The Kinkster – An unofficial biography

Common sense, common honesty–that’s all it takes. That’s all I’ve got. And sometimes I’m not sure about common sense.” Kinky Friedman.

 

The Kinkster

Richard “Kinky” Friedman was born on 1 November 1944 in Chicago, the son of Dr. S. Thomas (Tom)Friedman, and Minnie Samet Friedman. In his childhood his parents moved to Texas where his father was a professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas and his mother was a speech therapist. He has a younger brother Roger and a much younger “kid” sister Marcie. Kinky himself has never married and has no children although there have been a series of girlfriends over the years and he remains resolutely hetereosexual. He calls his books and his animals “his family” and says he is married to “Texas and the wind”.

 

In 1952, his parents founded Echo Hill ranch, a Jewish summer camp near Kerrville in the Texas Hill Country. Later, the Texas Exchange Club, a service organization, organized camps for inner-city youths, and Kinky met his life long friend there, Little Jewford, who still tours with him today. Since his father’s death in 2002 Echo Hill Ranch has been Kinky’s home and the location of the Utopia Animal Rescue Shelter which he founded to rescue abandoned and homeless animals.

 

 

Kinky graduated from Austin High School where he formed his first band, the Three Rejects, in 1962 and from the University of Texas at Austin in 1966. It was during his first year at college that Chinga Chavin (another friend who features occasionally in his books) gave him the nickname Kinky, for his curly “Jew-fro” (as Kinky has called his hair.)

 

 

As an undergraduate he formed a moderately successful rock n’roll band in Austin, called King Arthur and the Carrots and had a local hit with “Schwinn 24,” a parody of  the Beach Boys dragster songs, featuring a boy and his bicycle. Already his mordant sense of humour was making itself felt.

 

 

After university, inspired by John F. Kennedy, he signed up to the Peace Corps as a volunteer in the South West Pacific and was posted as an agricultural extension agent to Borneo. According to Kinky he spent his two years there distributing his seed to the local natives and introducing them to the Frisbee. However the isolation also served to stimulate his imagination and the ideas for some of his better known songs seem to have germinated around this time.

 

 

On his return from Borneo in 1971 Kinky formed his best known band, Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, a pun on a depression-era Texan band, Bob Willis and his Texas Playboys. His father seems not to have approved of the band’s name but Kinky was then, as now, totally unbiddable. His parent were however very supportive of him and told all their friends how proud of him they were when he released his first album, Sold American in 1973.

 

 

A number of musicians passed through his band and most were given nicknames, Little Jewford was there, Wichita Culpepper, Sky Cap Adams and Snakebite Jacobs. Members of the band feature in one of Kinky’s most popular novels “A Case of Lone Star” (1987) when they are reunited for a concert at the Lone Star road house and put up in the legendary Chelsea Hotel in Greenwich Village.

 

 

In the early 1970s country rock was being popularised by Gram Parsons and Kinky found  brief cult fame as a country and western singer. In 1973 when he was the first Jew to make it to the Grand Ole Opry as a country music performer. In the mid 1970s he toured with Bob Dylan in the Rolling Thunder Revue and with Willie Nelson. This was the start of an enduring friendship with Nelson with whom he shares an interest in chess (Kinky was a child chess prodigy). It was in the mid 1970s that he also became friends with legendary radio show host Don Imus.

 

 

Although his music with its blend of the sacred and the profane, was very controversial, it also had a serious side. As described in Kinky’s biography on wikipedia; “A central factor in the band’s material, almost all of which was at least co-written by Friedman, is the tension in his background as a Jewish intellectual raised in rural Texas. His songs explore many topics, including feminism, racial relations, the stresses of a musician’s life, and nostalgia for the past, but anti-Semitism and clashes with rednecks are frequent concerns.”

 

 

“Among his most famous songs are “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” and “Ride ‘Em Jewboy.” The latter song, in which the Holocaust is compared with a cattle drive, is a beautiful ballad with eerie lyrics, considered to be Friedman’s most affecting song.” Despite his wise-cracking manner, a deep strain of melancholy often seems to lie behind Kinky’s public persona.

 

In 1976 he made his third album, Lasso From El Paso, featuring Dylan and Eric Clapton. By now he had developed a substantial addiction to “Peruvian marching powder” (cocaine). He later wrote of this period in his life, “There is a fine line between fiction and nonfiction, and I believe Jimmy Buffett and I snorted it in 1976.”

 

 

After the band broke up in the mid 1970s, Friedman lived in a converted loft on Vandam Street in Greenwich Village and scuffled a living playing at the Lone Star café (run by Mort Cooperman, whose name Kinky adopted for the laconic police sergeant with whom he regularly tussles in his detective novels.) In 1983, he released Under the Double Ego for Sunrise Records.

 

 

Greenwich Village (“The Village2) in the late 70s and early 80s was a far cry from the gentrified neighbourhood it has become today and was popular with outsiders, outlaws, artists, musicians, a large gay community and various forms of low life. Among Kinky’s close friends at this time were “National Lampoon” editor Larry “Ratso” Sloman, “Daily News” journalist Mike McGovern, private investigator Steve Rombom, plus a crew of other friends including the Englishmen Pete Myers and Mick Brennan. They feature in his novels as members of  his “posse”, “The Village Irregulars”.  (The ball-breaking blonde, Stephanie du Pont, does not appear to be based on a real person but there is a back story here which I will cover later).

 

 

While living in Vandam Street, he foiled a mugging in the Village, and the local press designated him a crime fighter. As his music career came “to a screeching train wreck” in 1984, as Friedman put it, he found himself flat broke anddecided to try his hand at writing mystery novels starring himself as the detective. (With his mother Min he had always been interested in the genre).  He borrowed McGovern’s old typewriter and began working on his first novel, starring Kinky himself as the hard-boiled country-singer turned detective, set in the Greenwich Village milieu with which he was familiar. 

 

 “Greenwich Killing Time” was rejected by over 20 publishers before it was finally accepted by  Beech Tree Books on a single book deal. He got paid $7,500 but the laconic wisecracking style, reminscent of Groucho Marx and Mark Twain, turned out to be a surprise cult hit with crime fans.  Suddenly, unaccountably, the Kinkster was a novelist and reaching a whole new fan base.

 

 

After that first novel, and still “flying on 27 different herbs and spices”, the deaths of close friend Tom Baker and his first love, Kacey Cohen, spurred him to leave New York in 1985 and quit drugs cold turkey. His refuge was the family ranch in Kerr County.”I like to say it was the Hill Country, the Texas Hill Country that healed me,” he has said.

 

 

With “Greenwich Killing Time” a unique author was revealed and it proved to be the first of a very successful series. At home in Texas he “carefully crafted” a further 16 novels between 1986 and 2004. His friends rushed to praise the hard-boiled novels. “Kinky Friedman”, said Willie Nelson, who featured in the novel Roadkill, “is the best new thriller writer since Dashiell whatshisname”. Kinky himself says that his career an author has been “a financial pleasure for the Kinkster.”

 

 

Kinky claims to have written all his novels in a small dark green trailer on the family ranch with only his cat and an armadillo for company. Besides Echo Hill Ranch the family also owned a lived in family house on the outskirts of Austin which he put up for sale in 2008. Photos and a sale video on his website show a low sprawling white house and suggest its occupant lives a single life, with the living room filled by a pool table and dog bowls for his beloved pets (five dogs called collectively The Friedmans) in evidence.

 

 

Friedman’s office walls are decorated with photos of his parents and other heroes, including Mohatma Ghandi and Father Damien, a Catholic priest who ministered to lepers in Hawaii. It’s where he wrote mystery novels and humor essays on a dusty brown Brother electric typewriter. There’s also a photo of him winning $45,612 at a New Orleans casino. Casinos are his favorite haunts when not writing or performing.

 

 

Between 1986-2004 he published nearly one novel a year and sold over 6 million copies world wide. His father and the family ranch feature in the some of the novels including “Armadillos and Old Lace” along with Dusty, his late mother’s “talking” car. The success of the books brought about renewed interest in his music which led to the occasional tour. In June 2008 he even came to Europe to perform in Ireland, England and the Netherlands where he retains a fan base from his novels.

 

 

His mother died in 1985 and after the death in 2002 of his beloved father Tom, Kinky moved into the Echo Hill ranch and set up the Utopia Animal Rescue Shelter. The success of his music and writing career freed him to devote time to the Utopia Rescue project  which is a haven for 60 homeless dogs, cats, donkeys, pigs and chickens. He supports it with charity fund-raisers, including one recently with the first lady, Laura Bush, a childhood friend, and profits from his Politically Incorrect brands of salsa and coffee.

 

Kinky has never married, and has no children although there have been several women in his life: he refers poignantly in several of his novels to the death of his girl friend Kacey Cohen in a car crash. “I’m married to the wind, and my children are my animals and the books I’ve written, and I love them all. I don’t play favorites, but I miss my mom and dad.”  He is no homophobe and supports gay marriage (“Why shouldn’t they be as miserable as the rest of us?”)

 

 

On his official record company biography, which shows signs of the Kinster’s own hand, it records that by early 2004 Kinky had decided on a change of direction. “Deep down, in a part of himself he does not visit too often, Friedman nurtures an ambition to perform his own bizarre brand of public service, in which conventional wisdom is flouted, political opportunism scorned, truths told fearlessly, and the weary and apathetic electorate is cheered up.”

 

 

The novel writing stopped and, on 3 February  2004, the anniversary of his father’s death, he stood by the Alamo and announced he was running for Governor of Texas. His campaign slogan was: ‘Why The Hell Not?’ Some Texans thought it might just catch on. Kinky was strongly supported by fellow Texans Willie Nelson and Lyle Lovett who helped with fund-raising. In return for his support Kinky promised to make Willie Head of the Texas Rangers if he won.

 

 

One of his campaign goals was the “dewussification” of Texas and his slogans included: “How Hard Could It Be?”, “My Governor is a Jewish Cowboy” and “He ain’t Kinky, he’s my Governor”. He got off to a rousing start by making it onto the ballot paper at all, to the surprise of many local politicians. He toured the state in the pink “Govbug”, always with a trademark cigar in his mouth, accompanied by Little Jewford and bankrolled by his friend John McCall, “the Shampoo King of Dripping Springs” but he never raised funds comparable to the other candidates.

 

 

“I’m not rich, and I don’t spend my money on material things,” Kinky has said. “I do spend some on gambling and Cuban cigars.  I live modestly and I need a job right now, so winning this would be great,” he said in 2006. In the end, outspent by a ratio of 15:1 by the other campaigners he tailed away and finished 4^th in the ballot.  His campaign aroused a good deal of media interest local and nationally and was filmed by a tv crew. 

 

Meanwhile Kinky’s musical legacy was being reappraised by a new generation of fans.  Pearls in the Snow, a 1999 Kinky tribute disc was released on Friedman’s own Kinkajou label and featured some of  Kinky’s best-known material interpreted by the likes of Willie Nelson, Tom Waits, Guy Clark, and others.“If you want mankind to honor you,”Kinky wrote in Texas Monthly, “You have to get off your ass.”

 

In 2007 Sustain Records released Why the Hell Not, a compilation of some of the best selections of Pearls with newly-recorded versions of some more “Kinkster classics” from some of the brightest stars of the “Texas Music” country-rock scene. This release included Sold American by Lyle Lovett, Rapid City South Dakota by Dwight Yoakam and Ride-em Jewboy boy by Willie Nelson.  On July 20, 2007 Kinky Friedman hosted the “Concert to Save Town Lake” to honor the memory of Lady Bird Johnson and her efforts to protect and preserve the shores of Town Lake in Austin, Texas.  He launched his own range of Cigars, KFC, in late 2007.

Today he lives on Echo Hill ranch with the Friedmans, his five dogs: Perky, Mr. Magoo, Brownie, Chumley, and Fly.  In interviews he has said he has not ruled out standing again for governor in 2010, this time as a Democrat.