The last time Kinky Friedman released a studio album Ronald Reagan was in his third year of his White House stay and Michael Jackson debuted the moonwalk on the “Motown 25” special.







Four presidents later and six years after Jackson took his last moonwalk, Friedman has released “The Loneliest Man I Ever Met.”







John Lennon wrote that life is what happens while you're busy making other plans. Friedman knows the concept well. In the years he spent away from a recording studio, Friedman turned out a series of Raymond Chandler-like novels featuring fictionalized version of himself as the lead character. He has run for political offices, his most notable being the 2006 race for governor of Texas. He ran a campaign with classic slogans like, “My Governor is a Jewish Cowboy,” Why the Hell Not?” and “He Ain’t Kinky, He’s my Governor.” He finished with 13% of the vote.







The noted stogie-waving, tequila purveyor, country outlaw is set to embark on a tour that will see him play 34 dates without a day off. It is nothing that the 70-year old Texas Jewboy can’t handle.







The Swerve Magazine recently spoke with Friedman as he readied for his tour.







The Swerve Magazine: “The Loneliest Man I Ever Met” is your is your first new record in over 30 years.







Kinky Friedman: It is a long time between drinks.







SM: What made this the time to release it?







KF: The reason is I was badgered by a friend of mine Brian Molnar, who produced the record, convinced me this was a good idea. He is the one to blame if it is not.







(Molnar) is a kid from New Jersey. A ‘kid’ to me could be a 47-year-old man to me. He is young and he brought down Joe Cirotti who plays guitar and laid down some beautiful guitar work, and an engineer from Jersey. Those are the Jersey boys and they came out here to (Echo Hill Ranch). It was recorded right here, all except “Blood Mary Morning” which we did with Willie (Nelson) in his studio in Austin. That is where I got so high I needed a step ladder to scratch my ass. It throws my timing off terribly. It seemed like the song was way too long, like it was an hour and a half long and I think it is really under three minutes.







It has got that spontaneous spirit to it. It sounds like aWest Texas barroom. So, that one worked out well. It is kind of a leg opener on the record. An old girlfriend of mine used to call Jaegermeister a great leg opener. (“Bloody Mary Morning”) is a leg opener to the rest of the record.







The last interview I did, the guy was a fan of Willie’s and never heard of “Blood Mary Morning.”









SM: Wow. Really?





KF: And I’m hearing a bunch of that. I’m telling you it’s a millennial world out there.







SM: How can you be a fan of Willie Nelson and not know that song?







KF: Willie told me that many years ago that Glen Campbell gave him $25,000, which was like a king’s ransom back then. And Willie agreed to let him publish every song that Willie wrote that year. And that year, unfortunately for Glenn, Willie only wrote one song and the song was “Bloody Mary Morning.”







SM: You are about to launch a 34-date tour that features not a single night off.







KF: Doing this many shows back to back without a night off is going to be interesting. It really is a challenge and, Willie is right, you do start running on adrenaline.







It is remarkable, without having a hit or a big, best-selling book, it is nice to be able to have a tour like this and have this many dates on the tour. I think it is going to be a real financial pleasure for the Kinkster, which is always nice.







SM: That is nice considering how the music industry is these days.







KF: Warren Zevon was right our shit is fucked up (Ed. Note:“My Shit’s Fucked Up” is the title of a Warren Zevon cover on Friedman’s record). It is a very apt description of the world today. That is a visionary song. Can you print the song title? Wait, you're online, you can. You can’t give it to a newspaper. You can’t even talk about it.







SM: I like that you include that song on the album.







KF: Some other guy was just asking me about Donald Trump and I’m not vibrating at that frequency. And it is not just the Donald. It is every one of these elected officials from top to bottom.







SM: It is a circus and that might be too nice of a description of it right now.







KF: Like I said when I was running for governor in 2006, musicians can better run the world than politicians. We would not get a hell of a lot done in the morning, but that is all. We’d work late and we’d be honest. Willie’s advice back then is still really good, “If you are going to have sex with an animal, always make it a horse. That way if things don’t work out, at least you know you got a ride home.”







SM: It will be a long time until you see home once the tour starts.







Pittsburgh will be early in the tour, so I shouldn’t be running on pure adrenaline by then. It is the third show on the tour. I will be flying in from Denver. God almighty.







Think about this, the audience is younger than most of the songs. It is really weird and I’ll bet you it is not just an audience that is coming to see what ‘this guy’ has to say. These will be people that get it. They already know it.







I have done this before, but I’ve never done 34 shows. I’ve done 16 in Germany and that was terrific. All the audiences were all young. They all knew every fucking lyric and they had read the books. I’m the new David Hasselhoff over there.



The thinking man’s David Hasselhoff.







As a Jew, as a proud Red Sea pedestrian, I don’t want to lecture those people on morality. They weren’t even around when all that shit happened in World War II. They might be the only people on earth to have learned something from their own history. They are a very sensitive audience. All the shows were sold out in Germany. It was remarkable. We are not talking about somebody like Jimmy Buffett or somebody that had a huge worldwide hit.







SM: It has to be nice to have that dedicated of an audience.







KF: It hasn’t been worked very much because life got in the way and politics and other things kept me from really trying to develop a fan base. I’ve seen now from touring Australia, Canada, and the US that there is a great audience there. It is kind of fractured. A lot of them are there because of the books. Some are there because of the politics and some are there for the music. A lot of them know “Old Ben Lucas had a lot of mucus coming right out of his nose.” I wrote that when I was 11. Think about it. How long ago was that? That is damn near 60 years ago. So, 60 years later that song is known all over Australia and the whole audience sings along. I never like to say fuck in front of a c-h-i-l-d, but it is a children’s song. Most of those people say that their parents taught it to them.







SM: That is good to hear that people are passing your music down to the kids. It seems today everything is so disposable.







KF: You got it. It is cultural ADD as well as political correctness that really make our shit fucked up. The result may by our shit is fucked up irrevocably that we may not be able to fix this.







SM: That is the scary part.







KF: Certainly if you are a country music fan. I promise you this record doesn’t have any click tracks or was written by committee. There is nothing coming out of Nashville today that isn’t and it sounds great background music for a frat party.







SM: Thank you for saying that. It does sound exactly like what you would expect to hear at a frat party.







KF: The lost art of country music today. You don’t have a Roger Miller or a Shel Silverstein or a Kris Kristofferson. And I’ll tell you another thing is you don’t have a great song. There are a lot of young musicians that can sound like Stevie Ray Vaughn and they all want to be Townes Van Zandt when they grow up. Their hearts are in the right place, but that gene pool or that ability to write a great song, like “Blood Mary Morning” that’s gone. You don’t see anybody doing that.







The reason I think that Willie and Bob Dylan don’t write at the level they used to is success distances you from your art. There is no doubt about it. Van Gough if he had been vastly successful with his first few paintings might never have painted the rest of them or they would have been not what they were. He was only great because he was miserable, I mean that helps. I fight happiness. I fight happiness at every turn. That is the enemy.







Every artist should be, or my definition of an artist is, someone that is behind on his rent and ahead of his time.







SM: That sums all the great ones up doesn’t it?







KF: It really does. That is why Billy Bob Thornton says stay hungry. If you can stay hungry, you may have a chance. Once you’ve been a huge success, I don’t know if you can still write “On the Road Again” or “Silver Wings” or songs like that.







My theory is if you want to be inspired go see a geezer while they are still here. These guys are older than me and I’m 70, though I read at the 72-year-old level. If you see Bob Dylan and it may even be a weird show, you will come away with something. The same used to be true of Levon Helm from The Band. Billy Joe Shaver, Kristofferson, Willie, I would have said B.B. King, but that group is diminishing.







SM: When it is gone, it’s gone.







KF: It really is. And the problem is you don’t get that from Kenny Chesney. He makes a lot more money.







Well you know those guys, I don't know if he is in the Garth Brooks or Toby Keith category, but those guys have made more money than god. And they are kind of like Barry Manilow. He just made a fortune. The songs make you feel good for a short period of time.







SM: It is like a good drug. It makes you feel good for a time then leaves you feeling hollow.







KF: You can’t take that away from them. Anybody that sells millions of records is important to somebody. To the record company. To his fans. To somebody. But that is being important without being significant. Hank Williams was significant. Mozart was buried in a pauper’s grave, but he was significant. The same you can say about Gram Parsons and Warren Zevon and Shel Silverstein, Iggy Pop, and Tom Waits. And I hope Kinky Friedman. I would like to be in that significant group. They are the group that might write something that would stay with a lifetime and it might make you think.













