For more than five decades, Sam Kindrick carved a niche as San Antonio’s resident gonzo journalist, documenting the area’s outcasts, dreamers, oddballs, pimps, prostitutes, druggies — and its musicians.
As a close friend to legendary performers such as Augie Meyers, Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker, Leon Russell, David Alan Coe and countless others, Kindrick documented the rise of “ outlaw country ,” the movement that crossed the paths of shit-kicking rednecks and pot-smoking hippies. In documenting it, Kindrick became an outlaw himself.
As Kindrick documented those on the margins, he became one of them, transitioning from clean-cut country boy into an “outlaw journalist” with long hair, a scraggly beard and a dizzying array of silver jewelry. Along the way he also picked up a major drug habit.a feisty free newspaper remembered as equal parts brilliant and hilarious. Despite getting swallowed by his addictions, Kindrick never lost his newspaperman’s instinct to cut through the bullshit.
Thanks to his rural upbringing, Kindrick grew up on the land, riding horses and keeping wild animals as pets. His inimitable writing voice is an echo of that older world but combined with more modern influences. As a youth, he read J.D. Salinger’sKindrick started college at Sul Ross in Alpine, where he met a young Elvis Presley and his band. They performed in the town’s high school auditorium as a benefit for the Alpine Future Farmers of America.
Kindrick’s first story writing for his new university’s school paper involved interviewing a “half-naked female with hair scorched in a student housing fire,” he recalled in his memoir. Readers loved the story, and so the journey began.After graduation, Kindrick jumped from one small newspaper to another. While in San Angelo, he wrote alongside famed Western author Elmer Kelton, who penned a farm-and-ranch column, but it was another coworker who nudged him in his ultimate direction.
During those years, Kindrick also spent time in Crystal City, an impoverished South Texas town experiencing labor and racial upheavals. His dispatches on the strife earned a Pulitzer nomination. Ironically, Charlie Kilpatrick, the man who had him nominated, fired him a few years later. “I never was a critic,” Kindrick said. “Who am I to pass judgment on somebody’s fucking talent? I don’t give a fuck what some asshole in Austin thinks about something I’ve written. … What difference would it make what I think? I can’t play a guitar worth a shit.”cover. Kindrick had given Nelson ample ink while still at theand the two grew close enough that the writer joined Willie’s entourage and eventually emceed two of the singer-songwriter’s first picnics.
filmed in and around San Antonio. Kindrick details the on-set escapades in one book chapter, claiming that co-star Goldie Hawn, seen wearing a Hemisfair sweatshirt in the flick, was a “total pothead.
When Kindrick’s bust went down, every TV and radio station was on hand to document the proceedings. After his second arrest a year later, Kindrick faced a quandary — either rat out his drug dealer or go to jail. Fearing the wrath of his criminal associates and remembering the advice of Paul English, Willie Nelson’s drummer, Kindrick chose jail. He’d hit rock bottom.
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