Jeffrey Friedman, formerly the bass player of Storm & Twang and front man of The Fried Men, took what little earnings he got from a publishing deal that he’d lucked into upon first arriving in Los Angeles, and started a lucrative pot growing business out of his Eagle Rock garage. He possessed a green thumb, and the money rolled in. He would often play banjo to his plants, and sing them little songs that he made up on the spot. Things went well enough that soon he was able to afford a small chunk of land outside Landers, California near Joshua Tree. Here, he went full-scale ‘indoor warehouse grow’ and began to compete with the best of the best in the burgeoning California legal weed market. As with all recreational drug distribution channels, anyone doing reasonably well would most definitely meet unsavory characters along the way. These people would present themselves as ‘businessmen’ and then turn out to be very much connected to a cartel.
After moving to Nashville in the Great Eastward Migration of the 2010s, prior to the global pandemic, he continued to enlarge his marijuana business. He retained employees back in California while steadily branching out with a 60-acre purchase outside Columbia, Tennessee that was flush with pure underground spring water.
Friedman had a few local employees running that operation while he kept a house just north of Nashville in Whites Creek, where he lived alone with an orange Tabby cat named Sanchez. Although he purported to be a musician, and was actively playing sets at various East Side bars, he was in fact a successful drug dealer who was not quite able to shake some California business ‘partners’ interested in branching out to the ever expanding central Tennessee market. As a result of his dabblings in music (a somewhat genuine talent), Jeff Friedman quickly became the dealer or choice for many up and coming scene-makers, producers, lawyers, nurses, music business wranglers, as well as reefer connoisseurs residing in East Nashville and Music Row.
Lo and behold, it turns out his side hustle as a four-track cassette-recording enthusiast began to perk up some ears as well.
Several local clients were producers and Spotify tastemakers. Occasionally, Friedman would play his own music over the sound-system in the Whites Creek barn where he stored his weed, and, eventually, some heard a few of the unmixed cassette tracks while visiting. One of them asked to have a copy so he could bring the music to a label friend. At first, Friedman was sceptical, thinking his days of music business hustling were over, but the producer buddy was persistent and eventually Friedman mixed down a rough copy of the cassette into MP3 format. And thus we have the spark which ignited the fuse that detonated the bomb of this unfortunate story.
Between networking, establishing new contacts, and hiring employees Friedman unintentionally, if naturally, let more than a few distant relatives of the Sinaloa Cartel into the fold. Within a few years, men who wished to expand the business into more lucrative drugs, such as cocaine and fentanyl, were paying him visits. In the meantime, Friedman, who spoke enough Spanish and also was a serious aficionado of the gangster balladeer Chalino Sanchez, had begun recording his own Americana-tinged versions of original narcocorrido-style songs.
Friedman was tall, laid-back, and handsome enough. He often sported a leather trilby and had a gentle way of expressing himself. If there was nothing threatening about Jeffery Friedman, his colleagues were another matter.
After a music business associate made a Soundcloud link to pass around, the MP3s of Friedman’s songs began to circulate. The cover art was crudely made on his laptop from a printed image of the barn with the words “Passenger Slide” stamped directly on the front with an old typewriter. The photograph also featured a barely recognizable (to most) image of a lanky character in a straw cowboy hat entering the barn with a banjo on his shoulder.
One of the first people to hear the tracks was Kim Gantz of Dirty Pike Music. She raced out to meet Friedman and pitch him a deal. There was no two ways around it, the songs, primarily about the exact details, habits, mannerisms and fashion of actual drug dealers and cartel members, were catchy and recorded in a lo-fi way that made the listener feel like they were hearing something timeless and immediate at the same time. It was real street music, sung about real characters. Friedman possessed a gift of a baritone voice that kept your ears attuned. He wasn’t a perfect singer, but there was conviction there and any listener hung on every word.
The first track on the EP, called “Something That Is Real” had the lyrics:
I am no imitator,
I will not instigate your heart.
To break without good reason,
I have work to do and I am a man of my word.
The next time we arrive here,
I will have all of the things you need.
The silver and the gold
And we will take this town.
Other songs, with titles such as “Franklin By Midnight,” “Take Me To The Springs,” “River Of Blood,” “Last Strain In Clarkesville,” or “The Rat On The Roof” told specific details of drug deals that had gone well and some that had gone awry. The most popular track was a lone banjo and vocal song called “Man In The Black Truck” and it had specific details of an especially dangerous thug that Friedman had only encountered once down on the grow site outside Columbia, Tennessee.
His Mexican associates referred to this particular gangster as El Animalito (The Little Animal). Friedman, who had never ran afoul of his business partners, was very fortunate in that he never had to do any of the truly dirty work, i.e. the intimidations and sometimes beatings of local hoods who were late on paying their bills after being fronted drugs to sell. The successful pot farmer slash songwriter “El Jefe” Friedman maintained his own crew of both Caucasian and Latin American youth that had come up through the chain of command and had passed the various tests of trust and soldier camaraderie.
The cartel was simply not ever going to let a business opportunity just evaporate and the connections from California to Tennessee just got thicker as time went on. The Sinaloa Cartel in particular was brilliant at placing American born sons into universities where they would get business or law degrees and keep tabs on the local trade. These descendants of thieves had money and fast cars and they were able to infiltrate social scenes. They had jobs at legal firms and were completely planted to keep track of the workings of all illegal drug trade. They were not interested in the legalization of any of the drugs they moved and therefore letting the government take a cut of their money. Ironically, many were knows to contribute heavily to the campaigns of politicians who were anti-legalization of any kind.
As the underground popularity of the Passenger Slide tracks and then homespun videos made by super fans just took over the Americana internet channels, the Spotify numbers just rose and rose until eventually there was actual money being reported via the ISRC Codes implanted in all songs on all formats. So where was the money to go? At first it went to Dirty Pike Music, who then had to report these earnings and then open up an account with Friedman so that he could be paid his rightful royalties for being the composer, performer, and sole musician and vocalist on all of the tracks.
This was all a big surprise to Friedman, who didn’t have Spotify or television and basically listened to old blues and Narcocorrido albums on poorly attended vinyl and cassettes up in Whites Creek. He was completely unaware that local radio stations—specifically WXNA, had begun to play his songs quite regularly. Other local stations followed. Eventually, the call came in from Todd Snider, who was also a customer and had heard the tracks first hand, to do a support slot at The Ryman set for April 20th of 2021. The gig was eventually cancelled due to a Covid-19 situation, typical of that time, but Friedman and Snider decided to have a little shindig up at the barn in Whites Creek on that same day anyway. The party attracted more press about Passenger Slide and what it was all about. Nashville Scene did a two-page spread with the headline “The High Life In Whites Creek”, which featured photos that accidentally showed the distant relatives of actual cartel members. The FBI began to make just enough of a show to motivate certain activities intended to preserve the way things were.
One week after the Nashville Scene article came out, Friedman was paid a visit by El Animalito himself, along with a few of his subordinates. They got out of their trucks at 8 a.m., and kicked the door down, startling Friedman, who had taken to falling asleep on the couch in his living room, which had also become his home studio and ping-pong room. Friedman’s gun, a loaded, old-school cowboy style Colt .45 revolver, was on the coffee table next to him. There was no time to reach for it and besides he was severely outnumbered with several guys packing much more serious heat.
It seems the higher ups at the Cartel were none too pleased that Friedman has called so much attention to his (and by proxy, theirs) operation with his “pequeñas canciones maricon” (little faggot songs) that revealed a little too much. He tried to reason with them, but the order had come down, and while the subordinates surrounded the couch, the boss appeared from the kitchen calmly petting Sanchez the orange tabby cat and humming the melody from “Man In The Black Truck.” El Animalito, who had used cat food from his pocket to attract Sanchez, slipped on some oven mitts that were next to the stove, and continued to pet the purring cat. At once the men all grabbed Friedman and slammed his face down on the ping-pong table, ripping down his sweatpants and underwear. El Animalito slammed Sanchez down on the table in front of Friedman’s face, took out a machete and severed the head of the cat in one fell swoop.
Friedman was crying in horror at this while the little underboss made his way over to the instruments hanging on the wall nearby. He grabbed the banjo that was used in “Man In The Black Truck” and walked behind Friedman, who was still being held down by the underlings. “No mas Spotify, no mas Chalinillo,” he kept saying, using the derogatory term that Mexican music fans had invented for Chalino Sanchez imitators, before sodomizing him with the headstock of the banjo and smashing the body onto the Friedman’s head, severing the neck from the body of the banjo, while also rendering him unconscious.
Before exiting the property, one of El Animalito’s men watched over Friedman’s limp body while the rest went into the barn and helped themselves to all of the product that was stored there. They also took all of the Passenger Slide vinyl that had been recently delivered, plus used a baseball bat to smash all of Friedman’s recording gear, and were gone before 9 a.m. When Jefferey Friedman came to, he called a friend and told them to bring over a first aid kit. There was a mess to clean up, and there was business to tend to.
The phone call to Kim Gantz was easy. Legal documents had never been signed, so when Friedman asked her to remove the tracks from Spotify and she protested slightly Friedman yelled, “Take the fucking songs down right now!” and hung up the phone.
Passenger Slide was, obviously, never performed in public, and the Spotify account was removed the following week. All bootleg social media accounts were issued a cease and desist order, through Friedman’s lawyer, and the town quietly murmured about what may or may not have happened.
Today, the songs are the stuff of whispers and legends, as it is never brought up around Jeffrey Friedman, who gratefully returned to the horticultural life that had first brought him peace.
Americana Unsung 