\n<\/p>\n
The music producer David Mansfield flew down to Austin in May 2023 to record with Kinky Friedman<\/a>, the satirical country singer, mystery novelist and twice-failed candidate for Texas governor. \u201cI don\u2019t think he ever said this was going to be his swan song,\u201d said Mansfield, a fiddler and guitarist who met Friedman in 1976, when they were both part of Bob Dylan\u2019s Rolling Thunder Revue<\/a>. The two just got to work on the follow-up to Friedman\u2019s 2019 LP, \u201cResurrection.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, the sessions were complicated by Friedman\u2019s early symptoms of Parkinson\u2019s disease, and Mansfield handled the guitar parts. \u201cI just basically kept a flow going that was totally based around him and getting him to sort of be emotionally the freest he could be,\u201d Mansfield added.<\/p>\n The result, \u201cPoet of Motel 6,\u201d due March 21 on the Texas musician Jesse Dayton\u2019s Hardcharger Records, is indeed an emotional album, and one haunted by death. Friedman lost many friends over the years: the Rev. David Lee Carson, a fellow Rolling Thunder Revue musician known as Goat, died in 2018. Billy Joe Shaver<\/a>, the outlaw country legend, followed two years later. Friedman\u2019s girlfriend Kacey Cohen was killed in a car crash in the 1980s. All three show up in the album\u2019s lyrics.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t realize that all those songs were saying goodbye to people until it was all done,\u201d said Marcie Friedman, Kinky\u2019s younger sister and an executive producer on the album. \u201cI think he knew he was sick before a lot of people did. And I think that\u2019s definitely the theme, but I didn\u2019t really even notice it until way, way, way down the road.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Friedman died last June, at 79, from complications of Parkinson\u2019s. He\u2019d listened to an early version of the album, which by then included harmonies by Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Rick Trevino, Amy Lee Nelson and others, along with contributions from the accordionist Joel Guzman, the trumpeter Steven Bernstein and Mickey Raphael, Willie Nelson\u2019s longtime harmonica player. While most taped their parts elsewhere, Gilmore, Trevino and Nelson recorded in a single day at Austin\u2019s Arlyn Studios with Friedman present.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI think he knew he was on his way out and he didn\u2019t want to leave without making this album,\u201d said Nelson, who \u201cwas probably in utero\u201d when she first met Friedman, through her father, Willie.<\/p>\n Listeners with only passing knowledge of Friedman\u2019s music might be surprised by how heartfelt the new tracks are. Raised in Texas by parents who ran a summer camp for Jewish children, Friedman found fame in the early 1970s with satirical songs such as \u201cThey Ain\u2019t Makin\u2019 Jews Like Jesus Anymore,\u201d<\/a> about an epithet-spewing racist who pushes the song\u2019s narrator too far, and \u201cGet Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed,\u201d<\/a> a cheeky hoedown that was little appreciated by the feminists he was needling.<\/p>\n \u201cHe made it OK to poke fun at everybody \u2014 nobody was safe,\u201d said Raphael, who met Friedman when they toured with Waylon Jennings in 1973, bonding over being two of the few Jews in country music. \u201cHe was a very smart guy, and I don\u2019t think there was any vitriol at all in the way he approached certain topics that would normally be off-limits.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n With his ever-present cigar, dirty jokes and profanity-laden banter, Friedman was even more provocative onstage. (Richard Friedman got the nickname Kinky from a University of Texas frat brother joking about his curly hair.) \u201cEverything was a problem,\u201d said Jeff Shelby, an original member of the band who continues to perform as Little Jewford, a nickname Friedman gave him. \u201cYou know, \u2018Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys\u2019 \u2014 in your face. And, as I recall, the first time we played New York, we had bomb threats.\u201d<\/p>\n Friedman \u201chad the wisdom in his work to use comedy as an armament to combat despair, and he made light of some very dark places I think that he had experienced,\u201d said Van Dyke Parks, an arranger and composer who worked with the Beach Boys and toured with Friedman. \u201cSatire can be a lethal sociopolitical weapon. And you\u2019ll find that in the underpinnings of Kinky\u2019s work.\u201d Dwight Yoakam, a fan who honored Friedman on a 1998 tribute album, noted, \u201cPeople responded to his sensibility as a kind of borscht-dipped Mark Twain.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Friedman largely abandoned the music business for decades, initially to kick a cocaine habit and then to reinvent himself in the mid-1980s as an author of detective novels. He later took a stab at politics, running for governor of Texas as an independent in 2006 and as a Democrat four years later.<\/p>\n He returned to touring in 2010, and, persuaded by Brian Molnar<\/a>, a younger singer-songwriter then opening for him, recorded his first studio album in decades. \u201cThe Loneliest Man I Ever Met\u201d<\/a> from 2015 was mostly cover songs, but it spurred Friedman to start writing again.<\/p>\n \u201cHe got addicted to it. Right until the end, that\u2019s all he wanted to do was write and record,\u201d Molnar said. The new songs tend toward the somber, in stark contrast to Friedman\u2019s early, comedic music. \u201cHe loved playing that stuff, but he saw himself as a Warren Zevon kind of guy that ended up getting known for a couple of novelty songs that he did, rather than the really serious stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The songs on \u201cPoet of Motel 6\u201d tend to be haunted by death even when their subjects seem, at first blush, to be on the lighter side. On one track, backed by Guzman\u2019s accordion, Friedman sings about his onetime opening act Kirk Purcell being advised at the age of 3 to pursue an unlikely profession. By the final verse, Purcell is near death, but \u201cthere was no one to save the rodeo clown.\u201d<\/p>\n On \u201cWhitney Walton Has Flown Away,\u201d to the strains of Bernstein\u2019s mariachi-style trumpet, Friedman lovingly recalls a woman who famously conned a number of celebrities through late-night phone calls in the 1980s. And on a track about Cohen \u2014 who Friedman, a lifelong bachelor, called \u201cthe love of my life\u201d \u2014 he sings:<\/p>\n And 40 years is 40 years too long When Mansfield first began recording with Friedman, both hoped they\u2019d be able to play limited shows in support of the album. That seemed less and less likely as Friedman\u2019s illness progressed.<\/p>\n\n
Am I singin\u2019 to a world that\u2019s come and gone?
Sometimes I think I see her in a cold Vancouver dawn
And all I know is Kacey needs a song<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n