by Rob Curren

Artists seldom complement each other as completely as Billy Joe Shaver and Kinky Friedman. I saw them perform at the Broken Spoke on January 31 as part of their Two Moving Parts tour honoring Eddy Shaver, Shaver's son who died on New Year's Eve, 2000. The fierce reality of Shaver's life shared the stage with the Kinkstah's mythology.

Shaver, the bard lion, clawed into the depths of his heart. Amongst the results were "(Been to) Georgia on a Fast Train and "Old Chunk of Coal." As well as being covered by Willie Nelson and others, these two songs had appeared on the Tramp on Your Street album where virtuoso Eddy reinvented his father through his electric guitar. For some of Shaver's performance, the audience's hat brims tilted downward. But Billy Joe lifted the mood and the whoops, wilding up his hair for "Woman is the Wonder of the World" and reached epiphany with his spirituals, "You Can't Beat Jesus Christ" and "I'm in Love."

Over half a century of singing, Billy Joe Shaver has encountered most of the joys and horrors on offer from Texas to Nashville and back again. He started singing on a barrel in a grocery store in Emhouse, Texas to supplement his grandmother's pension. Victory, Shaver's mother, worked in a honky tonk called the Green Gables. He remembers these venues and times with bare beauty:

Piano roll blues
danced holes in my shoes.
There weren't another other way to be.
For lovable losers,
no account boozers
and Honky Tonk Heroes like me.

"The Corsicana Kid," as Kinky Friedman calls Shaver, has worked in a cotton mill, spent some time in the navy, lost a finger to a lumber saw and done "just about everything you can do with cows and horses." He divorced and remarried Brenda Tyndall twice. Elvis and Dylan sang his songs. A battle with the bottle took him back to religion.

One of Shaver's musical victories came in 1973 when Waylon Jennings used ten Shaver songs out of 11 that comprised the album Honky Tonk Heroes. Jennings had promised to cover Shaver's songs on an earlier album.

A dispute about the delay on that project resulted in the two troubadours rolling up their sleeves on the street in Nashville. Thankfully for the history of music, Jennings averted conflict by telling Shaver, "I sure don't like you, but I sure do like your music." Critics lauded Honky Tonk Heroes as inspiration for the "outlaw" country movement, which led to the boxcar ballads of Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson.

If Billy Joe Shaver lives out legends, Kinky Friedman lives out paradoxes. Cowboy hat in New York, cigar maintaining mouth, cat in charge of his household, entertaining a troupe of misfits on his couch:the narrator of Friedman's novels stretches the imagination. In the flesh, Friedman's hat and cigar only look bigger.

In his fiction, Friedman rejoices in category errors. God Bless John Wayne finds the author celebrating his Jewish heritage on the same page as egg noodles. Later in the novel, an exposition of Robert Louis Stevenson's short story, "The Bottle Imp" leads to the "Road of Loving Hearts," a road built by Samoans from the town of Apia directly to Stevenson's house.

Elvis, Jesus and Coca Cola open at Tom Baker's wake where the narrator sings, "Ride 'Em, Jewboy," a Western translation of what is an essentially Eastern experience, the Holocaust. This concoction of noir, self-parody and music is what Friedman strives for in his writing, performance and life.

Often, Friedman's writing, performance and life happen at the same time, like three tastes in a single happy hour cocktail. His fiction twangs with references to Willy Nelson and Waylon Jennings; his country and western songs read like political satire; his life story would make a good novel and a great Johnny Cash song. In his own words: "Some day they're going to make a life of my film." Friedman lives a theatrical life, seeking honesty in his writing.

From his days on the road with "The Texas Jewboys" to his recent performances with the only remaining ambulatory member of that band, Lil' Jewford (keyboardist and melodica player), Friedman has kept country music bizarre. He crooned satires like "People who read People Magazine" with the same reverence for the medium of country that Billy Joe Shaver would put into a reverie like "Jesus was Our Saviour and Cotton was Our King."

Back at the Broken Spoke, the performance of "Santa Claus Killed Jesus Christ" struck me as Kinky Friedman at his bizarre best. Billy Joe Shaver had just been singing odes to Jesus, many of the crowd sang along. A scathing comment on marketers usurping Christian beliefs and festivals did not appear opportune. Was Friedman lampooning the crowd? If so, they loved it.

More than the crowd, Friedman lampooned himself. Onstage, he claimed that Billy Ray Cyrus ("the anti-Hank") stole his riff from "Homo Erectus" for "Achy Breaky Heart." Friedman proved that he put his cigar-worn voice up against the beautiful strains of Sweet Mary's fiddle. He described his experiences in Borneo with the Peace Corps: "teaching agriculture to people who had been farming successfully for thousands of years." With "Asshole from El Paso", the Jewish cowboy outdid Okies from Wiskogie at parodying the place he loves. "We don't have no love-ins in El Paso", he sang with a mixture of pride and shame.The killer from A Case of Lone Star" was amongst those singing along.

Kinky Friedman's courageous choice of material mirrored the courage of Billy Joe Shaver's performance. On a night which might have brought bitter memories or sentimentality, both artists produced an uplifting set. Eddy Shaver's tribute came in the musicians' own, uncompromising styles.