Susanna describes their home in East Nashville as “this cheap, little house, with no air conditioning, no television set, no furniture. And the furniture that we had, the guy at the publishing company had given to us. And we had found Townes an old mattress in back of the Safeway there and drug it in.”
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Townes was on the circuit in support of
High, Low and In Between
, and was in and out of town, and he was also writing songs for the follow-up record, the sessions for which were already planned to commence at Bradley’s in Nashville. Jack Clement was returning to the production helm for the first time since
Our Mother the Mountain
, and he had lined up Nashville veteran Chuck Cochran to handle the arrangements. Townes had a handful of songs ready early, and he continued to write up to the beginning of the sessions, despite a somewhat hyperactive environment. “It was pretty wild around there all the time,” says Susanna Clark. “Townes would bring home people that he had met in cabs on the way in from the airport, sometimes people he had met on the airplane, and sometimes people he had found in bars. I remember one time he came in wearing this shirt that was huge…. It was a red, see-through nylon shirt. And I said, ‘What happened?’ And he said, ‘Well, I met this guy that weighs about 400 pounds, and we were gambling, and he lost his shirt to me.’
And sure enough, following, lumbering in after him, was this 400-pound guy with a pair of overalls on and no shirt.” Women were prominent among Van Zandt’s many visitors. “There were just
all kinds
of women,” Susanna continues. “I’d wake up in the morning and there would be blondes under the couch.”
Susanna Clark vividly recalls a morning that has since become part of Van Zandt’s legend. “Townes had just been in New York,”
Susanna remembers, “and we picked him up at the airport. And he came walking down the concourse, and both of his pockets were going ‘flip, flip, flip’ here, and ‘flip, flip, flip’ there, and
‘flip, flip, flip’ here, and ‘chh, chh, chh’ there, and we couldn’t understand what was flopping under his coat. And when we got in the car, he pulled out these two parakeets, Loop and Lil. He had smuggled them on the airplane. He called them his road birds, because they traveled well; his road ‘keets.”
As for the morning in question, “We would all get up every morning,” Susanna says, “and Loop and Lil would do aerobatics for us.… Anyway, that morning, Guy and I were already up at the kitchen table. We did have a kitchen table, and that’s where we
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spent all of our time. And Townes woke up and came in, and said,
‘I just dreamed a song, music and everything. See what you think.’
And he picked up the guitar and completely sang ‘If I Needed You.’
He said, ‘what do you all think?’ We were just amazed.”
Townes many times told audiences and interviewers the same story of how “If I Needed You” came to him whole in a dream.
One night, he says, he dreams he’s a traveling folk singer, singing before a small audience in a club. The song he’s singing is
“If I Needed You.” He wakes up and finds that he remembers the song perfectly. He turns on the light, grabs a pencil and his notepad, and writes down the words. The music, he thinks, is so simple and clear that he’ll have no trouble remembering it.
He turns out the light and goes back to sleep. He wakes up and plays the song fully formed.
The story is a classic, perfectly illustrating the subconscious nature of the writer’s muse, a tenet to which Van Zandt always adhered. “I don’t figure out what I want to say then work out how I’m going to say it,” he told an interviewer. “All of a sudden there it is, it pops into your brain. Then you step back and decide about it. You block out everything else that comes along…. The subconscious must be writing songs all the time. I’ve heard a lot of songwriters express the same feeling, that that song came from elsewhere. It came through me.”6 One such songwriter was the great Mississippi bluesman Booker T. “Bukka” White, who called some of his songs “sky songs” to acknowledge the way that they came to him with no conscious effort on his part. Bob Dylan has made similar comments about his songwriting. “I don’t really write my songs,” Dylan said, “I just write them down.”7
Townes told the “dream” story of the origin of the song for the rest of his life, and both Susanna and Guy Clark recall the incident the same way. Yet, considering this story brings up certain questions. To recall Townes’ former wife Fran’s recollection that “If I Needed You” originated a few years earlier, presented to her perhaps in an unfinished state, is to call Townes’ dream story immediately into question.
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Townes’ young friend Bianca, back in Houston, recalls another origin of the song. “I was at the Old Quarter,” Bianca recalls, “and Townes called and asked to speak to me, and asked me if I would fly to Nashville if he sent me a ticket…. And when I went to get the ticket to get on the plane, [I discovered] he had sent it to me as Bianca Van Zandt. And so I figured that I was going to go there and marry him. He got Susanna to pick me up at the airport there, and that’s what she told me too…. We went back to the house, and Townes had just gotten a royalty check for like five-hundred bucks or something [from Buffy Sainte-Marie’s recording of ‘Mister Can’t You See’]. He went and got a fiddle out of the pawn, which, of course, everybody was saying to him, whatever you do, don’t do that. Because he played the worst fiddle of anybody in the world.… After I got there and we hung around and he got the fiddle out of the pawnshop, we were drinking, of course, and that’s when he played me ‘If I Needed You,’ then finished writing it. He played the first part of
‘If I Needed You,’ and he said, ‘now that you’re here with me, I can finish the song.’ And he sat down in front of me and wrote the last verse.”8
Roughly three years had passed since Fran had heard Townes play an early version of the song to her, according to Fran’s recollection; Townes had yet to record the song, although he would do so within a few weeks of Bianca’s visit to Nashville.
Bianca also recalls it as a song Townes had started some time before, and then just finished in her presence. So, a plausible conclusion might be that Townes indeed finished the song to his satisfaction there in Nashville, and played it for Bianca that day; then, shortly thereafter, he awoke one fine morning and presented it with his “dream” story to Guy and Susanna.
Much later, Kevin Eggers would claim that Townes had written “If I Needed You” in Eggers’ New York home. And Townes would embellish the story of dreaming “If I Needed You” by saying that he had the flu at the time and the codeine cough syrup he was taking caused him to dream vivid dreams, including the one in question. Whatever the case might be concerning
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the origin of the song, it would become one of the jewels of his body of work.
As for Bianca’s part, she recalls that she and Townes went out drinking in the Nashville bars that night. “He really wanted to spend this money,” she says. “It was burning a hole in his pants….
But later, he picked up this woman, this barfly, in some bar, and he ended up taking her home. We all just got staggering drunk, but I felt that he knew what he was doing. The next morning, everybody was really hung over, and nobody knew what to say…. That evening I got packed up and they took me to the airport, and I got on the plane…. But I was really pissed about it.”
Bianca moved to California shortly after leaving Nashville, but she and Townes would cross paths again.
Much like the folk music scene that had formed around the Lomaxes in Houston in the early sixties—a scene the young Guy Clark had absorbed studiously—a growing community of itinerant Texas musicians soon began to form in Nashville, with the Clarks as their nucleus. An early refugee was Richard Dobson, a songwriter from Houston who had been working on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and decided to pursue his dream and give Nashville a shot. As Dobson remembers, “Nashville at that time was kind of a wide-open town. A songwriter could get into any office in town just by knocking on the door, pretty much.”9
Another figure in this burgeoning scene was an extremely tall, lanky standup bass player named Skinny Dennis Sanchez, with whom Guy had played in a bluegrass group in Long Beach, and who had followed Guy to Nashville six months after the Clarks had left the west coast. Van Zandt recalled the scene in a 1977 interview: “Guy had this house in Nashville next to Mickey Newbury, and I used to stay there, and Dennis, Richard Dobson, Rex Bell, and Mickey White from Houston, and David Olney, who showed up from North Carolina.… It got so intense one day that Guy just nailed himself in his room to get away from everybody.
He used big 16-[penny] nails and later had to climb out through the window because he couldn’t get the door un-nailed.”10
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Van Zandt dropped in and out of the Nashville scene as he continued to go on the road for three or four weeks at a time throughout 1972. He also continued to stay in close touch with his friends back in Houston, and he traveled back and forth between Tennessee and Texas often. It had not escaped him that some of the old crowd were not doing so well, and that heroin was taking its toll. As Mickey White recalls, “That fall [of 1972], I was getting really strung out. Townes had kind of got out of town. The song ‘White Freightliner Blues,’ which says, ‘It’s bad news from Houston, half my friends are dying,’ was about us being still stuck there. Me and Rex, ‘half my friends are dying,’
that’s what that’s about.” Townes told him about the growing musical community in Nashville, the positive energy among the songwriters and musicians there, and it didn’t take much more to convince White to leave what seemed to be a decaying scene in Texas and come to Tennessee.
“I had bought this little piece of shit car,” White remembers,
“and I sold it to my dealer for enough money for a plane ticket to Nashville and a half a paper. So I did it up and got on the airplane, and I ended up in Nashville, fall of seventy-two. And Townes was exactly right. That energy was back. All the energy that was going on with the pickin’ and everything in Houston a couple years before had been regenerated up there.” Like the others, White started playing for tips at Bishop’s American Pub, a songwriters’ hangout on West End Avenue, not far from Guy and Susanna’s house, where Richard Dobson had landed a job tending bar. In fact, White recalls, “except for Bishop’s, there wasn’t anything in Nashville. I mean, there were no gigs in Nashville. Everybody was up there for the same thing, myself included; I went up there to try to be a songwriter.”
In fairly short order after arriving in Nashville, White kicked his heroin habit. “It was great,” he says. “I pulled up. And Townes went through the same pattern. The drug of choice changed from heroin to Jack Daniels Black.” It was an improvement over his recent darker days in Houston, but as White was quick to see, “my alcoholism started really kicking in, and Townes’. For
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
him, that is when drinking became far and away number one.”
That is not to say that Van Zandt did not return to heroin as soon as he had the opportunity; only that he was able to place his habit on a back burner. Until then, the whiskey flowed like water wherever musicians were playing.
During this period, Townes wrote a song that he would claim was among his favorites of all his songs, but that he would never perform after it was recorded. He wrote “Snow Don’t Fall” for Leslie Jo, who had been killed the previous summer. On a snowy day in Kentucky, he quietly shaped his tribute, which he later said was “about the purest song, melodically and lyrically, that I’ve written.” He also complained that he had “recorded it perfectly and then they changed it around.”11
In March, Van Zandt went back to Texas, visited a new girlfriend, Donna Gay, in Houston, and played an event outside of Austin called the First Dripping Springs Reunion. Conceived as a sort of country & western Woodstock, the outdoor concert is now remembered as the fountainhead of the “Outlaw” movement in country music. Among others on the bill were Waylon Jennings, Billy Joe Shaver, and Willie Nelson, who had recently returned to Texas after his years in Nashville. The next Dripping Springs Reunion the following year would be the first annual Willie Nelson 4th of July Picnic, an event that would continue for more than two decades. “It was a great idea,” Nelson recalled, “so I stole or picked up on their ideas. They had it in March and the weather was cool and kind of windy, so I moved it to the 4th of July when it would be hot. I figured that with all the marijuana and the beer, it would cool everybody out. So that was the first 4th of July picnic.”12
That summer, Townes did something he’d been aching to do: he returned to the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, this time to Aspen, where he visited his old college friend Bob Myrick and where a friend named Bronco Newcombe ran a horse stables.
Newcombe had spent the winter in Nashville, writing songs and hanging out with the Clarks and their circle, and Skinny Highway Kind
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Dennis had accepted his offer to work at the stables that summer. Townes showed up in Aspen shortly after, and after visiting with various friends he planned to head into the wilderness on horseback. “I ended up kind of living up on the hill above the stables with Dennis in a tent, taking care of the horses,” Van Zandt recalled later. Sanchez accompanied Van Zandt on horseback into the backcountry a few times that summer, and Townes remembered him as a natural outdoorsman, “hunkering down over the fire flipping flapjacks and eggs, looking like he came right off the range.…”13
At the end of the summer, after about a month in Colorado, Townes returned to Nashville. He was seeing a dark-haired woman named Gloria, a publicist from New York who was living in Nashville and who, according to Richard Dobson, was