One of the fun things about having a blog is the ability to be totally self-indulgent. So… just because I like it, here is an author profile I wrote about Kinky Friedman a while back.

Growing Up Kinky

If there is one thing common to all the acts of his life, it’s self-promotion and the idea that the “self” component is just as important a the “promotion” component.

Who is Kinky Friedman? Unlike the fictional John Galt or the real-life Thomas Pynchon, Kinky Friedman (either the fictional character or the flesh and blood Texan) is a remarkably easy riddle to solve. Sure, he has had a variety of labels over the years – peace corp do-gooder, country music singer and songwriter, bestselling novelist, salsa baron, and politician – but all these personae serve the same purpose; to give Kinky a chance to get in front of a crowd and talk about things that are important to him and to talk about Kinky.

Unlike most writers who glory in their solitude and dread having to become an “author” and face the public on a book promotion tour or at an ALA event, Friedman lives for these chances to stand up and be Kinky. Jane Austen the author was completely overshadowed by her amazing body of work. Hemingway had a strong enough personality to stand shoulder to shoulder with his novels on equal footing. But Kinky Friedman the author eclipses his writing to an amazing degree.

I took an informal survey among ten of my friends and asked them if they had heard of Kinky Friedman. Of the seven who had, only one of them could tell me the complete and correct title of any of his novels. Admittedly, some of his books do have long and complicated titles like, The Love Songs of J. Edgar Hoover, and Elvis, Jesus, and Coca Cola, but out of eighteen novels, it seems that there should be at least one that resonates in the public consciousness.

But when I asked the same seven people about Kinky the author, they knew that he is from Texas, always wears a big black cowboy hat, is Jewish, smokes Cuban cigars, is politically liberal, and that he is a very funny guy. None could give me any similar information about mega-author, Dan Brown. Clearly, Kinky the author is of more interest to the reading public than his body of work. It is interesting to note that through all the years and various incarnations, the public persona of Kinky Friedman has remained remarkably stable. It’s as if the creative work, either music or writing, was never intended to be the end product or the means of self-expression as is the case for most artists. For Friedman, the end product and creative outlet were always Kinky, the public figure. It’s clear that F. Scott Fitzgerald never met anyone like Kinky as not only does he have an American life with a second act, he also has at least a third and fourth act, and maybe more beyond that.

Richard Becomes Kinky

Born Richard Friedman in 1944, Friedman spent his formative high school and college years in the politically liberal hot spot of Austin, Tx. Given the nickname because of his hair, Kinky quickly disposed of Richard during his teens. As Friedman put it in his December 2004 column for Texas Monthly –

“I met folksingers, poets, political radicals, and women who loved other women. None of these life choices were in mainstream fashion, of course. (Back then I never could have used one of the slogans for my white-hot gubernatorial campaign: “No lesbian left behind.”)  It would take another decade or two for Austin to become fully vilified by the rest of Texas as the long-haired, hippie, pot-smoking, hell-raising Gomorrah of the Western world. I never felt this way about Austin. All I knew was that the music was great, the drugs were cheap, and the love was free. “

By the time Kinky came back from two years in the Peace Corps, the war in Vietnam was in full swing.

“In the late sixties I’d been in the Peace Corps in Borneo helping people who wore conical hats and worked with water buffalo in rice paddies. When I returned to the good ol’ USA, I found myself in the basement thinkin’ ’bout the government. They wanted to send me back over to Asia to kill the same people. It was unconscionable.”

A team of rabbis and psychologists convinced the draft board that Kinky was not fit for service and helped him, quite literally, dodge a bullet. Out of this environment came the Kinky Friedman we know today, essentially fully formed at birth.

They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore

Looking for a way to express his ideas and avoid a real job, Kinky gravitated to music and wrote a series of humorous and politically charged songs that he performed as Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. Masquerading as country novelty songs, Kinky’s lyrics were able to generate a fair amount of success while mixing in a good deal of social commentary and often reaching a country music audience that may have avoided the protest flavored music of Bob Dylan and the rest of socially-conscious music of the time. It was here that he began a life-long habit of taking the established norms of a particular genre and bending them to fit the ideas he wanted to express. He addressed racism in “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews like Jesus Anymore” and “We Reserve The Right To Refuse Service To You.” In “Ride ’em Jewboy” he gave a tribute to the Holocaust victims. These are concepts not frequently visited in country music, then or now. But he also embraced the genre on occasion, especially in an anti-feminism song with the following lyrics:

“before you make your weekly trip to the shrink, you better occupy the kitchen, and liberate the sink. Get your biscuits in the oven and your buns in the bed.”

This pattern would continue as he worked his way through various mediums of expression. He found that as long as he was clever, he could address any subject and people would listen.

Country Singer Plucks Victim from Mugger

In the early 1980s, Kinky’s music career had stalled and he was scraping by living in a large, drafty loft in New York City’s West Village. A place that would later to become a familiar scene in many of his books. While out to buy cigars one night, he saw a lady being mugged on the floor in an enclosed ATM. There was a crowd watching but no one had the right bank card to get inside. Kinky had the right card and managed to get inside and hold the mugger until police came. He described the man as, “having sort of a mental hospital haircut and his eyes were rolling back in his head a bit more than is generally fashionable.” That incident was as he calls his “road to Damascus” experience. He immediately took to the idea of a country music singer who lives in New York City and solves mysteries. It took him only two months to crank out his first novel, Greenwich Killing Time.  He saved a lot of writing and thinking time by making himself the main character, and constructing the supporting characters using his actual friends. The fictional Kinky is indistinguishable from the real-life Kinky.

Once again he kept the genre’s rules that appealed to him and ignored the ones that didn’t. In a Kinky Friedman novel, it truly is the journey, not the destination. In several of the books, the mystery is barely solved and in others, the conclusion is that there was never any real mystery or danger in the first place. The books are fun and entertaining because you get to spend time with Kinky, the resolution of the case comes in a distant second.

It would be interesting to study the two-way relationship between Kinky the author and Kinky the fictional character. It would seem very natural for the reader to transfer their feelings about Kinky the character to Kinky the actual person. It would be easy to assume that the real Kinky is just as clever, witty, and tough as the fictional character. This may help explain why the author is more popular than his books. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see if events in the author’s real life have an effect on the reader’s attitude toward his work, or affect book sales. For example, did Friedman’s recent highly-publicized run for the governor of Texas affect book sales or the reviews for his books released during that period?

Lost in all the attention on Kinky the author, is the remarkable skill of Kinky the writer. Kinky has always had a way of using colorful Texas language to make whatever he is talking about entertaining. But often lost in between the chuckles is a lot of very good writing. Frequently moody and occasionally even poignant,  every paragraph is crafted. In this passage from the eighteenth, and last, Kinky novel, Ten Little New Yorkers, the writer does an excellent job of setting the mood.

“It was a hard rain, as Bob Dylan might say, but I didn’t mind. In fact, I didn’t really give a damn if the whole city floated away. Well, maybe it’d be nice to keep Chinatown. When it’s raining cats and dogs I miss the animals and people I’ve loved in my life and I feel closer to them, and farther away from today. Today is just a garbageman in his yellow raincoat. Today is the wet woman with the wild hair walking willfully into the white wall. Today’s a goddamn vase without any flowers. Hell, give me a passably decent tomorrow, I said. Give me a handful of scrappy yesterdays. Give me liberty or give me death or give me life on the Mississippi.”

Yep, I think we’ve all been there.

Kinky – Texas Salsa Magnate

After wrapping up his eighteenth mystery novel and killing off its lead character, Friedman took a surprise career turn and introduced Kinky Friedman’s Private Stock salsa. In Texas Monthly, Kinky himself said –

“If you start out dreaming of becoming a country-music star, then have to reinvent yourself as an author, then find your likeness smiling smugly back at you from a supermarket shelf, it may have the effect of making your entire life appear to be little more than an adventure in attention deficit disorder.”

While it may be confusing to some, it seems clear to me that this is just yet another example of the evolving private Kinky using the solidly-unchanging public Kinky to advance a personal cause. In this case, the cause is the Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch, a never-kill sanctuary for abused or stray animals, one of whom happens to be named Kinky Friedman. Taking his lead from Paul Newman, Friedman gives all the profits from salsa sales to the ranch.

It all started when Friedman rescued a three-legged kitten named Lucky. The saving of Lucky (“she’s single pawedly killed two rattlesnakes!”), plus 58 dogs, more cats, pigs, donkeys, goats, and turkeys led to the establishment of the Utopia Ranch. And since both the ranch and Texans need to be fed, Kinky combined the two and created the line of salsa products. Showing the big-hearted side of both the public and private Kinky, he wrote –

“All of the profits go to Alfred Hitchcock, a rooster who crows at noon; to three donkeys named Roy, Gabby, and Little Jewford; to a dog named Daisy who was found as a puppy alone in a field of daisies; to a dog named Eve, who was found shivering on a hilltop on Christmas Eve;  to a dog named Cat, who was sent to the pound for the crime of eating a Social Security check; and to 57 other dogs who each have a story, if only they could tell you.”

Kinky for Governor – How Hard Could it Be

In a fourth act plot twist, that should have surprised no one who was watching closely, the already political Friedman made a run for the governor’s mansion in Texas. Kinky has always had a political message and in 2006 the time seemed right to take that seditious message directly to the people. Once again, Friedman refused to change his image to suit the norms of a political campaign. It was the same Kinky that sang a country song about the Holocaust and wrote about solving mysteries in New York and he wanted everyone to know it. Friedman freely admitted to doing “mountains of cocaine” and was openly proud of the fact that he has never had a real job. But the real problem for the always flamboyant figure was to convince people that he was serious.

Evan Smith, the editor of Texas Monthly and one of the top political commentators in the state told CBS’s Morely Safer, “I think he’s dead serious. I think that if you ask him whether this is a joke, if you even suggest it’s a joke, he’ll lunge at you.” Smith continued, “His strengths, I think, begin with his independence. He’s independent of everything and of everybody. And sometimes he’s independent of his own brain. His mouth is independent of his brain. But I think the fact that he’s willing to take on the establishment, however he defines it on a given day. Republicans, Democrats, you know people in power. He has tapped into a dissatisfaction with the accepted order.”  In the end, that dissatisfaction was not enough and Kinky finished with a respectable 13 percent of the vote in a five-person race.

Whether it’s music, novels, salsa, or politics, Friedman has shown that it is possible to remain true to your own unique personality and be successful. Public relations managers, editors, and political image consultants have all failed in their attempts to separate the private Kinky from the public Kinky, and even the fictional Kinky. If there is one thing common to all the acts of his life, it’s self-promotion and the idea that the “self” component is just as important a the “promotion” component. As long as he stays true to all the versions of Kinky, the promotion process is fun, not work. Kinky laid it all out to NPR’s Leanne Hanson in 1988 –

“I’m glad my novels are doing well. I’m not afraid of success. I’m not afraid of failure. I’m not afraid of living life, and I’m not afraid to die. I’m not afraid to love. I’m not afraid to be alone. I’m just afraid that I may have to stop talking bout myself for five minutes.”