“When you grow up, you become a joke,” Kinky Friedman said in an interview in 1974. “I started out as a joke, and that's a pretty good start.”

This happened at the beginning of Friedman’s career, from enfant terrible to the beloved old nutcase, and he played the role of the punk kid wonderfully, dropping one caustic remark after another – from “I don't really consider hippies to be people” to “I hate intellectuals, and I am one.” Interviewer Jan Reid summed up the highlights The unlikely rise of redneck rockhis great book about the Austin music scene in the '70s, in which Kinky comes across as a witty smart-ass who likes to shock people and is somewhat ambivalent about the Austin experience, in part because he sees the place as his home rather than a destination. “I lived in this city for 17 years,” he told Reid. “I went to high school here, I did all the traveling. I didn't suddenly become a guru with long hair.” He even poked fun at the Armadillo World Headquarters, the city'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 can't say. But 50 years later, it's hard to imagine a city better suited to a talent like Friedman, who died this week at the age of 79. Don't get me wrong: There were plenty of places in 1970s America where you could sing songs about gas chambers, massacres and boogers. That's why God gave us punk rock. But singing country Songs about gas chambers, school shooters, and boogers—and I mean serious country music, not some novelty pastiche—you probably wanted to spend some time in Austin, even if you had a foot in Nashville and New York. There was a whole new style of countercultural country-western emerging that some people called “outlaw country,” others called “progressive country,” others called “redneck rock” (which sounded like the exact opposite of “progressive country”), and others called “cosmic cowboy music.” And Kinky Friedman was perhaps the most outrageous, eccentric, and funniest man to sing it.

Richard “Kinky” Friedman was born in Chicago in 1944, but his parents moved to Houston just a year later. When he was seven, they moved further west, to the Texas Hill Country, where they established a summer camp called Echo Hill Ranch. (One old camper told Friedman's biographer Mary Lou Sullivan that this “was The The family eventually made it to Austin, and Kinky attended college there and became involved with Students for a Democratic Society, while the decentralist and anti-authoritarian “Prairie Power” wing of the New Left group was on the rise. (During the Prairie Power period, some members of the organization noticed that the “Texas anarchists” were taking over.)

When he started playing professionally, Friedman called his band the Texas Jewboys – not just to annoy people, but because he was actually both very Texan and very Jewish, even if he didn't fit the old stereotypes of Texas or Judaism. The man had grown up listening to Hank Williams records at a Jewish summer camp near San Antonio. He earned that band name.

And he didn't just want to shock people: He was also a gifted songwriter. Sure, he could seem childish at times – he had started his career singing for the kids at camp, a background that led to lyrics like “Ol' Ben Lucas/Had a lot of mucus/Comin' right out of his nose.” (When my brother and I first heard this song on the radio, when We (We thought it was totally funny when we were little kids.) But his writing could be subtler and wittier, could offer a fireworks display of wordplay, could even be evocative and poetic. My favorite Kinky Friedman song, “We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to You,” is a virtuoso performance in which he inserts the title phrase into one context after another: a redneck throwing Kinky out of his restaurant because he's Jewish, a rabbi throwing Kinky out of synagogue services because he's a hippie, Kinky himself refusing to fight in a war, and then God himself throwing Kinky out of heaven because “our quota for singing Texas Jews has been filled for this year.” Along the way, the singer manages to “Baruch atah Adonai” with “What the hell are you doing back there, boy?” That's one of the best things I've ever heard.

And somehow the man who wrote it – and “Asshole From El Paso,” “The Ballad of Charles Whitman” and “They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore” – became a revered symbol of the Lone Star State. That was the real magic trick of Kinky's career. You start out singing satirical songs about the rednecks you grew up with, and somehow you end up symbolizing those same people, and it doesn't feel like a reversal or a betrayal, but like the fulfillment of something you've had inside you all along.

Friedman's career path may have been strange and twisted, but it's easy to summarize. When it became clear that he was not going to be anything more than a cult band as a musician, he disappeared for a few years on a cocaine binge, then got clean and started writing weird crime novels. (In the '90s, my brother went to one of his book signings and had him sign a book for me. He wrote, “Dear Jesse – any brother of Andrew's is a brother of mine!”) Texas monthly hired him as a columnist. At some point he got the idea of ​​running for governor – perhaps when Doug Sahm mentioned it at a Texas Tornados concert in 1992 – and in 2006 he threw his hat in the ring. His campaign slogans: “Why the hell not?” and “How hard can it be?”

When he entered the gubernatorial race, he was still pretty disreputable, or at least too disreputable to be elected. His critics brought up his drug past (Friedman responded that Sam Houston himself was “an opium addict and a drunkard”), and they brought up the fact that his jokes about racists and anti-Semites often contained the coarse language that racists and anti-Semites are known for. But when he spoke about his vision for the state, the man who had sometimes projected hostility toward his own audience in the 1970s now seemed like a populist. His platform transcended left and right and sounded more like the kind of ideological mishmash you might hear if you asked someone not addicted to cable news what their views were: He was for gay marriage, school prayer, alternative energy, border control, lower taxes, lower spending, higher teacher pay, drug decriminalization, and putting Willie Nelson in charge of the state energy commission.

I didn't agree with everything the candidate said, but I appreciated the spirit of the show. A decade later, I appreciated it even more. At some point after Election Day in 2016, I said to someone, “You know, if we had timed this like, 'Fuck it, I'm voting for him' Wait a little better, we could have had Kinky Friedman as president.”

Friedman's semi-serious campaign didn't make him governor, let alone president, but when it was over he had become something of an elder statesman. Or at least an older court jester sage, and that's not a bad quality. As a guy once said, “When you grow up, you become a joke. I started out as a joke, and that's a pretty good start.”