It’s around three and a half years since I opined:
I think I'm going off Kinky Friedmann.
Not that I was ever a big fan back in the days when the Kinkster fronted The Texas Jewboys, performing such classics as Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns In the Bed and They Don't Make Jews Like Jesus Anymore.
In fact, back in the seventies I think I might have heard the Sold American album once. Maybe twice at the outside.
Still I knew who the guy was, and the song titles indicated a certain deviant slant on the standard country music fare. By the same token I love the concept of a song called Jesus Even Loves White Trash Like Me, but I've never bothered to go out of the way to track it down and have a listen.
News in the Weekend Australian Review that this former country music semi-cult figure had morphed into a crime novelist was something that I filed away in the memory bank under the heading Check This Out Some Time If You Get Around To It.
The chance to do so came around sooner than expected in the days before a quality purveyor of mail-order reading matter called The Softback Preview was swallowed whole by a multinational concern and the quality on offer went down the gurgler, out the window and over the rainbow.
I was short of reading matter at the time and a volume titled Armadillos And Old Lace suggested a sense of humour that might translate into a reasonable read.
As soon as I started, I realized that this was another of the authors where Hughesy needed to read the collected works, more or less in order, while infrequent visits to major-city book shops would be finding me scanning the "F" sections of the crime fiction shelves for the latest in the series.
And from the start it was obvious that Kinky Friedman approached the thorny question of characters and their resemblance (intended or otherwise) to real people in a highly idiosyncratic way. Quite simply, he peopled the pages with his friends and acquaintances, having first taken the precaution of obtaining a signed release allowing him to say whatever he likes about them.
This group of friends, referred to as the Greenwich Village Irregulars, initially comprised McGovern, a larger than life newspaper reporter, New York Ratso (Larry Sloman wandering magazine editor of some note) and Rambam, a licensed private investigator wanted in every state whose name starts with 'I' as well as various other ne'er-do-wells.
That was the start of an entry in the old LHoC Bookshelves Author’s Oeuvre section of The Books Pages.
So, if you’re not familiar with the man already, who is this Kinky Friedman?
Born in Chicago in November 1955 to Jewish parents who moved to the Texas ranch where he still lives when he was a toddler, Richard S. “Kinky” Friedman ventured into country music after a post-college stint in the Peace Corps, fronting Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys, which may or may not have been a dig at Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, a decidedly non-PC outfit responsible for We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to You, Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in Bed, Ride 'Em Jewboy, and They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore, with the latter two included in the setlist for the only Austin City Limits episode recorded but not broadcast, as offensive today (according to the show’s producer) as it was back then.
It did, however, appear on DVD as Kinky Friedman: Live From Austin Texas in 2007.
He was also part of the second leg of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1976, a tour and therefore gets a fair airing in On the Road with Bob Dylan, the account of the tour written by one Larry Sloman, the man known to Friedman aficionados as New York Ratso.
When his music career took a nose dive in the eighties, Friedman turned his attention to crime writing, with most of the titles listed below reappearing as ebooks on the author’s Vandam Press. They’re apparently about to make another reappearance as unabridged audio books read by the author.