The Great Psychedelic Armadillo Picnic (4 page)

WILLIE NELSON

IN THE INTRODUCTION TO THIS GUIDEBOOK, I WROTE, “In Austin they say when you die, you go to Willie Nelson's house.” Well, good news, folks. You don't necessarily have to croak in order to go to Willie's place. Trust me, there are easier ways. Let's say you're a German tourist or a rising young urologist from Teaneck, New Jersey. You've heard good things about Austin, and you're down here for your first visit. You love Willie, but you've never met him. With all of the phases and stages of his life and lifestyle, how can you be sure when you meet him that it's really Willie? That one's easy. He looks like Jesus Christ on a bad-hair day.

How to find Willie's place? Well, I can't wrap your lunch in a roadmap for you, but it's on the outskirts of town. Follow Highway 71. It's called Briarcliff. Everybody knows where it is. If you get lost, you can ask the guy standing by the side of the road with the sign that says, “Need Fuel for Learjet.”

You won't find Willie in any house, though; he'll either be playing golf or in his bus. If he's in his bus, it could pose a problem. He has three buses. One's for Willie, one's for the band, and one's for carrying all of the weed necessary to keep everybody on the road again. But that's not why Willie smokes dope. He told me why once. He does it to keep down the rage.

And be careful if you try to talk politics with Willie. He's a conspiracy theorist of the first water. Once, just before the war with Iraq, I was arguing with him on the bus. I was very much in favor of the war. He was very much against it. He was also smoking a joint the size of a large kosher salami. In an attempt to reason with him, I said, “Look, Willie, the guy's a tyrannical bully and we've got to take him out.” “No,” said Willie. “He's our president and we've got to stand by him.”

But the place you're most likely to find Willie during the daylight hours (or possibly at night, wearing a miner's helmet with a headlamp) is on the golf course.

Willie owns his golf course, which makes it very convenient for him to play about forty-seven hours a day when he's not performing or helping me solve the problems of the world from inside the bus. You can play golf on Willie's course, and that, in fact, is a good way of running into him. Sometimes, however, this plan doesn't work out so well. Willie told me a story about a woman who'd recently come off his course complaining she'd been stung by a bee. The golf pro asked her, “Where'd it sting you?” She said, “Between the first and second holes.” The pro said, “Well, I can tell you right now, your stance is too wide.”

One of the things I love most about Willie is that, once you manage to locate him, he'll take the time to stop what he's doing (within reason) and talk to you like you're the only person in the world. That's why we call him the Hillbilly Dalai Lama. One of the most memorable things I've ever witnessed a star of any magnitude do was the time when, with the naked eye, I observed Willie Nelson standing outside his bus for three hours after a concert, signing autographs in the rain. It's what we call “dancin' with who brung you.”

JERRY JEFF WALKER

THE WANDERER

With the possible exception of a few early serial killers, Jerry Jeff Walker was one of the first people in America to pioneer and popularize the three-word name. I've often maintained that if Susan Walker, Jerry Jeff's wife/manager (emphasis on slash), had married me instead of him, I'd be the president of the United States and he would be sleeping under a bridge. While this may not be entirely true, it is accurate to say that Jerry Jeff would no doubt be very happy sleeping under a bridge. Especially if you let him have his guitar.

Jerry Jeff is not only a Texas music icon, he's something even more important to me: a friend. When I needed help in my 1986 campaign for justice of the peace in Kerrville, Jerry Jeff was there. When the Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch held its first “bonefit,” in 1999, Jerry Jeff was our headliner. I've called upon Jerry Jeff so often, in fact, that Susan once asked him, “Doesn't Kinky know any other celebrities?” I do, but few of them are as generous with their time. That's why I was happy to comply several years ago when he asked me to give him a blurb for his autobiography,
Gypsy Songman.
Now that I'm writing this chapter on famous Austinites and digging deeper into Jerry Jeff's life, I find myself in that most ironic of karmic circumstances: having to actually read a book I've given a blurb for. And you know something? It's pretty damn good.

Way back when doctors drove Buicks, Jerry Jeff rode his thumb out of his hometown in upstate New York, stopped by Key West long enough to invent Jimmy Buffett, then drifted over to New Orleans, where he sang for pennies on streetcorners. Perhaps he was curious to discover, in the words of Bob Dylan, “Who's gonna throw that minstrel boy a coin?” Jerry Jeff remembers a time when a group of fraternity boys about his own age came by and started getting on his case. “Why don't you get a job?” one of them said. “You can't just wander around with that old guitar forever.” “Watch me,” said Jerry Jeff.

In the mid-sixties, before he was nothing, as we used to say in Nashville, Jerry Jeff was singing in Austin. Today we would probably call him a homeless person with a guitar. During this period he wrote “Mr. Bojangles,” a song that now resides comfortably among the most recorded songs of all time. Looking back, it is hard to believe that a record executive once passed on the song, remarking at the time, “Nobody wants to hear a song about an old drunk nigger and a dead dog.”

“Mr. Bojangles was actually white,” Jerry Jeff told me recently. “If he'd been black, I never would've met him. The prison was segregated.”

“It's a perfect song,” I said. “But you keep changing the melody and fooling with the phrasing. Why?”

“To discourage people from singing along.”

I asked Jerry Jeff to tell me about writing “Mr. Bojangles.” This is what he said: “I'd been reading a lot of Dylan Thomas, and I was really into the concept of internal rhyme. I just had my guitar, a yellow pad, and the memories of guys I'd met in drunk tanks and on the street—one gentle old man in particular. The rest of the country was listening to the Beatles, and I was writing a six-eight waltz about an old man and hope. It was a love song.

“During the time I was writing ‘Mr. Bojangles,' I used to go down to the Austin city pound about every two weeks and adopt a dog. I didn't really live anywhere myself, so the dog would often stay with me awhile and then it would run away. Maybe find somebody else. At least I felt I was giving him a second chance.”

Jerry Jeff got a second chance himself when he married Susan, in 1974. She is largely credited with turning his life around and turning his career into a financial pleasure. Not only does he have houses in Austin, New Orleans, and Belize, but also, quite possibly for the first time in a lifetime of rambling, a sense of home. Jerry Jeff and Susan have two children, Jessie Jane and Django, who is starting to make a name for himself in the music world. Django has an album out and a hit song, “Texas on My Mind,” that was recorded by Pat Green and Cory Morrow. The Walkers credit Django's attending Paul McCartney's Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts with honing his skills as a songwriter and performer. They are currently in the final planning stages of opening a similar school in Austin. It will be, Susan says, a nonprofit organization of international scope, teaching music as well as the music business to anyone with the talent to gain admission.

The school could someday provide young people from around the world with the kind of education, direction, and support that Jerry Jeff himself never had. His education and inspiration were often provided by the real-life characters he met on the street and on the road; he returned the favor by immortalizing many of them in his songs. Through the music of Jerry Jeff Walker, people like Hondo Crouch, Charlie Dunn, and the ubiquitous Mr. Bojangles seem to live forever. This is important, because people today don't often get the chance to meet such men in the halls and the malls of our modern-day world.

At a television taping in November 2003, Jerry Jeff performed a few of these classics and then some songs by other songwriters. He played “The Cape,” a song by Guy Clark about a kid who thinks he can fly. I've always found this song a trifle treacly, but that night it brought a tear to my eye. Then he played Ian Tyson's “Navajo Rug,” which brought another tear, and Steve Fromholtz's “Singin' the Dinosaur Blues,” which really started the waterworks. When “Redneck Mother,” by Ray Wylie Hubbard, also put a tear in my eye, I realized that I was fairly heavily monstered.

Later, out on the street, I suddenly felt stone-cold sober. The ability to deliver another man's song faithfully is a rare enough talent, but Jerry Jeff Walker does not merely make a song his own. His magic is that he gives it to you.

ODE TO BILLY JOE

If Carl Sandburg had come from Waco, his name would have been Billy Joe Shaver. Back in the late sixties, when Christ was a cowboy, I first met Billy Joe in Nashville. We were both songwriters, and we once stayed up for six nights and it felt like a week. Today he's arguably the finest poet and songwriter this state has ever produced.

If you doubt my opinion, you could ask Willie Nelson or wait until you get to hillbilly heaven to ask Townes Van Zandt. They are the other folks in the equation, but they might not give you a straight answer. Willie, for instance, tends to speak only in lyrics. Just last week I was with an attractive young woman, and I said to Willie, “I'm not sure who's taller, but her ass is six inches higher than mine.” He responded, “My ass is higher than both of your asses.” Be that as it may, you'll rarely see Willie perform without singing Billy Joe's classic “I Been to Georgia on a Fast Train,” which contains the line “I'd just like to mention that my grandma's old-age pension is the reason why I'm standin' here today.” Like everything else about Billy Joe, that line is the literal truth. He is an achingly honest storyteller in a world that prefers to hear something else.

Thanks to his grandma's pension, Billy Joe survived grinding poverty as a child in Corsicana. “
'Course
I cana!” was his motto then, but after his grandma conked, he moved to Waco, where he built a résumé that would've made Jack London mildly petulant. He worked as a cowboy, a roughneck, a cotton picker, a chicken plucker, and a millworker. (He lost three fingers at that last job when he was twenty-two, and later wrote one of his greatest songs, which begins with these lines: “‘Three fingers' whiskey pleasures the drinker / Movin' does more than the drinkin' for me.'”)

I believe that every culture gets what it deserves. Ours deserves Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura and Garth Brooks (whom I like to refer to as the anti-Hank). But when the meaningless mainstream is forgotten, people will still remember those who struggled with success: van Gogh and Mozart, who were buried in paupers' graves; Hank, who died in the back of a Cadillac; and Anne Frank, who had no grave at all. I think there may be room in that shining motel of immortality for Billy Joe's timeless works, beautiful beyond words and music, written by a gypsy guitarist with three fingers missing. Last February, Billy Joe and I teamed up again to play a series of shows with Little Jewford, Jesse “Guitar” Taylor, “Sweet” Mary Hattersley, and my Lebanese friend Jimmie “Ratso” Silman. (Ratso and I have long considered ourselves to be the last true hope for peace in the Middle East.) Pieces were missing, however. God had sent a hat trick of grief to Billy Joe in a year that even Job would have thrown back. His mother, Victory, and his beloved wife, Brenda, stepped on a rainbow, and on New Year's Eve, 2000, his son, Eddy, a sweet and talented guitarist, joined them. Hank and Townes also had gone to Jesus in the cosmic window of the New Year.

I watched Billy Joe playing with pain, the big man engendering, perhaps not so strangely, an almost Judy Garland–like rapport with the audience. He played “Ol' Five and Dimers Like Me” (which Dylan recorded), “You Asked Me To” (which Elvis recorded), and “Honky Tonk Heroes” (which Waylon recorded). He also played one of my favorites, which, well, Billy Joe recorded: “If I could I would be tradin' all this fatback for the lean / When Jesus was our savior and cotton was our king.”

Seeing Billy Joe perform that night reminded me of a benefit we'd played in Kerrville several years before. Friends had asked me to help them save the old Arcadia Theatre, and I called upon Billy Joe. Toward the end of his set, however, a rather uncomfortable moment occurred when he told the crowd, “There's one man I'd like to thank at this time.” I, of course, began making my way to the stage. “That man is the reason I'm here tonight,” he said.

I confidently walked in front of the whole crowd, preparing to leap onstage when he mentioned my name. “That man,” said Billy Joe, “is Jesus Christ.”

Much chagrined, I walked back to my seat as the audience aimed their laughter at me like the Taliban militia shooting down a Buddha. It was quite a social embarrassment for the Kinkster. But I'll get over it.

So will Billy Joe.

BAND OF BROTHERS

A happy childhood, I've always believed, is the worst possible preparation for life. Be that as it may, my dream as a child was to grow up to be a country music star. But if you dream of becoming a country music star as a kid, you'll invariably wind up a best-selling novelist. It's just a little trick God plays on us, like the channel swimmer drowning in the bathtub. But for me, becoming a writer has been a rather fortuitous turn of events. For one thing, I've always wanted a lifestyle that didn't require my presence. For another, I've always been somewhat ambivalent about performing, and lately I've come to realize that anyone who uses the word “ambivalent” should never have been a country singer in the first place. As Joseph Heller once observed, “Nothing succeeds as planned.”

With country music still in my head after I graduated from the University of Texas, I joined the Peace Corps and worked for eleven cents an hour in the jungles of Borneo. As an agricultural extension worker, my job was to help people who'd been farming successfully for more than two thousand years to improve their agricultural methods. I was supposed to distribute seeds downriver, but the Peace Corps never sent me any. Eventually I was forced to distribute my own seed downriver, which had some rather unpleasant repercussions. Still, it was in Borneo that I wrote some of my first country songs and dreamed up the great notion of putting together a band called Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys.

Several years later the Texas Jewboys became a reality, a country band with a social conscience, a demented love child of Lenny Bruce and Bob Wills. The group included four Texans: Jeff “Little Jewford” Shelby, Kenny “Snakebite” Jacobs, Thomas William “Wichita” Culpepper, and myself, Richard Kinky “Big Dick” Friedman. All of us except for Wichita were Jewish. The other original members —Billy Swan, Willie Fong Young, and Rainbow Colors—were all Texans and Jews by inspiration. There were other Texas Jewboys over the years, of course: my brother, Roger Friedman; Dylan “Clitorious” Ferrero; Cowboy Jack Slaughter; Bryan “Skycap” Adams; Panama Red; Major Boles; Van Dyke Parks; Lee Roy Parnell; Roscoe West; and Arnold “Big Jewford” Shelby, Little Jewford's elder brother, to name just a few.

In 1972 we got our first big break, when Chet Flippo wrote a story about us in
Rolling Stone.
The title of the piece was “Band of Unknowns Fails to Emerge.” The following year we
did
emerge, traveling about the country, irritating many of our fellow Americans. With songs like “They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore” and “Proud to Be an A-hole from El Paso,” we were not destined to be embraced by Mr. and Mrs. Back Porch. In fact, in 1973 the Texas Jewboys received death threats in Nacogdoches, got bomb threats in New York, and required a police escort to escape radical feminists at the University of Buffalo.

We also had an audience with Bob Dylan after a show in L.A. (he was barefoot and dressed in white robes), walked on our knuckles after hanging out with Ken Kesey in San Francisco, played a farewell gig for Abbie Hoffman in New York before he went underground (we were co-billed with a video of Abbie's recent vasectomy), and were unceremoniously tossed off the stage by the management of a Dallas nightclub and resurrected the same night at Willie Nelson's house. On June 2 of that year, I had the rare distinction of being introduced by Hank Snow's son, the Reverend Jimmy Snow, as “the first full-blooded Jew ever to appear on the Grand Ole Opry.” Through it all, the Jewboys believed that the purpose of art was not merely to reflect a culture, but to subvert it. We also believed, just as passionately, that some things were too important to be taken seriously.

What happened to the Texas Jewboys? We live in the fine dust of the far horizon, beyond time and geography, where music and dreams play in perfect harmony. Little Jewford and I still occasionally travel the world (he plays keyboards and the most irritating instrument in the musical kingdom, the kazoo). Snakebite Jacobs blows his horn with the New Orleans Nightcrawlers. The last time I saw Wichita, who played guitar, mandolin, and fiddle, he was living in his car with his dog, Dwight. Like Mr. Bojangles's dog, Dwight died—from a rattlesnake bite in a trailer park. I would like to find Wichita. Billy Swan wrote “Lover, Please” and “I Can Help” and still lives and makes music in Nashville. Skycap has a band in St. Louis. My brother, Roger, who originally managed the band, is now a psychologist with three kids and lives in Maryland. Dylan Ferrero, our tour manager, who always wore dark shades and a python-skin jacket, now teaches Special Ed in Comfort and is married to a woman named Sage, who has forty-one tattoos, signs for the deaf, and runs my web-site.

As for me . . . well, I am the future governor of Texas, of course. Since I first announced my intention to seek office, I have been asked where in the hell did I get the idea? It's a long story. It begins with a man named George W. Bush.

AT THE WHITE HOUSE RECENTLY, as I was advising the president on Iraq, I thought I heard him mention putting me in charge of the National Park Service. It's about time he appointed a real cowboy, I said to myself as I adjusted my fanny pack. I knew, of course, that this would not be a Cabinet-level appointment. I would probably have a portfolio of some kind, a small staff of busy little bureaucrats to do all the work, and I'd no doubt carry the title of under-secretary. That was fine with me. I'd probably be spending most of my time under my secretary anyway.

As I left the East Wing, I became more and more certain that, if not exactly offering me a position, the president was subtly encouraging me to get back into politics. I'd been on hiatus since my unsuccessful campaign for justice of the peace in Kerrville in 1986, but that was then and this was now. I remembered a letter he'd written me soon after he got elected. He thanked me for mentioning his name in one of my columns “without using any curse words,” and he asked me if I intended to run for JP again. On a cold day in Jerusalem, I'd told him. Now, after practically getting vetted by the leader of the free world himself, I found myself standing ready to serve. I waited in the full-crouch position for a call from someone in the administration. When it didn't come, I couldn't decide whether to kill myself or get a haircut.

There must be a place in politics for a man of my talents, I thought. Dogcatcher might be a good place to start. I could free all the dogs and encourage them to lay some serious cable in the yards of people I didn't like. Or maybe I could run for mayor of Austin. I could fight against the fascist anti-smoking laws. I probably couldn't win without appealing to all the techno-geeks, but a good slogan would help—something like “a cigar in every mouth and a chip on every shoulder” might work. Basically, though, it'd be too small a gig for the Kinkster. I have bigger fish to fry.

Well, what about governor of Texas? That might be therapeutic, I figured. It's a notoriously easy gig, and I'd certainly be the most colorful candidate to run for the office since Pappy O'Daniel. Hell, compared with Tony Sanchez, I'm practically Mr. Charismo. I can work a room better than anyone since the late John Tower went to that great caucus in the sky. When I meet a potential voter, I'm good for precisely three minutes of superficial charm. If I stay for five minutes, I can almost see the pity in the person's eyes.

Nevertheless, being governor might be a lot of fun. I've known the last two and a half governors, and they didn't seem to be working all that hard. Of course, I saw them mostly at social events. In fact, I once mistook Rick Perry for a wine steward at the Governor's Mansion. I said, “Hey, you look familiar. Do I know you?” And he said, “Yeah. I'm the governor, Rick Perry.” Then he gave me a friendly handshake and looked at me like he was trying to establish eye contact with a unicorn. He didn't seem as funny as Ann Richards or George W., but he came off like a pretty nice guy—for an Aggie.

After some minor soul-searching, I decided to throw my ten-gallon yarmulke in the ring and form an exploratory committee headed by the dead Dutch explorer Sir Wilhelm Rumphumper. The committee had one meeting and came back with the consensus that, as long as Willie Nelson or Pat Green didn't decide to run, I could be the next governor. They offered the opinion that many of Pat's people were probably too young to vote and that Willie, God bless him, did not quite present as clean-cut an image as I did. Also, neither of them had had any previous experience in politics. Not only had I run for JP, but I'd also been chairman of the Gay Texans for Phil Gramm committee.

Though the report was encouraging, I had to admit that I was beginning to find the prospect of the governorship rather limiting. I aspired to inspire before I expired. There had to be something I could do for my country besides flying five American flags from my pickup truck and telling the guy with four American flags on his pickup truck, “Go back to Afghanistan, you communist bastard!” But what of the president's offer? To clear the boards for my race for governor, I asked my old Austin High pal Billy Gammon to check the status of my appointment. Billy's so close to the president he gets to fly in the White House helicopter. “I stand ready to serve!” I told Billy.

“I'll get back to you,” he said.

And he did. He told me that while the Bushes obviously considered the Kinkster a dear friend, the president had only been engaging in light banter when he'd raised the possibility of my moving into public housing. Billy also said that though I might have made a “fantastic contribution to government,” George W. could see how I might well have been a “scandal waiting to happen.”

“That's good news,” I told Billy, “because I'm running for governor and I'd like you to be my campaign manager.”

“I'll get back to you,” he said.

I got over my disappointment quickly. Like most of us, I determined that I'd rather be a large part of the problem than a small part of the solution. Besides, I've got Big Mo on my side. I'm not sure how traveling with a large homosexual will go down with the voters, but hell, I'll try anything. Just this morning, for instance, I tried making a campaign pitch to my fellow passengers on a crowded elevator. After several of them threatened to call 911, however, it unfortunately put me a little off-message. “Now that I have you people all together,” I told them, “I can't remember what I wanted you for.”