Kinky Friedman & Billy Joe Shaver: Live in Baton Rouge (2002)

(As published in the Times of Acadiana, October 16, 2002)

A lower-key gig than the “Two for Texas” show at Chelsea’s Café in Baton Rouge last week would be hard to imagine. Even with Jeff “Little Jewford” Shelby’s one-man opening act in full swing inside, the eight-o’clock darkness and the café’s extinguished outer lights rendered signs of life invisible.

Those equipped with night vision, however, would have noticed a cowboy-hatted, mustachioed, cigar-smoking, beer-nursing figure seated at an outside table, and in so doing would have noticed Kinky Friedman, the novelist, country singer, and quintessential Texas Jewboy who would soon be joining his fellow Texan, the equally quintessential Billy Joe Shaver, for an evening of below-the-belt satire, old-time religion, surreal rabble rousing, gallows humor, and song.

It’s too late, obviously, for anyone who missed the show to see it now, but Live from Down Under (Sphincter), the recently released double-disc set of the tour’s Australian leg available at sphincterrecords.com and other fine Sphincter outlets, is a reasonable and entertaining facsimile thereof. Minor set-list discrepancies aside, the main difference between the Baton Rouge and Down Under shows is that the Sydney audience was far less rowdy than the one at Chelsea’s, which consisted primarily of middle-aged men given to hooting, hollering, clapping, guffawing, and flicking Bics to Friedman’s and Shaver’s every pronouncement, wisecrack, and exhortation.

(Friedman: “An intellectual is someone who takes a simple idea and makes it complex”; Shaver: “Simplicity don’t need to be greased”; Friedman: “I hate intellectuals, although I am one”; Shaver: “If you don’t love Jesus, go to hell!”; Friedman: [introducing bandmember Washington Ratso] “He’s the Lebanese boy in the band!”; Shaver: “Jesus is the one who made us all Number Two”; Friedman: [joining hands with Ratso] “Ratso and I consider ourselves the last true hope for peace in the Middle East”; Shaver: [singing “Black Rose”] “The devil made me do it the first time, the second time I done it on my own”; Friedman: “Naomi Judd used to tell her children, ‘Always say your prayers and wash your hands, because Jesus and germs are everywhere.’”)

Little Jewford, after warming up the crowd, remained onstage to play electric keyboards, kazoos, and the melodica for both Shaver and Friedman. He also functioned as a one-man Firesign Theater, playing Ed McMahon to Friedman’s Johnny Carson and punctuating the proceedings with MC patter, deadpan asides, and impressively articulate belches.

And then, of course, there were the songs. Singing “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in Bed” always takes matzo balls, especially in a club whose audience includes women armed with beer bottles. But Friedman’s decision to open (after winning the who'll-go-first coin toss) with the sniper narrative “The Ballad of Charles Whitman” on the day that the shooting of a Washington, D.C., school boy highlighted a week of Beltway-area random shootings--well, let’s just say that Jesus ain’t the only Jew they ain’t makin’ more like anymore.