There’s a song playing over the sound system at the airport. It has me confused at first because I've got the same song on one of the CDs I’m carrying around with me to listen to in the car. It's Mary Gauthier singing Empty Spaces. Mary’s a country folk singer-songwriter from New Orleans. I’ve promoted a couple of shows for her in Cardiff, and while the shows were well attended, it’s fair to say that’s she’s not exactly a household name. Not exactly the kind of thing you expect to hear on an airport sound system while you’re waiting for your case to show up on the baggage carousel.

 

Except in Austin. Austin, more than any other American city with the possible exception of New Orleans, is about music. Well, it’s also about computers and students, but music’s at its heart. It's taken a while for this to happen, Austin doesn’t have the history of a New Orleans or a Memphis or a Nashville. It’s not the home of blues or country or rock and roll. In fact its rise to prominence as a music city only really began in the sixties.

 

It began with clubs like Threadgill’s putting on singers like Janis Joplin. The counter-culture was going on and the student town of Austin, home of the University of Texas, was the one safe-ish place in the Lone Star state to be a longhair. There was psychedelic music around, those that like that kind of thing swear by the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, but gradually what Austin came to offer was a home for longhairs who still loved the folk traditions, blues and country in particular. Off beat country singers like Jerry Jeff Walker made their home there. And the real breakthrough came when Willie Nelson moved to Austin in the early seventies, tired of the Nashville production line. A new club had just opened called the World Armadillo Headquarters and Willie started playing there, and outlaw country was born.

 

Other acts with a county hippie vibe started gravitating to the Austin scene: Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen, Kinky Friedman, Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, et al. On the blues side of the tracks Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Fabulous Thunderbirds did their thing. Gradually word started to get around that Austin was a place to check out. New York scenesters from Jerry Wexler to Lester Bangs spent time there.

 

In the eighties a festival called South By South West, or SXSW, got started. Initially this programmed lots of cool country and folk, and what was starting to be known as alt.country music. People like me were dead keen on it. Various friends of mine went over to the festival, told me how great it was. Finally, in 1995, I went over myself and it was indeed great. There was a moment where I walked out of one club on a warm March night, the sound of Lucinda Williams still ringing in my ears, and heard Robert Earl Keen chiming up in the back yard of a restaurant across the way, when I thought this place is really too good to be true.

 

Since then I’ve spent a lot of time boring people about what a great little town Austin is and plotting to go back there, and now, ten years on, I am back and to be honest I’m a little apprehensive that maybe it was indeed too good to be true. Or that it’ll have changed out of recognition. After all SXSW has now, I’m told, mushroomed into a giant music business jamboree with more emphasis on indie than alt.country.

 

An hour or so out of the airport and I’m definitely coming round to that point of view, I’ve been lost on ring roads and stuck in traffic, trying to find my way back to the freeway-side hotel I passed twenty minutes ago.

When I do get to my hotel room it smells like someone died in it, which may explain why it was very, very cheap indeed. A quick check around the room reveals that the body has at least been removed, though there are a few dubious looking stains in the bathroom. Did I mention that an inordinate number of serial killers seem to have lived in Austin at one time or another? Anyway.

 

OK, so my hotel is right next to a freeway, only accessible by car, and then only if you take you life in your hands every time you drive in or out of it, but never mind. I should only be ten minutes away from the laid back lovable cowboy hippie Austin that I'm convinced I remember.

 

Well, another half hour drive through grid locked traffic and I’ve sort of found some kind of fragment of what I was looking for. At least I’ve found the street where Waterloo Records and the Whole Foods supermarket were last time I was here. Waterloo Records is still there but the Whole Foods store, this very impressive all organic supermarket, seems to have been replaced by a multi storey car park. Well, with all this traffic I suppose they have to park somewhere.

 

So I head over to Waterloo Records and try to relax by staring at loads of records. Well it always used to work and I do find something I’ve been looking for, a record called Seven And Six by Bellwether, a fine alt.country band out of Minneapolis. I’m pleased about this and Waterloo Record is a very good record shop, but it’s still a record shop with record shop guys working in it, which means it could be anywhere, or at least anywhere cool. Time to go out and get amongst things, people. Real people, ones who don’t spend too much of their time living through books and records.

 

On my way to the checkout, though, I pause by the books section, have a quick gander and spot a copy of Jesse Sublett’s new memoir, Never the Same Again. I’ve heard about this book. Jesse Sublett is a guy who used to play in various Austin bands and he wrote a series of rock and roll detective novels around the turn of the nineties. He's one of a couple of writers I’m planning on meeting up with in Austin.

 

I pick up a copy of the book, pay for the stuff and head outside where it hits me that a lot of the reason I’m not feeling at one with this place is that I haven’t eaten all day.

 

It’s a problem simply remedied. Next door to Waterloo Records is the Waterloo Ice House. It has food. It has beer. Actually it has too much beer. After the guy has spent ten minutes telling me the names of all the different things they have on draught I can’t remember any of them, so point at random. And, exhausted by excess choice, plump for a burger to eat.

 

Replenished, I head out back to the payphone and call Jesse Sublett’s number. We fix up to meet for lunch tomorrow, and meanwhile he suggests I check out his old compadre Jon Dee Graham, who’s playing at the Continental Club later on.

 

So that’s what I do. Ten o’clock sees me pulling up in a parking lot on South Congress and walking back down the street towards the Continental Club, perennial fixture of the South Austin scene. South Austin is famously the most laid-back part of this laid-back city. It certainly feels that way tonight, the traffic has gone, the daytime heat has subsided and the vibe inside the club is as relaxed as they come. Jon Dee Graham is actually playing the opening slot tonight. Headlining is James McMurtry, the singer songwriter son of the writer Larry McMurtry (unsurprisingly, given his pedigree, McMurtry Junior is one of those acts who tend to be talked about in terms   of how great their lyrics are).

 

Jon Dee Graham is really good. Fortysomething guy in a thrift shop suit, sings like Tom Waits if Tom Waits could sing, and plays guitar with savage economy. You can see in his eyes that this is a guy who used to think he was going to make it big then realised he wasn’t and now doesn’t give much of a shit. He, as they say these days, rocks.

 

After he’s finished I hang around a bit, drink a couple of Shiner Bocks and watch as a roadie brings on no less than six different guitars on stage for James McMurtry to play. This does not bode well. Then Mr McMurtry makes it on stage, starts playing and leaves me cold. Not so much literate as wordy, if you ask me, but maybe I was just tired.

 

Back at the hotel I read the first few pages of Jesse Sublett’s memoir, in preparation for meeting him. And, Jesus Christ, in the first twenty pages we see him battling with cancer, some time in the late nineties, then flash back to the early seventies, his first band and, uh oh, his girlfriend getting murdered. I put the book down, exhausted. The room’s smell is really starting to get to me now.

 

In the morning I notice that in addition to the smell thing there are also a number of cockroaches clambering around the walls. Enough, I feel, is enough. So I head over to reception and tell them about the cockroaches. Oh, says the girl on the desk, you must be on the ground floor, right? Uh huh, I say. Well, she says, let’s sort you out with a room on the second floor.

 

So she does and from what I can see she knows her cockroaches and they don’t like to climb this high. Also the room doesn’t smell as if anything really bad had happened in it just lately. Not something I could say for the laundry room, but you can’t have everything.

 

Later on, laundry done, it’s downtown to meet Jesse Sublett. He's suggested meeting at Threadgill’s Armadillo World Headquarters. This is the latest restaurant and club run by a guy called Eddie Wilson, who used to run the late lamented Armadillo World HQ in the seventies, and then bought Threadgill’s diner in the eighties. The new place is just south of the river and it’s purpose built and comfortable, and has good bands on and is still identifiably a local institution and not a hard rock café, but it still rather lacks the rock and roll patina.

Which is not something you could say about Jesse Sublett. Jesse is tall and skinny with jet black hair, wears black leather and shades and looks in pretty good shape for a guy who had stage four throat cancer seven years back and was given a nine per cent chance of survival.

 

Sat down at a table we get talking, establish a little common ground – James Ellroy, Jake Riviera - and drink plenty of iced tea and I eat an authentically bland meat loaf special, and Jesse tells me about the book he’s working on now, the true story of a gang of long-haired, hell-raising armed robbers who hung out in Austin in the sixties.

 

Jesse’s clearly got a major interest in his city – he’s actually from a small town called Johnson City out in the Texas Hill Country but Austin’s been his home since he left school, give or take a stint in LA - so after lunch he volunteers to take me for a drive around in his PT Cruiser, see some landmarks.

 

As we drive we get to talking about the links between rock and roll and crime fiction. It’s certainly struck me how much the appreciation of certain kinds of music tends to go with certain kinds of crime fiction. It's an Americana thing in a way, or at least an aesthetic that seems to be particularly American.

 

Over the past five years I’ve been putting on monthly shows in Cardiff, mostly featuring American alt.country types, people like Mark Olson or Richard Buckner or Richmond Fontaine, names that I suspect are a lot more likely to resonate with readers of a book like this, than with the general public. And one thing I can almost guarantee these days is that each and every one of these people will have an affection for the works of Jim Thompson. For some that may be as far as if goes – noir kingpin Thompson is getting to be up there with the Hunter S. Thompsons as a ubiquitous cult figure – but the majority will also have an interest in Charles Willeford or Nelson Algren, etc, etc. I’d like to think it’s about appreciating art that tells the truth, or, to be more precise, maybe art that at least tries to tell the truth while attempting to give it some romanticism in the process.

 

Jesse is down with most of that, I suspect. He tells me how he got into reading classic crime fiction back in the eighties, to alleviate the boredom of life on the road. He started with Hammett and Chandler, then got into the more obscure stuff, lost Black Mask writers like Richard Torrey and Raoul Whitfield.  And then he got the idea of bringing his two big interests –music and crime fiction - together.

 

It's a fusion that has been attempted now and again in the other direction. Various musicians have had a go at rendering noir, whether Green On Red calling their album The Killer Inside Me, Gallon Drunk making a record with Derek Raymond, or Warren Zevon writing songs with Carl Hiaasen. But while several former musicians have written crime novels – Kinky Friedman and Rupert Holmes for starters - Jesse Sublett, surprisingly enough, is the only one to set them firmly in the world of rock and roll.

 

‘I’d spent a good part of the last ten years in dark clubs and studios, an environment that provided plenty of fodder for plots and characters’ he explains in the memoir ‘I had faith in my protagonist too. I saw him as a bass-playing Philip Marlowe/Sam Spade, tough and world weary but principled, a romantic at heart. No one else was doing detective novels like these, and the established authors got the details wrong when they wrote about rock’n’roll.’

 

Well the first part of Jesse’s closing statement is open to argument. I’d suggest there were quite a few people out there writing detective novels in the Hammett Chandler tradition. It’s the second half of the sentence that is more to the point. Rock’n’roll novels, and particularly thrillers, do indeed tend to be let down by the obvious ignorance of the writers. Just try struggling your way through the great Elmore Leonard’s lamentable music biz novel Be Cool, if you don’t believe me.

 

Jesse’s three Martin Fender novels do indeed get the details right. The first book, The Rock Critic Murders, though burdened by a hysterically busy and complicated plot, is at heart a simple and affecting story of the rock’n’roll dream going sour. There’s a real sense throughout the three books of the reality of the rock’n’roll life, the drudgery, the endless petty humiliations, and the occasional moments of transcendence.

 

The Rock Critic Murders was optioned by the movies and Jesse was paid to write the screenplay, which has led to other film and TV writing gigs. The music career chuntered on alongside, a story of bands that never quite made it or bands led by used-to-bes. He played with Kathy Valentine of the Go Gos, both before and after her hit band. He played with Mick Taylor of the Rolling Stones, some while after his hit band. It’s a hard knock life, the rock’n’roll one, with its own bitter gags (samples: What d’you call a guitarist without a girlfriend?’ Homeless. What's the difference between a large pizza and a guitarist? A large pizza can feed a family of four. And so on).

 

Then came the bout with cancer, which through some combination of mental fortitude, luck and the support of his wife and son, he made it through, to be the one in eleven to survive. And then the aftermath of this bout with mortality caused him, as it often seems to do, to reflect on his own life. And in particular to start to deal with the one terrible event that has overshadowed his adult life: the murder of his first serious girlfriend just as he was starting out in the business.

 

By now, as it happens, we’re driving through south Austin heading towards the site of that murder. It wasn’t quite the first place Jesse lived when he moved to Austin, that had been an apartment on Barton Springs, but after a little while there his girlfriend Dianne had found them this house on Glendale. Jesse parks outside it. It looks idyllic. The neighbourhood feels like its out in the country somewhere, not within walking distance of the centre of a major city. It looks, it has to be said, like the kind of place in which it would be easy to be happy.

 

Jesse and Dianne were happy when they moved there in late 1975. They’d both dropped out of college in San Marcos and come to Austin to make their way in the world. Jesse was going to be a rock and roll musician, Dianne was going to be a painter. Meanwhile Dianne temped and Jesse did odd jobs, house painting and so on. Austin was the kind of place back then where you could get by like that, even have a nice house to live in. Well, near enough anyway; to meet the rent they had a lodger, Jesse’s old friend and sometime drummer Dean.

 

Fast forward nine months or so to August 1976 and Jesse’s band was starting to come off. They had their first out of town gig coming up on Sunday 15th. Only thing that was a drag was that Dean had become an unreliable drunk. Jesse had asked him to move out and he had agreed, but as he was moving his stuff out, he’d come by with a lowlife friend called Lyle, who, Jesse later discovered, was out on parole for rape. When Jesse found that out he told Dean not to bring Lyle round again. Dean took no notice though, and even got Lyle to help him climb in through the bedroom window when he came back to pick up a few last things.

 

The Sunday night gig went like a charm. The band had played till 3a.m., an outdoor gig outside of San Antonio. They slept late and rolled back into Austin on the afternoon of Monday 16 August. Fazz Eddie the guitar player dropped Jesse off outside the house. He went in, found Dianne lying face down and naked on the bed. For a moment he thought she was sleeping but then found her cold to the touch. He turned over and saw that she was dead, strangled with a pillowcase.

 

Jesse called the cops and found himself the prime suspect. He was taken to the station completely out of it with shock, It was only once he’d calmed down that he realised he had a very good idea who the murderer might be. He told the police about Dean’s friend, said his name was Lyle, and he was a rapist from Kerrville.

 

That night Lyle Brummet was arrested and taken into custody just as Jesse was being released. Brummet confessed to the murder, confessed to several other murders as well and implicated others in his crimes in an attempt to make a plea bargain. Partially successful, he avoided the death penalty – a serious threat in Texas, of course – but according to Jesse he's unlikely to ever be released from prison. Which is something of a relief.

 

It’s a hell of a story and one that rather overshadows the rest of our drive around Austin, so before long we stop an outdoor coffee shop on South Congress just along from the rock’n’roll Mecca that is the Austin Motel and move the subject back to Jesse’s subsequent rock career. 

 

Jesse was one of those guys who, though they may not have know it , had just been waiting for punk to come along. He’d been trying to play classic Stoneys-y rock n roll on the laid back mid-seventies and the adrenaline rush of punk provided him with a context. Jesse and his crew went along to the legendary Sex Pistols show art Randy’s Rodeo in San Antonio (his band, the Violators, would have been the support act, but the promoter told them they could only have the gig ‘if he could fuck Marilyn, the drummer’ - oh those liberated 1970s).

 

The Pistols gig finally sent the punk scene over ground and Jesse’s subsequent band the Skunks became the biggest thing on the Austin circuit for a while. In fact they were more of a Dr Feelgood style high-octane r&b band than an out and out punk and that's maybe why they never really made it big outside of Texas, despite regular forays to New York.

 

At this point, and by fairly remarkable coincidence, I look up and see a familiar face walking down the street in front of me. After a moment in which my brain refuses to compute the sighting, I call out ‘Hey Jon’ and the guy stops and does his own double take before saying ‘Hey John’ back to me. The Jon in question, you see, is none other than Jon Langford, lynchpin of original punk survivors the Mekons. Jon’s originally from Newport, Wales, just up the road from where I live, and I've known him for a few years now. I also know he lives in Chicago these days and that he's always on tour and Austin is a particular home from home for him, but still. Weird huh?

 

I introduce Jon to Jesse, they know of each other but have failed to meet before on the great rock n roll highway. Turns out Jon’s in town to present some kind of stage show based on his  life and music. He’ll be performing it the following night at a theatre in East Austin, the black side of town. Do I fancy coming along?

 

I certainly do, and prior to that I fancy a drink or two, so we arrange to meet up later that night. Now it’s time to get moving: Jon’s off to rehearse, Jesse’s off to pick up his son from school, and I'm heading back to the hotel to cool off in the pool.

 

Did I mention the hotel had a pool? Well, it does and a decent size one at that. It's always been mysteriously empty up to now and when I get up close I figure this might have something to do with its being a strangely vivid green colour, and too cloudy to see the bottom. What the hell: it’s too hot for me to care, so I get in and swim and don’t notice any immediate toxic reaction and then I get out and dry off and watch the hotel parking lot, over by the bar, steadily fill up with bikers. By the time I’ve gone back to my room, got showered and changed, there must be two hundred serious motor bikes parked up in front.

 

And yet by the time I get back that night, after a few drinks and a Mexican meal with Jon, there’s absolutely no one there at all. And no debris blood or broken glass either. Bikers clearly aren’t what they used to be.

 

Next morning I head downtown to meet up with Jesse again. On the way I stop off at Whole Foods for breakfast, By now I’ve figured out that the multi story car park where Whole Foods used to be hasn’t replaced it.  It’s just the parking for the new improved Whole Foods, which turns out to be a gigantic palace of vaguely right-on food consumerism. The nearest thing to it would be an eco friendly organic version of the Harrods food hall: it’s every bit as lavish, has half a dozen places to sit down and eat or drink. This is hippy capitalism in excelsis and it’s hard to know whether to me more impressed or alarmed. It’s got all the contradictions of modern America  in one – terribly politically correct and concerned about the state of the planet and at the same time, quite terrifyingly over-abundant. Great cookies though.

 

Today Jesse wants to show me something of the way Austin was. So we head out west along the town lake that bisects the city till we come to Zilker Park and Barton Springs Pool. This is a big dammed up piece of river and, again, it’s idyllic except, Jesse says, in mid summer, when it gets way crowded and regularly has to be temporarily closed due to excess faecal contamination. Nice. For now though on a hot September day with the kids in school you could just stretch and let the world go by. 

 

But neither I, nor I suspect Jesse, are quite that laid back, so before long we’re back in the car and heading a little further west till we come to Mount Bonnell. A short hike up to the top and you can see just how far the city is starting to sprawl. I’m reminded of a list  I saw in an alternative guidebook to Austin published a few years back, It includes three commands to live by. The first two of them are in-jokes, the third one is ‘Don’t move here’, and you strongly suspect isn’t a joke at all.

 

Driving back into the city we keep on past downtown and over to the east side. This is the black and Hispanic part of town. East 11th  street is the heart of the black section. Once a thriving entertainment area, it’s long been run down, but moves are afoot to revive it, banners proclaim than we’re now in Historic East Austin. Jesse points out the surviving landmarks like the Victory Grill, a longtime blues hangout, and the school that his son has just started attending here under a new scheme to improve the integration levels. Which, as far as I can see, aren’t at their worst in Austin but, this being America, are still a long way less than perfect.

 

And then it’s time for Jesse to get back home. He’s taking his son to see the Foo Fighters. Do I like them? I don’t know, I say, I haven’t really heard them which is true enough, as far as it goes, but the reason for that is partly that I can’t imagine that I would like them much ,and partly because these days I try and leave rock music to young people. In general I still cleave to the idea that there should be an age gap in music. When I listened to the Clash or the Mekons or whoever I didn’t really want to do it in the company of my parents.

 

I realise that such a vibe - and indeed the word vibe itself – is horribly outdated, that father and son now happily exchange the contents of their IPods, but I’ve done my best to maintain it. Once my stepson reached his teens, in the early ‘90s, I forswore listening to hip hop and soul in favour of folk and country, and was duly rewarded by expressions of disgust and the defiant blasting of Cypress Hill from his bedroom. Way I see it is that music is to the generation gap as football is to international politics - a proxy for outright warfare.

 

Of course I don’t say all this to Jesse mostly because you only think of all this stuff some time later when you’re sitting down writing things up, and also because I understand the coded yearning implicit in taking your son to a gig, the urge to pass on what you know to your son, and if, like Jesse, what you know is rock and roll, well there you go. Doubtless if there were cool literary things you could go to with your son, I’d be pretty happy if Owen wanted to attend one.

 

Anyway, towards seven o’clock, while Jesse and his son are at the Foo Fighters, I'm back in East Austin, looking for the theatre where Jon Langford will be doing his thing. It turns out to be a brand new building just off 11th street. It sports a nice exhibition devoted to notable black musicians from Austin, but otherwise seems weirdly deserted. Eventually I wander into the auditorium and find Jon finishing off his soundcheck. Looks like he’ll be a little while yet so I head back out in search of something to eat.

 

The search ends a couple of blocks away at Gene’s, a friendly local soul food place that serves up some pretty good gumbo and corn bread. It's full name is Gene’s New Orleans Style Po-Boys and Deli and in the wake of Katrina it’s about as close as you’re going to come to eating authentic N’Awlins food  right now.

 

Back at the theatre a crowd has assembled and there’s barely time for a glass of warm white wine before we’re ushered into the theatre.  The show, a mixture of songs, visual and spoken word pieces, is an absolute winner of you happen to be a South Walian who grew up in the sixties and seventies, got into punk then spent time in America, and embraced the cheating charms of country music, and includes a song called Pill Sailor about the disappearing docklands of Newport and Cardiff that fair brings a tear to the eye.

 

After the show we head off to the nearest bar. This is a place called the Longbranch just along from Gene’s, and across the road from the Victory Grill, in what was once the heart of Austin’s black entertainment district. From the outside the Longbranch looks like a regular neighbourhood place for working men to drink Bud and play pool. Inside it looks pretty much like that too, but the working men turn out to be a mix of punk rockers and hepcats with interesting facial hair and just a few old school – i.e. black and Hispanic - locals.

 

Turns out the bar was taken over by a guy who used to run one of the rock’n’roll hangouts on Sixth Street. Sixth Street, though, has become a victim of its own success and is full of corporate tourist packed bars, so the hipper locals have started driving over to the east side. It’s the kind of situation that could cause a bit of rub, but East Austin feels pretty laid back and the atmosphere is generally convivial. At least it is until, several beers down the line, I decide I fancy a game of pool. A guy called Steve, who the boyfriend of Jon Langford’s bandmate Sally Timms, has been playing with a couple of diminutive Mexican guys,

 

Steve is a large black guy who, though a filmmaker these days, has done stints as a bouncer, and he tried to indicate that maybe the Mexican guys would prefer to play by themselves, but I’m too drunk by now to pay attention. So I allow Mexican guy number one to engage me in a macho handshake ritual while number two puts my money in the pool table, I bend down and put the balls on the table and indicate that I’m ready to go. Mexican guy number one, still smiling fixedly at me, suddenly reaches out and sweeps all the balls back onto the pockets. Uh oh. I smile back and retreat slowly , realising I've badly misjudged the situation. The two guys stare at me a while longer, then start yelling at each other. I move speedily away and rejoin the others at the bar.

 

‘Christ man,’ says Steve, ‘I thought the little fuckers were going to stab you.’ Not long after that the bartender calls time and while there’s talk of going on to a club I decide I’ve pushed my luck far enough for one night.

 

 

 

Next morning I've got a little time to kill before my first meeting of the day.  And so I give into habit and do a little book and records shopping. Actually secondhand book buying has lost a lot of its charm for me since I first came to America. When I wrote the original version of this book I came home with trunk loads of books. This time I haven’t bought a thing.

 

The reason why? Well maybe there’s a little jadedness, an awareness that I have hundreds of unread books on my shelves already. But that never stopped me in the past. The real reason is the internet. It’s just too damn efficient. Time was, I would walk into second hand bookstores across America and case their collection of paperbacks in the vague hope of alighting on a Jim Thompson or Charles Willeford rarity.

 

These days I could assemble a complete collection of Jim Thompson paperbacks in an hour or so’s browsing on abebooks.com (in fact it’s just taken me fifteen minutes to find first editions of all twelve of Jim Thompson’s preposterously hard-to-find paperback originals written for Lion Books -  The Killer Inside Me, Recoil, The Criminal, A Hell Of A Woman, The Kill-Off, Roughneck, Croppers Cabin, Bad Boy, The Golden Gizmo , A Swell Looking Babe, The Alcoholics and Savage Night  - all I need is $800 to pay for them), which kind of takes the fun out of it.

 

Records are a bit of a different matter. There isn’t a second hand record and CD site that I know of that's half as efficient as abebooks, and there’s always new stuff out there that you didn’t quite know existed till you see it in the rack. So I check out a couple of secondhand places, buy some old Tom T. Hall albums on vinyl from Antone’s (Tom T. Hall, by the way, is a totally underrated American genius and I only wish this book had a Nashville chapter so I could work him in there somehow) before I end up in a small and exceedingly hip new record store on South Main called End Of An Ear (which I am anorak enough to know is the title of Robert Wyatt’s little heard début solo album, which makes me think maybe I’ll fit in here). So I browse around the Davendra Banhart and Ash Ra Temple records, wonder at the amount of space given over to old school bootboy punk, and then I’m startled to alight on a whole section devoted to the works of  Jandek

 

Jandek, in case you don’t know, is a guy from Houston, Texas, who has been putting out records on his own label since 1978 at a rate of rather more than one a year. These records generally consist of Jandek playing an acoustic guitar without any sign whatsoever that he has the faintest idea of how to tune it, let alone play it, while over the top he tends to intone rather than sing disturbing/depressing free form lyrics. After a decade or so of Jandek making these records and sending them out to be ignored by college radio stations, the kind of obsessive who was starting to find Austin madman Daniel Johnston and his home-made cassettes a little too, you know, obvious, started to take an interest, and a cult of Jandek started to grow. Jandek himself, it has to be said, has a wonderful feel for how to grow a cult. His album covers are all photos with no writing on them, blurry shots of anonymous houses or living  rooms, occasional shots of a man one takes to be Jandek himself, generally taken years before the release of the record in question. The only contact information is for a company called Corwood Industries with a PO Box number in Houston. This, of course, is the only indication anywhere that Corwood Industries exists. Perfect outsider art.

 

Gradually the influence of Jandek has spread, most obviously in the work of Will Oldham aka Bonnie Prince Billy, who also favours the dark interior and out of focus snapshot approach to album cover design. Not to mention the creepy country blues as played by a madman thing. None of his imitators, however, are able to duplicate Jandek’s utter lack of conventional musicality. A movie Jandek On Corwood appeared in 2004, in which various talking heads opined about the mystery  wrapped in an enigma that is Jandek.

 

And then, to general befuddlement, one night in Glasgow, of all places, Jandek walked on stage (announced only as ‘a representative of Corwood Industries’) in the midst of an art music festival and proceeded to play a set of rickety sort of blues, (backed, weirdly enough, by someone I know, a remarkable folk jazz drummer called Alex Neilson). In the word of underground music obsession people could hardly have been more amazed if Captain Beefheart had showed up to duet with Albert Ayler.

 

Anyway that’s who Jandek is, and I’ve never seen his records before in a record shop and even though I’m well aware that they’re unlistenable, there is some atavistic record geek impulse to buy one even so, just to have this thing that will mark me out from my friends (but mark me out as what?). Then I sort of remember that I've sort of moved on, and anyway I've places to go and someone to see

 

The person I have to see is someone with pretty much the opposite approach to career building to Jandek. He’s the current frontrunner in the race to become the next governor of Texas, Mr Kinky Friedman.

 

Kinky Friedman is one of those characters who you have no need to invent because he’s busy doing the job for you. Whether as a singer of a crime novelist or an essayist or a politician, his primary drive is towards personal mythmaking.

 

I first heard the name Kinky Friedman sometime back in the mid-seventies when I was in school and given to reading all three music papers – Sounds, New Musical Express and Melody Maker - from cover to cover every week (no, I didn’t have a life). Now and again there would be a mention of Kinky Friedman and his band the Texas Jewboys, particularly when Kenny supported Bob Dylan on his Rolling Thunder Revue. However none of the coverage seemed to go much beyond the novelty angle: Jewish guy in cowboy hat sings country songs with funny titles. Then there would be a list of the funny titles: ‘Asshole From El Paso’ ‘Get Your Biscuits In The Oven (And your Buns In The Bed)’ ‘They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus’ etc, etc. And that would be it.

 

To be honest, not being much interested in country music as a teenager, and never being that fussed on comedy songs, I didn’t think much about him. I certainly never knowingly actually heard any of his songs. Then, sometime in the late eighties, I picked up a crime novel by this same Kinky Friedman (boy, it shows you how useful it is to have a wacky first name - if he’d stayed with Richard Friedman would anyone have remembered him?). The novel featured a private eye, also called Kinky Friedman and a sometime Jewish country singer. Actually he wasn’t so much a private eye as a guy who bumbled around Greenwich Village spouting one-liners and occasionally stumbling over a clue. It was a nice idea, I thought, but I didn’t feel it was all that well executed, and I suppose I half expected his literary career to pass by as quickly as his musical career.

 

But the books kept on coming, They were picked up by a British publisher who put them out in a series of omnibus editions which did pretty well, especially when Kinky started to come over to the UK to publicise them. I saw him at some crime fiction festival or other when he turned up with a woman he introduced as a former Miss Texas – something he wasn’t about to let anyone go unawares of – and he ran through a crowd pleasing routine, happily playing up to very British stereotype of what a Jewish Cowboy ought to be like. Still didn’t do much for me.

 

A couple of years later, though, I was asked to interview Kinky on stage at a London Arts Centre, for reasons not unconnected to needing the money I said yes and, in the interests of not coming over as a complete idiot, I read the book he was currently promoting. This was called Armadillos And Old Lace and it was set in and around something called the Echo Hill ranch in Texas, where Kinky appeared to have grown up, and I liked it a whole lot better than Greenwich Killing Time, partly because I was a deal more curious about the Texas Hill Country than Greenwich Village.

 

So I interviewed Kinky on stage, and had a few beers before and after and found that once you got past the shctick, here was an interesting and likable feller. Turned out he did indeed grow upon the Echo Hill Ranch. It was and is a summer camp for, mostly, Jewish kids, and it was run by his parents who were both educationalists. Kinky clearly loved it there, so much so, in fact, that he had recently gone back to live there. Afterwards I went back to the earlier books and enjoyed them more, stopped worrying about the sketchiness of the plots and started to notice of the grace notes of sadness and even wisdom lurking underneath the barrage of one-liners and intermittent PC-bating childishness.

 

A year or two later when I wrote my first book set in Cardiff, Five Pubs, Two Bars And A Nightclub, and the American publisher asked me who to send it to for blurbs, I gave her a list of names of people I’d met over the years, and put Kinky’s name down there as a bit of an afterthought, and was considerably surprised when the first person to respond was Kinky himself, with a very generous blurb. Inevitably my opinion went up a notch, and then a further notch when he did the same for my next book.

 

So enthused was I, in fact, that next time he came to Britain on a reading tour I made the trip over to Bristol to introduce myself. This was little harder than I anticipated. Meeting Kinky is a bit like meeting minor cigar-smoking royalty. It takes some while to communicate that you are anything other than a regular eager supplicant wanting a quick handshake or photo opportunity.

 

‘Hi,’ you say, ‘I’m John Williams.’

 

‘John, great to meet you,’ he says and shakes your hand and delivers a one-liner. For a moment you think he knows who you are and that’s why he’s said it was great to meet you, but then as he starts to look perplexed by the fact you are still standing in front on him, and starts swivelling his eyes to look for more flesh to press, so you jump in with a little more info. ‘From Cardiff, Wales. You read my book.’

 

‘Cardiff, Wales that’s great,’ he says, resolved to humour you a little longer, ‘I knew a guy from Wales once, name of sperm - sperm wales!’ Or something like that. When you don’t just chuckle and move along this time, he starts to look positively exasperated. He's given you two one liners, for Christ’s sake, what more do you want? Blood?

 

So dispensing with dignity you opt for shouting, enunciating each word extra clearly ‘I wrote a book called Five Pubs Two Bars and a Nightclub and another one called Cardiff Dead, You wrote blurbs for both of them. My name is John Williams.’

 

Finally the message come through, ‘Hey,’ he says again, ‘great to meet you,’ and shakes my hand again then introduces me to his sidekick, Little Jewford, a friend since childhood and a former Texas Jewboy.

 

I still feel like I’m basically in the way, so I slope off to the bar before much longer, feeling like a bit of an idiot. On stage, though, Kinky spends a couple of minutes telling the audience that I was amongst them and  that they should surely check out my books. Which was nice of him. The show was good, too. Kinky mixed up readings from his books with songs for the Texas Jewboy years. This was the first time I've heard any of then and it turned out that for each silly piece of cod chauvinism like Get Your Biscuits In the Oven there’s a thoughtful, socially aware ballad like Sold American. And it strikes me that Kinky’s blankness before the show is most likely a simple case of nerves. It’s easy to assume that a guy all dressed up and ready with the one-liners the way Kinky is, must be a confident individual. But thinking about it, it seems just as plausible that the reverse should be true.

 

Anyway that’s my history with Kinky Friedman. So when I heard about his decision to run for Governor of Texas, I figured that I could hardly come to Austin and not see the Kinkster’s election machine in action.

 

By way of preparation for the trip I read Kinky’s latest book, a slim guide to Austin. Actually it’s not so much slim as downright lazy, as if Kinky asked the publishers how short a freewheeling travel guide could be, and then halved it. Much of it is taken up with thoroughly anodyne lists of bars and restaurants, but just now and again, in the chapter on local history for one, and the chapter on local musicians for two, you feel Kinky getting interested despite himself.

 

There’s a great story about promoting Billy Joe Shaver at a benefit concert. At the end of Billy Joe’s set, he’s just saying there’s one more special person he has to thank. Kinky senses that this is him, about to receive props for being the organiser of the event, so he strides towards the front of the stage, ready to jump up and guest on the encore. Instead Billie Joe completes his sentence and announced that that special person was ‘…Jesus Christ.’ Leaving Kinky looking ever so slightly foolish.

 

And as ever with the Kinkster there’s a hit of sadness always lurking under the one-liners, often, in fact, lurking within them. Take this observation on his suitability as a candidate for political office.  ‘I can work a room better than anyone…. When I meet a potential voter, I’m good for precisely three minutes of superficial charm. If I stay for five minutes, I can almost see the pity in the person’s eyes.’ It’s a quote I’ll be reminded of time and again in the course of the day, never more so than at its start.

 

I catch up with Kinky at the Lee Mannix Centre for Canine Behaviour, in the south-western outskirts of Austin, It’s a dog training centre having an open day. There’s a handful of stalls and a fair few people wandering about with their dogs. There’s a tombola, lemonade and lots of small children. There is also a man in a black leather jacket and a Stetson looking uncomfortably hot in the baking sun.

 

‘Hi,’ I say, ‘I’m John Williams.’

 

‘Great to meet you John.’

 

Yeah,’ I said, ‘Kinky, I’m John Williams from Cardiff, Wales.’

 

‘Wales, that’s a beautiful country. I had a friend called Wales one…’

 

‘KINKY it’s John Williams. You’ve read my books, you’ve blurbed them.  We’ve met before. Someone should have told you I was going to be here.’

 

‘John, okay, right,’ he says and I can see him making the effort to retrieve my data from the memory banks. Then I can see him wondering whether or not to keep going with the Kinky shtick and deciding he really can’t be bothered, which,. I have to say, is a considerable relief.

 

‘Goddamnit,’ he says then, ‘it’s too damn hot’.

 

Then Little Jewford materialises and says hello, complains about the heat as well, and suggests the Kinkster does what he has to do, and we get the hell out of there. Kinky clearly thinks this is a solid plan. So he heads over to the table where they’ll be giving out the prizes to the best-trained dogs later on.

 

Little Jewford finds the microphone and introduces Kinky. Kinky thanks Jewford ‘He’s a Jew and he drives a Ford’ he says, as he does every time he introduces Jewford (real name Jeff Shelby) to anyone, and then he makes a short speech. The jokes fall flat and the little girls clearly have no idea who he is but he gets through it and at the end there a round of applause and a few people come up to wish him luck  and  then Jewford suggests we all head back into Austin as Kinky has a TV interview to record.

 

Sitting in the lobby of the local Fox affiliate TV station, Kinky looks utterly exhausted. He and Jewford have been campaigning across the state for the last week and he just wants to get home and put his feet up. But once he’s in the studio with the lights on, and a perky young interviewer asking him questions, he brightens up and comes out with fluent funny answers to all the questions and, for the first time, it strikes me that this candidacy is both serious and actually in with an outside chance of succeeding. This becomes particularly clear when the interviewer brings up the subject of education. Kinky points out that Texas, the richest state in the Union, is currently 50th out of 50 states in education, and you can see that he, the son of educators, is genuinely appalled by this state of affairs.

 

Once the interview has wrapped and a remarkable number of Fox employees have come up to give Kinky their support, we head out the northwest Austin house where Kinky’s campaign is based.

 

Its an unremarkable place in a newish suburban development and when we head inside its very hard to tell what going on here. There’s a living room full of middle-aged guys watching a ball game. There’s an office where Kinky stashes his stuff and there’s a guy painting the front room green. There’s also a guy called Goat, who looks a bit like a clean shaven Willie Nelson, wandering about. Jewford, as ever, takes charge of the situation.

 

Let’s go get some food, he suggests. Kinky agrees, asks me if I’d like to get some Texas bar-b-q. Fine by me, I say, and we head off down the street to a Texas bar-b-q pit, i.e. a basic barn of a place that serves assorted barbecued meats, a bit of corn and coleslaw and, uh, that about it. Kinky orders for everyone and before long we’ve all got hunks of charred flesh in front of us, and very good it is too. There’s no alcohol on offer, so the feller called Goat has headed over the road and brought back some beers. Life is sweet.

Goat’s full name turns out to be the Reverend Goat Carson. Kinky explains that he's a street preacher from New Orleans and ‘my own personal evacuee. Some people think because they’ve adopted a large number of families they’re doing more than I am. But this is an intense evacuee relationship and may last the rest of our lives so…there’s a commitment on my part.’

 

Goat cracks up at this and elaborates a little. Turns out he's a native American who’s been around the music business for years, working with the Neville Bothers amongst others, before getting into the street preaching thing. And he has indeed been evacuated. He’s angered and depressed by the aftermath of Katrina. As far as he can see there’s no way his house, or even his neighbourhood, will survive. He's fully expecting it to be torn down and rebuilt as a theme park New Orleans, courtesy of Haliburtons. Katrina, as far as he’s concerned, has been allowed to carry out a job of slum clearance and open the city up to development profiteering.

 

That’s the conspiracy theory surrounding Katrina’s aftermath, and quite a mild version of it too. Several people I spoke to while travelling volunteered the theory that the second levee breach, the one that led to black New Orleans being flooded, was caused deliberately. Thus, the government blew up the levee to relieve the possibility of white areas being badly flooded, and to move the black people out.

 

Anyway, whether or not one buys the conspiracy theories, what everyone agrees on is the incompetence that has marked that clean-up operation. This evident disorganisation does, if nothing else, play to Kinky’s campaign. His slogan ‘How Hard Can It Be?’ is finding a lot of approval, as the people of Texas watch their neighbours lives’ destroyed by the incompetence of the authorities. How hard indeed to do better then that?

 

It’s a theme Kinky develops when we head back to the house to do the interview. Kinky installs himself in the office and switches into homespun politician mode. He's actually very impressive. This whole Kinky For Governor thing may have started as a joke, but it’s clearly not one any longer. Just as in the television interview he comes over as passionate about both education and the environment. And while his dependence on rehearsed one-liners can be a little wearing in the course of a serious literary type interview, it’s par for the course for an aspiring politician. Indeed, after a while, I start to suspect that, rather than politics being a sidetrack for this writer/musician, it’s really the other way round; writing and music have been lengthy sidetracks for this born politician.

 

Kinky comes close to acknowledging as much when he explains how the project began; “Probably started in Ireland in this little fuckin’ town that Jewford knows the name of. A guy came up and said ‘you know Kinky you’re not a musician, you’re a politician.’ Because the intervals between the songs were stronger than the songs themselves. At least I assume that’s what he meant. And he wasn’t quite right. I’m not a politician and nor do I wish to be one when I grow up.  But I do think what Texas needs right now is to get rid of the politicians we do have and replace the. with musicians. That’s my idea…” He pauses then hits me with the punch line. “Unfortunately I’m not a very good musician either.”

 

Kinky simply can’t resist the lure of the one-liner and in the era of the sound bite politics why should he? The interview is littered with them. Apologies to those of you who may have come across some of these several times before.

 

On his leather jacket: ‘It was given to me by my old friend Waylon Jennings slightly more than thirty years ago in Colorado. One night I told Waylon I liked his vest and he took it off said take it, it’s yours. And that’s what I’m telling the people of Texas about our campaign - take it it’s yours.’ 

 

On the day he declared his candidacy: ‘Feb 3rd in front of the Alamo, I was half serious half not, I told people I was running for governor because I needed the closet space. Which was not true as I only have two outfits’ (This last by the way does not appear to be a joke, in fact most people suspect it’s an exaggeration. Oh god, I’m doing it now).

 

On the current Texas governor, Rick Parry: ‘He goes to church a lot, which is either political or religious but not spiritual.’

 

On where he grew up: ‘Born in Chicago lived there about six months, couldn’t find work, moved to Texas where I haven’t worked since.’ Boom, boom

 

On his previous venture into public life: ‘Kerrville, Texas is where I ran for Justice of the Peace in 1986, and my fellow Kerrverts returned me to the private sector.’

 

On the oil question: ‘We’re running out of dinosaur wine We’ve got to stop the Saudis from playing the jukebox and the  rest of us dancing to the tune.’ (His policy by the way is summed up like this  ‘As regards oil I've suggested the Trust for Texas Heroes which is a one per cent surcharge on oil and natural gas which we estimate would bring in 1.5-2 billion dollars a year to be spent exclusively on raising the salaries of teachers cops and fire-fighters. And I'm also recommending the state government get behind biodiesel and help Willie Nelson and myself sell the state bio diesel. Willie’s bus ruins on 100% vegetable oil.’)

 

On fiscal policy ‘I’m not an economist I follow my father’s line. His accountant once asked him what his financial goals were. My father said his financial goal was for his last cheque to bounce.’

 

On open government: ‘I want to be the first governor with a listed phone number which you can call several hours a day.’

 

On moral teaching: ‘You won’t find another candidate who supports both prayer in school and gay marriage.’

 

On the death penalty (a big issue in the state that executes more people, by far, than any other) ‘I’m not anti-death penalty, but I'm damn sure against the wrong guy getting executed.’

 

And so on. After a while Kinky seems satisfied that he's got the election message over and we move on to talking about his career to date.

 

He offers a little more detail on his childhood: “I lived in Austin, Houston, and the Hill Country, Kerrville. My dad was a professor of  educational psychology at the University of Texas. My mother was the first speech therapist in the Houston school district. They started a camp for boys and girls, the Echo Hill Ranch, where I spent many summers.”

 

So what was it like being a Jew in Texas at that time? Did he experience any prejudice? “No, not at all, most people were busy picking on the Mexicans. Jews had an opportunity to pass if they wanted to, But a Jew should be an outsider, that's one of the nicest things about being a Jew, to be on the outside looking in. That’s a good vantage point. Like Lieutenant Colombo.”

 

The Echo Hill camp has a strong Jewish cultural identity, but also a distinctly Texan one. It’s a combination Kinky has no problem with. His affection for Texan culture, while sometimes self-parodic, is plainly rooted in deep affection. Nowhere more so than in his fondness for that iconic Texan figure, the cowboy: “I want to defend the name of the cowboy, people use it to mean a bully the cowboys never been a bully. Anne Frank has pictures of American cowboy stars pinned up on the wall in her secret annexe.”

 

But didn’t the Texas Jewboys cater to liberal anti-Texan prejudice by parodying cowboy culture? Not in Kinky’s view: “No, we didn’t. I wasn’t parodying anything, I’m the bastard child of two cultures. I’m a cowboy and a Jew. It’s absurd to be both those things but that’s the way it is. I see them as endangered species these days because cowboys and Jews - real cowboys and Jews - care about everybody in the world.”

 

Rather Kinky sees his vision of the cowboy as a liberal icon as one that is increasingly vindicated: ‘Texas has been Austin-ised, Austin and the Kerrville folk festival used to be my power bases, all I had: today you can go to the most redneck part of Texas and they're voting for Kinky.’

 

Kinky himself left Austin in the mid seventies. The Texas Jewboys looked like making it big for a while, touring with Bob Dylan and all. That opportunity disappeared in a cloud of cocaine, and by the late seventies Kinky had moved to New York where he embarked on a seven year residency at the Lone Star Café . It’s these years that he draws on for most of his fiction. They saw him running around with the hard living crowd that people his books, including the writers Larry Ratso Sloman and Bill McGovern. It was also a time that nearly killed him: “I'm very lucky to have survived New York. My friend Tom Baker had died, a lot of people were dropping like flies, kind of a life in the fast lane experience and I’d burned out on New York anyway. I came to Texas to recover and it did heal me.”

 

Hs return to Texas coincided with his mother being gravely ill. She died of cancer in 1985. And Kinky moved back into the family ranch, helping his father Tom, brother Roger and sister Marcie to run it in the summer time, and living on his own there – give or take a small menagerie - through the rest of the year.

 

It was a time that brought him back into the family, and family is clearly enormously important to Kinky. The legacy of his father Tom, ‘Uncle Tom’ to generations of camp-goers, who died in 2002, overshadows everything Kinky does. “He died three years ago but he's still my special consultant on these matters,” he says of his decision to run for office.

 

Just before Tom Friedman died, Kinky wrote movingly about him, and in particular about his career as a World War Two flying hero, in an essay called The Navigator, written for Texas Monthly. Amongst the readers moved by it was another war veteran, George Bush Sr. He's not the only Bush to have taken an interest in Kinky’s career, though, which may explain why one easy target he's reluctant to take potshots at is the current Pres.

 

This is most likely because Kinky, perhaps uniquely amongst contemporary writers, has been invited to the White House by both the last two presidents. Bill Clinton, whose love of crime fiction is well known, invited Kinky to a dinner, and apparently spent much of the evening trying to persuade the head of a film studio that she should film Kinky’s novels.

 

George Bush, however, being a former governor of Texas, has a rather more long-standing claim on the Kinkster. Or at least his wife does. Before becoming First Lady Laura Bush was a librarian and she later helped set up the Texas Book Festival as well as fronting various campaigns to get children reading. She’s a long-time Kinky fan and he returns the sentiment vigorously ‘If Laura had married me,’ he’s quoted as saying, ‘I'd be president of the United States, and George would be -- I don't know, managing a Wal-Mart in Midland or something.’

 

The friendship has continued even after the junior Bushes made it to the White House. Kinky has been their guest there and not just for dinner but staying the night and all, and generally being treated as part of the family. He evidently reckons it’s churlish to run down someone who’s shown you that level of hospitality, and you can see his point.

 

And it may be that having had such unusual access to the corridors of power helped to persuade Kinky to go for it himself. That and the death of his father which, I can’t help suspecting, may in some way have been a liberation. He’s no longer under the shadow of the universally loved war hero, Uncle Tom Friedman.

 

As we wind up the interview Kinky tells me, in an unusually quiet and serious tone, that ‘I think me being elected would be great for the people of Texas and great for the office of the governorship, and it would be great for the Kinkster.’

 

Then, as if afraid that he's revealed a little too much, he adds ‘I know that if I lose I’m going to a retire in a petulant snit to a goat farm for the rest of my life and not speak to anybody.’

 

After the interview we head on out for the day’s final campaigning opportunity. Its at another pet centred event. Pet By Pet West is being held at a bar called Opal Divine’s and they’ve invited the Kinkster along.

 

From the start it’s obvious that this isn’t going to work too well. What people there are, are drinking in the bar. There’s a band playing, to general indifference, and barbecues going, to rather more enthusiasm. Kinky orders a Guinness, does his best to press the flesh, and then gets buttonholed by a journalist from Oregon who proceeds to grill him in minute detail about his policies. Kinky does his best, but after half an hour or so he just snaps, tells the writer he needs to go outside and smoke a cigar.

 

I find him outside a little while later, standing on his own and clearly hoping to be left that way. I know that feeling, so I join him in not saying anything for a bit and then he starts to unwind a little and he tells me about the time he was in South Africa, where his books are rather bizarrely popular, and he heard something Nelson Mandela said to his daughter, explaining that the reason he's never home is because there’s millions of little girls all over South Africa he has to look out for.

 

‘I was very touched by that and as someone who’s not married, never been married, married to Texas, no kids of my own, I think that the politicians, with respect, have not been taking care of the kids. I now feel that every kid is my kid and I will look after them.’

 

And I think I believe him There’s something curiously childlike about the Kinkster. It makes you feel oddly protective of him. I suspect that’s how Little Jewford feels as just then he appears and tells Kinky not to worry, they’ll be heading off any minute. And that’s where I leave him, a tired sixty something Jewish Cowboy with an ancient leather jacket and a good heart.