You might think Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys is the most peculiar name in country music history. But no, that honor belongs to Tex Goebbels and The Blind Drunk Mountain Boys, who recorded the classic “Wreck of the Arschloch Tavern Jukebox by the Drunkard Skunky Lee” back in 1937. Okay, so I made that up. Kinky Friedman and His Texas Jewboys win the marbled rye.
But then again, what do you expect from the incorrigibly irreverent Richard “Kinky” Friedman, who has given us such great songs as “They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” “Willie Nelson’s Latent Homosexual Silver Concho Belt,” and “Waitret, Please, Waitret,” a song that invites a waitress to sit on his face? To say nothing of the brilliant—and immensely moving—“Ride ‘em Jewboy”? Kinky’s tunes are the Jewish equivalent of Bobby Bare’s “Drop Kick Me Jesus (Through the Goalposts of Life),” the world’s only Christ-as-field-goal-kicker themed waltz.
Chicago born but Texas raised, Richard “Kinky” Friedman formed The Texas Jewboys in 1971, following a brief career with surf-parody band King Arthur and the Carrots and a stint in the Peace Corps. His very unhappy father called the band name “a negative, hostile, peculiar thing.” Kinky knew he was on the right track. He was certain he was on the right track when The Jewboys were attacked by what he termed “cranked-up lesbians” while performing their parody tune “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed” in Buffalo, NY. He was absolutely positive he was on the right track when the National Association of Women bestowed upon him their “Male Chauvinist Pig” Award that same year.
Over the years Friedman and The Texas Jewboys have released some dozen albums—as well as playing the Grand Ole Opry and famously joining Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in 1976—but none are as fascinating as 2013’s Lost and Found: The Famous Living Room Tape, a recently discovered recording of the first line-up of The Texas Jewboys (i.e., Little Jewford, Big Nig, Panama Red, Wichita Culpepper, Sky Cap Adams, Rainbow Colours, and Snakebite Jacobs) performing in Kinky’s living room in 1970. Why, it’s the musical equivalent of finding Martin Bormann alive in the darkest reaches of the Amazonian Jungle, wearing a manatee skin suit, a Kinkajou tongue necktie, and shoes of possumwood bark.
The LP is slightly ragged, but not half as primitive sounding as you’d expect for an album recorded in somebody’s parlour. The Basement Tapes are far rougher and loosy-goosy, which tells me The Texas Jewboys put real time into polishing their material. Anyway, the tape disappeared, but may still have helped Kinky and Company snag a deal with Vanguard Records. Some say an allusion to the lost record by rock crit Chet Flippo was enough to perk Vanguard’s interest; others that Vanguard was approached by Commander Cody on Kinky’s behalf.
Anyway, opener “Flying Down the Freeway” is (I think) Kinky’s reaction to the election of Ronald Reagan as Governor of California. To wit: flee. It’s fast and features one cool electric guitar playing great country licks and let’s-wing-it vocals by Friedman and a pal on the chorus (“Flying down the freeway/Jetting out of LA really sets me free/Going back to nature in my Jew canoe/Flying down the freeway all the way to you.”) It also includes the great lines, “In Hollywood I totaled my Karma,” and “Ain’t nobody casting asparagus on me.” As for “The Ballad of Charles Whitman” (who killed 16 people and wounded 32 others in a shooting rampage from atop the U. of Texas Tower in Austin in 1966), it’s probably the funniest song about a spree killer ever written. A speedy tune featuring a great banjo, it has Friedman singing, “He was sittin’ up there with his .36 magnum/Laughing wildly as he bagged ‘em/Who are we to say the boy’s insane?” In poor taste? Sure, but when Kinky sings, “A real rip-snortin’ trigger squeezer/Charlie proved a big crowd pleaser” I defy you, sensitive soul, not to laugh.
“Why Do You Bob Your Nose, Girl?” is an up-tempo banjo and fiddle tune based on some uniquely Kinky Bible exegesis: namely, that getting a nose job is a sure way of not getting into Heaven. “Why looky there, it’s old second-hand nose,” says Kinky as the song starts, then somebody else says, “Hey, where’d you get that nose?” to much laughter. Then Kinky and another fella sing, “When you mangle mother nature/And break the Lord’s command/You cannot bob your nose girls/And reach the promised land.” You heard it here first, ladies. Meanwhile, “Keno the Rent Man” is an unrepentantly ragged, fiddle-fueled honky tonker with great tandem vocals about a mean-ass landlord who “Throwed my trunk out in the yard/Kicked off the end of my nose/Well, he hit me in the head with a washboard/Tore out the back of my clothes.” There are plenty more great lines, and the song’s worth a buck download for the fiddle playing alone.
As for “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed,” which features a spunky banjo and a great sing-along chorus, all I can say is that NOW’s umbrage at the tune seems indicative of a serious irony deficiency, because it’s obviously a lark. Friedman is clearly pulling the legs of women’s-libbers when he sings, “Mean-hearted harpies are breaking all the laws/Tearing up their girdles and burning up their bras/Now the air is dirty and the sex is clean/And your coffee makes my hair turn green.” As for “I’m Gonna Protest You,” it’s a tune about not taking a broken heart lying down. Get out there and protest! A mock Dylan protest ditty, it has an outraged Kinky singing, “I’ve seen your crude brutality/But you ain’t heard the last from me.” He promises to grow a shaggy beard, buy some sandals, wave a big sign, and stop bathing, and call her old man an “aristocratic fascist pig.” He sings, “A flower and a gatling gun will do,” and “Well I ain’t no fan of Chairman Mao/But I want to see some action now.” It’s a wonderful parody, and demonstrates that student demonstrators were no safer from Kinky’s jibes than NOW.
Bonus live track “Carrying The Torch” five interminable minutes of irony-free patriotic swill, and I can’t believe it came from Kinky Friedman. The girl “carrying the torch for you” turns out to be the Statue of Liberty, and while Kinky never says “Love her or leave her,” he does sing, “Her love light shines for all this world to see,” and “She wants you just to know you’re always free.” I don’t recall her love light shining for Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos, and this ditty makes Kinky sound like the redneck he likes pretending to be. I’m not wild about “Make My Coffee Blue” either, because the melody is a dud and the lyrics aren’t particularly distinguished. “Sold American” is more like it, a quiet, sad, and lovely midtempo lament about a “Faded jaded falling cowboy star/Pawnshops itching for your old guitar/Where you’re going, ain’t nobody knows/The sequins have fallen from your clothes.” And that washed-up country star isn’t alone as he writes his memoirs “in some window in the frost”; we’ve all been “Sold American/Don’t let me catch you laughin’/When the jukebox cries.”
“Silver Eagle Express” also highlight’s Friedman’s serious side. A lovely and poignant train song in the great country tradition, it features some wonderful guitar, rugged harmony vocals, and lots of brilliant lyrics, including, “Today my heart’s a worn and weary vessel/I’ve been hauling dreams that never last seem to last/Once I slept beside a trembling trestle/Woke up lost across the rusty lifelines to the past.” That there is poetry, people, as is, “Freedom’s only station to station/A paper suitcase on the track of time/Ain’t hard to tell a hard luck situation/Ain’t hard to tell a homeless country boy how to ride.”
“High on Jesus” is another quiet midtempo tune about a guy who doesn’t need dope when he’s got Jesus. You would think Kinky would mock the fellow, but no. (Friedman has always had an affinity for Christ, although he has sometimes expressed it ambiguously, as when he quipped, “I even went so far as to become a Southern Baptist for a while, until I realized they didn’t hold ‘em under long enough.”) I have my own problems with the song, and they have nothing to do with Christ. Confronted by protesters, Kinky’s Jesus freak sings, “A burning bottle in his hand/A long-haired youth screamed, “Come on man!”/The conscience of America has died.” Kinky can be one lovably contrarian fellow, but if he’s serious about those protesters being a sign that the conscience of America is dead all I can say is he’s full of shit. They may have been guilty of the high crime of humorless, but those agitators’ cause was just.
“Highway Café” is a tearjerker featuring some great high and lonesome vocals that occasionally break, and one big old electric guitar so countrified you can almost smell the pig shit. A waitress in a highway café waits for the trucker who has won her coffee-pouring heart to “park his park his great semi- off Rte. 64,” order his usual corned beef and rye, then drive off with her to paradise. But he’s a no-show. Instead two highway patrolmen show up and one says, “Boy, whew, Jesus, what a hell of a mess that was out there tonight.” (Personally, I prefer the version where one highway cop says, “Hey, curly, did you see that old diesel flattened out/Like your damned nose up by the predicament tonight?” and the other cop responds, “Well, he jack-knifed that son of a bitch slicker than owl shit!”) And she knows it was her trucker, and now she’s “heartbroken 24 hours a day/For she longed for her trucker who’d gone.”
I’ve saved the best for last. “Ride ‘Em Jewboy” is a remarkable song; on first listen it appears to be one very sad cowboy lament, but it soon becomes clear it’s something far more profound—a meditation on the Holocaust. Featuring just a guitar, a doleful harmonica, and a couple of voices, the first clue comes in the opening verse, when they sing, “Ride, ride ‘em Jewboy/Ride ‘em all around the old corral/Oh, I’m, I’m with you boy/If I’ve got to ride six million miles.” They go on to sing, “Now the smoke from camps arisin’/See the helpless creatures on their way.” Then, later, “Don’t you let the morning blind ya/When on your sleeve you wear the yellow star.” As for the chorus (“How long will you be driven relentless around the world/The blood in the rhythm of the soul”) it’s lovely beyond words, but oh so sad, as are the “ooh ooh oohs” that open and close the song. And Kinky manages to salvage some hope when he sings, “Oh, how the song becomes the singers/May peace be ever with you as you ride.” “Ride ‘em Jewboy” is one of the most amazing and great country songs ever written: poignant, beautiful, and sad beyond words, and if Friedman had never done a single other thing, this song would alone make him a great.
Friedman has worn many different 10-gallon cowboy hats since 1970. He’s a popular performer, a successful author, and a hawker of his own brand of cigars (you can tell he smokes ‘em by comparing his smooth vocals on Lost and Found to his gruff voice nowadays.) He even ran for governor of Texas in 2006, calling for the state’s “dewussification” and keeping things entertaining by saying things like, “I support gay marriage. I believe they have a right to be as miserable as the rest of us.” And, “How can you look at the Texas legislature and still believe in intelligent design?”
You’ve got to hand it to a guy who can even make politics entertaining to a disengaged cynic like yours truly. But his politics aren’t nearly as entertaining as Lost and Found: The Famous Living Room Tape, which is by turns hilarious, irritating, irreverent, astounding, and profoundly and deeply moving. Kinky Friedman has depth, like a sinkhole that swallows a house complete with mom, dad, kids, and family dachshund. About which I’m sure he could write a song that would make me both laugh and cry, just like “Wreck of the Arschloch Tavern Jukebox by the Drunkard Skunky Lee” did way back in 1937.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
