus with exits a a changeable letter placard on the front that reads “SHOW TIME.” Dressed in black on a sunny afternoon, he walks into the dimly lit McGonigel’s Mucky Duck and greets its owners. Midconversation, he stuffs an unlit half cigar into his craw and holds up a metallic semicircle hanging from his turquoise necklace. “I ran into an Indian at a Willie Nelson show in Helotes,” he says. “Do you know what he told me this means? I’ve been wearing this 20 years. Do you know what he said it means?”
His audience awaits, the corners of their mouths twitching for the inevitable punch line.
“‘Available Indian woman,’ that’s what it means. ‘Available Indian woman.’ ”
With Friedman, it’s showtime most of the time. On this occasion, he’s in town with Mary Lou Sullivan, his biographer, who attempted to condense his strange life into 300 pages. Hers was an unenviable task.
“A lot of people try to be themselves,” Friedman says. “That’s the hardest thing to be.”
So he’s been many
selves, which Sullivan documented in the book, such as the garrulous raconteur who asks outright, “What all do you want to know?” A pause. “Can I smoke this mother (expletive) in here? I guess I could just do it and plead ignorance.”
Sullivan’s book, which was released last month, is called “Everything’s Bigger in Texas: The Life and Times of Kinky Friedman.”
“I Guess I Could Just Do It and Plead Ignorance” also would have worked as a title.
The allure of failure
A successful writer himself, Friedman acknowledges he needed a biographer. “The first half of my life I don’t remember.”
So he relied on Sullivan to do the homework. She researched his childhood in Houston as a Jewish outcast in West University Place. His Peace Corps run in Borneo. A wild run as a misunderstood songwriter in the ’70s. Getting lost in a snowstorm of cocaine in the ’80s. A reinvention as novelist and humorist in the ’90s and a gubernatorial candidate in the 2000s.
Friedman is 73, so technically his John Belushi story falls in the second half of his life. Friedman was living in a New York hotel in the early ’80s, and Belushi visited him there. When Friedman went to the bathroom, his friend threw himself to the floor and surrounded himself with Quaaludes and all manner of other pharmaceuticals.
“It was a joke,” Friedman says. “He was being funny. But it wasn’t too many weeks after that when he went for good. And I wonder what I’d have done if I’d been there. I like to think I’d have known to dial 911 to get him out. But you don’t really know who’s a hero until the ship really starts sinking. You don’t know who’s going to get people out and who’s going to be in the life boat until the (expletive) goes down.”
That uncertainty was part of the draw for Sullivan. She points out that “when things get serious, he makes a joke. So my job was to get beyond the jokes, and that took a while.”
What she came away with is an interesting story about the perception of success and failure.
Throughout our conversation, Friedman repeats his favorite phrase these days: “It’s not the pot of gold, it’s the rainbow.”
“There are a lot of people more successful,” he says. “It’d be a pretty boring book if it was just people saying, ‘What a wonderful man.’ But I feel like it’s been an interesting journey. And here I am today.”
He holds up the necklace again.
“Available Indian woman.”
Rainbow connections
Both in the book and conversation, Friedman rarely lets his guard down. Most of the time when he speaks of others, they sound like characters in a movie. His “shrink” is Willie Nelson. Bob Dylan shows up time and again, sometimes as a circus ringleader, as on his chaotic Rolling Thunder Revue Tour, and other times as an elusive fringe character drifting in and out of parties. Everybody has a role. Friedman talks about all sorts of odd witnessed events, like the time he was in a room with guitarists Michael Bloomfield and Eric Clapton. Bloomfield was haranguing Clapton to admit Bloomfield was the better guitarist. Clapton, according to Friedman, admitted as much. He tells another great story about taking musician and actor Van Dyke Parks to meet Merle Haggard.
“Van Dyke was worried he’d get lynched because, well, he’s a sort of Noel Coward type,” Friedman says. “So he asked everybody, ‘How long have you known Merle?’ And every one of them would answer, ‘Ever since.’ ‘Ever since,’ ‘Ever since,’ ‘Ever since.’ So he asked me, ‘What does that mean, ever since?’ I told him, ‘Ever since prison, stupid!’ Stupid is one thing Van Dyke is not. But ever since prison. Band, crew, management. Everybody Merle worked with was loyal to him, and that’s because they all met in the same place. Willie’s the same way. I’ve crossed the Canadian border with Willie, and half his guys had to get off the bus because they’re felons. It’s a loyalty thing.”
Friedman can tell these sorts of stories for hours. But Sullivan found a few cracks that let a different side of Richard Samet Friedman show. Particularly with regard to his parents: Tom, an Air Force pilot who flew dozens of missions over Germany, who studied psychology upon his return from the war; and Minnie, who taught Shakespeare and loved the stage.
They’re almost like the Greek chorus of Sullivan’s book, appearing and reappearing with words of encouragement and advice. For all of Friedman’s bluster, when he talks about his parents — in the book or conversation — the quips cease.
“I guess if your father runs off when you’re 2 like Obama’s did, you build a myth about him,” he says. “But my parents were my two best friends. If you grow up like that, it really devastates you when you lose them. They were my heroes.”
Then, finally, an oft-repeated quip.
“I always say a happy childhood is the worst possible preparation for life.”
The implication of the last statement is that Friedman is a failure whose recognition will likely come after he’s gone, though he’s been successful enough to fund habits ranging from cocaine to cigars to gambling.
By some measures, the failure argument could be made: Friedman’s albums were misunderstood in their day and didn’t really sell, even though they impressed some formidable songwriters. The cover of Sullivan’s book bears a quote from Dylan: “I don’t understand music. I understand Lightnin’ Hopkins. I understand Leadbelly, John Lee Hooker, Woody Guthrie, Kinky Friedman.”
Despite the high praise, Friedman stepped away from writing songs and reinvented himself as an author in the ’90s. His mystery novels found an audience, but he never achieved the success of a Carl Hiassen; Friedman’s former editor attributes it to laziness in the book. And Friedman’s runs for public office never resulted in holding public office.
“My shrink told me if you fail at something long enough, you become a legend,” he says. “That’s one way of doing it. Politics, I think I can safely say I failed. That’s really how I see myself commercially, professionally. But I think I’m in good company. John Lennon, Winston Churchill: They didn’t feel like life’s winners. But it really is about the rainbow. That’s the key. There was a guy who was the Justin Bieber of the art world in Van Gogh’s day. We don’t know his name today, but he sold a lot of his (expletive) art, and Van Gogh didn’t. So I’ll take a little success late in life.”
He holds out both arms in a Nixonian peace-sign salute. “One of life’s winners!” And then he tugs again on the necklace. “Available Indian woman.”
One of life’s winners
“Dylan told me a long time ago that the timing of this (expletive) is everything,” Friedman says. “Had he come along two or three years earlier, he’d have done nothing. He’d have been a joke. Another four or five years later, same thing. He told me I got to the scene too late, after college and the Peace Corps. That the timing was off.”
It’s hardly my place to question Bob Dylan, but what if Friedman’s timing had been different? Without the Peace Corps, there’s no “Wild Man From Borneo.” Like Randy Newman’s, some of Friedman’s songs were a little too well written to be understood in their day, but would five years in either direction have helped? Or would they have been just as confounding?
But those songs — some of them more than 40 years old — kept circulating on tribute albums and among fans who get the fact that “Ride ’Em Jewboy” isn’t a crude play on cowboy lingo but rather a tribute to Holocaust victims.
“There’s a real depth to some of those songs,” Lyle Lovett says. “‘Sold American’ is just as relevant today as it was then. It may be even more meaningful. Kinky is so wonderfully clever. And even though he has this larger-than-life persona, he’s perceptive and sensitive and thoughtful.”
Those qualities aren’t really well stocked in country music these days.
“It’s just background music for a frat party now,” Friedman says. “But that’s perfect for our culture, which listens to about 20 seconds of a song.”
Sullivan adds, “If he’d had a big hit in Nashville, he’d just be another guy the town forgot. Another old singer you never hear about. What I love is no matter what happens, he’s always onto the next thing. He doesn’t win an election, he gets up the next day and starts a novel. Some people sit around and whine. Not Kinky.”
Friedman holds his arms out again with the peace signs: “One of life’s winners!
“I’ve said it many times, but the crowd always picks Barabbas.”
He finds his victories where he can. Sometimes that’s in Germany. He brings up a book called “The Crazy Never Die.” The subtitle is “Amerikanische Rebellen in des populären kultur,” so Klaus Bittermann’s book focuses on outsiders such as Hunter S. Thompson, Shel Silverstein, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Waits, Robert Mitchum and Friedman.
“These German kids, they can’t go to ancestry.com,” he says. “They know what they’re going to find: Their grandfather killed all these gypsy kids in a ditch one day. So they’re drawn, instead, to these weird troublemakers. They think they’re the ones who made America great, not Blake Shelton.”
A conversation with Nelson about “Matlock” nudged Friedman to start writing songs again. Friedman has an album, “Spitfire,” due next year, his first set of original new songs in over 40 years. He has another mystery novel done. And he co-wrote a book about Dylan with Dylan’s childhood friend Louie Kemp that will be published next year. He’s hardly sitting idle at his ranch near Kerrville.
“This is a story about a guy who’s been miserable for 72 years, and now things are starting to look up,” he says. “It really is the rainbow. I had an old friend who died. And he told me he was a lucky man because he loved so many people in his life. That’s the situation I’m in. I have loved many people in my life, and I still do. Sometimes it’s not reciprocal. And most of them are dead. Most of the people I’ve loved are dead. Because all the very sweet men are bugled to Jesus. It’s the real (expletive) like that guy in Zimbabwe, Mugabe, they don’t die, man. Actuarial tables will show you that dictators outlive heroes.
“But here I am. One of life’s winners!
“Available Indian woman.”