Remembering Kinky Friedman’s campaign for Texas governor

You come to see

What do you want to see

Yeah, you come see

But you’ll never know

— Kinky Friedman, “The Wild Man of Borneo”

Kinky Friedman died Thursday. His obituaries list his various activities: Peace Corps volunteer, bandleader, provocateur, satirist, singer-songwriter, crime novelist, essayist, perennial candidate for various offices (Kerrville justice of the peace, governor of Texas, commissioner of agriculture). I would add Borscht Belt comedian, killer chess player, dedicated cigar smoker and dog rescuer to the list.

He also happened to be my boss when he ran in a four-way race for governor in 2006.

I’ve never known anyone who worked harder without having a real job, and I consider my own efforts in this regard quite impressive. His campaign had many career-minded people focused on order and organization. There were a few who seemed determined to avoid not only work or employment, but in fact any kind of useful activity whatsoever.

Over the years, I’ve come to understand that this was intentional, that it was Kinky’s preference. For him, a level of chaos was a feature, not a bug.

My hiring was just one example: as I approached fifty, my resume was limited to one job: bass player.

I joined the campaign to escape a life that was becoming unbearable for me after 30 years as a professional musician. A few years earlier, at a festival in downtown Birmingham, Alabama, two band members and I had gotten on stage and started tuning our instruments—the adjusting of monitor levels, the beating of drums, and the clacking of cymbals that precedes a concert—when I suddenly felt like I could hear every single thought of every person in the audience. I stared at my bandmates in wonder, wondering if it was just me. This condition, which I’m not even sure has a name, only got worse over the next few years. The crowds became intolerable, an impossible situation for a professional musician. When I got the call from our former booking agent and Kinky’s first campaign manager, Cleve Hattersley, I jumped at the chance. It was a testament to my musical talent that I thought I was getting a real job.

The first time I remember meeting Kinky was at UT-Austin, one of the first events of the campaign. Accompanied by a large number of students, he wandered the campus, chewing an unlit cigar and answering questions from a group of captivated students. I was seduced by his ease, his lively and quick wit and his ease with difficult questions (which I noticed he didn’t really answer).

The details of Kinky’s gubernatorial bid were never made clear, but his platform was strongly supportive of teachers and public schools, deeply skeptical of the death penalty, and adamantly opposed to Gov. Rick Perry’s proposed Trans-Texas Corridor, an ambitious but deeply unpopular multinational corridor of superhighways, railroads, and utilities that would have cut a gigantic swath through the state.

Kinky also offered voters an ambitious vision, rich in slogans but lacking in detail. She echoed Texans’ deep sense of identity, including their distrust of government. “Is it that hard?” and “You can lead a politician to water, but you can’t make him think” were classic Kinky slogans, which appeared on t-shirts and stickers that we sold by the load. He knew how to exploit a feeling that was neither liberal nor conservative: anger. Very few people, if any, looked to Kinky for political statements. What appealed to many people, myself included, was a persistent frustration with the status quo.

Unlike the major party candidates — Perry and former Democratic Congressman Chris Bell — independent candidates Kinky and former Austin Mayor and state Auditor Carole Keeton Strayhorn faced the difficult challenge to stand for election. The obstacles were considerable: getting the signatures of 1% of the number of voters in the previous election (in 2006 this was around 50,000) for a petition. But each signature had to come from a registered voter, and that voter could not have voted in either the Republican or Democratic primaries. Voters could only sign one or the other petition – Strayhorn or Kinky, but not both – otherwise the signature did not count. And our campaigns had 60 days, from the primary until May 11, 2006, to collect these signatures, which would then be validated by the Texas Secretary of State.

To maximize those 60 days of signature collection, we should begin an intense campaign much earlier than party candidates. When I joined in the spring of 2005, about 18 months before Election Day, the campaign was just getting underway. My first job was painting our first headquarters, a small, drafty office in an old two-story building a few blocks south of the Capitol. I set up the first computer, a Dell with Windows (I spent so much time on the phone with a Microsoft tech assistant in India that I knew her children’s names), I set up the first telephone, and I even had my bicycle stolen from the alley behind the office.

We eventually got two more HQs as the campaign gained momentum. The second was a former main office and warehouse of a cosmetics company, donated to the countryside either for free, or almost for free, by a millionaire close to Kinky. We were fired when the production team from the beloved TV series “Friday Night Lights” spotted our building and offered our landlord a ton of money. I made the producers pay for us to move smoothly and overnight into our new home, a boarded-up car dealership with a large campaign sign mounted high and visible from the adjacent highway. After our campaign ended, Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign team took over the location.

We were constantly on the campaign trail. If we couldn’t get enough signatures, two years of hard work would vanish like smoke from a Kinky cigar.

Our approach to obtaining these approximately 50,000 petition signatures was different from Strayhorn’s. She had decided to spend huge sums of money on a company that would operate mainly with temporary workers. We decided to keep it in-house, so we bought banks of used computers and hired lots of volunteers (we used Facebook when it was still limited to colleges and universities), as well as all the staff, to participate in the gathering. So we were able to verify our signatures before delivering them to the secretary’s office, whereas Strayhorn’s campaign relied on the number of signatures. The day we turned in all of our signatures (in an elaborate convoy led by Austin police officers on motorcycles), we knew we were way over the minimum. Our verified signature total left Strayhorn in the dust.

For a man who avoided real jobs, Kinky was relentless. He was on the road all the time, all over Texas, in front of anyone who wanted to have him. And many would – he was an incredibly engaging presence who read the rooms as only politicians and performance artists can. He shared a politician’s talent for making you feel, in a brief one-on-one encounter, like you were the only person in the world. If he had an appointment at 2 p.m., he considered himself late if he wasn’t there by noon. It was a running joke that if he had a flight at noon, you would drive him to the airport at 5am.

Kinky’s campaign reflects a lingering frustration that fueled populist insurgents like Ross Perot in 1992 and Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in 2016. A former Texas governor, George W. Bush, was in the White House, presiding over unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Texas, Perry found himself in a difficult situation for his support of the Trans-Texas Corridor. Meanwhile, Democrat Chris Bell exceeded expectations in the end, as Kinky’s youth turnout never really materialized. The prevailing opinion at the time was that Kinky was winning voters’ votes…