Fran arrived at the hospital in the middle of the night, and they took her to Townes. “Immediately, I was scared really badly,”
she recalls, “because they’d knocked his teeth out at the hospital. They told me he was DOA, and they knocked his teeth out trying to get the tubes out of him. His heart had stopped. He was dead.” A couple of friends remember that somehow, one of the emergency room attendants, a young intern, recognized Townes on the gurney and led the successful effort to revive him. At any rate, he had regained consciousness and called for Fran. When she arrived, the doctor told her to keep Townes from drifting off by holding his hand and talking to him. “They said, ‘just keep talking to him.’ So I talked to him all night long,” she remembers. “He was breathing irregularly, and I was just talking real sweet and telling him how much I loved him, and saying ‘you just can’t die.’ Then I’d get real angry at him and say, ‘you’re not gonna leave this legacy for our son.’ Oh, it was horrible.”
Shortly after dawn, Townes’ condition stabilized. “They said
‘he’s going to be okay, he’s made it,’” Fran recalls. “They made sure there was no brain damage, and he woke up and knew who I was, and he was okay. He was in the hospital for several days, but he came back out of it.”
The family, Fran recalls, were horrified. “His mother loved him so much; they were so much alike,” she says. “Bill has this great sense that some would say Townes was her favorite, but Bill thinks that his mom just knew that Townes needed her the most.
That’s the kind of love that family had; all of us knew that. We had always thought his mom was kind of a dependent woman, dependent on her husband, but it turned out she had incred-110
A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
ible strength and independence.” With this incident, Townes withdrew further from his family, in part because he saw clearly the pain he was inflicting on his mother. This was bad, even for him, and he knew he had to keep his family—including Fran and J.T.—away from this part of his life. He joked about it with some of his friends, though. Bob Myrick visited Townes and was giving him a serious chewing out about the dangerous situation he was placing himself in. “Townes just looked at me with a real funny smirk and he said, ‘Well, it’s not my drug of choice.’”9
“Living was painful to Townes,” Fran says reflectively, tenderly. “There was too much suffering in the world. Townes just didn’t know how to live in this world. I personally always believed that he had a chemical imbalance, that if we could have ever found the right diet or the right pill or the right something, he could have been okay. It would come on so suddenly, it was like there would just be neurons flying off balance that would drive him to some other place. Because when he was good, he was just incredible. He was one of the kindest, gentlest, smart-est, most compassionate people you could ever know. I think that’s why I hated drugs so much, because I watched what it did to him. But I couldn’t understand why he was so dependent on it. It was more than alcoholism. It was something else. It was like something just couldn’t fire right in his body.”
9
Highway Kind
T
HENEWALBUM,CALLED
HIGH,Low and In Between,
was released in the fall of 1971. It was a heady time in popular music, seeing the release of a seemingly endless slew of great records such as the Rolling Stones’
Sticky Fingers
,
Who’s
Next,
Rod Stewart’s
Every Picture Tells a Story
,
Led Zepplin IV
, Van Morrison’s
Tupelo Honey
, and the Allman Brothers Band’s
Live at
the Fillmore East
. Still spinning on many turntables from the previous year were the swansongs of the Beatles (
Let It Be
) and Janis Joplin (
Pearl
). Recent work from singer–songwriters included Joni Mitchell’s
Blue
, Leonard Cohen’s
Songs of Love & Hate
, John Prine’s first album, and Neil Young’s
After the Gold Rush
. All in all, a formidable field.
High, Low and In Between
explored a vein that ran through many of the prominent recordings of the day and that was the inevitable result of a generation coming of age. A seriousness of purpose had been coalescing among so-called “pop” artists and musicians that signaled the end of the innocence of the sixties.
Significantly, many of these artists were reaching their thirtieth birthdays. Townes had turned twenty-seven that spring. By fall
111
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
he must have felt that he was more than ready to close out this particularly hard year, and the new record reflected this.
The arrangements are low-key, complementing the lyrics in an intelligent, understated way, and the Jim Molloy/Kevin Eggers production is nearly transparent, the best of any of Van Zandt’s recordings up to this point (and as good as nearly any that followed). In its quiet way,
High, Low and In Between
is one of Townes’ most artistically successful records. The opening cut, the knock-off gospel number “Two Hands” (“I got one heart/I’m gonna fill it up with Jesus”), sets a bright mood. “You Are Not Needed Now” certainly suggests something harder to penetrate, but the song has a gentle quality. Some of the songs that follow also have a light, welcoming mood. The wistful “Greensboro Woman” is Townes’ speech to a North Carolina girl about being faithful to his woman back in Texas. “Standin’” and “No Deal”
are similarly straightforward and relatively light (“No Deal,” in fact, is hilarious). “When He Offers His Hand” is a somewhat better faux-gospel song than “Two Hands.” “Blue Ridge Mountains” is an exuberant country–folk workout. But the album’s remaining songs leave a particularly strong impression and, examined as a batch produced over a short period, show Van Zandt at a high crest of his writing powers.
Prominent among these is “Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold,” a sublime, tongue-twisting account of a cosmic five-card-stud poker game. “I have songs of every degree, from pure craftsmanship to inspiration,” Van Zandt told an interviewer.1 “Of all my songs,
‘Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold’ was closest to just coming out of the blue,” he said. Townes was in South Carolina during a small circuit tour, and late one night, as he sat in the kitchen with his guitar, the song suddenly came to him. “It felt like my right arm was going to drop off,” he claimed, from writing so quickly.
After three and a half hours of writing, with crumpled pieces of yellow legal paper all around him on the kitchen floor, “it came to its own natural conclusion,” according to Townes. He reread the lyrics in the morning and changed only “a couple of things.” The album recording is tight and the performance is Highway Kind
113
clean; the song stood out in Van Zandt’s repertoire throughout his career.
The album’s title piece is one of Van Zandt’s most beautiful poems, touching on some of his familiar themes with a refined touch, focused but relaxed, with an effortlessness that belies the precision craftwork that he put into his best songs. “High, Low and In Between” develops the mythology of the traveling poet: “There is the highway/and the homemade lovin’ kind/The highway’s mine.” The poet philosophizes about his own condition; he asks what he could leave behind after “flyin’ lightning fast and all alone”; his answer is humble but is also a perfect example of the poetry that will in fact be his legacy: “Only a trace, my friend/spirit of motion born/and direction grown.”
But the real “meat” of the album—and of this entire period of Van Zandt’s writing—is in two of Townes’ strongest songs, “To Live’s to Fly” and “Highway Kind.” “To Live’s to Fly” is written with one foot in the material world and the other in a world beyond. Townes makes one of his most exuberant declarations, not exactly of love, but of devotion, then shares some of the wisdom he has acquired in life, of life, with his lover, “soft as glass,” and his friends as he prepares to depart life. The language is gentle, lulling, as is the music, the chords delicate, almost lilting, with full resolution. Here is some of Van Zandt’s most beautiful imagery, expressing a grand, cosmic vision simultaneously with a tender, romantic invitation: “we got the sky to talk about/and the earth to lie upon.” And the lessons of life, too, are gentle, “like rain on a conga drum.” The message of “To Live’s to Fly” is hopeful: “To live is to fly/low and high/so shake the dust off of your wings/and the sleep out of your eyes.”
From “To Live’s to Fly” to “Highway Kind” is a short step. A line such as “where you been is good and gone/all you keep is the getting there” in “To Live’s To Fly” becomes more concrete in “Highway Kind”: “My days, they are the highway kind/they only come to leave/but the leavin’ I don’t mind/it’s the comin’
that I crave.”
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
“Highway Kind”—darker, more inevitably set in its minor key—is another piece seemingly written from the mountain top, where primal forces are represented metaphorically as features of the landscape, the place where the inner man is reflected in the outer world, and where the inner and the outer worlds are shown to be one. This duality is reflected in the dual points of view taken in the song’s verses, leaping from the heavenly to the earthly.
The road—the highway—is one of Van Zandt’s favorite metaphors, one that he used repeatedly, always treating the road as though it were a natural, not a man-made, feature. “Highway Kind” is Townes’ expression of his place in the universe, the familiar and highly imperfect place that he has accepted as his destiny. The song’s real subject is the Tao, the true way, where darkness and light share a dependent relationship. It’s easy to picture a weary traveler as he looks from the window of a car speeding to another gig in another town, feeling his destiny, seeing it literally in front of him, the stripes on the road flying toward him like lightning bolts, only to flash past in the blink of an eye, and then more of the same. And that’s what the traveler has come to crave, not only accepting his destiny, but relishing it. Or does he?
In lines such as “Pour the sun upon the ground/stand to throw a shadow/watch it grow into a night/and fill the spinnin’
sky,” Townes is writing like Van Gogh painted, with technically discrete parts, whether a word or a line, a broad brushstroke or a tiny point, all united in a flashing expression of a universal point of view, filling the cosmos. The protagonist is a reverse Prometheus; he stands, and the shadow he casts, in the light of the sun he himself has poured upon the ground, turns into the very night itself, filling the “spinnin’ sky.”
But where does adopting this universal point of view get him? The answer in the following verses is bleak, as he grins a grin not of bitterness, but certainly of grim irony. There are small pleasures—summers in the mountains, for example—but, ultimately, the knowledge of the void is all-encompassing. How Highway Kind
115
can he care about day-to-day life while staring into the void?
He hovers tantalizingly close, asking where we’d be if we were to “follow the circle down,” with the answer implicit: the void.
And then the final cosmic joke: “You’re the only one I want now/I never heard your name/Let’s hope we meet some day/if we don’t it’s all the same.”
This droll acceptance of the sad fate of never finding a true
“soul mate” in life adds a darkly amusing cap to the song. Perhaps knowing that he has yet to discover that true soul mate allows this pilgrim freedom to explore “the ones between,”
though always mindful of his quest. He is, at any rate, accepting, but unsatisfied. “Highway Kind” is an amazing document of Townes’ philosophy of existence as he approached his thirtieth birthday.
In the fall of 1971, Van Zandt was playing a stand at the Old Quarter in Houston when some out-of-town guests dropped in to see him. The Allman Brothers Band, then at the peak of their musical powers, had played the Houston Coliseum that night, and Duane Allman had heard that Townes was playing the Old Quarter. “They came down just to hang out with Townes,” Rex Bell remembers.
“They played all night, and Townes played. We locked the door and smoked joints and played until four in the morning.”2
“Duane, in particular, wanted to come down and hear him and meet him,” Mickey White remembers. “It was pretty late, it was like one o’clock and he’d done his two sets. He was kind of hedging a little bit about whether he’d do one more. There were plenty of people there still. And Duane pulled out a little vial and said, ‘well, maybe this … ’. So Townes did up a little snort, and he went up there and did really one of the best sets I’ve ever heard him play. Back in those days—man, he was always good, but back in those days, he was great.”3
After the set, the musicians went upstairs. “We were up there smoking some substances when the joint was closing down,”
White continues, “and … somebody ripped off all the money….
So Dale was going, ‘God.…’ He said, ‘oh man, I don’t have the
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
money to cover it. I don’t have any money to buy beer and wine for next week, man.’ So Duane said, ‘well, look, don’t advertise it too much or it’ll be nuts, but kind of put the word out, and we’ll come down tomorrow night and play a little bit.’ So they came down; it was Duane, Dickey Betts, Berry Oakley, and Jai Johanny Johanson. Gregg wasn’t there, but nevertheless it was really, really cool. They played like two two-hour sets. And Townes and Duane really dug each other, and they started hanging out, doing various illicit activities…. And sure enough, just a few weeks after all that, Duane died on the motorcycle.”
“Oh man, it was something,” Dale Soffar adds. “I remember them doing ‘Stormy Monday.’ Very, very touching. It was something else, I’ll tell you that.”4
Van Zandt was staying with Kevin Eggers and his wife Annie in their New York City apartment when Guy Clark reached him on the phone in January 1972 and asked Townes to serve as best man at his upcoming wedding to Susanna in Nashville. Guy and Susanna had lived together for eight months in Houston, then for eight months in Long Beach, California. Guy then landed a song publishing deal, and as Susanna recalls, “They asked him whether he wanted to go to L.A., New York, or Nashville. So, we came to Nashville. And we decided to get married. Guy asked Townes to be best man, and we decided to take Mickey Newbury’s houseboat for a nice ride down the Cumberland River, to a small town in Tennessee. And we got off at the courthouse, went in, got married, then got back on the houseboat. Mickey and Susan, his wife, baked us a wedding cake on the boat…. Townes came down to be the best man in the wedding, and he stayed for eight months. At first I thought it was kind of strange, but then I just sat back and watched and learned. We were like a family.”5