MAMAS, DON’T LET YOUR BABIES GROW UP TO BE KINKY

PART ONE: DUBLIN TO ATHLONE

“I’m not supporting their economy, I’m burning their fields.”

Richard Kinky ‘Big Dick’ Friedman, justifying his Cuban cigar habit to President Bill Clinton at a state dinner in the Whitehouse.

AFTER SEVERAL frantic minutes of searching Heuston Station for Kinky Friedman, I finally find the elusive Texan holed up with his party of three in a second-class carriage of the Galway-bound train. Kinky’s actually not a hard man to locate, clad as he is in Johnny Cash country-crow black from cowboy-hatted head to pointy-toed foot. The only suggestion of colour on the man is the red Texas dirt still caking the cuffs of the jeans that chafe against an ancient pair of cowboy boots.

Amongst Friedman’s company is John McCall, one of the richest men in Texas. McCall made his fortune in shampoo – you might know the mogul from walk-on parts in Friedman books like Roadkill, in which he flew the Kinkster down to Hawaii in search of a gone-walkabout Willie Nelson. John is slumming it, roadie-ing for his friend on this European tour, the first time Kinky’s hit the road with a guitar rather than a book in his hand since the mid-’80s.

As photographer Peter Matthews and myself slide into a seat opposite him, the Kinkster strokes his bandit’s moustache and chews on an unlit Montecristo # 2.

“Cigars are like medicine to me,” he remarks, checking us out from behind a pair of shades he won’t remove for almost an hour. “Willie Nelson believes he’s spent in the neighbourhood of $50 million on cocaine in his life. But cigars are like, 20 bucks apiece and I smoke about eight of ’em a day.”

Kinky Friedman is an odd combination of laid-back and intense, by turns at home and uneasy in his skin. He’s also a hell of a talker – 60 minutes of taped conversation will later yield over 8,000 words of text, and, as his novels bear out, he’s a funny guy. Friedman’s conversation, like his stage patter, is peppered with jokes, anecdotes and the best lines from his last couple of novels.

“I get to be like a human jukebox, that’s the problem,” the writer admits. “We did 50 fuckin’ interviews down in Sweden and basically . . . you’ve got the odd good line, like, talkin’ about golf: ‘The only two good balls I ever hit was when I stepped on a garden rake.’ But basically as an author you put a lot of it in the books.”

But over the course of a three-hour train journey, you begin to see the odd jagged fragment protruding through the Texan’s press-persona; anger at the pundits who sometimes treat him like a lowbrow hack, an abiding love of country music and literature, and of course, an acute sense of his own Jewishness. Indeed, it’s no small cause of consternation to this Texas Jewboy that one of his biggest markets is Germany.

“This German guy showed up about six months ago, he found our ranch by reading one of my books,” Friedman confides, his face a portrait of incredulity. “He’d read all the books and heard all the music. Anyway, he attempted to suck, fuck or cajole me to come to Germany. I’d never been, and because I belong to the Jewish persuasion . . . I mean, there’s gotta be a statute of limitations for how long you wanna carry a grudge, but let’s just say the Germans are my second-favourite people, and my first is everybody else.”

On or off the record, Kinky’s never dull: he inscribes my copy of Roadkill with a droll “See you in hell with Oscar Wilde”, hands me his card (Kinky Friedman is allowed to walk on the grounds unattended. If found elsewhere, contact . . .), dispenses gifts of lucky plectrums, and inquires after his friend Patrick Bergin.

After the interview, when we adjourn to the smoking carriage, Kinky removes the shades, and the eyes are thoughtful as he discusses the recent Hollywooding of Hunter S. Thompson, admits that Nelson Mandela is a fan of his 1973 Sold American album (although Dolly Parton narrowly beat out Kinky for the status of the ANC leader’s favourite country singer), rhapsodises about Australia, and recalls the night he captivated a Swiss audience with his version of ‘Kevin Barry’ (“I didn’t think they’d get it ’cos they don’t have any martyrs”).

Richard Friedman was born in Chicago in 1944, the son of Tom Friedman, a psychology professor (who several years later, would move the family south to take up a post at the University of Texas) and Min, a speech therapist who died in 1985. Friedman wrote his first song at the age of 11 (“Old Ben Lucas/Had a lotta mucus/Comin’ right outta his nose”) which he still performs. He attended university as a psychology major, but his dream was to be a country singer. After a spell in Borneo with the Peace Corps, where he wrote much of the material that would appear on Sold American, he returned to Austin and fell in with the emerging outlaw country movement being advanced by the likes of Kris Kristofferson, Billy Swan and Waylon Jennings.

He began recording albums in 1972, and within four years was appearing alongside Bob Dylan on the legendary Rolling Thunder Revue.

Friedman moved to New York in 1979, scored a weekly gig at the Lone Star nightclub, and developed a rather serious cocaine habit. With his music career on the wane, and many of his friends “gone to Jesus”, Kinky borrowed a typewriter from his friend McGovern and tried his hand at writing a mystery novel. The result was Greenwich Killing Time, completed in a matter of months. After two years, Faber & Faber seized on the novel and made it an immediate bestseller.

By then, Kinky had moved back to Texas, and would spend the next ten years eating, sleeping and writing in a trailer on his father’s 350-acre Echo Hill ranch, near Kerrville (he recently moved “up to the big house”). Now, ten novels later, everything Kinky pumps out goes through the roof in Britain, Ireland and Germany, and his books have been translated into 18 languages.

Yarns like The Love Song Of J Edgar Hoover, Armadillos And Old Lace, and A Case Of Lone Star, featuring our hero as a country singer-turned-gumshoe, are wry, dry, liberally dotted with killer one-liners (“Kinky Friedman at your cervix”), and totally addictive. His most recent Irish-published novel, Roadkill, is a murder mystery in which Willie Nelson occupies a central role, but there are more on the way, including Blast From The Past, Spanking Watson, and a work in progress, The Mile High Club.

The irony is, as a result of his popularity as a writer, Friedman’s been tempted back out on the road as a musician. But then, given the love as well as loathing that infuses his descriptions of life on the bus in Roadkill (“I’d pretty much become a perpetual case of wake me when we get there if we’re goin’”), it’s no wonder that he should succumb to the old white line fever once again.

“I think to perform on the road is a spiritually cleansing thing to do,” Kinky reflects. “Nothing succeeds as planned, as Joseph Heller says. I’m aware of that and I’ve kind of based my life on it.”

In the 1970’s, The Jewboys’ seeds fell on largely fallow ground. Like a country Fugs, their irreverence and anarchist spirit rubbed the Nashville establishment up the wrong way, while PC-baitin’ tunes like ‘Get Your Biscuits In The Oven (And Your Buns In the Bed)’ incensed the liberals and the burn-the-bra brigade. He was booed and chased off campus by feminists at the University of NY at Buffalo 1973, and the following year the National Organisation for Women voted him male chauvinist pig of the year.

“We did get as far as the Grand Ole Opry,” Kinky recalls. “I was introduced as ‘the first cold-blooded Jew to ever appear on the Grand Ole Opry stage.’ The crowd went nuts. We were a country band with a social conscience, and that was a very stupid idea on our part. It managed to irritate Americans of all stripes. And that’s no joke, I mean, the Jews were nervous about it, the Negroes didn’t like us, the homosexuals didn’t like us. And the women were absolutely dangerous.

“We needed police escorts a number of times to get out of certain college campuses. Some of the rednecks actually took what I was doing literally, they liked it, which was also a bit worrisome. Our audience was largely comprised of Jewish homosexual lawyers, that was the basic crowd that went for the Kinkster back then. It wasn’t a financial pleasure. So I decided, ‘When the horse dies, get off.’”

What was the worst scrape Kinky ever got himself out of?

“Well, there were a number of ’em,” he considers. “And it was back before it was fashionable to be politically incorrect. So, you know, there were people throwin’ bottles at us in Berkeley, we were really chased outta town in East Texas. New York was bad, when we first got there the Jewish Defense League called in bomb threats and painted yellow stars on buildings and all that shit. And then they decided they really liked us. But having the Jewish Defense League on your side is like having some bunch of Irish fanatics on your side.

“But we would take any fans we could get in those days,” he reasons, “and the band became very trendy with a certain set. We were never commercial, I mean, I thank the Lord we never had a big hit ’cos I’d be playing EuroDisney right now with the Pips or something. The closest we came was ‘Sold American’ in 1973 which was No.1 in Cadillac, Michigan and a couple of places like that.

“That song’s become more political as the years go on. I believe a lot of the emotional heritage of country music has been lost, with the cleverness, the tighter pants, the shorter songs and so on. That’s why I refer to Garth Brooks as ‘the anti-Hank’. He’s not an evil force, but no-one’s gonna sing Garth Brooks songs to their grandchildren.”

In 1966, after graduating from Plan 2, a highly selective University Of Texas honours programme in which “most participants were recognised by characteristic facial tics”, Kinky served in the Peace Corps for two years.

“The fact is, I am the man who brought frisbees to Borneo,” he claims. “That’s no fuckin’ question – there wasn’t any Peace Corps volunteer before me that ever thought to bring one over. And the kids went crazy over the thing; my parents sent me a bunch of ’em. Some of the natives stole the frisbees and used ’em to make their lips big!”

It wasn’t to be the only time in his life the Kinkster attempted to assert himself as a socially conscious individual. In 1986, 16 years after Hunter S. Thompson’s attempt to become Sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, Friedman ran for Justice of the Peace in Kerrville, Texas. His campaign slogan was, “If you elect me your first Jewish Justice of the Peace, I’ll reduce the speed limit to 54.95”.

“I wasn’t good enough to win, unfortunately,” he says, ruefully. “I was sincere about wanting to work on a local level and do something, ’cos the music was going nowhere and I hadn’t published a book yet, and I thought I could win. Turned out that a woman won the race. She’s the heroine of Armadillos And Old Lace, Pat Knox. And since then she has fallen out of her chair and hurt her back so she cannot hose her husband – according to her – and has sued the Board of Commissioners for not getting her a new chair.

“Anyway, they’ve thrown her ass out, but she was good for a while. I knew she was a crazy person. She won, I came second, and a guy came in very closely behind me; he got a charge of sodomy reduced to ‘following too closely’. This guy killed his dog with a hatchet two weeks before the election and still got 800 votes. Kinda gives you the idea of what my fellow Kerrverts were all about, what the electorate was like.”

Kinky lived in New York from 1977 to 1985, and as his musical career went down the tubes, or rather, up his nose, he also watched many of his friends and contemporaries pass away (Kacey Cohen, the woman he sometimes refers to as the love of his life, “kissed the windshield at 95mph”).

“At that time I was doing a ton of Peruvian Marching Powder, following my motto, ‘Find what you like and let it kill you’,” Kinky admits, “and I did a pretty good job, actually. I think that’s why some people confuse me with an American philosopher, they think that I have some sort of wisdom to offer, when in truth I’m just some guy who died in the gutter and lived to tell about it.”

Be that as it may, at this point The Kinkster became an unlikely urban hero: walking back to his loft after dinner at The Monkey’s Paw, he saw a woman being mugged inside one of those sealed glass booths designed to make cash-machine bank transactions safer. It was Kinky’s bank. He swiped his card, entered the booth, and pinned the mugger to the floor until the police arrived. Tom Waits later said it was Jesus telling him to get away from drugs. Newspapers ran with the headline, “Country Singer Plucks Victim From Mugger.” The incident spurred him into inventing his fictional crime-fighting alter-ego.

“I’ve learned since that you have to fail at one thing before you can succeed at another,” Kinky reflects. “I’ve always been ambivalent about being a country singer, and I finally came to realise that anyone who uses the word ‘ambivalent’ should never have been a country singer in the first place. I mean, really I was just desperate, I was empty and I was totally broke. And now, ten scant years later, I’m very close to achieving my personal goals, which are to be fat, famous, financially fixed, and a faggot by 54.”

It is, of course, as a writer of private eye yarns that the Kinkster is best known on this side of the water, but his books owe as much to Hank Williams as Chandler, or Spillane. Friedman’s stories are the literary equivalent of Chinese food: they’re loaded with flavour, substance, and enough monosodium glutamate to make you hungry for another one an hour after consuming the last. However, don’t let the writer’s irreverent attitude to his own craft mislead you: when it comes to books, The Kinkster is deadly serious.

“I would think, litteraly speaking, that you should break as many rules as humanly possible,” he insists. “Do whatever the normal people or the copy editors would not like.”

Kinky’s brandishing his stogie as he speaks, eager to adjourn to a smoking carriage where he can finally light the damn thing.

“In an odd way, there is a peer artistry to what I’m doing, even though I am kind of a shuckster maybe,” he continues. “I’ve been accused of being a self-promoter, but fuck those people and feed ’em Froot Loops, the truth is, I never say, ‘How is this gonna play in Ireland?’ or ‘Will the masses understand this?’ I’m saying that I don’t wanna be in the mainstream and I think there’s enough of us that like Allen Ginsberg and Townes Van Zandt to make me very, very commercially successful.

Kinky Friedman’s books are populated by his real-life friends and family; journalists like Ratso and Rambam, Chet Flippo (author of the Hank Williams biography Your Cheatin’ Heart), Doc Imus (a New York country DJ), and even Bob Dylan. How do these people feel about their cameo appearances in his novels?

“It hasn’t caused trouble yet,” Kinky shrugs. “I’m stuck with a lot of old friends, that’s all. You can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but you can’t wipe your friends off your saddle. Years ago a lawyer I was workin’ with had these people sign a legal release form in case the thing goes to the movies, and now it looks like it will. If they’re not happy with their character, then they can speak to my attorney, Sonny Corleone!”

On the subject of mortality, it’s not everyone that gets to be the subject of a tribute album before shuffling off this mortal coil. Pearls In the Snow is being co-ordinated by Nashville producer Casey Jones, featuring mostly maverick country artists performing Friedman originals. Perhaps unsurprisingly, kd lang turned down a chance to croon ‘Get Your Biscuits In The Oven (And Your Buns In the Bed)’.

“The album is going to be controlled by us,” Kinky attests, “it’s on KinkaJew Records out of Nashville, which I’m the CEO of, and trust me, my word of honour as a Jewish record company president, I will not fuck you. I wrote that in a little note to Willie (Nelson) the other day, I brought him this paperwork because everybody’s gotta sign off a participation agreement. So he signs, ‘Willie Nelson – Please fuck me!’ Willie’s the only one that keeps rolling with this Texas Zen attitude.”

And how did the Texas Zen master feel about his central role in Roadkill?

“Very good,” Kinky confirms. “Willie was great to work with, and I travel a lot on the bus with him. It started out as a kind of caper, and it turned out to be a lot of insights into country music, or what it used to be anyway, on the road and backstage and behind the scenes. Like Johnny Gimble, the fiddle player, when he was a little boy, he told his mother, ‘Mama, when I grow up I want to be a musician.’ And she says, ‘Well, make up your mind son, you can’t do both.’

“But Willie does smoke a joint the size of a large kosher salami, so he’s very easy to work with. He’s really so high he needs a stepladder to scratch his ass most of the time. And that golf joke of his is very funny. This girl complains about being stung by a bee while she’s playing golf. And he asks her where she got stung, so she says, ‘between the first and second holes.’ And he says, ‘Well, I can tell you now, your stance is too wide!’”

Tribute albums are one thing, but there’s also a high probability of Kinky being immortalised either in feature film, or a TV series.

Of course, as Kinky admits, having fans like Bill Clinton trying to broker a film deal on your behalf can’t hurt.

“That was very nice of him,” he nods, “he tried, he really did. But the lady there at Paramount, Sherry Lansing, she told me that the books are funny and quirky and smart, but the kind of movies the big studios are doing are about volcanoes and shit like that. She recommended going with an independent. Clinton put us both sitting right next to him at this big state dinner at the Whitehouse, which really impressed me. Clinton had been questioning her to make a movie out of Kinky’s books, so that was really wild.”

“I mean, he’s a self-effacing, funny guy, and that’s pretty hard to hate. I think he’s weak in some ways but I’m not sure if it’s our place to judge whether he’s telling the truth, or if it’s important. I mean, do you tell the truth all the time? There’s certain sexual things that I think would be a dishonourable truth to tell. On the other hand, it could be a case of eatin’ ain’t cheatin’, like from the old Kinky Friedman song: “Waitress, please waitress, come sit on my face/Eatin’ ain’t cheatin’/Lord it ain’t no disgrace”.

“But as a person I think Clinton’s got a lot of qualities that are overlooked. One of them is that he’s very human. If you started projectile vomiting and you’re head started spinning round right now, he’d would not hesitate to grab you and give you some medical aid, and y’know, the rest of us would be squeamish. I mean he loves people. I don’t love people, I love animals.”

This is borne out later in the train ride, when the Kinkster coos over a middle-aged lady’s pooch, exhibiting more enthusiasm for the beast than he’s shown for anyone else on the train, not least the Arizonian wench who interrupted him in mid-photo shoot with an exclamatory “Garth Brooks!”

“I think, y’know, between the gutter and the stars, people are what people are, but they will let you down,” he muses. “They let Jesus down, they let Van Gogh down, I don’t doubt they’re gonna let the Kinkster down. Mankind marches forever toward this beacon of light and when we get there it’s always Joan Of Arc with her hair on fire.”