“It’s not the pot of gold that matters, it’s the rainbow.” — Kinky Friedman
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by: George Varga
Never tell author, singer-songwriter and former Texas gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman you’re sorry for being late. Not even if you’re calling him a full day after a scheduled phone interview.
“Don’t apologize! That’s for Catholics and Democrats!” quipped Friedman, whose several dozen books include “Elvis, Jesus and Coca-Cola” and “Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned: A Novel.”
More examples of his brashness — and his remarkably colorful life — are highlighted in the new book “Everything’s Bigger in Texas: The Life and Times of Kinky Friedman” by Mary Lou Sullivan.
The 332-page biography includes a two-page foreword by Friedman, who writes: “I have no regrets about what I told Mary Lou or what she may have written. Like I say, there’s a fine line between fiction and nonfiction and I believe Jimmy Buffet and I snorted it in 1976.”
Here are edited excerpts of our interview with Friedman, whose songs were recorded by Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, Dwight Yoakam and other admirers on the 1999 tribute album, “Pearls in the Snow.”
Question: Is happiness good or bad for a songwriter — or any writer, for that matter?
Answer: I think that if you’re happy and well-adjusted, you can forget it. You have to be miserable to write a good song. I’m kind of at a point of happiness right now, but I don’t want it to influence me too much. I really don’t want to be happy — and I’m a little too happy right now.
Q: You’ve had success in your life and you’ve had failure. Which has been a bigger impetus?
A: Well, my shrink, Willie (Nelson), says if you fail at something long enough, you become a legend. I like that one; that’s pretty accurate. … Unbounded success is much harder to deal with than failure. Failure is easy and anybody can deal with that. But success — I’ve noticed with the success I’ve had — is a harder thing to work with.