Kinky Friedman Bringing New Album, Less Misery To Bridge Street

People tend to speak their minds when they meet singer-songwriter Kinky Friedman, 70, who’ll be at Bridge Street Live in Collinsville on Friday, Oct. 30.

There was the older lady — Friedman guesses she was in her late 80s — who approached him last year after a show at a community center. “She said, ‘It’s so nice to have you on the planet,'” Friedman says.

Then there was the guy in Texas, after Friedman closed his show with “They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” who asked, “Why did your people kill our Lord?'” Friedman, in his characteristic in your face style, replied it was because he had it coming.

Friedman meets a lot of new people these days. His current tour — in support of “The Loneliest Man I Ever Met,” his first studio album in 32 years — consists of 34 shows in a row, without a break. It’s a grind for performers half his age, but Friedman insists it has perks.

“You start to feel like Hank Williams opening for Mozart,” Friedman says. “You begin running on pure adrenaline. And the shows get better and better, it’s very pure, very raw. I think there’s something to that.”

Friedman, who was born in Chicago and grew up in central Texas, has been provoking audiences with songs, humor and political satire for 45 years. After college and a Peace Corps stint, he formed a country-rock outfit called Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys and recorded a number of songs, including “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in Bed” and “Ride ‘Em Jewboy,” a tribute to Holocaust victims. Friedman eventually toured with Bob Dylan on the 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue tour.

When his music career crested in the 1980s, Friedman wrote detective novels. He eventually became a columnist for Texas Monthly and ran for governor of Texas in 2006.

“Bob Dylan once told me that I just started [playing music] about five years too late,” Friedman says.

“The Loneliest Man I Ever Met” marks a serious return to music — or maybe a return to serious music. Backed by guitars, harmonica, piano and a stand-up bass, Friedman’s gravelly baritone brings weight and nuance to “Tom Waits’ “A Christmas Card from a Hooker In Minneapolis,” Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country,” Willie Nelson’s “Bloody Mary Morning” (a duet with Nelson himself), and other songs by his heroes and contemporaries.

The new album, in a sense, is Friedman’s “Time Out of Mind” — the critically acclaimed 1997 Bob Dylan album, released after a seven-year drought — or perhaps a late-career gem of the type that Rick Rubin has produced for older artists.

“I love [‘Time Out of Mind’],” says musician Brian Molnar, who produced “Loneliest Man.” “It’s a big influence on the sound I go for. We use a lot of vintage mikes and stuff, certainly like [producer] Daniel Lanois did on that one: old carbon ribbon mikes and old preamps, and stuff that gives it that kind of feel that the vocals really cut through. Nobody’s doing that really these days.”

Molnar opens shows on Friedman’s current tour. He and Friedman met five years ago. “I was down there [at Friedman’s ranch],” Molnar said, “just visiting and hanging out and hit him with a few ideas he didn’t go for.” He referenced a live recording that Friedman made with Larry Campbell in the 1980s. “I said, ‘Let’s do something kind of like that. Let’s do a stripped down thing where you’re just delivering the vocals and the story,’ and he thought it was a great idea, rather than going in with drums and pedals and all this stuff. We figured we’d do a nice underproduced record, as opposed to an overproduced record.”

Friedman and Will Hoover wrote “The Loneliest Man I Ever Met” years ago. It’s one of three Friedman originals on the album. “We planned out about 25 songs,” Molnar said. “If something didn’t work, we just kind of checked it off and moved on. We didn’t want to add a lot of pressure to the situation and labor over everything, but it sounds more natural that way. If it works it works.”

The new album was released on Avenue A/Thirty Tigers on Oct. 2. “It’s really selling, and more importantly, the critical acclaim: It’s hard to find a bad review of it,” Friedman says. “It’s absolutely amazing to me. … I’d be the last guy that you would expect to do a record like this.”

Despite his current bliss, Friedman doesn’t expect to stay happy. “If you’re happy, you can forget it,” Friedman says. “I fight happiness at every turn. If you want to be an artist, you’ve got to be ahead of your time and behind on your rent. You’ve got to be miserable.”

For now, Friedman’s fans will see the other side of him.

“There’s this kid, a teenager … he said, ‘It’s so nice to see somebody enjoying his life,'” Friedman says. “And I thought that was very nice.”

KINKY FRIEDMAN performs at Bridge Street Live in Collinsville on Friday, Oct. 30, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $25-$35. Information: 41bridgestreet.com.

Editor’s note: this story has been changed from an earlier version to remove an expletive reference.