The Great, Late Townes Van Zandt
He was a reckless drunk and a hopeless idealist, but he was also the best Texas songwriter of our time. Just ask Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith, and countless others who knew him well.
ghg3 says: I have always admired great writers whether they were poets, novelists or songwriters. There must be something in the water in Texas to produce so many greats like Kristofferson, Robert Earl Keen, Cindy Walker and Billy Joe Shaver. Townes lyrics are the most beautiful and at the same time the most haunting I have ever heard. Rest easy Townes, you changed many lives including mine. (May 17th, 2009 at 11:35pm)
(Page 3 of 3)
Yet crowds would come—partly out of curiosity, to see if he’d crash, but mostly because when Townes was on this side of the line, and especially when he was close to it, his heart and humor filled the room. “He showed his innermost pain under the spotlight,” says Ely. “He’d start crying in the middle of a show—I mean, nobody does that.” Over and over he told the same corny jokes (“What’s white and crawls up your leg? Uncle Ben’s Perverted Rice”) after the darkest of songs, as if to say, “Hey, lighten up.” He loved playing in front of people—he felt safe onstage, he told Harold Eggers—and he especially loved touring. John remembers a show his father did at Austin’s Cactus Cafe in 1996: “He was real shaky, trying not to drink too much and blow the gig. He had his microphone cord wrapped around his guitar strap, and he was struggling with the strap. The crowd began murmuring, and finally the sound man ran up and fixed the strap. It was a forty-second ordeal. It was so quiet that you could hear a pin drop. Townes looked up from his lap, still shaky, and said, ‘It gets much worse.’ The way he laughed, everyone roared in laughter. It was a great show once he played a few songs and got into it.”
The only thing Townes ever wanted, he told Jeanene, was to write the perfect song that would save somebody’s life. The only thing his friends and family wanted was to help him save himself. After the debacle at La Zona Rosa, he let Wiener take him to a Nashville treatment center—but not before having a drink in the Dallas airport. “Amigo, I’ve been drinking for thirty years,” Townes told him. “You can’t feel guilty that you can’t stop me.” Most everyone tried to get him to slow down, and most everyone failed. “When I told him he drank too much,” says Susanna Clark, “he’d say, ‘Susanna, there’s sober people in India.’”
Townes deteriorated rapidly in his last three years, almost dying in 1994 when Jeanene (by then his third ex-wife) drove him to Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville for pneumonia. Then, on Christmas Eve, 1996, he fell and hurt his hip; a week later he agreed to go to the hospital, where doctors said the hip was broken. After making Jeanene promise not to leave him there, he let doctors operate on him at one in the morning on January 1. Jeanene took him home later that day. At ten that evening, while lying in bed nibbling on cheese, crackers, sliced apples, and roast beef, with Will and Katie Belle nearby and Jeanene on the phone with Susanna Clark, Townes had a heart attack and died. “He told me three or four times in the last three or four years that he’d live to be fifty-two,” says Steve Wiener. His father had died of a heart attack at 52. Townes was sure the same fate would befall him.
“All you keep’s the getting there . . .”
Townes had two funerals—one for each of his lives. The service in the North Texas town of Dido, where his father was born, was mostly a family affair. Some of his ashes were buried under a headstone bearing the epitaph “To Live’s to Fly.” The service in Nashville, by contrast, was a music business happening; it grew so big that it had to be moved at the last minute from a funeral home to a large church. Friends like Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett eulogized him and sang songs.
As often happens after the death of someone famous, especially someone mischievous enough to tell writers what they wanted to hear, the tributes and obituaries missed some things, like his sense of humor, and printed exaggerations of the legend. The New York Times, for instance, pegged him as a rich kid who had spent “many of his teen-age years in a mental institution” and ate dog food to survive as a poor musician.
As also happens when someone famous dies, squabbling erupted over Townes’s legacy. For several years now, fans have awaited a sixty-song, multi-CD set from Tomato (formerly Poppy) that was recorded in 1991 and contains new versions of his songs. That in itself would be nothing extraordinary, but the premise was that all of the songs would be duets, with Townes and one or another of his various admirers. Almost half of the collaborators have already sung their parts, including Willie Nelson, Freddie Fender, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Emmylou Harris. Townes was sober when he recorded his vocals, says Kevin Eggers, who calls them “magical.”
But there’s a problem. According to Jeanene, Eggers got Townes’s blessing to bring in a group of backup singers to sing on 5 songs during the recording sessions. Two years later, she says, Eggers brought them back to sing on 25 more songs without Townes’s knowledge—“and they drown him out.” Eggers retorts that they’ve always been on the songs and that Townes loved them. Although Jeanene has threatened to sue to prevent release—“It can’t come out with those cows mooing over Townes”—Eggers will put out a single-CD sampler this April and the whole set by next year. Or at least those are his plans. “I will put the records on a shelf,” he says, “if she keeps harassing me.”
Jeanene often inserted herself into the thick of Townes’s career when he was alive, and her continuing to do so after his death bothers some, who point out that she is his ex-wife, not his widow. Then again, their divorce decree gave her all the copyrights that he owned, and she is coexecutor, with John, of his estate. Jeanene says that she and Harold Eggers took care of Townes during his last fifteen years, even after their divorce, and—with their two children to raise—she’s not going to stop now.
Which is to say the estate hopes to put out an album of its own: just Townes and his guitar, two new songs plus “Pancho and Lefty” and other usual suspects. At the time of his death Townes and Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth were making another album, this one for Geffen Records, which would have been his major label debut. He got a kick out of being discovered by the younger generation. “I’m the mold that grunge was grown in,” he would tell Jeanene, who is buying the masters from Geffen for a possible future release. They cut four songs, including “Screams From the Kitchen,” whose chorus is: “Good-bye to the highway, good-bye to the sky. I’m headed out, good-bye, good-bye.”
“To live’s to fly low and high . . .”
Guy Clark opened the Austin City Limits show by telling how Townes had had an epiphany in school when a teacher was talking about how the sun was eventually going to burn out: “Townes said he snapped and said, ‘Hold it. Do you mean I’m supposed to be here on time, shine my shoes, sit up straight, pay attention—and the sun is burning out? Man, are you hip? The sun’s burning out!’” Then Clark played “To Live’s to Fly,” Townes’s quiet masterpiece of affirmation in the face of despair and loss. If “Waitin’ Around to Die” was his road map, “To Live’s to Fly” was his statement of purpose. He wasn’t the best gambler, but he was lucky. Whether touched on the shoulder by God or just plain touched, he figured out what he was supposed to do: write songs, sing, save lives. Fly. And, like the punch line to one of his bad jokes, crash. It’s funny how sometimes those who are so good at dying are so good at living. To Townes Van Zandt, that was the best joke of all, and he got to tell it over and over again.
My Library
