THE INSTITUTE OF TEXAN CULTURES
Oral History Office
SUBJECT: Kinky Friedman, multi-tasker
INTERVIEW WITH: Kinky Friedman
DATE: January 14, 2011
PLACE:
INTERVIEWER: Sterlin Holmsley
Sterlin Holmsley (SH): Alright we’re on. Introduce yourself please.
Kinky Friedman (KF): Kinky Friedman. I don’t know what the hell I am.
SH: Singer, musician, author, savior of wildlife, anything else?
KF: Add defender of strays, uh, yeah I guess that’s about it.
SH: When and where were you born?
KF: November 1st, 1944. Chicago, Illinois. Stayed there one year, couldn’t find work and moved to Texas.
SH: Ok. Then your father started a ranch in Kerr County.
KF: My parents did. My mom and dad…
SH: A summer camp.
KF: A camp for kids. Echo Hill Ranch about 1953. The place is still running. Echo Hill is run by my brother Roger now and we’ve got on the same property Utopia, Utopia, Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch which is a sanctuary, a never kill sanctuary for animals.
SH: You started that when?
KF: 13 years ago. It started in Utopia, Texas but the neighbors came with pitchforks after a few years and drove us out of there so my dad gave us some land on the ranch and that’s where Utopia Rescue Ranch is operated out of.
SH: How do you fund that?
KF: Kindness of strangers. People give us money that’s how we survive. It’s a, what is it, C-5103.5, whatever, it’s a real charity. And people can help us, by, any animal lovers, go to Utopia Rescue.com.
SH: Weren’t you selling Kinky Salsa for a while?
KF: I think Kinky Salsa still is available. Yeah I think it’s…SH: Those funds go to the ranch?
KF: They do.
SH: How did you become a musician?
KF: Well, there is some question of whether I ever did.
SH: Well you have 3 chords.
KF: Yeah. Willie says that “Kinky thinks he’s a guitar player but he’s not really a guitar player.” But I play as much and as well as Hank Williams for instance. I know about 5 or 6 chords and can play most things by ear.
SH: Did you start that up on the ranch? Did you pick up a guitar there?
KF: I was taking accordion lessons in Houston, Texas and I seg-wayed to the guitar about age 12, and Townes Van Zandt was also in Houston at the time. He and I didn’t know each other but we got guitars about the same time and the first song we both learned was “Fraulein” by Bobby Helms and there are paths shattered and split.
SH: So, you led the Texas Jew Boys for some years. Who were the Jew Boys and how did that come about?
KF: Well I was uh, the Texas Jew Boys were a country band with a social conscience which is always a mistake. And uh, a couple of them were really Jewish, like Little Jewford was. He’s a jew and he drives a Ford, Little Jewford and Snakebite Jacobs was.
SH: He was the saxophonist?
KF: Yep. Billy Swann was the rhythm guitarist and uh, probably the most experienced guy in the band as far as Nashville was concerned and country music ‘cause he’d been with Kristofferson’s band, very close to Kris, or Pissed Pissedofferson as Billy Joe Shaver calls him. But uhm, Kris was a great one, he’s a great one. Anyway, some of the members of the band were Jewish by inspiration.
SH: When did that get started up?
KF: ’73.
SH: And how long did they last?
KF: Its wingspan was about, with that band it was about 4 years.
SH: And you were on the road and developed somewhat of a following that still exists.
KF: Yeah, it was a strange thing. It was nice because it was a very avant-garde band and it had lyrics that country people didn’t like for the most part and music that urban people didn’t like. So we figured out a way to keep things from being commercial right from the start. I guess I should have known. You don’t write songs like “They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore” and think it’s gonna be a number one hit or anything.
SH: How many songs have you written? Any idea?
KF: Not that many, but they’re all pretty good. Maybe, I mean a couple hundred maybe.
SH: One of them caused you to be named the number one chauvinist pig in the country.
KF: The Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year award from the National Organization for Women.
SH: You still proud of that one?
KF: Yeah.
SH: What was the song?
KF: “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed” and I think when you do something is probably what’s important. You can go out and stand on a street corner in the East Village in New York and play your guitar, pass the hat and that would be kind of sad. But for people who did it first, for Bob Dylan and that bunch, that was very cool, cool thing to do. Today anybody can do it. It’s like, I always thought some of the material we used was a lot stronger than what’s happening today. Not to get into a whole, uh , uh , political correct rant but let me just say Barbara Jordan, who is one of my heroes. First black congress woman from the South, she was the first black everything just about and I’ve written about Barbara in my book “Heroes of a Texas Childhood”. One of her great enemies was political correctness. Even then, which was decades ago, she was warning that it would destroy us and now we’ve reached that point. We’ve reached a point where Richard Pryor or George Carlin or Mel Brooks or Lenny Bruce could not make it today if they were young comedians coming up. In this environment they would never make it, never be commercially successful.
SH: Because they would be offensive to some people, as you were (unclear)?
KF: Yeah and it was dangerous to do that. I think it was risky and we managed to offend everybody and I mean the idea that we should let charlatans like Al Sharpton define whether somebody says the word nigger in context of Huckleberry Finn or in context of ‘They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore’ is ridiculous. Just because we are all going around saying n-word, n-word, n-word, there’s no progress here. There’s nothing, we haven’t moved any closer, the races haven’t. If you listen to the song ‘They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore’ and you don’t care about the word kike for jew, or the word nigger for black, or spic for a Mexican, or whatever, on and on or Aristittle Onasis. You get the message which is, this is a story about a guy in a bar whose being picked on by a bully who is a racist. The guy singing the song is kinda standing up, standing up for the underdog everywhere and it works if you listen to the song. But if you just pick it apart by n-word, or whatever, if that’s all your listening for then you won’ get very far nor will the nation get very far.
SH: And the guy does duck the redneck song.
KF: Yeah he does. Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson are singing back up on that and Tom Paul Glazer that was a…SH: Was a pretty good group.
KF: Yeah. I’m thinking of putting that song back in the repertoire. I’ve taken it out for a while. Just because you get bored with, you know it’s just, I don’t wanna, like I did a show in Houston last month. I was gonna sing that song and these very nice black ladies came in and the audience is mostly white. My audience is not as narrow casted as Jimmy Buffet’s say where everybody in the audience is a middle-aged lawyer who wants to go back to a happier time. But that’s the group Jimmy plays for and that’s the bottle of ketchup on the kitchen table, that’s nostalgia. Now ‘They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore’ is a valuable song. It’s saying something but I don’t want to say nigger when there is only two of them in the audience that are there, that are black and whether they get it, whether they came prepared to hear that or not. I guess I could I’ve done it before.
SH: Well in some versions, in one version I have you changed the word nigger.
KF: Well that’s a mistake.
SH: Yeah.
KF: I mean, you leave that song the way it is ‘cause that’s what the redneck said. It’s exactly what he said. That song is also irreverent. Where it goes into pointing out that we Jews believe that it was Santa Claus who killed Jesus Christ. I think Santa has killed Jesus or gone a long way into killing Jesus. Then of course there is ‘Men’s Room L.A.’ but we won’t get into that.
SH: Go ahead this is not a family show.
KF: It’s a song about a guy who finds a picture of Jesus on the floor of a men’s room in Los Angeles and then realizes there is no paper on the roll and questions what to do, whether to save his pants or his soul. Jesus tells him “Feel free to use my favorite shot man. I got these pictures everywhere.” It’s oddly a very, I mean Jesus is a very generous, magnanimous Jesus as he should be, as he really is.
SH: For a Jew you cite Jesus a lot.
KF: I do but I’m not a normal Jew. Basically I believe that Jesus and Moses were two good Jewish boys that got into a little trouble with the government. But Jesus is, Jesus I think was a real civil rights leader, not like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. So was Ghandi and so was Martin Luther King. But Jesus was basically at heart a trouble maker. That’s how the Roman authorities regarded him. Of course the crowd always picks Barabbas. That’s what somebody told me after I lost the race for governor. They do and the crowd in the middle of the time said “Free Barabbas! Kill Jesus!” They freed Barabbas, it’s been a couple thousand years, we haven’t heard much from Barabbas. He never calls. He never writes. He has never won a football game for anybody. He has never saved a soul. But Jesus that’s another story. The fact that Jesus, I believe in a kind of, you know how mental patients are always saying they talk to Jesus? I think that’s who he really talks to, to the people in mental hospitals. They told us that for years and we never believed them. I know he doesn’t speak to football coaches or televangelists.
SH: You wound up in New York at the Lone Star Café how did that come about?
KF: I was in L.A. and Mort Cooperman, the owner, invited me out. We were a big hit and so I started playing every Sunday night. That was a real experience. Like the Jew Boys we met everybody. I mean if you want to meet Ken Kesey, or Andy Warhol, or whoever the hell it is, or some, Ken Stabler the quarterback, they would come to those shows.
SH: Were you solo at the café?
KF: No. In New York I used two bands, The Exxon Brothers and The Entire Polish Army was one of the other bands yeah.
SH: How long were you there? From when to when?
KF: About six years, until ’85. I still went back and played occasionally but not.
SH: Is that when you came across your Peruvian marching powder?
KF: No, that was in L.A. Peruvian marching powder was L.A. or Irving, Irving Berlin’s White Christmas. So I was probably, that was when I also believe that I snorted the line between fiction and non-fiction at that time. It’s a fine line and I think I snorted it in 1976.
SH: Heavy cocaine use?
KF: I was only using cocaine like everybody else was in the entertainment business.
SH: Recreational?
KF: No not recreational, not at all, never. It was a part of life. It was for me what morphine and alcohol were to Hank Williams for that decade and everybody I knew too. It was very hard to get away from when you’re on the road a lot. I think cocaine is a very bad drug. I think it distances you from your dreams and destroys will power. I don’t think it’s physically harmful except that it puts you into a fast lane kinda situation quite often.
SH: You decided to stop. How did you arrive at that conclusion?
KF: I stopped when my friend Tom Baker, the Bakerman, died of a drug overdose in New York, of a heroin overdose and people were dropping around me like flies. I pretty well, I was in very bad shape and I came back to Texas. I think the hill country in Texas saved me.
SH: You came back and kicked it cold turkey?
KF: Yeah. I geographically removed myself from, from that and lived on the ranch with my 3 cats. Casey Cohen, a woman that I loved very much, had just died too and her life was uh, (long pause) just a parade of drug abuse and who’s to say. I’m not saying it was a waste of time especially. I made some very dear friends out of that and there was some meaning in it. I think it’s a better thing to do then to be somebody like Ted Nugent or my friend Dwight Yoakum who have never touched alcohol or cigarettes or drugs. I think it’s an experience that everybody should have.
SH: Was this hard to do?
KF: To what?SH: Do you miss it?
KF: Yeah, you do miss it.
SH: For how long or do you still miss it?
KF: No. No, I kind of, I don’t miss much because never having been married and part of the reason was Casey was probably my first real love and her death, I think, in a very tragic way, I mean, she kissed a windshield at about 95 miles per hour in her Ferrari up in Vancouver. She, I just don’t think, I mean, I wonder about the same thing. I mean I’ve got friends: Willie, Billy Bob Thornton, Robert Duvall have all been married about five times. I think Billy Bob maybe, yeah Billy Bob definitely five. I don’t want to be like Larry King, Larry King Live, “So what happened to you Sterling? Why did you get that divorce?” He doesn’t say that he’s been married seven times himself you know. Which he should. Some guys like to be married and they get back on that horse and they ride and their married. That’s just what they do. I’m a little more careful and I believe that the things you keep are the things that you let slip through your fingers and Casey was one that slipped through my fingers and that is why I will always keep her. So was Rita Joe, who was another love of mine, who was Ms. Texas 1987 and of course I was Ms. Texas 1967 so we had a lot in common. I should have married one of those probably but I didn’t.
SH: At the ranch is that when you started writing the detective stories?
KF: No. I wrote in New York when I was doing a lot of Peruvian marching powder playing the Lone Star Café every Sunday, in a kind of abandoned loft that I lived in. I borrowed my friend Mike McGovern’s typewriter and I think inspired by Simenon, Georges Simenon, the mystery writer who was Belgian. There are very few great people from Belgium in the history of the world. I can think of three of them. You know anymore besides Simenon?
SH: No.
KF: Audrey Hepburn and Van Gogh. Now can you name any of, Albanians, there are two world famous Albanians. I am doing this for a reason. Can you name either one of them?
SH: No I can’t help you.
KF: Very famous. There’s only two of them. That’s John Belushi and Mother Teresa in a random and haphazard order, John being a friend of mine.
SH: A late friend of yours.
KF: Yeah. Maybe more alive than a lot of the people who think they are. Now knowing information like this, like I’ve just passed along is what we call, what Mark Twain calls abstruse learning. That’s what I’m good at. That’s why I was in Plan 2 at the University of Texas in Austin, a highly advanced liberal arts program which I believe prepares you to be governor of Texas or sleep under a bridge.
SH: Well you’re obviously very bright. You were a …
KF: Well thank you very much.
SH: …a child chess prodigy?KF: I was a chess prodigy at about age 9 maybe, 1952, eight, nine. I played Samuel Reshevsky the grand master of the world in Houston, Texas. He played 50 of us at the same time. There were people moving the pieces around but anyway he beat everybody. He told my dad later that he hates to beat his kid, he hates to beat any kid he said, but the has to be very careful with an eight year oldbecause if an eight or nine year old kid beats him, it’s headlines, it’s his career. It was downhill from there pretty much but as Edgar Allen Poe says “Chess is complex without being profound.”
SH: Well obviously you’re off the charts with the IQ test.
KF: Obviously.
SH: You are a man who has made to your age…
KF: I’m a mental patient. An outpatient.
SH: …without ever, never had a real job.
KF: That’s right I survived all these years without a real job. Well that’s not true, I had a few but not many. I ‘m a drinker with a writing problem, basically that’s what I am.
SH: You killed yourself with the Kinky Friedman ace detective to end your series but you’re working on other books now, what are they?
KF: After 17 mysteries and about 28 books, 29 books. I am working on a book with Willie now and Willie and I, it gets very contentious sometimes, I mean because we are getting this deal together what we’re gonna write about. How it’s gonna be. We get along as long as we stay the hell away from each other. We’ve been friends for a very long time. I met Willie on the gang plank of Noah’s Arc, back when doctors drove Buicks, back when Christ was a cowboy and we’ve remained close friends in a spiritual way. The book, I really think this, well it’s called ‘The Troublemaker’. It’s about, about just about everybody we know and about the fact that the troublemakers through history have been very important to stirring things up and moving humanity forward. And many of them, if you look at a lot of the great people you see that they couldn’t get out of their own way. They really were troublemakers whether it’s Woody Guthrie, or Edgar Allen Poe, or Hank Williams, or Charles Bukowski, or Jesus Christ. Troublemakers are, Billy Joe Shaver’s a good one, they’re very important and of course willie is the hillbilly Dhali Llama I think.
SH: Politics. What on earth compelled you to run for public office starting with Justice of the Peace in 1986?
KF: Just lucky I guess. The justice of the peace thing was kind of a joke and then it got more serious as it moved along. I’m glad I lost that one actually. That one you had to run as a Republican in Kerr County to have a chance so I did. Later the weak willed Democrats gave me a hard time for that too. The race I’m proud of is running as an Independent for governor in 2006. Where I got roughly 13 percent of the vote, we rounded up to that. Almost 600,000 people voted for me. The truth is I won that race every place but Texas. If you go to Ireland, Israel or Australia or Illinois, any place that starts with an I, New York, L.A. They don’t know who are governor is really. Most people don’t but if you ask them about that race, they were for me. I base that on a lot of things not just the media but having done a tour of the West Coast recently and seeing how, in fact I was so much more popular there. Everything was sold out there. The people all want me to come there and run for the governor of California which is not a, woulda been a good idea actually. I don’t hold the Texans responsible for it, again the crowd always picks Barrabas and they did again. But I have in my last will and testament determined that when I die I am to be cremated and the ashes are to be thrown in Rick Perry’s hair.
SH: Ok. What, had you been elected, what would or could you have done as governor?
KF: Well I think a strong leader. Not Rick Perry, not Obama. Those are not leaders. A leader is Churchill, an amazing man who I’ve finally been getting around, you know I’m 66 years old now but I read at the 68 year old level. So I’ve read a lot of stuff on Churchill lately and I’m deeply impressed with this guy. Not just what a leader he was but how he was an aristocratic man. Raised as an aristocrat playing polo, butterfly collections and knowing all of the higher class of society and yet as a politician, and those idiots didn’t even realize his greatness, didn’t even, he wasn’t Prime Minister until he was 65 years old.
SH: And only then to save the nation.\
KF: Yeah he was a failure before that and he regarded himself. When he almost died in a plane crash in 1918 he wrote that its’ the end to an eventful if disappointing life. What he had was a bond with the common man. He loved people and people loved him. He really loved people and he was there to serve people. And he had an enemy named Lord Philip Snowden who in some miraculous deal for over 50 years they were mortal enemies in politics. Snowden never missed a chance to twist the knife. Did everything he could to screw Churchill and vice versa and then Snowden died and the Times of London asked Churchill will you write a eulogy for him for the paper and Churchill wrote this beautiful and accurate eulogy stressing all of the good things about Philip Snowden but none of the bad never mentioning they were mortal enemies. It was very widely read and praised and about a month later he gets a letter from Philip Snowden’s widow who said, “Now I see why they call you the great gentleman because of your generosity of spirit you have even unto your enemies.” Can you imagine Obama being like that or Boehner or anybody else in Washington? There is only three people in Congress that aren’t corrupt and that’s Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, the three wing nuts. They’re crazy, everybody thinks they’re crazy but they’re not corrupt.
SH: Going back to the question, What…
KF: What would you do as governor? There is a lot of things. Just take a real quick one. Churchill would do this everyday. Rick Perry the whole time he’s been governor he’s never done anything for the people. He’s like the other governors, fat, white, he’s not fat, white, rich, stupid men for the most part. That’s what most are governors are going all the way back to. The best recent one was probably Anne Richards who was a man of the people even though she wasn’t a man at all. Perry had a chance when that guy got killed on Falcon Lake there, shot by the Mexican drug cartels. If he wanted to do something about the border instead of just bitching about the feds, he could have made a statement right then and done something. Instead he trumped his usual anti-Washington business up. Now I tell you I like Rick Perry and believe it or not he likes me. We get along. I say that we are just incapable of resisting each other’s charm I think is what it is. Now I do like the man but I don’t think he’s…SH: You like him as a man not as governor.
KF: I don’t think he is a strong leader, yeah. There’s certain things, take the death penalty. I’ve campaigned against the death penalty all across the state. It’s not a popular thing to do. Perry’s base is amongst the religious right. I think if Rick seriously wants to be president, or if he wants to really pass from a politician to a statesman, he needs to come out against the death penalty and explain to his people why. That being Christian does not mean holding hands around a plate of fried chicken on Sunday and singing a song or a hymn. It means thou shall not kill. It means being like Jesus, as Christ like as you can get. Especially when the system is as broken as ours is and we’ve got all kinds of people, maybe five percent, maybe more, that are innocent. We don’t DNA death row. We never have. The governor of Nebraska DNA’ed death row and he only had nine people on death row and five of them were found to be innocent. Could not have done the crime by DNA. Now, uh, it’s cheap to do. We could do it. So, instead we’ve got these uh, case of, Todd Willingham, Cameron Todd Willingham, which is a horrible case. The guy who Rick Perry put on the fast track and we executed. Who supposedly burned up his three little daughters in an arson fire. Now every expert in the world, people that have never heard of Rick Perry, have no political axe to grind. Some guy in lower baboon’s asshole whose a arson expert there looks over this and he says there is no way this guy committed arson. He did all 27 indicators show that it was not an arson fire. You killed an innocent man. That’s what the experts are saying and so if you’ve got a system that broken, not to mention Timothy Cole, the Tech rapist, who was not a rapist at all, died in prison after 13 years, who I know his family very well. I know the whole story there then. The Innocence Project with Jeff Blackburn tried to DNA his body after he died. You can’t DNA a dead body in Texas if he’s been in prison, I mean, there’s a law. The good ole boys that Rick Perry has appointed make sure you don’t do it. Now why do you think we would have a law like that? Is there a reason? Sure there is. You don’t want to show that a guy stayed in prison 13 years who could have easily been DNA’ed. Well finally one judge had the balls to let the Innocence Project DNA Timothy Cole’s body. Timothy Cole who said “I believe in the system even though the system doesn’t believe in me.” Maintained his innocence all the time. In Lubbock there is another guy named Jones who was in prison, who told the cops and the lawyers and the judge, “I did the rape. It wasn’t that guy Timothy Cole. I raped that girl.” Well for 10 years they never listened to the guilty man and they never listened to the innocent man. They swept it under the rug. Why? I don’t think that’s just inefficiency. I think they wanted to protect the system. I think it looks damn bad when a guy’s in prison like Max Sulfire in Houston for 24 years on death row and he didn’t do the crime. I think that looks bad. So, anyway, the Innocence Project DNA’s Timothy Cole, finds him a 100% innocent. Then they DNA, they do this because this one freak, maverick judge let them do it otherwise they never would have been able to prove this. Then they DNA Jones who is a 100% match. So, uh, this is justice? You got a broken system like this. You can’t, you can’t do what we’re doing. I speak to Christian groups often. I always tell the Christians, “You know I’m sorry, I hate, I really hate for you to have to hear this from a Jew but remember folks that’s who you heard it from the first time.”
SH: You also have an opinion on smoking bans.
KF: That’s part of the political correct thing. Lance Armstrong is a friend of mine and Lance, I blame Lance for getting these smoking bans going. He’s popularizing them. Lance, I admire him for beating cancer. I think that’s great but I think it’s a matter of hall monitors. I think all politicians use to be, that’s my theory, they were once hall monitors when they were in school. Then they become politicians and as politicians they have this great desire to please the most number of people they can and to control things, power. So they’ve got this, uh, and Lance always says “Kinky you don’t understand we’re doing this for your health.” Well Martin Luther, forget Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King. Tell this story, let me slow down to Mark Twain. Mark Twain, who was born the same day as Churchill, Novemebr 30th, that’s abstruse learning, and who dropped out of school at age 12, Twain. Twain said “Smoking cigars is my chief joy in life.” I think it’s one of the chief joys in life there’s no question about it. Now in America I should be able to set up a bar down the street that says Kinky’s Bar smoking allowed and Sterlin you should set up a restaurant next door that says Sterlin’s Restaurant no smoking. That’s America, that’s what it’s always been. Now we have a situation, that I think is at fair fault is destroying the pubs of London because people, it’s natural to smoke and drink at the same time so the unforeseen effect is that you’ve got knots of thousands of people in the streets, taxi cabs and cars can’t get through until four in the morning because they’re smoking. Taking a smoking break which tends to stretch and last for hours as you chat with your friends and you go back in and have a drink and the bars, the pubs are dying. I always point out the six or seven countries that all have a higher smoking per capita then we do and they are: Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Israel, Japan and Greece. That’s seven, seven countries. All of them, all of them have a much higher smoking per capita then the U.S. Every one of those seven countries I mentioned has a longer life expectancy then the U.S. Now all that we can conclude from this is that speaking English is killing us. I mean does that make any sense to you? So as governor, you get rid of the smoking ban by example. You do something about the border by example. You do things. You have a bully pulpit. You lead the people. You saw what a strong leader Obama was during the BP oil spill. He abandoned it. He totally just, somebody told him that’s a mess. You don’t want to deal with a mess, you wanna. He didn’t even think that we might be able to plug that hole with a Nobel Peace Prize. He completely abandoned ship. Maybe he doesn’t care about those people, which is probably true. He probably doesn’t. They’re not his people but it was a complete example of how leadership failed. You can imagine what other people might have been able to do. I mean actually what you can do when you can’t do anything. Say you can’t plug the hole but you can certainly do what FDR did during the tough days when he was able to make the country at least feel it was a part of something, it was together. He had that touch too by the way. He was an aristocrat who had the touch with the common man. I just don’t think Obama wants to be, he’s not a man of the people and he doesn’t really want to be. I think for most of those politicians in Washington and in Austin I think we have government by ego.
SH: Someone I think accurately said Obama belongs in the faculty lounge.
KF: Yeah. I mean he is a bright man that would do well in certain things but if anybody thought he was a leader they made a mistake. Just exactly like the draft of the quarterbacks in the NFL. That’s how Tom Brady, who I don’t like, I don’t know the guy but I don’t lik’em. I don’t like the Patriots but I will admit that Tom Brady is one of the greatest quarterbacks that there ever has been and he was drafted 156th round or something. Nobody believed this guy could do it and the same way. Well we’re back to the crowd picking Barabbas.
SH: Is there anything we haven’t touched on that you would like to…
KF We’re touching to many things I think already, yeah.SH: Well.
KF: Heroes. We haven’t hit heroes yet.
SH: Alright, heroes?
KF: Show me a hero I will show you a tragedy, paraphrasing F. Scott Fitzgerald.
SH: Barbara Jordan was one. Who were your others?
KF: Well there is 23 of them. This is a book of mine called ‘Heroes of A Texas Childhood’ and Audie Murphy is one of them. Audie Murphy, somebody pointed out that, let’s see, well Reagan. Ronald Reagan and John Wayne spent the war in Hollywood and Audie Murphy said “It’s guys like me and the guys who never came back who fought to buy the freedom the rest of us cherish and abuse.” And that’s basically it. This book has everybody from Sam Houston, who as you may know was the Senator I think from two states, governor of Tennessee and Texas, governor, president of the Republic of Texas, general of the Texas Army and somebody asked him which title do you cherish the most and he said that of teacher because when he was 19 years old he built and taught in a one room school house in Tennessee and that was the most important job he ever had he felt.
SH: Your father?
KF: My dad. My dad is one of the heroes in my book, in ‘Heroes of a Texas Childhood’. He was a navigator in World War II and the story I’m telling is ‘The Navigator’ because he’s navigated the lives of many people he’s touched as well as 35 missions over Germany, successful missions and he was able to bring the 10 man crew back safely in the B-24 every time. They have a, the plane was called the I’ve Had It. I remember he was telling me one incoming crew accidentally hit a British runway maintenance worker and how they, they put a bomb, they paint a bomb after every successful mission is painted on the side of the plane and in a rare instance of shooting down an enemy plane a swastika is painted. So when this crew accidentally hit this British maintenance worker they put a little tea cup on the side of the plane.
SH: No they didn’t.
KF: It almost engendered a international incident. Having written the book I went over and I realized there is only two living people in the book and that’s Racehorse Haynes, the lawyer in Houston and Willie Nelson and the reason anybody is in the book is because of the failures and tragedies in their lives and the way they dealt with them and how they handled that. These are not lucky people in this book. Emily Morgan’s in the book, the Yellow Rose of Texas. J. Frank Dobie’s in the book. Quanah Parker.
SH: Is Ira Hayes.
KF: Ira Hayes is not from Texas last time I checked.
SH: Right. Arizona.
KF: This is, uh, heroes of a Texas childhood. If it was heroes of a Arizona childhood believe me he’s one of my favorite heroes. So, then I showed the manuscript and the table of contents to a group of counselor at our ranch, at our camp in the hill country and to a bunch of young people and a bunch of recent college graduates and they looked at the list of 23 people and they never heard of any of them except for Davey Crockett and Sam Houston, Willie Nelson, they heard of three out of the 23. I mean there are some names here they really ought to know. They never heard of Audie Murphy. They never heard of Barbara Jordan. This is not a few of them this is most of them.
SH: This is a failure of our teaching?
KF: Well, yes, they don’t know upon whose shoulders they stand. So I recommend this book to anybody who has young people that are in school, get it for them and if I ever am governor of Texas this book will be mandatory reading in the public schools.
SH: Summing up, what do you want to do with what’s left?
KF: Well right now, right now I’m feeling pretty good. I don’t know why, most of the people I’ve loved are dead. Remember, I never liked to say somebody died I just say they are not currently working on the project. We don’t want to make projects to important, I mean, but that does supply us with some financial support, with some income. Most people, I was rather chagrinned to realize recently, that most people think I am very rich. I ran into the TSA guys in the San Antonio airport, who were very nice to me, and they said “Kinky we saw your big mansion up on that hill there where you live.” Of course it’s not my house it’s a big house near where our ranch is. I live in a very Christ like, Gandhi like fashion, very simply.
SH: Well you lived in a green trailer for many years. Now I moved up to the big house. So I believe as Churchill says, that uh, “We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.” and I could recall a lot of things faster if I had taken one of my brain pills this morning. I bought these, they were invented by an Australian scientist and I bought them off a television infomercial and if you take three of them a day (snaps fingers) it helps you recall stuff really quick and when you have abstruse learning that’s a lotta shit. An example is I was driving to Kerrville the other day and I could not remember Ralph Nader’s name, could not remember it. Five minutes later I still couldn’t remember his name. So I called people and I said “Who is that guy, he ran for president, he looks like a praying mantis. What’s his name?” and they said, “Ralph Nader.” “Ralph Nader, that’s right.” Maybe it’s God telling me it’s not important for me to remember Ralph Nader but if you take these brain pills then you will remember Ralph Nader very quickly.
SH: Guaranteed. Rhett.
Rhett Rushing (RR): Yes sir. I want to start with, if you were governor or if you had a shot at any office in the state, I would love for you to shoot for Commissioner of the Texas, of the book commission. Somebody to oversee and shake them by the hair of their head, the textbook committee. That’s how we’re teaching and the legacy we’re leaving.
KF: Yeah, it is complex. I agree we have a bunch of idiots there, most of this Board of Education, most of these people are idiots. The one who had it right was, Michelle Ree, the uh Michelle Ree, the Superintendent of Schools who they recently got rid of by rejecting the mayor. She had the right idea, it’s really pretty simple and that is that the unions have now become bad. What I use to love, I mean, what Joe Hill and Woody Guthrie died for and believed in have now become as bad as the big corporations. They’re the same thing and all they care about is the teachers in a very narrow sense and what Michelle Ree cares about is the fact that if by third or fourth grade you don’t have a great teacher, one, one ,great teacher, guys like you and me are gonna get screwed. We’re gonna take the wrong road, I mean, it’s just that fast. If we don’t have it, if we’re not getting help at home. Now as a Jewish kid and all that I was always into education. I mean, my parents were both into it. If your Vietnamese, they’re into it, they stress it. But if you’re not, if you’re a Mexican guy who may have a richer, happier form of life, you know, I mean, you look at Los Angeles there are no Japanese gardeners anymore. There were tons of them at one time. Now there is none, you can’t find one. They are all Mexicans or Latin Americans. How did that happen? Well because the Japanese, the Japs, wanted all their kids to be lawyers and doctors and such. I’m not saying this is good. I side with the Mexicans. The Mexicans are proud that their kid is helping them with their lawn mowing service. You know, they’re happy with that. That’s fine. He’s helping the dad with the air conditioning service whatever it is and I think there is something to that. There is a richness to that culture that’s very nice but that’s why you find the Vietnamese and the Jews sort of super achieving. I don’t know what happened to me but. What the hell were we taling about before that.
RR: W were talking about textbooks but that’s alright because it leads into, you enumerated this already, but I want to sort of wrap up with, the idea of troublemaker. I mean the idea of being a troublemaker is a burden, it’s also a justification, it’s also a charge, it’s a mandate. How do you see yourself?
KF: Well you look at. I would say what Texas needs as a governor is a troublemaker at this time. I saw Rick interviewed by Gretta Van Sustern on Fox the other day and he was saying we’ve got ideas in Texas that could help the health care programs that could help the national, the Feds could learn from us. He neglected to say that we are 50th in healthcare coverage in Texas, 50th. We are the eighth largest economy in the world, we’re 49th in education and 50th in healthcare coverage. If he thinks that’s a great record that’s fine. We need a troublemaker that has some brains. That is not afraid to, you know I would put forth the five Mexican generals plan for immigration and the Democrats, I used to be a Democrat myself. I don’t think I’ll ever be a Republican but I sure wouldn’t be a Democrat again. I think Barbara Jordan, and Molly Ivins and Ann Richards were the best the Democrats ever had to offer. They had some balls. Today they don’t. Today they are just like the Republicans. They’re apologizing to everybody for everything they do. They’ve made the country and the world a more dangerous place because they are conflicted about America and about who they are. I mean, an example is, the Tea Party should have been embraced by the Democrats. The Tea Party, I’m old enough, think about this, the Tea Party was what the Democrats used to be. It had the same feeling, the same spirit to it. Barbara Jordan, to her the constitution was her bible. Now who does that sound like? The Tea Party. Who stands up for the people? The Tea Party. Instead the Democrats vilified the Tea Party. They mocked the Tea Party and they lost to the Tea Party. That means a lot. It’s not just the Tea Party. It’s all of those that are in sympathy with it. All the Independents, which are now bigger than Republicans and Democrats reservedly because I was right when I ran for governor. I said some things that were right, I was ahead of my time but that the Democrats and Republicans are crips and bloods. I said that. I pointed out that we probably should limit terms, have term limits for all these guys. In fact I’d like to limit them all to two terms, one in office and one in prison.
SH: I think that sums it up and you are a troublemaker in your own right.KF: Well thank you and may the God of your choice bless you.
SH: Thank you Kinky.
KF: Thanks. Now we can light up right. America won’t let me?