Quintin Jardine's blog

Kinky Friedman died yesterday. I knew him. I read his books and when he was signed up for the Edinburgh Book Festival I volunteered to chair him. 

It was an interesting gig. He brought his guitar, did an hour of songs and standup and only read from his current book because I persuaded him. Afterwards we went to eat. I blew most of my chair fee on the tab. He told me ‘It will be returned to you tenfold,’ which of course it never was.

Kinky was a great friend of Willie Nelson. During that dinner he talked about him, fondly. He told me that one of the things about Willie was that he never refused an autograph, to the extent that he would stand for an hour and more in the rain signing his name for fans.

A couple of years later I was looking for a title for a Skinner and recalled that story. I called Kinky and asked if he minded me using it. He said ‘Fine, go ahead.’ Thus, my novel, ‘Autographs in the Rain’, came to be called what it is. Around that time a couple of US kids appeared in the queue after one of my Festival gigs and asked me to sign a book for him. ‘The Kinkster reads you,’ they assured me.

I hadn’t thought about him in a while, but it was a shock to hear that he had died. This afternoon I read an obituary that said he’d gone back to recording music independently in his later years. When I looked for it on Apple Music, I found a song. It was written and recorded in 2018, and it was about, and dedicated to, Willie Nelson.

The title? ‘Autographs in the Rain.’ Returned to me tenfold, you might say.