Music producer David Mansfield left to record with Austin in May 2023. Kinky Friedmansatirical country singer, mystery novelist and two-time failed candidate for Texas governor. “I don’t think he ever said it would be his swan song,” said Mansfield, a fiddler and guitarist who met Friedman in 1976, when they were both part of Bob Dylan. Rolling Thunder Review. The two have yet 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 basically kept a flow going that was completely around him and making him the most emotionally free he could be,” Mansfield added.
The result, “Poet of Motel 6,” out March 21 on Texas musician Jesse Dayton’s Hardcharger Records, is a truly emotional album, and a death knell. Friedman lost many friends over the years: Rev. David Lee Carson, a fellow Rolling Thunder Revue musician known as the Goat, died in 2018. Billy Joe ShaverOutlaw country legend, followed two years later. Friedman’s girlfriend Casey Cohen was killed in a car accident in the 1980s. All three appear in the lyrics of the album.
“I didn’t realize all those songs were about goodbye people,” said Marci Friedman, Kinky’s younger sister and an executive producer on the album. were saying until it was all over.” “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 feel it way, way, way down.”
Friedman died last June at age 79 of complications from Parkinson’s. He heard an early version of the album, which by then included harmonies from Jimmy Dale Gilmore, Rick Trevino, Amy Lee Nelson and others, as well as accordionist Joel Guzman, trumpeter Steven Bernstein and Mickey Raphael, Willie Nelson’s vocals. Collaborations were also included. Long time harmonica player. While most taped their parts elsewhere, Gilmore, Trevino and Nelson recorded with Friedman in a single day at Austin’s Arlen Studios.
“I think he knew he was going out and he didn’t want to go without making this album,” said Nelson, who was “probably in utero” when she first met Friedman through her father, Willie. .
Listeners with only a passing knowledge of Friedman’s music will be surprised at how catchy the new tracks are. Raised in Texas by parents who ran a summer camp for Jewish children, Friedman rose to fame in the early 1970s with satirical songs. “They’re not making the Jews like Jesus anymore,” About a bigoted racist who pushes the song’s narrator too far, and “Get your biscuits in the oven and your buns to bed,” A cheeky sketch that feminists had little of the appreciation it needed.
“He made it okay to make fun of everybody — nobody was safe,” said Raphael, who met Friedman when he was touring with Waylon Jennings in 1973, and is one of the few Jews in country music. The two belonged to the relationship of being. “He was a very smart man, and I don’t think there was anything wrong with the way he approached certain topics that would normally be off limits.”
With his ever-present cigar, dirty jokes and profane sarcasm, Friedman was even more provocative on stage. (Richard Friedman got the nickname Kinky from a Texas university brother who made fun of his curly hair.) “Everything was a problem,” said original band member Jeff Shelby, who plays Little Geofford. continues to perform, a nickname given by Friedman. It was “you know, ‘Kinky Friedman and the Texas Geo Boys’ — in your face. And, as I remember, the first time we played New York, we got bomb threats.
Wayne Dyke Parks, an arranger and composer who worked with the Beach Boys, said that Friedman “was wise in his work to use comedy as a weapon to combat despair, and he did some very It shed light on the dark places that I think they experienced.” and toured with Friedman. “Satire can be a deadly sociopolitical weapon. And you’ll find it at the core of Kinky’s work. Dwight Yoakam, a fan who honored Friedman on a 1998 tribute album, noted, “People have responded to his sensibility as a kind of borscht-dipped Mark Twain.”
Friedman largely abandoned the music business for several decades, initially to kick his cocaine habit and then to reinvent himself as a writer of detective novels in the mid-1980s. He later took a stab at politics, running for Texas governor in 2006 as an independent and four years later as a Democrat.
He returned to the tour in 2010, and, persuaded by Brian Molnera younger singer-songwriter then opened for him, recording his first studio album in decades. “The Loneliest Man I’ve Ever Met” Since 2015, there have been mostly cover songs, but he began rewriting Friedman.
“He got addicted to it. By the end, all he wanted to do was write and record,” Molner said. The trend of the new songs is a stark contrast to Friedman’s early comic music. “He loved playing this stuff, but he saw himself as a Warren Zevon kind of guy who got famous for some novelty songs rather than the really serious stuff.”
“Poet of Motel 6″‘s lyrics tend toward death even when their subjects seem light-hearted at first. On one track, backed by Guzman’s accordion, Friedman sings about his one-time opening act Kirk Purcell at age 3. I was advised to take up an unexpected profession. According to the final verse, Purcell is near death, but “there was no one to save the rodeo clown.”
On “Whitney Walton Has Flown,” about Bernstein’s mariachi-style trumpet strains, Friedman fondly remembers a woman who made several celebrities famous in the 1980s with her late-night phone calls. And on a track about Cohen — who Friedman, a lifelong bachelor, calls “the love of my life” — he sings:
And 40 years is 40 years too long.
Am I singing in a world that has come and gone?
Sometimes I think I see her on a cold Vancouver morning.
And all I know is that Casey needs a song.
When Mansfield first began recording with Friedman, the two hoped to play limited shows in support of the album. This seemed less and less likely as Friedman’s disease progressed.
Dayton has had a long history with Friedman, who featured her in the 2011 drama “Becoming Kinky” and produced an album of covers. “As Kinky Sings,” next year. When Friedman became ill, Dayton visited him and promised to release “Poet of Motel 6” and to accompany Friedman’s family after his death. A final agreement was reached.
“You can feel it’s like, ‘OK, I’m swinging for the fences. It’s all left in me,” Dayton said. “And it’s a great record.”
Friedman often worried about his reputation, realizing that dividing his attention between music, books and politics – as well as cigars, alcohol and salsa – as well as hawking, and supporting animal rescue groups. – His legacy could be disrupted.
“That’s the curse of being multi-talented – I think that’s a problem for me. If I just did one thing really well, wrote a few hits for other people or something, I’d probably be a lot more successful. Will go,” he said in a 2010 interview at Echo Hill Ranch, his family’s property in Texas. “You fail at something long enough, you become a legend.”
Reflecting on his career, Friedman warned both Nelson and Dayton not to record comedy songs if they wanted their other music to be taken seriously. Gilmour, who co-wrote the title track “Poet of Motel 6” about mutual friend Billie Joe Shaver, hopes the album will help make amends.
“He was dismissed as if he was a lesser artist or something, but most musicians really respected his serious side. He wasn’t just a clown,” Gilmour said. “Certainly among musicians, with people like Billie Joe and Willie and everybody, he was looked up to, and didn’t think of it as a new thing or anything—though he cultivated it himself. What was it?”