Ranch Report: Kinky, Martin and me
The passing of Kinky Friedman and Martin Mull brought back memories.
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When Kinky Friedman died last week I got a boat load of e-mails and texts asking me if I knew him or had any stories to tell.
As with any story about a musician, movie star or artist, it all happened when I was at Buddy magazine, and working for Stoney Burns.
I met Kinky while he was still a performing musician and recording artist. He had not started writing crime novels or running for governor. Below is one of my fave pictures of him, in the upstairs office of Bill Simonson, at Mother Blues in Dallas. Ron McKeown took this incredible picture, which we ran in Buddy, and I used in my documentary When Dallas Rocked (which you can watch for free on YouTube). Ron has probably the best collection of photos of “progressive country” artists on the planet that he took back in the 70s when they were all riding high.
Kinky Friedman with owner Bill Simonson in the upstairs office at Mother Blues, Dallas, Texas.
I first met Kinky on a trip to New York City that Stoney and I took in 1977. We were hitting up all of the major record labels (Columbia, Arista) to advertise in Buddy. Kinky and his band, The Texas Jewboys, were playing at The Lone Star Cafe up in the Big Apple. Back then, Texas was very hip in New York, and The Lone Star Cafe was packing them in. It had a big iguana on the roof, designed and built by Bob “Daddy-O” Wade who later went on to put those giant dancing frogs on top of the nightclub, Tango, in Dallas. (When Tango was torn down, the frogs when to Carl’s Corner truck stop in Abbott.)
Stoney got us into the club and we took a seat at one of the tables while Kinky performed “The Ballad of Charles Whitman” and “They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore.” Between songs he gave Stoney a shout out from the stage, and remarked that he saw a few of the players from the New York Rangers hockey team in the crowd. There was a pause, then he said, “You know that most hockey players are pussies.”
It was all part of that in-your-face humor he threw out there.
The next time I saw him was at a place in Dallas called The Old Warehouse. It was on Mockingbird Lane. He did the entire Texas Jewboy shtick, but this time I noticed that whenever he put on his guitar he didn’t sling the strap over his shoulder, but laid the guitar and strap on the floor, then stepped into it and pulled it up like he was pulling up a pair of pants. My old childhood friend Jim Quinn was visiting Miles and I that night and he got a kick out of the whole thing. Mainly because he had never seen anything like that in south Mississippi.
The last time I saw Kinky alive was at Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnic in 1980. It was held at the Perdenales Country Club, which Willie had purchased. Stoney called me up that afternoon and said that he was driving down to it in his 1974 convertible Cadillac and did I want to go. I called up Miles, he said yes, then turned my then-wife, Lisa, and asked her. She said yes so the four of us headed south on I-35 out of Dallas.
We turned down a two-lane road that led to the country club, when we came to a dead stop. The road was filled with empty cars. The concert goers had gotten tired of the long wait and simply turned off their engines, got out, and started walking to the picnic, which we could hear, but not see. Given no choice, we did the same. Eventually we got to the concert stage, and got in backstage, thanks to some passes that Stoney had. However, backstage was not the normal respite it was at most rock shows. Willie, family and friends were notorious for giving everyone a backstage pass, even distant relatives or hangers-on of any strip. It was pure pandemonium. People standing so close to each other you couldn’t turn around, and most all of them were incredibly drunk, high, or both.
After about five minutes of this Stoney suggested we go over to the swimming pool by the old country club. We got over there and found more room and took some seats by the pool. Sitting in a chair next to us, all alone, was Kinky Friedman. I had never seen him without his sunglasses on. He wore them onstage for all of his performances, but here, without them, he looked rather squinty-eyed, almost like a man stepping out into the sunlight for the first time. He also looked about as beaten down as we were. Stoney suggested we all go skinny-dipping in the pool, which we did, even Kinky. Tossing our clothes onto the pool chairs, we jumped in.
A couple soon joined in, as well as a few other folks we didn’t know. All of them stripped down and hit the water. The new couple moved over to the corner of the pool and began to get amorous. At first they tried to be discreet, but after a few moments they gave up and started copulating in full view of the crowd.
We soon had cooled off enough, climbed out of the pool and decided to drive back to Dallas that night because being at the concert was just a beating. As we hiked back to our car we saw hundreds of other concert goers doing the same, many of them carrying folding chairs and ice chests. It looked like the Bataan Death March.
We had all gotten into Stoney’s Cadillac when someone shot off a bottle rocket. Instead of soaring into the sky, it arced back to earth and started a fire in the dried-out grass on the roadside. I feared the worst, when a shirtless hippie ran over with one of those cheap, styrofoam ice chests and poured the melted ice water onto it, putting it out before we became tomorrow’s headline. (“Concert-goers burned to death by accidental wildfire!”)
Somehow we got the Caddy turned around, drove with two wheels in the bar ditch around the still-parked cars, and headed back to Dallas.
That was my last encounter with Kinky Friedman. Everyone who was with me that night has died since then, so I’m the last living eyewitness.
Martin Mull with Donna Read, Dallas, Texas, 1977. (Photo by Kirby Warnock © Trans-Pecos Production)
A few days after Kinky passed, I read that Martin Mull had joined him in the Great Beyond. To many people Mull was the goofy actor on Roseanne, or the villain in some of the Olsen Twins direct-to-video productions, but long before that he had a career as an off-beat musician and comedian. Then in 1977 he hit the TV screens as Barth Gimble, the smarmy talk-show host of Fernwood 2 Night. Stoney loved that show, so when Mull was slated to appear at The Palladium in Dallas, he wanted an interview and story.
Back then Martin would appear onstage with just a Gibson guitar as he sang his comedy songs (“Jesus Christ, Football Star”) and did some patter with the audience between numbers. I got to the Palladium the afternoon of the show right when he arrived for sound check. Word had gotten out that he was “in the building”, and a fan of his (Donna Read) showed up. While I was attempting to get a few photos of Mull, she sat beside him and was basically all over him, as the photo shows. (I have no idea if they met up after the show, but I’m betting they did.)
The guy was extremely smart and witty, not a bit like most of the musicians I spoke to back then. During his performance, a female fan had the waitress bring him a shot of tequila. Picking it up, Mull said, “That’s why I came to Texas, for the culture.”
Funniest thing he said during the interview were his comments on the TV mini-series Roots, which was all over the media back then.
“You know that when they broadcast Roots in Alabama, they showed it in reverse, starting with the last episode first, and running it backwards, so that way the mini-series ended with all the blacks going back to Africa.”
You didn’t hear that kind of stuff coming from most “rock stars” of the 70s, but you did from Martin Mull.
He was, like Kinky Friedman, one of a kind. (Does that make them two of a kind?)
Glad I got to have a “brush with greatness” with both of them.
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That’s it for this episode.
Adios.