With a new album, a successful mystery-novel series and a movie in the works, Texas Jewboy' Kinky Friedman is once again riding high
Two decades ago, as frontman for a cult country-and-Western band called the Texas Jewboys, Richard (Kinky) Friedman was touring America belting out tunes like "Why Do You Bob Your Nose, Girl," "They Ain't Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore," and "Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed."
"Many people," recalls Friedman, speaking by phone from the Kerrville, Texas mobile home he shares with three cats and a pet armadillo, "just couldn't get past the title of songs like Ride 'em Jewboy,' or for that matter the name of the band. It got a lot of people's backs up."
Fifteen years after the Jewboys disbanded due to internal dissent, bad deals with record companies, and a world that wasn't quite up to their antics, Friedman has released a two-CD set of previously-unheard live Jewboy performances on his own Fruit of the Tune label. Called "Old Testaments and New Revelations," it is now being sold at record stores and over a 1-800-KINKY phone line. Rolling Stone magazine, which described Friedman as "Hank Williams mutated with Shecky Green," called the album "a true delight for those who like to two-step while committing sacrilege."
Now 48, Friedman works these days mainly as a mystery writer; he has six suspense novels under his big brass belt buckle and a new three-book deal with Simon & Schuster peeking out from under his gleaming white Stetson. The Kinkster figures in each of them as his own protagonist: a dour, sharp-tongued, feline-loving, ex-country-&-Western singer-turned-Greenwich Village gumshoe.
Friedman is currently also preparing to produce a feature movie based on his second novel, "A Case of Lone Star," which he says is about "sequined singers at the Lone Star Cafe in New York, who start dying with their hand-tooled boots on and the lyrics to a Hank Williams song in their hands." He claims to have raised $ 5 million for the project, and hopes to get the cameras rolling this winter.
The son of a psychologist from Chicago and a speech therapist who moved to Texas in the early 50s to establish a Jewish summer camp, Friedman is a liberal arts graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. He began songwriting in the late 60s, as a Peace Corps volunteer in Borneo.
In 1973, Friedman was in Nashville, assembling a group and giving it a name inspired by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. The Texas Jewboys signed with Vanguard Records, a small folk label, and hit the road.
At the time, an ethnic C&W band wasn't so novel. The commercial expansion of country music in the 60s had lured ethnic outsiders eager to cut into the industry's Anglo-Protestant consensus. Catholics, Hispanics, blacks and other minorities were sidemen and -women in bluegrass and country bands, and particularly country-rock groups.
During their first year, the original Jewboys Kenneth (Snakebite) Jacobs, Jeff (Little Jewford) Shelby, and non-Jews Billy Swan, Willie (The Singing Chinaman) Fong Young, and Thomas (Wichita) Culpepper toured honky-tonks and Hillel Jewish student centers. Their first album, "Sold American," appeared in 1973; it managed to offend Jews and Gentiles equally with lyrics like:
They ain't makin' Jews like Jesus anymore They don't turn the other cheek like they done before.
Despite the often-irreverent nature of their material, the Jewboys were never a novelty act. Many of their songs on "Sold American" received a fair share of airplay on C&W radio stations. In 1974, Friedman cut a second album, "Kinky Friedman," assisted in the effort by established C&W stars like Willie Nelson (who produced the record), and Waylon Jennings. A third and final album, "Lasso From El Paso," featured even more big-name performers: Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr and Eric Clapton.
At their apex, the Jewboys were big enough to appear at Nashville's Grand Ole Opry, where Kinky was announced as "the first full-blooded Jew ever to play the Opry." In 1976, at the peak of his celebrity, he joined Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder concert tour.
But, as Friedman is fond of recounting, "the distance between the limousine and the gutter is a short one." As his star began to wane, he began a solo career; in 1979 he moved to New York and eked out a niche for himself at the Lone Star Cafe, then the center of the urban cowboy scene. He performed regularly with pickup bands, becoming something of a Sunday night institution.
An incident on the streets of Manhattan in 1984 led Friedman directly to his second, more successful, career as a writer. As he recounts it, he left his apartment in the Village to buy cigars, and spotted a woman in a bank being beaten by a man "whose eyes were rolling around more than was fashionable," while passers-by gaped. Friedman hurled himself through the glass door and rescued her, pinning down the assailant until the police arrived. The next day, as newpapers extolled his virtues, an inspired Friedman headed straight for a typewriter.
His first novel, "Greenwich Killing Time," was rejected by the first 17 publishers who saw it. "Of course," says Friedman, "I realized I had something pretty hot here." He was right: The 18th publisher, William Morrow & Co., bought the book, which sold some 15,000 in hardcover; in paperback, his novels have average sales of about 100,000. The reviewers have been surprisingly kind to Friedman's endeavors, and he numbers among his fans the acclaimed mystery writer Robert ("Spenser") Par- ker, who says that "he has a wonderful eye for detail, a good grasp of irony, the same kind of sense of humor I have, and a nice social conscience."
With the success of his mystery series, Hollywood came a-courtin'. Director Ron Howard's company, Imagine Entertainment, took out options on film rights for the books. But the options lapsed and the projects came to naught dashed, for the most part, on the shoals of casting.
"The head of a big agency once asked me how I'd feel if I were portrayed in an adaptation of one of my novels by Eddie Murphy," recalls Friedman. "Another biggie was ("Welcome Back Kotter" star) Gabe Kaplan. Since then, I've had to deal with a whole bunch of crazy suggestions. I've always said that the only person who could probably play me better than I could play myself is (the late Western actor) Warren Oates."
Friedman is still getting offers for the books. The most recent was from Dolly Parton's production company, which suggested a TV series with country singer Mac Davis as Kinky. But Kinky is determined to play his own literary alter ego on the screen.
"I came to realize," says Friedman, "that, in the words of my current girlfriend, former Miss Texas Jo Thompson, if it's gonna be, it's up to me."
After finding (unnamed) private backers, he believes that the film version of "A Case of Lone Star" is just about in the saddlebag. He says that a number of performers, including Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Dennis Hopper, have agreed to appear in the film.
And while Friedman still plans to play himself, he modestly adds: "If Harrison Ford were to step forward, I'd be prepared to step down as the Kinkster."
The Kinkster: A Texas Jewboy' turned Big Apple private eye