"Two for Texas" Show Preview: Kinky Friedman & Billy Joe Shaver (2002)

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

Between writing detective novels, shooting the breeze with Don Imus, keeping several cigar manufacturers in the black, and helping out with the Utopia Rescue Ranch for animals in Medina, Texas, Kinky Friedman doesn’t spend much time in recording studios anymore. His most recent on-disc appearances--Live from Down Under and Classic Snatches from Europe--are collaborative live albums, with Billy Joe Shaver and Little Jewford Shelby respectively on Sphincter Records, the label he co-owns with Shelby and whose motto, give or take an apostrophe, is “Leaving Our Competitors Behind.”

Still, there is one song that Friedman wouldn’t mind returning to the studio to record. “It’s time for me and Willie Nelson to do our duet of ‘Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other,’” he says, referring to Ned Sublette's camp-country classic. “I’d like to let everybody know that my heroes have always been faggots.”

Friedman, who’ll turn fifty-eight this Halloween, was politically incorrect long before political incorrectness was cool. A major-label country musician in the mid-’70s, he named his band the Texas Jewboys and gave the world such masterpieces of insensitivity as “Ride ’Em Jewboy” (about the Holocaust), “Men’s Room, L.A.” (about upholding high standards of personal hygiene with a gospel tract), “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in Bed” (about keeping women’s libbers in their place), and, his signature tune, “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews like Jesus Anymore” (about “a redneck nerd in a bowlin’ shirt ... a-guzzlin’ Lone Star beer / Just talkin’ religion and politics for all the world to hear”). By comparison, songs like “Ol’ Ben Lucas” (rhymes with “mucus,” about an inveterate nose-picker) and “Asshole from El Paso” (a parody of Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee”) seemed tame.

Friedman readily admits that such material “kept [him] poor” (“It kept down the airplay totally”), but he still performs it, and he’s not the only one. In 1999, Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, Delbert McClinton, Dwight Yoakam, Tom Waits, and other high-profile admirers of the “Kinkster” recorded Pearls in the Snow (Oarfin),a seventeen-track album of Friedman compositions that stands as one of history’s few genuinely useful tribute LPs. Currently on tour with his fellow Texan Billy Joe Shaver on what’s being billed as the “Two for Texas Tour,” Friedman performs tonight at Tipitina’s in New Orleans and tomorrow night at Rabb’s Steak and Spirits in Ruston. “We do a few songs together,” says Friedman, “but mostly it’s back and forth, so there is kind of a tension and a competition. There’s a good dynamic going on.”

For his part, Shaver, sixty-three, is touring in support of The Earth Rolls On (New West), the second in a series of what many had hoped would be a long run of albums featuring him in collaboration with his axe-slinging son Eddy. That the partnership was cut short by Eddy’s drug-related death on New Year’s Eve 2000 at the age of thirty-eight has only deepened the music’s appeal for many of Shaver’s fans, of whom Friedman himself may well be chief. “Kristofferson wrote some great stuff,” Friedman says, “and Harlan Howard did too. But Billy Joe is the best living poet in country music. I mean, the weight of the catalog that he has written is quite outstanding. The difference between us is I’m doing the same songs I was doing twenty years ago. Billy Joe is currently writing great songs.”

Another difference is that Friedman is currently writing best-selling detective novels. In keeping with a tradition established by its fourteen predecessors, the protagonist of the latest, Meanwhile Back at the Ranch (Simon & Schuster), is Friedman himself--or, at least, Friedman as he’d be if instead of a hard-bitten, cigar-chomping, liquor-quaffing, blisteringly satirical, novel-writing Semitic minstrel with friends like Willie Nelson and Don Imus he were a hard-bitten, cigar-chomping, liquor-quaffing, blisteringly satirical, novel-writing Semitic private eye (or, as Friedman would say, “dick”) with friends like Willie Nelson and Don Imus.

Fast-paced, profane, funny, suspenseful, and written in the first person, Meanwhile Back at the Ranch details Friedman’s attempts to find a missing three-legged cat in Texas and a missing, autistic ten-year-old boy in New York. It’s also rife with pop-cultural and rock-and-roll allusions, and Friedman knows how to use ’em: high noon is “Gary Cooper time,” midnight is “Cinderella time,” and a character named Hattie tells a character named Mattie about a thing she saw, just like in Sam the Sham’s “Wooly Bully.” The novel, in short, makes an ideal gift for that literate baby boomer in your life who has almost everything. “The books are what’s happening now,” says Friedman. “My interest and my energy are going into them.”

The effort is paying off. According to the “bibliography” link at kinkyfriedman.com, the novels are “now being published in Swedish, Japanese and fourteen other languages, two of which even Kinky cannot read.” Many of the “Two for Texas” dates, in fact, are doubling as book signings. According to Friedman, however, the audience for his books and the audience for his music seldom overlap. “They’re wholly two different audiences. If I could combine those two, I would have a huge audience.”

It is, he says, his “cross to bear.” “But the Lord only gives you as big a cross as you can carry, you know?”

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.