How Kinky Friedman Conquered Texas
"When you get big, you become a joke," Kinky Friedman told an interviewer in 1974. "I started as a joke, and that's a pretty good way to start." This was near the beginning of Friedman's career arc from enfant terrible to beloved old crank, and he was playing the punk-kid part beautifully, dropping one caustic aside after another—from "I don't really view hippies as people" to "I hate intellectuals, and I am one." The interviewer, Jan Reid, put the highlights in The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, his great book about the Austin music scene of the '70s, where Kinky came off as a witty wiseass...