The music producer David Mansfield flew down to Austin in May 2023 to record with Kinky Friedman, the satirical country singer, mystery novelist and twice-failed candidate for Texas governor. “I don’t think he ever said this was going to be his swan song,” said Mansfield, a fiddler and guitarist who met Friedman in 1976, when they were both part of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. The two just got to work on the follow-up to Friedman’s 2019 LP, “Resurrection.”
Still, the sessions were complicated by Friedman’s early symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, and Mansfield handled the guitar parts. “I 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,” Mansfield added.
The result, “Poet of Motel 6,” due March 21 on the Texas musician Jesse Dayton’s 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, the outlaw country legend, followed two years later. Friedman’s girlfriend Kacey Cohen was killed in a car crash in the 1980s. All three show up in the album’s lyrics.
“I didn’t realize that all those songs were saying goodbye to people until it was all done,” said Marcie Friedman, Kinky’s younger sister and an executive producer on the album. “I think he knew he was sick before a lot of people did. And I think that’s definitely the theme, but I didn’t really even notice it until way, way, way down the road.”
Friedman died last June, at 79, from complications of Parkinson’s. He’d 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’s longtime harmonica player. While most taped their parts elsewhere, Gilmore, Trevino and Nelson recorded in a single day at Austin’s Arlyn Studios with Friedman present.
“I think he knew he was on his way out and he didn’t want to leave without making this album,” said Nelson, who “was probably in utero” when she first met Friedman, through her father, Willie.
Listeners with only passing knowledge of Friedman’s 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 “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” about an epithet-spewing racist who pushes the song’s narrator too far, and “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed,” a cheeky hoedown that was little appreciated by the feminists he was needling.
“He made it OK to poke fun at everybody — nobody was safe,” said Raphael, who met Friedman when they toured with Waylon Jennings in 1973, bonding over being two of the few Jews in country music. “He was a very smart guy, and I don’t think there was any vitriol at all in the way he approached certain topics that would normally be off-limits.”
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.) “Everything was a problem,” said Jeff Shelby, an original member of the band who continues to perform as Little Jewford, a nickname Friedman gave him. “You know, ‘Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys’ — in your face. And, as I recall, the first time we played New York, we had bomb threats.”
Friedman “had 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,” said Van Dyke Parks, an arranger and composer who worked with the Beach Boys and toured with Friedman. “Satire can be a lethal sociopolitical weapon. And you’ll find that in the underpinnings of Kinky’s work.” Dwight Yoakam, a fan who honored Friedman on a 1998 tribute album, noted, “People responded to his sensibility as a kind of borscht-dipped Mark Twain.”
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.
He returned to touring in 2010, and, persuaded by Brian Molnar, a younger singer-songwriter then opening for him, recorded his first studio album in decades. “The Loneliest Man I Ever Met” from 2015 was mostly cover songs, but it spurred Friedman to start writing again.
“He got addicted to it. Right until the end, that’s all he wanted to do was write and record,” Molnar said. The new songs tend toward the somber, in stark contrast to Friedman’s early, comedic music. “He 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.”
The songs on “Poet of Motel 6” 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’s 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 “there was no one to save the rodeo clown.”
On “Whitney Walton Has Flown Away,” to the strains of Bernstein’s 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 — who Friedman, a lifelong bachelor, called “the love of my life” — he sings:
And 40 years is 40 years too long
Am I singin’ to a world that’s come and gone?
Sometimes I think I see her in a cold Vancouver dawn
And all I know is Kacey needs a song
When Mansfield first began recording with Friedman, both hoped they’d be able to play limited shows in support of the album. That seemed less and less likely as Friedman’s illness progressed.
Dayton had a long history with Friedman, portraying him in a play called “Becoming Kinky” in 2011 and putting out an album of covers, “Jesse Sings Kinky,” the following year. When Friedman grew unwell, Dayton visited him and promised to put out “Poet of Motel 6,” and a final agreement was reached with Friedman’s family after his death.
“You can kind of feel that this is like, ‘OK, I’m swinging for the fences. This is all I got left in me,’” Dayton said. “And it’s a brilliant record.”
Friedman often worried about his reputation, realizing that dividing his attention among music, books and politics — plus sidelines hawking cigars, tequila and salsa, and supporting an animal-rescue group — may have muddled his legacy.
“It’s a curse of being multitalented — I think that’s a problem for me. If I just did one thing very well, wrote a few hit songs for other people or something, I’d probably be a lot more successful,” he said in a 2010 interview at Echo Hill Ranch, his family’s property in Medina, Texas. “You fail at something long enough, you become a legend.”
Thinking of his own career, Friedman warned both Nelson and Dayton not to record humorous songs if they want their other music taken seriously. Gilmore, who harmonizes on the title track of “Poet of Motel 6,” about their mutual friend Billy Joe Shaver, hopes the album will help serve as a corrective.
“He did get relegated as if he was a lesser artist or something, but most of the musicians really just had a lot of respect for his serious side. He wasn’t just a clown,” Gilmore said. “Definitely amongst the musicians, with people like Billy Joe and Willie and everybody, he was looked up to, and he wasn’t thought of as a novelty act or anything — even though he cultivated that himself.”
