Poet of Motel 6
Echo Hill Ranch, where Kinky Friedman roamed 40 years, could host God’s own bowl game.
Perfect oval bordered precisely and completely by a wave of hills and mountains, the 400-acre expanse awes and humbles, naturally, but also empowers – palpably. Three hours out of Austin, past country stronghold Bandera and not far from the legendary Kerrville Folk Festival grounds, Echo Hill Ranch manifests an epic tranquility beyond the sheer grandeur. Crowning it all, the property’s namesake peak rises 1,800 feet above a cluster of cabins and living quarters.
Kinky Friedman’s inadvertent swan song, was written here on this land: Poet of Motel 6. The album emanates from the Ranch’s main structure, where Kinky lived and died. His office manifests as if out of a Raymond Chandler novel, 20th century sepia (pictures, paintings, gubernatorial signs), and war heroes: parents, pageant beauties, presidents. A guitar leans near his cot-like bed, and on a table by the door – near a six-foot promotional cut-out of Kinky – sits one of his iconic black hats.
Completed before its proprietor… checked out (Kinky would’ve appreciated that one!), Poet of Motel 6 bears out that enthusiasm from first second to last. Ten tracks written and sung by one Richard Samet Friedman, born November 1, 1944, the album caps a rich musical renaissance its late author enjoyed during the final decade of his reign. Humanist, satirist, novelist, Kinky wore “musician” the proudest.
In 2015 – as if one of his trademark cigars – The Loneliest Man I Ever Met chomped down on cover touchstones from outlaws who considered Kinky a peer: Cash, Dylan, Haggard, Nelson, Waits, Zevon. Circus of Life three years later produced the celebrated detective novelist’s first new material since Under the Double Ego a whopping 35 years earlier. Resurrection in 2019, a full-band triumph produced by preternatural overseer Larry Campbell, completed the comeback.
Until Poet of Motel 6, it turns out.
“I think it’s his most heartstring-pulling record,” opines Hardcharger Records head Jesse Dayton, who played his confidant for six weeks in a sold-out Houston theatrical production called Becoming Kinky. “And not just because he passed away. At the time, he had no idea [the LP would prove his last]. It’s not like Blackstar from David Bowie.”
“‘Last hurrah?’” considers the album’s producer, instrumental MVP, and post-production genie David Mansfield. “No. I don’t think so. There might have been times when [Kinky] feared it might be his last hurrah, but he still talked about other things he wanted to do, musical and literary.”
“We had hoped to put the vinyl in Kinky’s hands,” acknowledges Marcie Friedman, Kinky’s younger sister, “but that’s not quite what happened. That really made me listen to the songs differently, because there was a time when it was just Kinky’s voice and David’s guitar. Then David started adding the music and harmonies, and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh. What a great interpretation of the music!’
“Now that we’ve really had the loss, I understand a lot of stuff in the songs better.”
“The record Kinky had done before with Larry Campbell, Resurrection, [showcased] some wonderful work,” says Mansfield. “Larry went back with him all the way to his New York City residency at the Lone Star Cafe. After that album, Kinky had a bunch more songs, but he wanted to do something a little bit different.
“We knew each other from back in the mid-Seventies on [Bob Dylan’s] Rolling Thunder Review and the aftermath of that where we did some recording together. We lost touch, but I had been producing records and a couple mutual friends thought we might make a good match.”
Tracked spring 2023, Poet of Motel Six advanced quickly, but Marcie Friedman estimates Kinky began suffering from Parkinson’s perhaps as far back as 2020.
“I think Kinky knew early something was going on [health-wise],” she offers. “He set up this whole record of saying goodbye and wanting to write it and have it be done. It was getting harder for him to move around.”
When Kinky returned home in the late-Sixties after a post-collegiate tour of duty with the Peace Corps., he pursued the state soundtrack and modeled his Texas Jewboys after swing king Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys. Outlaw country classics like “Ride ’Em Jewboy,” “The Ballad of Charles Whitman,” and “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” dried up in the Eighties, wherein he switched to authoring full-time – books, Texas Monthly columns, and eventually speeches. Famously, he sought the Texas governorship in 2006.
Fortunately, music never got its fill of Kinky Friedman, so what restarted last decade didn’t end until Poet of Motel 6.
“Spring 2023, Kinky and I met in Austin at a friend of his,” recounts Mansfield. “We spent a few days just going over the songs. [Then], we went into a local Austin studio with his old pal Steve Chadie, who engineers a lot for Willie. Kinky was already experiencing moderate cognitive issues at that point, so I came up with a technique I thought would work.
“It was just the two of us and Kinky did not play guitar. We were facing each other in comfortable easy chairs with a glass in-between and I played and accompanied him. If he started getting lost I’d throw him a line. If he did something quirky in his phrasing, I would follow him like a hawk.
“Working on vocals, he would sometimes experience hallucinations, which is one of the things that happens with the cognitive problems that accompany Parkinson’s. Fortunately, he had a sense of humor about it and would ask if YOU saw the little children dancing in the corner.
“I kept a ledger of what we had and didn’t have, and kept doing takes until I knew we had enough to piece something together. Then I took it all back to my studio in New Jersey and spent a good while editing and turning it into a performance.”
Jesse Dayton, himself a modern country outlaw – writer, director, guitar-slinger for hire (Waylon, Willie, X) – heard Poet of Motel 6 soon after completion, searching for fodder for his imprint with boutique Los Angeles indie Blue Élan Records.
“Well, the first thing I heard was ‘Poet of Motel 6’ and it choked me up a little bit,” he says. “when I heard these songs for the first time, it sounded like Kinky trying to explain to people how lucky he was for what he suffered for. He told me one time, the people who do best in this business are the people that can suffer the most. All those things he’s talking about, like the rodeo stuff, he’s bringing in all these small town characters and how they’re dealing with the world.”
“[With] ‘Poet of Motel 6,’ Kinky was very upset when Billy Joe Shaver died. Kinky idolized Billy Joe. I hear that sense of loss.”
David Mansfield experienced it firsthand. “Those songs he wrote about people he cared about that had passed on, they were quite elegiac,” says the producer. “He sang beautifully, and at the end he was in tears. He was very emotionally connected when he was doing these vocals.”
Both David and Marcie recall those vocals coming full-circle September 2023.
“A great idea of David’s was that the first session was just Kinky alone, but for the final harmonies, David came back down from New York to Arlyn Studios in Austin,” beams Marcie. “Everybody who’d sung harmony came: Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Rodney Crowell, Rick Trevino, Amy Nelson. He brought everyone together, so Kinky came in for one of his last trips to Austin.”
“That Arlyn session,” agrees David, “Kinky was able to be there with his cigar and his duster coat, and just enjoy being around everybody.”
From Nelson Mandela to Presidents Bush Jr. and Clinton, Kinky Friedman made fans with every song he wrote and some of them live right here in the trees of Echo Hill Ranch.
“I believe the symbolism for ‘Hummingbird Lanai’ originated here on this patio,” says Marcie, everyone rather sleepy after feasting on Thanksgiving leftovers, including six of Kinky’s beloved rescue dogs. “My mother began feeding hummingbirds here in 1953 – began attracting them. The hummingbirds always come on March 15. It’s uncanny.
“They come on the Ides of March and leave about the middle of August. They’re migratory. So she fed them and we have a lot of them – the children would come and feed them.
“When she died, my father took over doing it. When he passed, Kinky took over.
“This record is as good as Kinky’s [celebrated 1973 debut] Sold American,” she concludes. “I think it’s as good as anything he’s ever written. And I, sister helping my brother, I missed the point that every song on this record is about saying goodbye. I don’t know why. They’re all beautiful songs and they say it in different ways. I finally realized that – a little too late.”
Not too late, because one needs only step into this natural Hill Country coliseum to understand – and hear it in the wind as every Lone Star song-teller from Lefty Frizzell to Townes Van Zandt – that the hills are alive with the sound of Kinky Friedman.
And then – again – on another uncloudy day, Billy Joe Shaver’s voice was heard across the heavens and this is what he said: Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome the next governor of the great state of Texas, Kinky Friedman.