“I’ve never written with anybody,” Van Zandt said in an interview, “because I just can’t.” He explained that his songs emerged at times of isolation, “like, when I’m in upstate New York in a motel room and it’s freezing out and I don’t know anybody and the gig’s not been going very good and I haven’t seen anybody I even know for weeks … a song will come out.”
Townes recalled this period in Austin and the origins of the Delta Mama phenomenon. “I was a house act in this club in Austin, one of the other guys was the manager of the club, the other guy of the trio was a good friend of mine. I would do my show and then, during the intermission, we’d do one. [We’d] Just kid around, play some Woody Guthrie songs, this that and the other.
We wrote a couple of songs, but the only one that’s ever been recorded was ‘Delta Mama Blues.’ That was our theme song; real light. It was about … the time I was playing in Oklahoma City
[and] I met these two guys that was in the army, stationed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Every time they got out on leave at the weekend they armed themselves with a jug of Robitussin-DM
cough syrup. Some kind of dextromethorphan hydrochloride drug-store high, you know what I mean? Anyhow they called it For the Sake of the Song
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‘delta mama,’ and I wrote ‘Delta Mama Blues.’” He concluded that, at least, “I just never have tried to write anything real
serious
with anybody.”11
Back in Houston, Van Zandt’s friend Rex Bell had been working at a VA hospital and continuing to play music at the Jester and Sand Mountain, sometimes opening for Van Zandt, and all the while trying to save the money necessary to open his own club.
By the spring of 1969, Bell and a partner from his Navy days had saved enough to buy a place, a club called the Old Quarter.
“I think we had thirteen-hundred dollars between the two of us, myself and Cecil Slayton, who was my first partner, before Dale [Soffar],” Bell recalls. “The Old Quarter was at Austin and Congress, downtown Houston. It was just an old dive, and it was already called the Old Quarter; the Old Quarter was a ship
… and the sign was already hung on the building. So we figured, what the hell?”12 The building itself had once housed the Yellow Cab Club, a notorious speakeasy during Prohibition. In a written reminiscence, Texas singer–songwriter Vince Bell recalled that the Old Quarter was also “in earshot of the nightly howling from the Harris County Women’s Jail,” and described the place as “a run-down two-story stucco blockhouse of a building with iron bars across broken, cloudy windows. The 10-foot barn-wood front doors could not be locked without a chain and a stout broom handle on the order of a two by four.”13
Van Zandt started playing at the Old Quarter in the summer of 1969. Fran, who was still seeing quite a bit of Townes at this time, remembers well the early days of the club. “The Old Quarter was in the part of Market Square where during the days all the street people hung out, then, about eight or nine o’clock at night the college kids and professionals would all come swooping down and pour into this old dirty bar and it would become the yuppie place. And Townes had both crowds. Both crowds loved him.”
The fledgling club had some brief difficulty with Houston folk-scene matriarch “Ma” Carrick, but that didn’t last long. “I would have the same acts that she had, except I had beer and
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you could smoke joints on the roof,” recalls Bell. “It didn’t take long to get all the hippies over there. At first, she tried blackball-ing anybody who would play at my club, until Townes played over there. Once Townes played over there, and Don Sanders and Guy Clark, that was it. She accepted it, and she still had a good club for a long time.” As Vince Bell summed it up, Sand Mountain “served cherry Cokes with whipped cream on top.
So it was no place for us budding writer types to drown our sorrows.”14 Dale Soffar, another native of Texas City, quickly joined Rex Bell at the Old Quarter when Slayton dropped out. “We stole a lot of the Sand Mountain crowd because we had drinks.
The scene shifted over from there to the Old Quarter.”15
Fran tells a story from the period just before J.T. was born that is typical of a pattern Townes would follow for many years.
“Townes befriended a street guy down there at the Old Quarter,”
Fran recalls. “He brought this guy home. I remember waking up in the middle of the night because this guy was coughing. It sounded like he had TB or something … he turned out to be a great guy, and this guy loved Townes…. Townes couldn’t sleep thinking about him being out on the street.”
Meanwhile, that fall of 1969, Kevin Eggers was making things happen back in New York City. He managed to book Townes on an east-coast college tour featuring an unlikely pairing with Philadelphia rock band Mandrake Memorial, another Poppy act.
Eggers billed the tour as sponsored by “The Poppy Foundation in Cooperation with College Radio,” although it is possible, as some have said, that Eggers was the “Poppy Foundation” and the beneficiary of whatever profit the tour was to make. Milton Glaser was again contracted to do artwork and created a distinctive series of colorful, poppy-themed posters promoting both the label and the tour.
The high point of the tour, for symbolic reasons if nothing else, was a booking at Carnegie Hall on November 26. With a short set of songs punctuated by his own droll humor, the fairly obscure Van Zandt followed the fairly well-known political co-For the Sake of the Song
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median Dick Gregory (also recording for Poppy at the time), and preceded the virtually unknown-outside-of-Philadelphia Mandrake Memorial. Townes was somewhat nervous and tentative, and he was received politely for the most part, although near the end of the set a round of applause arose when he announced that he was about to play his last song.
He opens provocatively with the facetious “KKK Blues,” telling the audience, to their nervous chuckles, that he had considered opening with his talking blues about Thunderbird wine but decided to do the one about the KKK because he figured
“there were more bigots here than winos.” He is briefly heckled by someone yelling for him to enunciate better, but he proceeds to make his way through a nine-song set smoothly and steadily, in good voice and with crisp guitar playing. The recording of the show reveals that he’s captured the audience’s attention after a few songs, and they listen quietly to the understated set. Townes is clearly not a typical folk singer. He spends four minutes of his allotted time telling an elaborate joke about a martini-drinking nun, which he recounts to the puzzled crowd with good-humored authority to fairly good effect. In introducing “Talking Thunderbird Blues,” he reveals his newly discovered favorite way to drink Thunderbird wine, which is to pour a little out of the bottle and mix in some grapefruit juice, which he calls a “shake-‘em-up.” His performances of “Second Lover’s Song”
and “Tecumseh Valley” are particularly strong and well received, but it is the two new songs he performs, the as-yet-unrecorded
“Rake” and then “Lungs,” that are the most gripping. These songs show the development of Townes’ writing over the past year or so, and they remain among his best work.16
Van Zandt never made much of his Carnegie Hall appearance, rarely referring to it through the rest of his life, and this is one way to gauge what the appearance must have meant to him.
Carnegie Hall was an establishment goal, but not a goal for a wandering folk singer. He told friends that he had refused to appear on the
Ed Sullivan Show
for these reasons; it is not too much of a leap to assume that Carnegie Hall meant little to Townes.17
8
Don’t You Take
It Too Bad
T
OWARDTHEENDOFTHEyear, during a trip to Oklahoma City to play some coffee-house gigs with Guy Clark, Townes and Guy met a woman who was to become a major part of both of their lives.
“Townes claims that he was the one that introduced me and Guy,” Susanna Clark recalls, “but I think Townes met my sister first somehow. I met Guy and Townes both exactly at the same time…. I was living with my sister. And apparently they had become friends with my sister…. I walked in and they were both sitting on the couch. And boy, did they look bedraggled. I introduced myself, and the first thing I did was offer Guy a vitamin pill. They both had hair down past their shoulders, and skinny as rails, both of them. My easel was set up in the living room, where they were sitting, and I was painting a painting. Townes was just still very, very quiet. And I was painting away and trying to kind of chat with them, and I said, ‘I just don’t know
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Don’t You Take It Too Bad
93
what to do with this foreground. I just don’t know how to bring it forward. I just don’t know what to do.’ And Guy said, ‘You know what to do.’ And I thought to myself, ‘Well, I can’t drop my artistic hanky in front of him, because he ain’t going for it.’
And he got up and started showing me these things to do. So I really liked Guy because he knew about painting.1
“When I met Townes,” Susanna Clark says, “he had decided to leave home and decided not to call home for help for any reason whatsoever, and to be completely self-sufficient. And, by hook or by crook, he did it, even though we were all starving to death.”
Shortly afterward, Susanna’s sister died unexpectedly, and Susanna decided to move to Houston with Guy. “Townes came over practically every day in Houston, whenever he was in town,” Susanna recalls. “I remember one time that there were a lot of people down there I didn’t know. And Townes came up to me. He recognized my forlorn-ness; I had just lost my sister and I was quite lost…. Townes came over to me and put his arms around me, and then held me by both shoulders and stood back and looked at me, and he said, ‘If Guy loves you, I love you.’
And for the first time I felt welcome and I knew I had a friend for life. And he stuck to his word. No matter what happened, he was always there for me.”
On January 16, 1970, Townes and Fran made their split final with a divorce. Together, they went to the courthouse in Houston, filed the paperwork, then drove back to the house. “Townes said something interesting to me when we finally got the divorce,” Fran recalls. “We were coming home from getting the divorce, and we were still friends. It wasn’t an angry thing. And he said, ‘I may have been physically unfaithful to you, but you were mentally unfaithful to me.’ I’ll never forget that. I said,
‘You’re just trying to make me feel bad.’ But after I started thinking about it, I realized he was probably right, in a way. I always had a guilt complex over not sticking with him, feeling like I let him down. It’s that mother–protection thing. And he really went off the deep end for a while after that.”2
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
According to Townes’ friend Bianca, “After he broke up with his wife, it was a steady downhill.”3 He continued to drink heavily, and more and more he supplemented the drinking by in-gesting a wide variety of drugs, including heroin, persistently.
He was engaging in edgy, dangerous behavior, and according to friends, his treatment of others, particularly of women, started to grow increasingly abusive. “When he was drinking, he’d needle people mercilessly,” one friend recalls. “He would just go after somebody, and he’d smell blood, and he wouldn’t let up, sometimes until the poor guy—or, yes, the poor girl—was in tears.”4
That spring, Van Zandt continued to drift around Houston, wandering occasionally to Austin and sometimes as far as Dallas and Oklahoma City, playing the folk clubs and coffee houses, partying and crashing with friends, and writing songs. For a period, he moved into an apartment with his friend Darryl Harris. “It was a big place with lots of people,” Harris remembers.
“Truxillo Arms, we called it,” he says. “The street was Truxillo, between Caroline and San Jacinto, on Burnett, just south of the downtown district.” Harris describes the Truxillo Arms as “a great hippie dump. We’d get a bottle of wine and go up in this apartment and smoke joints and play the guitar…. It was a big party.” Townes was seeing a girl he’d met in Austin named Dana Kinney. “There were always lots of girls after Townes, but Dana was special,” Harris says. “They kind of looked alike; they both had that dark presence. She was very much the hippie queen; the ‘dark angel,’ she called herself.”
Van Zandt wrote throughout this period under some degree of pressure for the first time, with the knowledge that he needed new material for the album he was already scheduled to record.
This time it was back to Nashville for the recording, again at Owen Bradley’s “Barn,” where Jim Malloy would take over the production helm. Jack Clement was working on a very successful recording run with Charley Pride; “Charley was selling millions of records,” Clement recalls, “and I just kind of bowed out of recording Townes. I got disgusted with Kevin too,” Clem-Don’t You Take It Too Bad
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ent adds. “He was pushy about the music, and the production, which I felt that I knew more about than he did, and I think he really put it to Townes. He just never did what he said he was going to do. I don’t think he ever paid [Townes] what he should have paid him. I basically tried to like the guy, and I think he probably had good intentions at some point, but he was just a fuck-up; that’s what it is.”5
Indeed, while Townes was to remain loyal to Eggers for years to come—or at the very least indifferent to the problems Eggers created or allowed with regard to his career—Eggers was from the earliest period forward to be followed consistently by accusations of business indiscretions, oversights, and downright wrong-doing, whether through malfeasance or misfeasance, and he never escaped the cloud of these accusations. For now, though, Kevin Eggers was in charge, and the business at hand was to get another Townes Van Zandt record on the shelves and to put the artist out on the road to support it.
So Eggers set out to work with Malloy on producing the third album. They agreed that the production of not just the first, but also the second record had been somewhat overdone, and that a more sparse approach would be in order. String arrangements were replaced by simpler arrangements of more standard folk instruments. One of Van Zandt’s goals was to re-record some of the other songs he felt had been particularly mishandled on the first album, and some of the first tracks they laid down in Nashville were retakes of some of Townes’ oldest and most favored songs: “For the Sake of the Song” and “Waitin’ Around to Die.” He also chose to re-record “I’ll Be There in the Morning,”