"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 who liked shocking people and was a bit ambivalent about the Austin experience, partly because he saw the place as his home, not as a destination. "I lived in this city for 17 years," he told Reid. "I went to high school here, I did the whole trip. I didn't suddenly become a guru with long hair." He even sneered at the Armadillo World Headquarters, the town's legendary music venue: "A lot of people think it's a very warm place, but to me it's an airplane hangar."
