C'mon, "Austin City Limits": Lighten Up!

The Kinkster is an accomplished author (57 books, several best-selling mystery novels) and putative gubernatorial candidate. However, between a stint in the Peace Corps and his first book in 1986, the Kinkster was part of the Austin music scene (Waylon, Willie, and the Boys) in the 1970s. His appearance on "Austin City Limits" in 1976 has never aired on PBS. Why the hell not? How hard could it be? The Kinkster's election slogans work in this miscarriage of musical justice. I am sorry I never saw Buffy Sainte-Marie chasing the Kinkster around that stage in San Francisco. If this is (fair & balanced) music appreciation, so be it.

[x Texas Monthly]
No Show
Only one performance in the thirty-year history of Austin City Limits was taped but never aired. Guess whose?
by Richard (Kinky) Friedman

For almost thirty years Austin City Limits and I have interacted much in the same manner of Joseph Heller's fabled covenant with God: We've left each other alone. There's a reason for this. In all its storied, glorified history as the longest-running music show on television, ACL has taped only one performance that it has steadfastly refused to air: mine. I'm not bitter about this (though I am bitter about almost everything else). Indeed, I take a somewhat perverse pride in the fact that, way back in 1976, Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys were considered too risky, too controversial, and very possibly, too downright repellent for public television. For years my performance could be seen only at the Jim Morrison Museum, in Waco, but now that Janet Jackson has bared herself to the world, it's time for me to make a clean breast of things as well.

For a while after the show didn't air, I was in a mild snit. In fact, I contemplated committing suicide by jumping through a ceiling fan. Fortunately, I'm of average height, so the ceiling fan would have merely provided me with a mullet, which definitely wasn't in at the time. If I'd been as tall as Ray Benson, of Asleep at the Wheel, the world's tallest living Jew, I might have actually croaked myself. Ray, it should be noted, is not a suicide risk, having been on ACL about 117 times. Over the years, in fact, just about everybody in the musical universe has been on the show, with the possible exception of the great Buddy Rich. When Buddy was at last preparing to spring from his mortal coil, a nurse in his hospital room asked him if there was anything that was making him uncomfortable. "Yes," he told her. "Country music." That was probably why they didn't have Buddy on the show.

There have been other great artists whom the powers that be have deemed not ready for prime time. Years before ACL gave the Kinkster the old heave-ho, George D. Hay threw Elvis Presley off the Grand Ole Opry and told him to go back to driving a truck. Elvis is said to have cried on that occasion. He left Nashville, but he didn't remain a trucker for long. Some years later, when he was an international superstar, he happened to be at a party in Music City, when a record company flack introduced him to George Hay. Matter-of-factly, without malice, Elvis shook hands with him and said, "I know you. You're the man who made me cry."

Watching a bootleg video of my non-show recently was almost enough to make me cry. It was a bit like a funeral or a high school reunion, events that register faithfully the rapid and ruthless passage of time. There I was in the spotlight, wearing an Indian headdress, big blue aviator glasses, a furry blue guitar strap, and a sequined pair of bell-bottom trousers—and this was almost thirty years before Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. The headdress had gotten me into trouble before, during a show in that most-liberated of all places, San Francisco, when Buffy Sainte-Marie chased me around the stage attempting to snatch the offending warbonnet off my head. She did not succeed, but the two of us hopped around in an angry circle for about five minutes to the delight of the crowd.

As I watched the ancient concert, I didn't get that dated, insects-trapped-in-amber feeling I often have when watching Leave It to Beaver reruns. If the clothing and some of the hairstyles were clearly from another time warp, the social satire seemed to be more applicable to 2004 than to 1976. What the hell; every great artist should always be ahead of his time and behind on his rent. As Bob Dylan has said, art should not reflect a culture; it should subvert it.

There certainly seemed to be plenty of that going on in the video. There was, for instance, our song about the Statue of Liberty, "Carryin' the Torch," in which our drummer, Major Boles, played the last chorus using American flags for drumsticks. And who could forget "They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore," which contained a line that even Mel Gibson could get behind: "We Jews believe it was Santa Claus who killed Jesus Christ." There was also a spirited version of "Proud to Be an A—hole From El Paso," which stated emphatically: "God and Lone Star beer are things we trust" and "The wetbacks still get twenty cents an hour." And there was the ballad "Rapid City, South Dakota," which was recorded by Dwight Yoakam 25 years later—the first country song to touch on the subject of abortion.

I don't like to put myself up on a pedestal, but the concert was pretty damn good. I wish you could've seen it. On the other hand, all of life is perception. George Bernard Shaw was such a genius that he could review a play without even seeing it. As Sherlock Holmes once said, "What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is, What can you make people believe that you have done?"

In any case, when the producers of ACL, in their infinite wisdom, decided not to air the show, the legend only grew. Had they gone ahead and run it, I'd undoubtedly be playing a beer joint tonight on the backside of Buttocks, Texas. I'd never have had the chance to become a best-selling novelist, a friend of presidents, and a candidate for governor. The truth is I wouldn't even be writing this column, which would be a real shame, since it's the only job I've ever had in my life. So God bless Austin City Limits.

Today I have many fans, not all of whom are attached to the ceiling. They listen to the songs that made me infamous and read the books that made me respectable. To some, I'm a Renaissance Texan. To others, I'm just another a—hole from El Paso wearing a cowboy hat and smoking a cigar. Take, for instance, the manager of a Barnes and Noble in New York. When the publicist for my latest novel, The Prisoner of Vandam Street, told him that I'd be there in person to give a reading, the manager was impressed. "Oh, great!" he said. "Is Kinky going to be wearing his costume?"

Copyright © 2004 Texas Monthly Magazine

THE Question Of The Day

Not only WHY are we in Iraq, but—more importantly—how do we get OUT? William Raspberry gets to the heart of the matter. If this is (fair & balanced) Vietnam-syndrome, so be it.

[x Washington Post]
The Question We Should Be Asking
By William Raspberry

I suppose I should be more interested in what is (or was last week) the question of the day: Did our government have reason to know that something like Sept. 11 would happen and, if so, who failed to take appropriate preventive action?

But I can't get past the previous question: Why are we in Iraq?

The reason I can't get worked up about the question that dominated last week's hearings before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States is pragmatic. Suppose we had been pretty sure that the al Qaeda network had something in mind, but we weren't sure what. What would have been an appropriate response? To heighten security at the World Trade Center, which, after all, had been targeted in a terrorist attack in 1993? To step up security at all very tall buildings in America? To intensify security everywhere?

Even supposing our intelligence suggested something involving airplanes, what might we have done? If we knew flight numbers, we could cancel those flights (or run every passenger through a particularly thorough screening). But without that specific knowledge, should we have shut down certain airports? All airports? For how long?

The flap over who ignored the terror warnings leaves me feeling as I do when the Homeland Security Department ups the threat level from yellow to orange. Just what am I supposed to do?

And so I return to the question I've been worrying over for more than a year: the war in Iraq. I wish they'd form a commission to answer my questions. Was a naive President Bush duped into war by those in his administration who had a deeper purpose? Or was Bush himself calling the shots while members of his administration scrambled to provide the necessary pretext?

I had tended toward the Bush-as-puppet theory, primarily because of the president's preelection incuriosity about the rest of the world, and because certain members of his administration were on record as having a keen interest in rearranging the Middle East.

But now a second former member of the Bush administration is painting a picture of a president for whom Sept. 11 was merely a convenient pretext for making war on Saddam Hussein.

Richard A. Clarke, who was Bush's counterterrorism coordinator, recalls in his newly published memoir that Bush pulled him aside the day after the attacks and told him, "Go back over everything, everything; see if Saddam did this."

Reminded that all available intelligence showed al Qaeda to be behind the attacks, Clarke writes, the president said: "I know, I know, but . . . see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred."

Then as the still-resisting Clarke left the room, he says, the president said -- "testily" -- a third time: "Look into Iraq, Saddam."

This account comes after former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill's assertion (in Ron Suskind's book) that the president was planning from the very first days of his administration to get rid of Hussein.

Did key White House advisers conspire to get the president fixated on Hussein, or was the fixation the president's own?

And even as I ask the question, I have to acknowledge that the answer doesn't really matter -- for two reasons.

First, I don't imagine that President Bush, no matter how misguided I believe him to be, would have acted as he did in Iraq if he hadn't truly believed it to be in America's interest. Second, just as the question of who knew and failed to act before Sept. 11 has become largely irrelevant, so has the question of how we wound up in Iraq.

The fact is, we're there -- and no one I know would suggest that we simply turn and leave the Iraqis to the chaos we've largely created.

The real question (though I'd love to see it preceded by an honest confession or two) is: How the devil do we get out?

Is there a commission for that?

© 2004 The Washington Post Company