Music

Jesse Walker | 6.28.2024 11:02 AM

"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........

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