Poet of Motel 6
Outlaw statesman Kinky Friedman bids adieu from Echo Hill Ranch
By Raoul Hernandez
Echo Hill Ranch, where Kinky Friedman roamed 40 years, could host God’s own bowl game.
Perfect oval bordered precisely and completely by a wave of hills and mountains, the 400-acre expanse awes and humbles, naturally, but also empowers – palpably. Three hours out of Austin, past country stronghold Bandera and not far from the legendary Kerrville Folk Festival grounds, Echo Hill Ranch manifests an epic tranquility beyond the sheer grandeur. Crowning it all, the property’s namesake peak rises 1,800 feet above a cluster of cabins and living quarters.
“Our little green valley we call it,” motions Marcie Friedman around us the day after Thanksgiving 2024, a shorts-n-fleece winter day in Texas.
Youngest of three, Kinky’s little sister helped him transcend Echo Hill on June 26, 2024, at the brilliantly smoked age of 79. Chicago-born eldest to Dr. Thomas Friedman and Minnie Samet Friedman, the Austin High graduate and UT Plan II honoree returned in the mid-Eighties and assumed the soul of a place his parents acquired in 1953 and ran as a youth camp the rest of their lives. All three sibs including Roger took up that gauntlet through the decades, with State Department veteran Marcie and her 17-year elder brother and statesman Kinky reopening the facilities post-pandemic for summer youth programs.
Lamentably, what Kinky Friedman did not survive to steward is the release of his inadvertent swan song, written here on this land: Poet of Motel 6.
Hardcharger Records’ third total curation, Poet of Motel 6 emanates from the Ranch’s main structure, where Kinky lived and died. His office manifests as if out of a Raymond Chandler novel, 20th century sepia (pictures, paintings, gubernatorial signs), and war heroes: parents, pageant beauties, presidents. A guitar leans near his cot-like bed, and on a table by the door – near a six-foot promotional cut-out of Kinky – sits one of his iconic black hats.
Dating back to the 1920s, the patio hosted most of the writing for Poet of Motel 6, borne out of this big valley where Kinky Friedman lived and died with all the barrel-chested gusto and Zen he embodied for an astonishing global array.
Remember that Sixties TV western, The Big Valley? Marcie lights up.
“Kinky always said I should be more like Barbara Stanwyck running this place,” she chuckles. “You get Kinky’s spirit when you’re here. You really get that. We lost him June 26 and I’m just barely getting to where I can talk more about him. We’re super excited about the new record.”
Completed before its proprietor… checked out (Kinky would’ve appreciated that one!), Poet of Motel 6 bears out that enthusiasm from first second to last. Ten tracks written and sung by one Richard Samet Friedman, born November 1, 1944, the album caps a rich musical renaissance its late author enjoyed during the final decade of his reign. Humanist, satirist, novelist, Kinky wore “musician” the proudest, so his bequeathing that era real closure now proves precious.
In 2015 – as if one of his trademark cigars – The Loneliest Man I Ever Met chomped down on cover touchstones from outlaws who considered Kinky a peer: Cash, Dylan, Haggard, Nelson, Waits, Zevon. Circus of Life three years later produced the celebrated detective novelist’s first new material since Under the Double Ego a whopping 35 years earlier. Resurrection in 2019, a full-band triumph produced by preternatural overseer Larry Campbell, completed the comeback.
Until Poet of Motel 6, it turns out.
“I think it’s his most heartstring-pulling record,” opines Hardcharger head Jesse Dayton, who played his confidant for six weeks in a sold-out Houston theatrical production called Becoming Kinky. “And not just because he passed away. At the time, he had no idea [the LP would prove his last]. It’s not like Blackstar from David Bowie.”
“‘Last hurrah?’” considers the album’s producer, instrumental MVP, and post-production genie David Mansfield. “No. I don’t think so. There might have been times when [Kinky] feared it might be his last hurrah, but he still talked about other things he wanted to do, musical and literary.”
“We had hoped to put the vinyl in Kinky’s hands,” acknowledges Marcie, “but that’s not quite what happened. That’s really made me listen to the songs differently, because there was a time when it was just Kinky’s voice and David’s guitar. Then David started adding the music and harmonies, and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh. What a great interpretation of the music!’
“Now that we’ve really had the loss, I understand a lot of stuff in the songs better.”
“Poet of Motel 6” opens the album upon its producer’s bed of strings – mandolin, dobro, acoustic guitar – which all bounce a rousing and rising strum of mood and motion that encases Kinky’s folksy croon: tangy, twangy, intimate. Dressed with Joel Guzman’s Texican squeezebox, Mansfield’s country fiddle, and preternatural accompaniment from Panhandle whisperer Jimmie Dale Gilmore, the song at first appears autobiographical before unfolding a stirring ballad for Lone Star song prophet Billy Joe Shaver.
“May you lay in a field of stars, serenaded by a million guitars / playing songs of your honky-tonk youth / playing songs of your beautiful truth.”
Gilmore’s tickling harmony lopes behind Kinky’s ambling, heart-on-leather-vest recollection of his great friend, Waco’s poet laureate, who passed away in 2020. Finally the music parts up to the firmament itself and the main attraction intones:
“And then, one uncloudy day, God’s voice was heard across the heavens and this is what he said: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome Billy Joe Shaver.’”
Willie Nelson himself might shed a tear right there – for both the song’s subject and its singer.
“Hello, Good Morning” follows up with a back-porch ramble that embodies the entire album, which sounds like Kinky holding court at the fire pit, Kinky holding court in the main cabin living room, and Kinky courting the wide open range and wherever Texas roots music bubbles up from the Earth as a natural resource. And speaking of Willie, his daughter Amy Lee Nelson steps up here with a second vocal that conjures an honest-to-God Gram and Emmylou moment.
“Buddy, You’re Living My Dream” sounds like a tune Guy Clark found on his work bench and gave to Joel Guzman, who breathed life into it with his accordion before Kinky walked in and ordered drinks for the entire establishment.
Willie joint to be? Just as the Red Headed Stranger covered Clark’s “My Favorite Picture of You” late in the day, the man who ever only refused Kinky a single favor out of countless will want a crack at “See You Down the Highway.” In fact, the country titan’s lieutenant Mickey Raphael already blows harp on it:
“Are you going my way, dear old pal of mine? / We will never make enough money, love or time / But we’ll be dancing on the shoulder of the highway of the mind.”
Shout out to co-author and late L.A. song pundit Chuck E. Weiss.
“The Life & Death of a Rodeo Clown” pushes back from the table with a clip-clopping twirl and Mariachi horn. “Hummingbird Lanai” hums a languid lullaby to the elements – sky, sea, and land – on an island of the heart. “Kacey Needs a Song” reminds us Kristofferson wrote a Casey song once and would’ve commended his comrade here for this one.
Poet of Motel 6 finale “Whitney Walton Has Flown Away” opens with a lei lapping at the toes of trumpet, fiddle, and is that Mansfield on singing saw? Climb inside and sail away. Westward ho, to see Kinky once more.
“The record Kinky had done before with Larry Campbell, Resurrection, [showcased] some wonderful work,” says Mansfield one mid-November Friday at the Fairmont Hotel in downtown Austin, passing through with his comrade and Fort Worth cowboy T Bone Burnett’s tour. “Larry went back with him all the way to his New York City residency at the Lone Star Cafe. After that album, Kinky had a bunch more songs, but he wanted to do something a little bit different.
“We knew each other from back in the mid-Seventies on [Bob Dylan’s] Rolling Thunder Review and the aftermath of that where we did some recording together. We lost touch, but I had been producing records and a couple mutual friends thought we might make a good match.”
Tracked spring 2023, Poet of Motel Six advanced quickly, but Marcie Friedman estimates Kinky began suffering from Parkinson’s perhaps as far back as 2020.
“I think Kinky knew early something was going on [health-wise],” she offers. “He set up this whole record of saying goodbye and wanting to write it and have it be done. It was getting harder for him to move around.”
When Kinky returned home in the late-Sixties after a post-collegiate tour of duty with the Peace Corps., he pursued the state soundtrack and modeled his Texas Jewboys after swing king Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys. Outlaw country classics like “Ride ’Em Jewboy,” “The Ballad of Charles Whitman,” and “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” dried up in the Eighties, wherein he switched to authoring full-time – books, Texas Monthly columns, and eventually speeches. Famously, he sought the Texas governorship in 2006.
Fortunately, music never got its fill of Kinky Friedman, so what restarted last decade didn’t end until Poet of Motel 6.
“Spring 2023, Kinky and I met in Austin at a friend of his,” recounts Mansfield. “We spent a few days just going over the songs. [Then], we went into a local Austin studio with his old pal Steve Chadie, who engineers a lot for Willie. Kinky was already experiencing moderate cognitive issues at that point, so I came up with a technique I thought would work.
“It was just the two of us and Kinky did not play guitar. We were facing each other in comfortable easy chairs with a glass in-between and I played and accompanied him. If he started getting lost I’d throw him a line. If he did something quirky in his phrasing, I would follow him like a hawk.
“Working on vocals, he would sometimes experience hallucinations, which is one of the things that happens with the cognitive problems that accompany Parkinson’s. Fortunately, he had a sense of humor about it and would ask if YOU saw the little children dancing in the corner.
“I kept a ledger of what we had and didn’t have, and kept doing takes until I knew we had enough to piece something together. Then I took it all back to my studio in New Jersey and spent a good while editing and turning it into a performance.”
Jesse Dayton, himself a modern country outlaw – writer, director, guitar-slinger for hire (Waylon, Willie, X) – heard Poet of Motel 6 soon after completion, searching for fodder for his imprint with boutique Los Angeles indie Blue Élan Records.
“Well, the first thing I heard was ‘Poet of Motel 6’ and it choked me up a little bit,” he says onscreen, choking up a little bit from Cleveland for an opening night pairing with Louisiana bluesman Tab Benoit. “There’s certain indignities in being an artist that you just have to deal with. And I don’t mean playing in a cover band or making music in a pop band. I’m talking about guys that actually write and perform their own songs, and have just enough fans to keep them in the game – which is most of all of us, our whole life.
“Every once in a while, something cool happens like when I got Grammy nominations, but when I heard these songs for the first time, it sounded like Kinky trying to explain to people how lucky he was for what he suffered for.
“He told me one time, the people who do best in this business are the people that can suffer the most. All those things he’s talking about, like the rodeo stuff, he’s bringing in all these small town characters and how they’re dealing with the world.
“[With] ‘Poet of Motel 6,’ Kinky was very upset when Billy Joe Shaver died. Kinky idolized Billy Joe. I hear that in what Marcie’s saying. I hear that sense of loss.”
David Mansfield experienced it firsthand.
“Those songs he wrote about people he cared about that had passed on, they were quite elegiac,” says the producer. “He sang beautifully, and at the end he was in tears. He was very emotionally connected when he was doing these vocals.”
Both David and Marcie recall those vocals coming full-circle September 2023.
“A great idea of David’s was that the first session was just Kinky alone, but for the final harmonies, David came back down from New York to Arlyn Studios in Austin,” beams Marcie. “Everybody who’d sung harmony came: Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Rodney Crowell, Rick Trevino, Amy Nelson. He brought everyone together, so Kinky came in for one of his last trips to Austin.”
“That Arlyn session,” agrees David, “Kinky was able to be there with his cigar and his duster coat, and just enjoy being around everybody.”
From Nelson Mandela to Presidents Bush Jr. and Clinton, Kinky Friedman made fans with every song he wrote and some of them live right here in the trees of Echo Hill Ranch.
“I believe the symbolism for ‘Hummingbird Lanai’ originated here on this patio,” says Marcie, everyone rather sleepy after feasting on Thanksgiving leftovers, including six of Kinky’s beloved rescue dogs. “My mother began feeding hummingbirds here in 1953 – began attracting them. The hummingbirds always come on March 15. It’s uncanny.
“They come on the Ides of March and leave about the middle of August. They’re migratory. So she fed them and we have a lot of them – the children would come and feed them.
“When she died, my father took over doing it. When he passed, Kinky took over.
“This record is as good as Kinky’s [celebrated 1973 debut] Sold American,” she concludes. “I think it’s as good as anything he’s ever written. And I, sister helping my brother, I missed the point that every song on this record is about saying goodbye. I don’t know why. They’re all beautiful songs and they say it in different ways. I finally realized that – a little too late.”
Not too late, because one needs only step into this natural Hill Country coliseum to understand – and hear it in the wind as every Lone Star song-teller from Lefty Frizzell to Townes Van Zandt – that the hills are alive with the sound of Kinky Friedman.
And then – again – on another uncloudy day, Billy Joe Shaver’s voice was heard across the heavens and this is what he said: Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome the next governor of the great state of Texas, Kinky Friedman.
A KINKY BIOGRAPHY OF KINKY FRIEDMAN
By Michael Simmons
-Part One-
Americans seem unable to share a song, a beer, a joke or a toke without strangling each other. The exception in this great divide is the non-conforming, free-spirited, follow-the-bouncing-testicles allure of Kinky Friedman, among whose utterly unique characteristics is his uncanny ability to appeal to MAGA-hatted Tea Party animals as well pansexual Marxist vegans. Rudyard Kipling once wrote that “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” but Kipling had never met Kinky and apparently was riding the wrong twain. Wherever the Kinkster goes, he’s ten steps ahead of the crowd who, when not trampling over each other in a mad rush to hang Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, have loved his songs, his concerts, his jokes, his books, his runs for political office, his mere presence. He’s shaken more hands, posed for more selfies and kissed more girl babies barely over the age of 18 than O.J. Simpson, Ted Bundy and Charles Manson combined. That he’s never killed anyone makes him that much more of a rarity, moral beacon and American hero of our time.
Born in Chicago, he moved to Texas before his training wheels blew out, while he let his family ride in the U-Haul hitched to the back of his Schwinn tricycle. He immediately established himself as a Lone Star State lone star, when at age 7 he played chess grandmaster Samuel Reshevsky in Houston, letting the older man win so as not to hurt his feelings. As a young Texas Jew, he was always aligned with the oppressed and was multicultural before it was cool, as evidenced by his passion for hot and sour soup. In the 1960s, he marched against segregated lunch counters in Austin and served two years in the Peace Corps where he introduced the frisbee to Borneo, whose natives were desperately searching for something to do in their spare time. He cemented his early efforts as a musical pioneer in surf-rock band King Arthur & The Carrots, a novel aggregation largely because they were in closer proximity to cement than an ocean and thus nowhere near a wave.
Speaking of waves, his lifelong love of country music brought him his first wave of fame with Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys, his band of impossibly stoned headnecks with whom he became the first full-blooded Jew to play Nashville’s revered Grand Ol’ Opry. His first album, 1973’s Sold American was quickly followed by 1974’s eponymously-titled second and 1976’s Lasso From El Paso, creating Kinkster’s holy trinity of material which he continues to draw from in concert. The Jewboys’ sound was hardcore honky-tonk country, but his lyrics were both Kinky as well as kinky. Many of them were social commentary, some folks even recognized they were satirical. He took aim at bigotry (“We Reserve The Right To Refuse Service To You”), serial killing Boy Scout/Marines (“The Ballad Of Charles Whitman”), organized religion (“They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore”), rednecks (“Asshole From El Paso”) and male chauvinists/female feminists (“Get Your Biscuits In The Oven And Your Buns In The Bed”). He was neither left-wing nor right-wing – simply fucking funny.
On top of his sui generis wit, Kinkala could do poignant like no one else. “Sold American” was an ode to the troubadours of the heart who get forgotten in the music racket’s short memory hole (Glen Campbell immediately covered it in ’73), “Rapid City, South Dakota” a subtle story about the moral complexities of abortion and, arguably his greatest song, “Ride “Em Jewboy,” a tribute to the victims of the Holocaust. The combination of devastating tragedy and outrageous wit in his work drew the attention of the greats: his peers in the highest realms of creativity. Kinky and The Texas Jewboys headlined Max’s Kansas City in ’73, New York’s hippest nightclub and infamous hang of rock stars, the era’s greatest painters and the Warhol crowd. While living in Los Angeles in the ‘70s, he hosted an infamous party that drew gatecrashers Robbie Robertson, Lowell George, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, Van Dyke Parks, Bob Dylan and a hundred other musical legends at the top of their game who wanted a whiff of more than cocaine, i.e. proximity to King Kink. (He spent the bash oblivious, passed out on his bed, but that didn’t stop Dylan from inviting him to join the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1976.)
Throughout the ‘70s, the peripatetic head Jewboy had floated twixt his home in Kerrville, Texas to Los Angeles, New York and Nashville. It was in Music City where he became kin and key to the crew of stoner misfits of Hillbilly Central and the Nashville Underground, who armed with an overabundance of talent had stormed and overtaken the Bastille of the slick, commercial Nashville Sound and freed the English language in country music. Compatriots there included Kris Kristofferson, Tompall Glaser, Billy Swan, Shel Silverstein, Mickey Newbury and countless others. He was equally a brother-in-arms with the Texas contingent of malcontented singing poets including Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Jerry Jeff Walker and especially Billy Joe Shaver. For the ease of record racket trade magazines, they were collectively dubbed Outlaw Country, a handle that earned bemused cynicism from those named. (They and their offspring are now considered the forefathers of Americana, a name redolent of a Wal-Mart furniture set.)
But no one was as adept as the Kinkster at conjuring controversy, which hounded him like he was Lenny Bruce with a twang. In 1973 a lynch mob of women’s libbers stormed the stage in Buffalo, NY and the Jewboys fled with previously-referenced testicles intact. Their videotaped appearance on Austin City Limits went unaired because of pre-cancel culture tender sensibilities. Kink was booked to play Saturday Night Live in 1976, but lawyers stopped him from performing “The Ballad Of Charles Whitman.” He sang “Dear Abbie” instead, an equally subversive shout-out to his fugitive friend, revolutionary Abbie Hoffman, the message of which evaded the clueless suits.
He moved to New York City in 1977 to become a fixture at a new nightclub called the Lone Star Café. A new band, alternately called the Entire Polish Army and the Blue Ball Truckers, but still referred to as the Texas Jewboys, was formed with fiddler Sweet Mary Hattersley (Jerry Jeff Walker), drummer Corky Laing (Mountain), harmonicat Sredni Vollmer (Rick Danko), mandolinist Jim Rider (Ramblin’ Jack Elliott), pianist/drummer Howie Wyeth (Rolling Thunder Revue) and led by multi-instrumentalist Larry Campbell (future Dylan and Levon Helm mainstay). Yours truly, Mike “Kike” Simmons, played acoustic guitar and sang harmonies. Kinkala became the toast of the Big Apple – a celebrity magnet. Regulars included Abbie, Dylan, Mike Bloomfield, John Belushi, Hunter S. Thompson, Keith Richards, The Band, Dr. John, Robin Williams, JFK impersonator Vaughn Meader (whose paycheck had been assassinated in Dallas in ’63), New York Rangers, Hell’s Angels, porn stars, politicos, a posse of posh society types and a lot of other people who are now (or ought to be) dead. His live shows at the Lone Star were manic orgies of spontaneous musical and comedic combustion, highlit by Kink’s exuberant version of “Yellow Submarine” that gave the Beatles serious competition. It was exhilarating and fueled by shovelfuls of what Kinkster called “irving” [sic], named for Irving Berlin who wrote “White Christmas.” (Do the math.)
Songs were pouring forth from the Kinkster’s typewriter and a handful of woefully overlooked classic albums were released. (Keep your eyes peeled on this site for reissues of these out-of-print gems.) He wrote the songs for a Broadway musical based on close pal/talk-show legend Don Imus’ book God’s Other Son. (It never got made due to its ahead-of-its-time scandalous content, although a bootleg of the songs as sung by New York’s top vocalists is a coveted artifact.) The New York press fell in love with Kinky as he supplied them with endless anecdotes of his adventures on the city’s mean streets. Notable was his intervention when a gorgeous dame got mugged at an ATM machine and Kink conked the mugger’s bonk with his guitar and saved the distressed damsel’s bank account and curvaceous rump. Photos of Kinkster posed with his Martin slung and swung over his head made all the tabloids and he was the envy of every man and the wet dream date of every woman.
But he wasn’t happy.
Kinky was burning out on rock ‘n’ roll and Irving, not necessarily in that order. “I need a lifestyle that doesn’t require my presence,” he confided in me. He’s always loved mysteries, especially Agatha Christie, and needed to maintain his singular sensibility without being hounded by multitudes who wanted a piece of his soul every waking minute, which in that sleepless era meant 1,440 minutes a day. So he moved back to the Friedman family ranch in Kerrville, Texas and began writing a whodunit. And Kinky Friedman re-invented himself.
INTERMISSION
Stay tuned! Part two coming soon!
From the liner notes for “Pearls In The Snow: The Songs Of Kinky Friedman”
For the whole story…
Everything’s Bigger In Texas: The Life & Times Of Kinky Friedman
by Mary Lou Sullivan
Available at Booksellers everywhere. Click HERE to buy!