Appreciation: Kinky Friedman, dead at 79. 'You have to be miserable to write a good song' he told us.

“I’m still lecturing Christians about the death penalty,” Friedman said in our 2018 interview. “I say: ‘I’m sorry you have to hear this from a Jew. But, remember, you heard it from a Jew the first time.'”

Nixon and Friedman were friends for several decades and delighted in each other’s company, in nearly every instance.

“There was this time in Ohio where Kinky said: ‘Mojo, come up on stage and play a few (solo) songs’,” Nixon recalled in his joint 2010 interview with Friedman. “And then I could hear him and his band, laughing, as they left the dressing room and started to get in the van.”

Friedman laughed with delight at the memory.

“That’s the old Tom Sawyer (fence-painting) gambit!” he said.

Alas, a planned film project by the two went up in smoke – or something akin to it.

“In the 1980s I hired Kinky to write the screenplay to a movie I was going to do, called ‘Citizen Mojo,'” Nixon said in their join interview. “The result was 30 pages of gibberish. I think most of the budget went up our noses.”

Friedman’s other close collaborators included Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson, and he counted both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush among his friends. In any setting, Friedman stood out as befits a former child chess prodigy who earned a degree in psychology and spent two years in Borneo working for the Peace Corps before moving back to Texas to focus on music full-time.

His tongue-firmly-in-cheek songs included “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” and “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed.” But Friedman also crafted poignant ballads such as “Sold American,” a moving lament that included such memorable couplets as: And everything’s been sold American/ The lonely night is mourning for the death it never dies/ Everyone’s been sold American/ Don’t let me catch you laughing when the jukebox cries.

The history of Friedman’s life, or at least some of it, is now being recounted in numerous obituaries. But no one spoke about him better than Friedman himself. Here is our complete 2018 interview with him.

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