Kinky Friedman 'Why The Hell Not... The Songs Of Kinky Friedman' album

By the time you read this, Kinky Friedman will be the newly-elected Governor of the great state of Texas, or not. Gubernatorial candidate (yes, folks, he’s serious) is just the latest incarnation of Richard “Kinky” Friedman, a restless spirit who has found various degrees of fulfillment as a politically-incorrect country music star. Kinky is also a Peace Corps volunteer in Borneo (where he swears he introduced the frisbee to a native population), a best-selling mystery novelist, a hot sauce entrepreneur, the self-appointed “Noah” of a Texas hill country ranch full of abandoned and abused animals and , most recently, independent candidate for the governor’s office (His campaign motto: “How hard could it be?”).

Friedman’s campaign for the governor’s chair has heightened his profile on a state and national level (something the Kinkster is never averse to). But those who know him lately, as the unlikely star of Texas politics or the mystery novelist, might not realize that his musical pedigree runs both deep and wide.

With much of Friedman’s original catalog being out of print, Why the Hell Not: The Songs of Kinky Friedman serves as an introductory primer to one of the most gloriously contradictory bodies of work in Texas music.

Fittingly, this disc is something of a contradiction itself. Its genesis lies in Pearls In the Snow, a 1999 Kinky tribute disc released on Friedman’s own Kinkajou label.

Unlike Jesus, with whom he draws frequent comparisons, the Kinkster didn’t want to wait until he tottered off to the “Great Perhaps” to enjoy his hosannas. Enlisting a host of fans, friends and kindred spirits, Kinky and producer Kacey Jones assembled Pearls In the Snow, which featured some of Kinky’s best-known material as 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.”

So, in that spirit, Sustain Records has taken some of the best selections from Pearls In the Snow and combined them with newly-recorded versions of some more “Kinkster classics” as rendered by some of the brightest stars of the “Texas Music” country-rock scene, including Todd Snider, Charlie Robison, Kevin Fowler, Jason Boland & the Stragglers, Reckless Kelly (working with Asleep At the Wheel’s Ray Benson), Bruce Robison and Kelly Willis.

Kinky, for those who have become acquainted with him via his mystery novels or his latest political incarnation, is actually best known in many circles by his musical pedigree. Having grown up in Austin, the son of University of Texas psychology professor, he was ideally suited to observe the creative explosion that resulted in the mid-1970’s when rock musicians began experimenting with indigenous country music, and vice-versa.

Spearheaded by Willie Nelson (whose move from Nashville to Austin provided a sort of critical mass to the scene), Michael Martin Murphey, Jerry Jeff Walker, Asleep At the Wheel, Doug Sahm and others, the Austin “progressive country” era was one in which boundaries were made to be stretched, if not obliterated entirely.

Even by those “loosey-goosey” standards, Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys red-lined the tolerance meter of their audiences and peers. Even now, more than three decades after he taped a performance, Kinky is still the only episode that the long-running PBS series Austin City Limits has declined to air.

Performing in a “nudie jacket” , spangled with images of Jesus and crosses, jeweled sunglasses and a feather-boa guitar strap, he waves an omnipresent cigar like a chicken-fried Groucho Marx and sings self-penned songs like “The Ballad of Charles Whitman” (a lampoon of the deranged UT sniper) and “We Reserve the Right To Refuse Service To You.” Friedman, along with the rest of the Texas Jewboys, prides himself on being an equal-opportunity offender.

Satire, as many others before Friedman have discovered, is a razor’s edge. He was nearly immolated by a pack of angry New York feminists after playing “Get Your Biscuits In the Oven (And Your Buns In the Bed)” and “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” , which contained enough racial slurs to turn Richard Pryor’s head.

And yet, there is more to Friedman than just shtick. His first album, Sold American, was released on Vanguard, the venerable folk label, in 1973. It is suspected to be the most tender with emotionally resonant Friedman compositions like “Sold American,” “Highway Café” and “Ride ‘Em Jewboy” which sold the label on the brash Texan.

Kinky calls those songs, and other like them (“Rapid City, South Dakota” and “Lady Yesterday”), “pearls in the snow”—the soulful stuff that gets lost between the in-your-face blasts of satire and irreverence. In reconciling the two sides of the Kinkster’s musical personality, it helps to think of him as a marshmallow wrapped in barbwire.

Friedman released two more major label albums after that debut (the third featured guest appearances by Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan), but by the mid-Eighties he had dissolved his band and moved to New York City where he held court weekly at the Lone Star Café on Fifth Avenue.

About that time, he rescued a female passer-by from a would-be mugger and the incident was written up in the Manhattan tabloids, granting Kinky a second fifteen minutes of fame. The incident also sparked his “writer’s imagination”, leading him to craft a long-running series of mystery novels starring a cowboy-singer-turned-private-eye named (who else?) Kinky Friedman.

A sort of kosher Philip Marlowe on wry, the literary “Kinky Friedman” gradually eclipsed the musical figure. However, the real-life Kinky never gave up on music. Soon after he released a series of independent-label albums, embarked on a series of tours with Billy Joe Shaver, the unofficial poet laureate of Texas music, rode on the bus with Willie Nelson, and hosted annual fundraisers for his animal rescue ranch in the Texas hill country town of Utopia.

And, as the stellar cast of characters on Why the Hell Not: The Songs of Kinky Friedman, amply attest, his musical peers and acolytes still hold him in high esteem. Or maybe they’re just sucking up for cushy patronage jobs in case the Kinkster does in fact wind up calling the Governor’s Mansion home…Hey, why the hell not?

Song by Song

GET YOUR BISCUITS IN THE OVEN (AND YOUR BUNS IN THE BED)—Kevin Fowler: Fowler first got his taste of the big time as a member of the thrashing metal band Dangerous Toys. But a bona-fide good ol’ boy resided behind the power chords and headbanging attitude (“They never could figure out why I liked to listen to Lefty Frizzell,” he recalled). When he re-emerged in a cowboy hat and pearl-snap shirt with the sleeves cut off, cynics thought it was just another costume. But Fowler had simply come home and it is evident in his clever and catchy honky-tonk anthems “Beer, Bait and Ammo” and “Señorita Mas Fina.” Here, he turns one of Friedman’s funniest and most irreverent anthems into a beer joint dancefloor reel and throwdown., propelled by a popping snare drum and ricocheting fiddle/guitar solos. ”You better occupy the kitchen and liberate the sink. ” Fowler sings, but, as his vocal tag at the end reveals, if Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.

RAPID CITY, SOUTH DAKOTA—Dwight Yoakam: This is one of Friedman’s most plaintive tales. It was crafted in the mode of Roger Miller or Mickey Newbury, chronicling the shamefaced abdication of a boy who’s been body-checked by reality—in this case, a pregnant girlfriend. The lyrics do not preach, and they don’t have to. Vocalist Dwight Yoakam eschews his usual Buck Owens/Bakersfield twang to render this downbeat tale in an understated country-folk arrangement.

WILD MAN FROM BORNEO—Charlie Robison: Something of a wild man himself , at least in the public eye (Hey, the guy penned a song called “Life of the Party”), Bandera native, Charlie Robison goes against the grain with a meditative take on one of Friedman’s favorite lyrical subjects—displaced spirit. In this case, a free spirit, the “jungle king,” who succumbs to civilization’s shackles. “You come to see what you want to see,” Charlie sings plaintively, “You come to see, but you never come to know.”

SOLD AMERICAN—Lyle Lovett: Besides representing the most robust vocals, Lovett has recorded in many a moon. His sour rumination on celebrity and the star-making sausage grinder of Nashville contains some of Friedman’s best and most vivid lyrical imagery: “The sequins have fallen from your clothes”…”Don’t let me catch you laughin’ when the jukebox cries”…”Writin’ down your memoirs on some window in the frost”…”It’s almost like they raised the price of fame”…Lovett teams up here with Asleep At the Wheel’s Ray Benson, steel guitar maestro Cindy Cashdollar, Viktor Krauss, Western Swing fiddle king Johnny Gimble, Mickey Raphael of Willie Nelson’s Family, and Viktor Krauss from his own Large Band for this all-star session.

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JOHN—Jason Boland & the Stragglers; A fractured gospel piano segues into a country lament about a radio preacher and a lonely convert, framed by Jason Boland’s prematurely weathered voice (and yes, that’s a compliment). It’s yet another portrait of one of Friedman’s misplaced characters, viewed through a compassionate eye (“Life’s a sacred pilgrimage/Whatever trip you’re on,” the singer notes). An export of the Red River border country between Texas and Oklahoma, Boland and the Stragglers are among the most popular purveyors of what’s called the “Red Dirt” sound, a raucous blend of rock and country that gestated in the college towns and beer joints on both sides of the border.

THEY AIN’T MAKIN’ JEWS LIKE JESUS ANYMORE—Todd Snider: A professional wiseacre. Snider is a tongue-in-groove fit for this side-splitting indictment of intolerance. Friedman’s (and Snider’s) redneck adversary runs through every racial slur in the book (“Wops and micks and slopes and spics and Jews are on my list…”), and Friedman gives as good as he gets (“We Jews believe it was Santa Claus who killed Jesus Christ!”). But when Bubba starts talking smack about Aristotle Onassis, well, the gloves come off. In a bit of lyrical revisionism, Snider slides in a plug for Kinky’s gubernatorial race…but don’t expect to hear this PC-proof ditty at the inaugural ball.

RIDE ‘EM JEWBOY—Willie Nelson; In perhaps his most evocative song, Friedman manages the neat trick of using the imagery of a cattle drive as a metaphor for the Jewish Diaspora and the Holocaust: ”How long will you be driven relentlessly around the world”…“Your dreams were broken/Rounded up and made to move along/The loneliness which can’t be spoken/Just swings a rope and rides inside a song…” Willie Nelson, who was not only the paterfamilias for the 1970s-era “progressive country” movement and gave rise to Kinky and the Texas Jewboys but also served as one of the Kinkster’s protagonists in the Kinkster’s 1997 mystery, Roadkill where he turns in a masterly, mournful vocal performance.

LADY YESTERDAY—Bruce Robison & Kelly Willis: “The Fred and Ginger of Texas country music” offer an intimate and understated duet on one of Friedman’s most unabashedly sentimental tunes. Robison, one half of a songwriting family (Charlie is his brother) and Willis, who plays Emmylou Harris to his Gram Parsons, sing as though they were put on earth to look into each other’s eyes over a shared microphone, which makes them the ideal candidates for this valentine confection.

HOMO ERECTUS—Ray Benson & Reckless Kelly: Step right up, folks! Western Swing, twin fiddles and all, go to college! Or at least Animal House…It was all the lady professor’s fault, or at least according to Asleep At the Wheel’s Ray Benson, who teams up here with brothers Willy and Cody Braun and the rest of the raucous Reckless Kelly boys. Somewhere, Bob Wills is looking down and saying, ”Just what in the hell is that all about?!,” but a swell time is clearly being had by all, from Ray’s “boom-biddy-boom” sub-vocal to a cantering steel guitar breakaway, it’s all a great lark. Hot licks, indeed…and a great sing-along, to boot.

AUTOGRAPH—Delbert McClinton: Gary Nicholson’s acoustic guitar builds underneath McClinton’s anguished vocal until the sound of twin electric guitars by James Pennebaker and Lee Roy Parnell finally provide catharsis. A song in which the mirror is the only thing that doesn’t lie, “Autograph” falls into the same category as Sinatra’s “Lonely At the Top” and Leon Russell’s “Superstar”. A maser of blue-eyed soul who studied at the shrines of the Bobby “Blue” Bland and Jimmy Reed, McClinton’s voice is a durable, evocative wonder, which makes the Fort Worth bluesman a natural fit for this tale of a star who knows better to look back, ‘cause something’s gaining on him.

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Kinky Friedman - Why The Hell Not... The Songs Of Kinky Friedman