The Great, Late Townes Van Zandt
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After years of playing the guitar for himself and his friends and family, Townes decided to play in front of strangers. He hung out at Houston’s Jester Lounge, where he listened to and then opened for artists like Hopkins, Guy Clark, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Doc Watson. He developed a wheeling, flat-picking style from listening to Hopkins. And he started writing, at first novelty songs like “Fraternity Blues.” Townes later told Austin deejay Larry Monroe that he heard Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are a Changin’ and decided, “This is what I’m gonna do.”
“Nothing is too much to bear . . .”
If music was in his heart, he was still studying to be a lawyer. “A lot of Townes was doing things because it was what he was supposed to do,” says Fran. But in January 1966 Townes’s father died at age 52, prompting him to leave school for good, turn his back on his past, and do what a musician was supposed to do. For the first time he went on the road, playing shows with Walker and Clark, and he began to write serious songs. One of the first was “Waitin’ Around to Die,” a road map for his adult years: “I guess I’ll keep gambling, lots of booze and lots of rambling / Aw, it’s easier than just waitin’ around to die.” He purposefully set out to live by those words, telling Fran that “you were living a lie if you sang the blues and hadn’t lived them.”
In 1967, Townes went to Nashville, where a tape he had made caught the attention of Kevin Eggers, who was looking for acts for his fledgling independent label, Poppy Records. The following year, Eggers released Townes’s first album, For the Sake of the Song, which contained some of Van Zandt’s most despairing songs—“Waitin’ Around to Die,” “Tecumseh Valley”—plus bizarre kitsch like “The Velvet Voices” and “All Your Young Servants.”
Over the next five years the Texas blue blood turned Texas bluesman cut five more albums, all on tiny Poppy. They were sometimes overproduced and frilly, the Nashville sound threatening his dark vision, but the songs he wrote during this period were some of his best. Influenced by Shakespeare as much as Williams and Dylan, they told of the romance of rambling, the precious weight of moments, the quiet glories and sore failures of love—and the utter aloneness of human beings. They were odes to joy that had no sentimentality, blues numbers that had no self-pity, and sad songs that made people feel good. Townes believed that the sky was full of songs just waiting to be pulled in. He said that “Pancho and Lefty” came through the window of a seedy hotel room and that “If I Needed You” came to him in his sleep, in a flu-driven fever dream. “I was just tapped on the shoulder from above and told to write these songs, as opposed to wanting to be a success in the music business,” he told writer Don McLeese. “What I do is between me and the Lord, to examine and possibly alter the state of grace in which I live, and thereby the state of grace of anybody who listens.”
His impact was indisputable. Emmylou Harris remembers seeing him play Gerde’s Folk City in New York in 1968 or 1969. “I was stunned,” she said at the Austin City Limits taping. “I had really never seen anything like that before. I thought he was the ghost of Hank Williams, with a twist.” In 1969 Townes was in Lubbock hitchhiking to Houston, his backpack crammed with copies of Our Mother the Mountain but no clothes, when he was picked up by Joe Ely. He gave Ely a record, and that night Ely and Jimmie Dale Gilmore stayed up listening to it and learning to play the songs. “Every song seemed like a dream,” Ely says now. “They were painted dark shades of blue.”
So, it turns out, was Townes. In 1971 he overdosed on heroin and almost died. In the 1975 country music documentary Heart-worn Highways, he’s seen wandering playfully around an Austin back yard in the middle of the day with a bottle of whiskey, a can of Coke, and a BB gun. Given his bouts of deep depression and his adventures of manic frenzy, people took literally the title of his sixth album—The Late, Great Townes Van Zandt—though Eggers says it was a “goof on the nonexistence of his career.” Stories of his reckless ways were told and retold. One of the most notorious involved a drunken Steve Earle, an angry Townes, and a five-in-the-morning game of Russian roulette. Or maybe it was a calm Townes and an angry Earle. Either way, the inveterate gambler was lucky. “He was very similar to Hank Williams,” says Eggers’ brother Harold, Townes’s longtime road manager and sometime manager. “He was running himself into a wall.”
Townes spent most of the seventies moving between Austin, Houston, Nashville, New York, and the mountains around Crested Butte, Colorado. He and Fran divorced in 1970; sometime during the next decade he married and divorced again. He was living the life he was writing about: traveling, lighting for a while, then traveling again. John remembers spending a year with his father in Austin “listening to all these unrecognized folk players and pickers drink and play every night until morning.” Maybe because Townes had grown up in one elite society, he rejected another: the rarefied hierarchy of the Nashville music scene. “He surrounded himself with desperate people,” says John. “He didn’t have to explain his way of living to them.” In whatever town he played, says Harold Eggers, he would go down to skid row and give each of the winos five dollars. “He almost resented money,” Eggers says.
“Where you been is good and gone . . .”
Townes’s final decade gave him plenty to be happy about. In 1987 he released his first album of new songs in nine years, At My Window, on a new label, Sugar Hill Records. Then 43, he was living in Nashville with his third wife, Jeanene, and their four-year-old son, Will (their daughter, Katie Belle, would be born in 1992). He had an extraordinary collection of songs to his credit, and many of the artists he had inspired ten and twenty years before—Earle, Ely, Gilmore, Harris, Lovett, Crowell, Butch Hancock, and Lucinda Williams—were making albums of their own. Now a new generation of musicians was discovering him. The Seattle protogrunge band Mudhoney recorded his “Buckskin Stallion Blues” with Gilmore. The Canadian folk rockers Cowboy Junkies invited him to tour with them and recorded a couple of his songs.
But for every high in Townes’s life, there was a low. A life of hard living had taken its toll. You could hear it in his voice, which was lower and thinner and halting; he often spoke his lyrics instead of singing them. You could hear it in his new songs, which came less frequently and had less subtlety than his earlier work; he told Jeanene that “A Song For,” the unrelentingly bleak first song on 1994’s No Deeper Blue, was a suicide note. You could see it in his live performances, where he sometimes seemed to be dying onstage. He went into detoxification programs a dozen times, by John’s reckoning, though he’d have to bottom out before he’d go. “Unfortunately, someone who is as afflicted as Townes, he has to drink,” says his friend Steve Wiener. “He would try to ration it out. He’d stop drinking between four and nine p.m. on the day of a show.” Of course, he sometimes crossed the line, as he did that night at La Zona Rosa.
