Kinky Friedman (1944-2024), and Charles Manson (1934-2017). Credit: Wiki-cc
While I would not want to imply that he who dies with the most news obituaries wins, you have to hand it to Kinky Friedman, whose death was reported by both The New York Times and Rolling Stone. For a songwriter, musician, and writer in the United States, that is a one-two punch anyone would have follow them to the grave.
“Kinky Friedman, 79, Dies; Musician and Humorist Slew Sacred Cows,” read the Times headline on June 27. “He and his band, the Texas Jewboys, won acclaim for their satirical takes on American culture. He later wrote detective novels and ran for governor of Texas,” continued the deck. I am not crazy about cliched metaphors in the headline of a news obituary, but the Times was pointing to controversial Kinky Friedman classics like “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” with a lyric calculated to offend everybody, starting with his fellow Jews.
I never met or shared a stage with Kinky Friedman, but we were label mates in the 1990s along with none other than Charles Manson, who had more news obituaries (in 2017) than just about anybody, but was still, of course, a profoundly unenviable man. That record label, Fruit of the Tune Records, died decades before Charles Manson or Kinky Friedman, or, thankfully, anyone in our band Enormous Richard. The death of Kinky Friedman leaves me thinking about the demise of our record label more than thirty years ago and wanting to memorialize it now. This is an obituary, not of Kinky Friedman, but of the record label that he and we shared with Charles Manson.
Fruit of the Tune Records is not robustly documented for posterity. I am assured I did not dream up the matter by two citations on the discography of Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys: Old Testaments and New Revelations (Fruit of the Tune, 1992) and From One Good American to Another (Fruit of the Tune, 1995). Those release dates align with the release date of the Enormous Richard record that Fruit of the Tune distributed, Warm Milk on the Porch, which was 1992. Obituaries tend to begin with the ending, and the end of Fruit of the Tune goes some way toward explaining why the label has left few traces for music historians.
I got a call one day from Bello, one of the two men (the other was Mango) who ran Fruit of the Tune in Montclair, New Jersey. Bello was calling with bad news—perhaps the worst news you can get from your record label. We no longer had a record label. It had ceased to exist. Bello, of the charming smartass type ubiquitous in the indie rock business, explained how after Nirvana exploded with Nevermind in the last quarter of 1991, every label like Fruit of the Tune snapped up a bunch of sketchy bands like Enormous Richard, thinking there was now major money in what had been classified as indie music. The market had since spoken in the form of an historic flood of returns— returns are records returned, unsold, to distributors and labels that had optimistically accounted them as sold. The unprecedented volume of returned product was driving indie distributors and labels out of business, and Fruit of the Tune had sunk in that torrent.
Bello explained to me that our records would be auctioned off at some point along with all of the label’s inventory left from their bankruptcy proceedings. An outlaw for real, Bello had broken into their now former warehouse and stolen some of our CDs—he felt sorry for us—that he said he would mail to us. As for himself, he had chosen the route of tax exile. He named a certain island and said that if I ever wanted to see him, I should go to that island, ask around for the biggest waves, and find a fish taco stand on the beach near the best surf. If he was not riding a wave, he would sell me a fish taco. For Bello was a surfer—yes, a surfer in New Jersey like the young Bruce Springsteen, though the young Bello had surfed in southern California with Dick Dale, when Dale was more or less singlehandedly creating the genre of surf rock.
Enormous Richard had come to the attention of the two strange men who ran Fruit of the Tune through a notice about our live appearance at the legendary CBGB in the Bowery on October 8, 1991. Speaking of strange men, Neil Strauss—who would go on to ghostwrite Marilyn Manson’s autobiography and author an obnoxious book about the cottage industry that trains awkward men to pick up women—wrote the preview for NY Press (Oct. 2-8, 1991). Strauss proclaimed us “funny as fuck” and said we “sound like we tour on a haycart with one loose wheel, and give away free condoms in concert.” (I handed out condoms when we played our song “Afraids,” a country-punk polka that parodied a bigoted, straight redneck who thought he couldn’t get AIDS because he wasn’t gay or a junkie— “what should I be afraid for?”) You can see how all of that would have appealed to an indie label whose best-selling artist was a satirical, self-proclaimed purveyor of Outlaw Jewish Country Music.
Kinky Friedman was out roaming the country, not behind bars, so there was not much for Bello to say about Kinky that we could not sleuth out for ourselves; and it was always understood that, with Kinky Friedman and Enormous Richard both being outside of prison facilities, we would one day meet one another and share a stage. It was Charles Manson and his deal with Fruit of the Tune that Bello liked to talk about. According to Bello, he and Mango one day hit upon the bright idea that everyone knew Charles Manson was a failed musician and this had something to do with the killing spree he masterminded, yet no one had a record of his music. They decided there must be some money in releasing a Charles Manson record.
According to Bello, they wrote to Manson in prison and soon found themselves negotiating with a lawyer on Manson’s behalf and the State of California. Bello claimed that California was then governed by a so-called Son of Sam law that precluded mass murderers like Manson from profiting from their intellectual property. Bello and Mango hit upon a workaround with the state where a foundation was formed that accrued Manson’s royalties, which were then distributed to nonprofits; Manson favored funding food pantries. Bello found it amusing and cool that Fruit of the Tune’s opportunism on Manson’s notoriety ended up feeding some food-insecure people in California.
Looking at Charles Manson’s discography, such that it is, I see no mention of Fruit of the Tune, but that absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. The Enormous Richard record distributed by Fruit of the Tune was first released on our own vanity label. In those heady few months when one could walk into a major retailer anywhere in the country and lay hand on our record, the only evidence that Fruit of the Tune had anything to do with it was their sticker they had affixed to the cellophane. Their ultimately fruitless plan had been to do a second, larger pressing of Warm Milk on the Porch when our initial run sold out, then release our next record on Fruit of the Tune, by which time we’d be chasing Kinky Friedman on the charts.
The only Charles Manson record that accords with Bello’s admittedly tall tale is Poor Old Prisoner Boy, released in 1989—a credible year for an upstart, outlaw label that would be releasing a Kinky Friedman record by 1992. At that time there was no other Manson record in print, the market gap that Fruit of the Tune was formed to exploit. The title – mass-murdering cult leader posing as “poor old prisoner boy”—suits sarcastic hipsters like Bello and Mango. The release is credited to what Discogs refers to as an “unofficial label in Germany” with no other records to its name. It would be just like these two tricksters to create a German front to facilitate an overseas pressing of Manson’s record and then be its distributor, perhaps marked with a Fruit of the Tune sticker they created for that purpose and later stuck on Enormous Richard records. That ploy would hide their fingerprints on a product that could be expected to end up in court and give them a haven for inventory in a nation with less reason to impound Charles Manson records than the United States. I also note that the name of this “unofficial label”—Remote Control Records —would be an appropriately witty name for the German front of a record label run from afar by two wiseguys in New Jersey.
It is perhaps fitting that a record produced to exploit a gap in the market—Charles Manson’s music was not in print—would be impounded, in the end, not by a prosecutor or censor but by bankruptcy court. One of the more puzzling things my band members and I have to say for ourselves is one of our records was sold at auction in a lot that also included boxes of records by Charles Manson and Kinky Friedman.
When Bello mailed me (at the house I rented on Marconi Street on The Hill in St. Louis) the boxes of our record he had stolen from bankruptcy court, he included a postcard with an impromptu cartoon of himself surfing a wave. It is funny, his visual clue that the surfer was him. When Enormous Richard signed with Fruit of the Tune, Bello took us out to celebrate at a cheap Indian buffet in Manhattan. In those days I was playing sight gags with my partial denture—a mouth plate with only one false tooth that you could flip out without opening your mouth. At some point during our lunch at the Indian buffet, I pulled my stunt on Bello—I flipped my denture mouthpiece into the back of my mouth and smiled with my right front tooth suddenly missing. Without missing a beat, Bello then flipped his own denture mouthpiece into the back of his own mouth and smiled with his own right front tooth suddenly missing. That was the visual clue: the smiling cartoon surfer also had a hole in his face instead of a right front tooth.
