Who was/is Kinky Friedman (Hörbuch) ? - CDs, Vinyl LPs, DVD and more
Kinky Friedman (Hörbuch)
Keeping the world at bay – on the Jewish-Texan country singer, crime writer and entertainer Kinky Friedman, who ran for governor of Texas. On the audiobook 'Greenwich Killing Time', read by Wiglaf Droste.
In the spring of 1992 the Zurich publisher Haffmans brought out Kinky's first crime novel in German. 'Greenwich Killing Time', first published in the American original in 1986, was a revelation. The book was so funny, and the author quite obviously a devil of a fellow. Kinky Friedman was tough without being stupidly cool, he did not give a hoot about conventions, he had a highly idiosyncratic sense of humour, and he knew people. Of actors he wrote, roughly, that in this trade honesty was the most important thing of all – and anyone who could fake that could fake almost anything else. I was impressed.
Kinky Friedman opened up the universe for me all over again. It was not about interpreting the world in various ways, nor was it about changing it. The art lay rather in adopting and maintaining an attitude in the firestorm of life – not a pose, but a real attitude. On the first page of 'Greenwich Killing Time' Friedman describes this attitude: he leans back in his chair, puffs a little and tries to keep the world at bay. Yes, that was it: trying to keep the world at bay.
The sentence goes on, however – for then the telephones ring. Friedman's hero has the habit of placing two red telephones on the left and right edges of his desk, both on the same line, which somehow raises the importance of his calls. Ah yes – the man clearly had a quirk, which he cultivated with self-confidence and held up against a show-off world full of fashionable windbags. He liked people who said "touché" about as much as people who said "ciao" – not even Italians, although he conceded that they would otherwise have a hard time leaving a room.
I immersed myself deeply in the world of Kinky Friedman. Every year a new novel appeared, in which 'the Kinkster', as his friends call him, above all Larry 'Ratso' Sloman, casts himself as a Sherlock Holmes-like protagonist. All this, I learned, was no fake – Kinky Friedman throws his own life into the balance and rewrites it, lets friends and colleagues populate his novels and demands at least as much humour of them as of himself. For as beautifully as Kinky Friedman can write, the man glosses over nothing. He writes quite often that he wanders around his loft – a pretty phrase for a life marked above all by solitude.
There are friends and friendship in Kinky Friedman's novels – yet every one of his friends counts among the suspects when he is solving a murder. Love is more a memory than something real; the dream of a 'girl in the peach-coloured dress' drifts through his books. Two women do appear, an 'Uptown Judy' and a 'Downtown Judy', but they remain peripheral. By and large, 'Greenwich Killing Time' tells us, he preferred cats to women, because cats very rarely used the word "relationship". That makes sense, for it sounds dreadful, that nasty R-word – like the choking mess that remains when love is over.
Anyone who reads crime novels for the sake of the whodunit is in the wrong place with Kinky Friedman. His murder stories merely provide the frame for the laconic, melancholy or comic sayings with which he swings himself against the idiocy of existence. In 'Lone Star', published in the original in 1987 and in German in 1993, he confesses to smoking up to ten cigars a day while expecting to live forever – without inhaling, of course; he only blows the smoke at toddlers, house plants, vegetarians and joggers. Being a good smoker, he says, takes work, especially in a world full of non-smokers.
His books are only one part of the total work of art that Kinky Friedman has made of his life. He was born Richard Friedman in Chicago on November 1, 1944. Soon afterwards his Jewish family moved to Texas. On the 'Echo Hill Ranch', as his younger sister Marcie tells it, the roughly five-year-old Kinky decided to become a country singer. He made the plan come true a little later; he formed the band 'Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys' and became, by his own account, "the only Jew besides Jesus that people in Texas know".
Being known did not necessarily mean being loved. When Friedman and his band played the song Proud To Be An Asshole From El Paso, they sometimes had to hurry nimbly to the tour bus; some Southerners react to a truthful description of their state and its inhabitants with about as much humour and composure as people from Brandenburg who are told how things stand with them and the region they live in. Women who mistakenly considered themselves enlightened could also become aggressive and rough when Kinky Friedman turned up. For his song Get Your Biscuits In The Oven And Your Buns In The Bed he was voted 'Sexist Of The Year' by Women's Lib. His charming reply, that he was simply "the sexiest", did not make matters any easier. The song's clear signals of irony were ignored, and for simplicity's sake Friedman was declared an enemy of women and hence of humanity.
With his magnificent song They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore Friedman also made plenty of enemies; the song is a clear statement to anti-Semites who, as soon as they are challenged, naturally do not want to be what they are. That Jews no longer turn the other cheek in the manner of Jesus, as is said of them by people who infamously want to assign them at least partial blame for the Holocaust, is a fine message to the world. Kinky Friedman put it in his own blend of toughness and humour: in essence he sings that they don't make Jews like Jesus any more – they no longer turn the other cheek as they once did.
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More information about Kinky Friedman (Hörbuch) on Wikipedia.org