How Kinky Friedman Conquered Texas
“When you get big, you become a joke,” Kinky Friedman told an interviewer in 1974. “I started as a joke, and that’s a pretty good way to start.”
This was near the beginning of Friedman’s career arc from enfant terrible to beloved old crank, and he was playing the punk-kid part beautifully, dropping one caustic aside after another—from “I don’t really view hippies as people” to “I hate intellectuals, and I am one.” The interviewer, Jan Reid, put the highlights in The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, his great book about the Austin music scene of the ’70s, where Kinky came off as a witty wiseass who liked shocking people and was a bit ambivalent about the Austin experience, partly because he saw the place as his home, not as a destination. “I lived in this city for 17 years,” he told Reid. “I went to high school here, I did the whole trip. I didn’t suddenly become a guru with long hair.” He even sneered at the Armadillo World Headquarters, the town’s legendary music venue: “A lot of people think it’s a very warm place, but to me it’s an airplane hangar.”
Well, maybe it was; I wasn’t there, and I can’t say. But 50 years later, it’s hard to imagine a city better suited for a talent like Friedman, who died this week at age 79. Don’t get me wrong: There were plenty of places in 1970s America where you could sing songs about gas chambers and mass shooters and boogers. That’s why God gave us punk rock. But to sing country songs about gas chambers and mass shooters and boogers—and I mean serious country music, not some novelty pastiche—you’d probably wanted to spend some time in Austin, even if you kept a foot in Nashville and New York as well. There was a whole new style of countercultural country-western emerging there, which some people called “outlaw country” and some people called “progressive country” and some people called “redneck rock” (which sounded like the exact opposite of “progressive country”) and some people called “cosmic cowboy music.” And Kinky Friedman may have been the most outrageous, eccentric, and funny man to sing it.
Richard “Kinky” Friedman was born in Chicago in 1944, but his parents moved to Houston just a year later. When he was seven they moved further west, to the Texas Hill Country, where they founded a summer camp called Echo Hill Ranch. (One old camper told Friedman’s biographer, Mary Lou Sullivan, that this “was the Jewish camp for Reform Jews and Jews that weren’t that observant.”) The family eventually made their way to Austin, and Kinky went to college there too, getting involved with Students for a Democratic Society while the New Left group’s decentralist and anti-authoritarian “Prairie Power” wing was ascendant. (During the Prairie Power period, some members of the organization took to remarking that the “Texas anarchists” were taking over.)
When he s
Article from Reason.com
![](https://libertarianguide.com/wp-content/uploads/reason-logo-square.jpeg)
The Reason Magazine website is a go-to destination for libertarians seeking cogent analysis, investigative reporting, and thought-provoking commentary. Championing the principles of individual freedom, limited government, and free markets, the site offers a diverse range of articles, videos, and podcasts that challenge conventional wisdom and advocate for libertarian solutions. Whether you’re interested in politics, culture, or technology, Reason provides a unique lens that prioritizes liberty and rational discourse. It’s an essential resource for those who value critical thinking and nuanced debate in the pursuit of a freer society.