The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock by Jan Reid

Author:Jan Reid [Reid, Jan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press

KINKY FRIEDMAN

Over the Top. The performance of Friedman and the Texas Jewboys for the first season of Austin City Limits is legendary, but it was never aired on television. Too much. 1975.

“But I’ve got to ask if the scene is really here. Something’s happening because of the interest in the press. The Washington Post called me in Nashville a while back and wanted to know about the Texas scene. But the question really is, does that mean anything? Remember a couple of years ago when Mickey Newberry and Kris Kristofferson were saying Nashville was the Paris of the thirties? Paris of the thirties, my ass, it was one big con.”

Finley interjected, “Every ten years or so they start talking about a metamorphosis in country music. There’s no such thing. After the dust has cleared, control rests in the same hands that always had it. Every time somebody says there’s a new phase in country music, invariably it doesn’t get absorbed by country, because those people reject it. It gets absorbed by pop.”

“Now if Willie Nelson can get off as a big, national, commercial pop star,” Friedman said, “with his angelic attitude intact, it’ll be very interesting to see. Somebody behind him has got to do some ball-cutting though, because you get hosed by people as you go along.

“But I wonder if it’s going to become a localized thing like Cajun music, which I suspect. I don’t really think people in Madison, Wisconsin, and Berkeley are going to get off to it. Everybody keeps talking about Waylon Jennings crossing over and becoming a pop superstar, but the only way he’ll do that is with a big TV thing or movie.

“Personally, I think all the talk about the brotherhood of country music is a lot of baloney. When Skeeter Davis pulled her stunt at the Grand Ole Opry, not one of the people who’d been singing with her for twenty years would stand up for her when they threw her off. It was a stupid thing for her to do there, talking with the Jesus trippers, but her career was just nipped in the bud, for whatever it was worth. None of those people would help her.

“I really think the best thing to say about these people in Austin is that if at any time they wanted to be a rock-and-roll star and make a lot of money, and they didn’t make it, then they just like their music. That’s the difference between me and Michael Murphey. You called him an intellectual in your article. Well, I hate intellectuals, and I am one. He maybe more of an artiste and his music may be a way of life, but I look at it as a business. If I had an old lady and a dog and a house by the lake and a child I really liked, I might be able to settle into that kind of thing.

“But what does it matter if we have two hundred or four hundred country bands

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