R.I.P. Kinky Friedman
A eulogy for the 'Jewish Cowboy', Kinky Friedman, author, musician, politician, counter-cultural legend
Kinky Friedman has died. He was 79. The satirical songwriter, author, and politician had been living with Parkinson’s disease.
He was friend of Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson, his heroes were Mark Twain and Raymond Chandler. He was hilarious with a bone-dry wit. He was one of those counter-cultural icons that could not exist today in the flesh, would have to be dreamed up and scratched out with red pen by a disbelieving editor.
I first found Friedman, the novelist. That was actually his second incarnation. The music career had dried up in the 1980s — I’d find out about that later. But across the 80s, 90s and 00s, Friedman wrote a run of hilarious, compelling, stupidly-funny detective novels which seemed to take The Big Sleep as a central vibe with lashings from the Police Squad! procedural spoof of the Zucker brothers. To that wonderfully weird brew, he combined liberal doses of self-effacing humour where he parodied himself in caricature as almost a send-up of Bukowski-ian auto-fiction.
I bought Elvis, Jesus and Coca-Cola on a whim, purely for the title. I laughed from the first page, and read it in close to a single sitting. I was back to the bookstore for The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover and Greenwich Killing Time and A Case Of Lone Star.
And then I found the music.
Sold American arrived for me at the end of a serious exploration of all-things country and Americana. It felt like perfect timing.I kept reading Friedman books — perfect on planes and for holidays, great in-between any ‘serious’ reading that was getting too heavy; laugh out loud funny and packed with lines I wanted to steal and rework. I sometimes did. I never did it well.The character of Kinky Friedman in the novels would “eat” Jack Daniels for lunch and dinner. He was behind the beat but ahead of his times, he was out of touch but had a finger on the pulse.
He was just wonderfully absurd. When I first watched The Big Lebowski I felt like the Coens had been equally inspired by The Big Sleep and Kinky. Their ‘Dude’ was like the collaboration between Friedman and Chandler that the world never got.He ran for Governor of Texas, and though his campaigning was in part satirical, and he played a send-up of a conservative model — lampooning redneck culture — he often made a lot of simple sense: “"I am not anti-death penalty, but I'm damn sure anti-the-wrong-guy-getting-executed."
I loved Kinky Friedman. He was funny. And fascinating. In near equal measures.His work is still hanging around of course. It’s there for you still. To discover or rediscover. It’s still fun. Still funny, still sometimes profoundly moving. He was clever. A crack-up. Wise.
It was his line — although it’s so often now associated with Charles Bukowski — that gave me some (misguided) hope to just carry on along my own path for as long as I did:
“you've got to find what you love and let it kill you”.
Thank god Kinky got to do what he did for so long and so well.
R.I.P. Kinky Friedman
