My first live sighting of Richard "Kinky" "Big Dick" Friedman was at Max's Kansas City in New York in 1973. He was headlining Upstairs at Max's with his band the Texas Jewboys and I was an 18-year-old hometown Jewish country singer who revered both Hank Williams and Lenny Bruce. Kinky and I were a match made in purgatory. It would've been heaven had it not been for the opening act, an unknown named Billy Joel.
PHOTO BY CLEVELAND STORRS
Texas Jewboys, circa 1989: Larry Campbell, Michael Simmons (our writer), Jim Rider and the one and only Kinky Friedman
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The Piano Hack notwithstanding, the Kinkster blew my still-growing mind and made me the disrespectful malcontent I am today. Kinky practiced truly free speech, the kind guaranteed in the Constitution but relatively unused. Kinky's songs satirized racism ("We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to You"), serial-killing Boy Scout/Marines ("The Ballad of Charles Whitman"), rednecks ("Asshole From El Paso"), religion ("They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore") and male chauvinism ("Get Your Biscuits in the Ovens and Your Buns in the Bed").
That proto–politically correct feminists failed to see the wit in the latter wasn't Kinky's fault, and there were some ugly incidents, including the storming of the stage in Buffalo, New York, where band and leader fled for their lives. But Kink could also do poignant like nobody's bidness in "Sold American" (ostensibly about a washed-up country star but really about greed American-style), and "Ride 'Em Jewboy," a heartbreaking meditation on the Holocaust from his viewpoint as a Hebe from Kerrville, Texas. There's a damn good reason the Kinkster is one of Bob Dylan's favorite songwriters.
His tagline onstage was "Thank you for being an American!" Damn, he made this little hippie patriotic!
I knew that night at Max's that one of my goals in life was to be a Texas Jewboy.
Me and my band Slewfoot were soon a popular act on the Northeastern country circuit, a crew of Yankee headnecks adept at Western Swing with a cannabinoid baditude. In 1977 Slewfoot open-nighted a new honky-tonk on Fifth Avenue called the Lone Star Café, where Kinky began regularly gigging, eventually settling in NYC. We were introduced and broke bread with a spoonful of irving (Irving Berlin wrote "White Christmas" ... you do the math). The Texas Jewboy invited me to sit in and I simply never left the stage. It wasn't a stretch — I knew all the songs!
The original Texas Jewboys had recently scattered and Kinky's new band included, among others, Sweet Mary Hattersley on fiddle, Corky Laing (from Mountain) alternating with Howie Wyeth (Rolling Thunder Revue) on drums, Sredni "Nigger Lips" Vollmer on harp (a Kinky sobriquet), and a killer lead/pedal-steel guitarist named Larry Campbell. Larry was bandleader, would later tour over six years with Dylan and is now Levon Helm's maestro. I played rhythm and, with mandolinist Jim Rider, sidekicked with the Kinkster, singing harmonies and staging semi-elaborate dance routines. Although technically we weren't the original Jewboys — names like the Entire Polish Army and the Exxon Bros. came and went — people still referred to us as such, satisfying at least one of my life's goals. (I've yet to do the hucklebuck with Catherine Deneuve.)
Kinky was (and remains) a celebrity magnet. He's got an authentic and peculiar genius that can't be duplicated, and the talented and famous like to get close. In the Lone Star days, a partial list included my heroes Mike Bloomfield and Abbie Hoffman, as well as John Belushi, Hunter Thompson, Keith Richards, the Band, Dr. John, Robin Williams, Dylan, of course, and a lot of others who are dead or ought to be. There were fringe bohemians like JFK impersonator Vaughn Meader, who'd lost his job on November 22, 1963. I also met my best friend, author Larry "Ratso" Sloman, in that menagerie. And there were many, many women.
We did some strange gigs, including a bar mitzvah in New Jersey that was more like a coronation. But by the mid-'80s, Kinky was burning out on rock & roll and irving, not necessarily in that order. "I need a lifestyle that doesn't require my presence," he told me. He loved Agatha Christie and began writing mystery novels with himself as the Sherlock, Ratso as his Watson, and our friends as other characters, real names and all. I'm a hard-drinkin', Hank-singin' murder suspect in A Case of Lone Star and am described as engaging in so many kinds of debauchery that the novel may have been what did my late mother in when she read it.
The books became best-sellers and Kinky became hugely famous in your household definition, and Bill Clinton's favorite author. Some were appalled when he likewise palled around with George W. Bush, but Kinky's World is a big one, as anyone knows who followed his noble — albeit failed — 2006 run for governor of Texas.
No matter how many books he autographs, the Kinkster has always identified with outsiders — particularly musicians. You can take the Texas Jewboy out of music, but you cannot take the melody out of Kinky. He's currently on his Go West Young Kinky musical tour — 15 shows in 16 days. "It's a giant step down from musician to politician," he tells me. "This is a healing kind of thing."
Kinky Friedman performs at McCabe's on Saturday, July 31. Michael Simmons will open the late show.
