Essay: Life on the trail with Kinky

You come to see

What you want to see

Yeah you come to see

But you never come to know

— Kinky Friedman, “The Wild Man of Borneo”

Kinky Friedman died Thursday. His obituaries have listed his various endeavors: Peace Corps volunteer, bandleader, provocateur, satirist, singer-songwriter, mystery novelist, essayist, perennial candidate for various offices (Kerrville justice of the peace, governor of Texas, commissioner of agriculture). I’d add Borscht Belt comedian, killer chess player, dedicated cigar smoker and savior of dogs to the list.

He was also, as it happens, my boss when he ran in a four-way race for governor in 2006.

I have never known anyone who worked harder at not having a real job, and I count my own efforts in that regard pretty impressive. His campaign had plenty of career-minded people focused on order and organization. There were a few who seemed determined to avoid not only work or a job but really any kind of useful activity whatsoever.

Over the years I’ve come to understand that this was by design, that this was Kinky’s preference. A level of chaos for him was a feature, not a bug.

Hiring me was just one example: Nearing 50, I had a resume that consisted of pretty much one job: Bass player.

I joined the campaign seeking to escape a life that was becoming unbearable to me after 30 years as a professional musician. A few years earlier, at a festival in downtown Birmingham, Alabama, two bandmates and I had taken the stage and begun tuning our instruments — the adjusting of monitor levels, the thump of drums and splash of cymbals that precede a live show — when I suddenly felt I could hear every individual thought of every person in the audience. I looked wildly at my bandmates, wondering if it was just me. That condition, which I’m not sure even has a name, only worsened over the succeeding years. Crowds became intolerable, an impossible situation for a professional musician. When I got the call from our former booking agent and Kinky’s first campaign manager, Cleve Hattersley, I jumped at the chance. It was a measure of how much of a musician I was that I thought I was getting a real job.

The first time I remember meeting Kinky was at UT-Austin, an early campaign event. With a large following of students in tow, he strolled the campus, chewing on an unlit cigar and answering questions from a rapt group of students. I was taken with his ease, his sharp and rapid wit and his comfort with tough questions (which I noticed he didn’t actually answer).

The particulars of Kinky’s run for governor were never very specific, but his platform was very pro-teacher and public schools, deeply dubious of the death penalty and adamantly opposed to Gov. Rick Perry’s proposed Trans-Texas Corridor, an ambitious but deeply unpopular multinational superhighway, rail and utility corridor that would have cut a gigantic swath across the state.

Kinky further offered an aspirational vision to voters that was long on slogans, if short on details. It spoke to Texans’ deep sense of identity, including distrust of government. “How hard can it be?” and “You can lead a politician to water but you can’t make him think” were classic Kinky one-liners, and they appeared on T-shirts and bumper stickers we sold hand over fist. He tapped into a sentiment neither liberal nor conservative: pissed off. Very few people, if indeed anyone, looked to Kinky for policy pronouncements. What drew many, myself included, was an abiding frustration with the status quo.

Unlike the major-party nominees — Perry and former Democratic congressman Chris Bell — the independent candidates, Kinky and former Austin mayor and state comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, faced the difficult challenge of actually getting on the ballot. The hurdles were considerable: get 1% of the previous election’s number of voters (in 2006, that meant about 50,000) to sign a petition. But each signature had to be from a registered voter, and that voter could not have voted in either the Republican or Democratic primary. Voters could only sign one or the other petition — either Strayhorn or Kinky, but not both — or the signature wouldn’t count. And our campaigns would have 60 days, from the primary until May 11, 2006, to gather those signatures, which would then be validated by the Texas Secretary of State.

To maximize those 60 days of signature gathering, we’d have to engage in strenuous campaigning far earlier than the party candidates. When I signed on in the spring of 2005, about 18 months ahead of Election Day, the campaigning was just getting underway. My first job was to paint our first headquarters, a tiny, drafty office in an old two-story building a couple of blocks south of the Capitol. I installed the first computer, a Dell machine with Windows (I spent so much time on the phone with a Microsoft tech support worker in India that I knew her children’s names), set up the first telephone, even had my bike stolen from the alley behind the office.

We ultimately had two more HQs as the campaign rapidly grew — the second was a former main office and warehouse for a cosmetics firm, offered to the campaign either gratis or very nearly free by a millionaire friendly to Kinky. We were booted when the production crew for the beloved TV series “Friday Night Lights” scouted our building and offered a ton of money to our landlord. I made the producers pony up considerable funds to move us seamlessly and overnight into our new home, a closed car dealership with a big campaign sign mounted high and visible from the adjacent highway. After our campaign ended, Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign took over the spot.

We were on the campaign trail constantly. If we failed to get enough signatures, two years of very hard work would just waft away like smoke from one Kinky’s cigars.

Our approach for getting those 50,000 or so petition signatures was different from Strayhorn’s. She decided to spend huge amounts of money on a firm that would fan out with mostly temp workers. We decided we’d keep it in house, so we bought banks of used computers and engaged many volunteers (we were using Facebook when it was still limited to colleges and universities), as well as everyone on staff, to participate in the gathering. We were therefore able to verify our signatures before delivering them to the secretary’s office, while Strayhorn’s campaign relied on sheer bulk. On the day we delivered all our signatures (in an elaborate convoy led by Austin cops on motorcycles) we knew we had wildly exceeded the minimum. Our total of verified signatures left Strayhorn in the dust.

For a man who avoided real jobs, Kinky was relentless. He was on the road all the time, all over Texas, in front of anyone who’d have him. And plenty would — he was an incredibly engaging presence who read rooms as only politicians and performance artists can. He shared a gifted politician’s knack for making you feel, in a brief one-on-one encounter, like you were the only person in the world. If he had an engagement at 2 p.m., he considered himself late if he wasn’t there by noon. It was a running joke that if he had a noon flight, you’d be driving him to the airport at 5 a.m.

Kinky’s campaign reflected a persistent vein of frustration that has fueled populist insurgents like Ross Perot in 1992 and Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in 2016. A former Texas governor, George W. Bush, was in the White House, presiding over unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Texas, Perry was in some hot water for his support of the Trans-Texas Corridor. Meanwhile, the Democrat, Chris Bell, outperformed expectations in the end, because the youth turnout from Kinky never really materialized. The conventional wisdom at the time was that Kinky was peeling votes from the left, Strayhorn from the right and middle. The reality was more nuanced. At the hundreds of Kinky campaign events I worked, there were young ideological voters, middle aged and elderly former hippies, resolute Libertarians and future Tea Party adherents. What they saw in Kinky was someone who wouldn’t filter himself, someone whose image was crafted by himself and no one else. It wasn’t enough to win, but with Strayhorn at 18% and Kinky at 12%, it was the wildest Texas election in recent memory.

As a fellow musician, I know the power of authenticity, and I have never met anyone as authentic, as completely himself, as Kinky.

John Jordan, a native of Corpus Christi, was a longtime Austin bass player before he worked on Kinky Friedman’s campaign in 2006. He joined The Dallas Morning News’s Austin bureau in 2008 as an office manager and The Texas Tribune in 2012 as an editorial administrator. He was named deputy director of photography in 2022.

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