A few more gigs got Townes and the group to the end of June, and they went home to rest up for a shorter second leg, which would begin in October. The dozen-odd stops included D.C., Boston, New York, and some of the other cities they had hit earlier, plus a few others. By the end of October they were home, exhausted but exhilarated from a long, successful run. The gigs had been well received, with good crowds in many of the venues, and the band had formed strong bonds among themselves.
Harold Eggers had been recording nearly every show from the soundboard and soon began to cull through the tapes for the best performances.11 These recordings reveal Townes as a seasoned, comfortable performer. He sounds road-hardened. His voice has developed a mature, rough edge, and his singing is assured. The ensemble sound meshes perfectly—two acoustic guitars (Townes strumming rhythm or finger-picking, Ruester playing lead); subtle but solid electric bass guitar; and fluid, melodic, hillbilly–gypsy fiddle—and gives Townes’ songs a clean, unclut-tered showcasing they often lacked in their more elaborate studio recordings. The set lists included a core group of songs that Townes had performed since they were new, and that he would continue to perform for the rest of his life: “Pancho and Lefty”
and “If I Needed You,” of course, and “For the Sake of the Song,”
“Our Mother the Mountain,” “To Live’s to Fly,” “Lungs,” “Loretta,” “No Place to Fall,” “White Freightliner Blues,” “Brand New Companion,” “Tecumseh Valley,” “Don’t You Take It Too Bad,”
“Tower Song,” “No Lonesome Tune,” “Rex’s Blues,” “Rake,” and
“Waitin’ Around to Die,” among other old favorites, which all sounded fresh and new.
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He also played a wide variety of covers, including the familiar Lightnin’ Hopkins songs, such as “Short-Haired Woman Blues”
and “My Starter Won’t Start,” plus classic folk and country numbers such as “The Coo-Coo,” “Wabash Cannonball,” “Cocaine Blues,” “Jolie Blon,” and, of course, “Fraulein.” He featured an affecting, deadpan reading of the Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers,” a twist on Bruce Springsteen’s “Racing in the Streets”
(wherein Townes takes the point of view of the man who’s ready to “just give up living/and start dying little by little, piece by piece”), and a tender rendition of Joe Ely’s “Indian Cowboy.”
(“This is the only circus song I ever liked,” Townes said onstage of “Indian Cowboy”; “I don’t like zoo songs either.”) A couple of lesser-known Bob Dylan songs—“Little Willie the Gambler”
and “Man Gave Names to All the Animals”—found their way into the sets as well.
As he was performing, Townes deftly read his audience and made adjustments to his sets, as he always had, but on this tour he had such a broad array of material to choose from that the sets had a depth and a variety that they never had before.
Townes and Jimmie Gray worked out some rudimentary vocal harmonies for a couple of songs, and Ruester and Cody spun off well-focused, melodic solos, intertwining intuitively with one another and with Townes’ solid guitar work. According to Rowland, the band did not rehearse, but “we understood each others’ competence and capabilities.” And the group kept the performances fresh and interesting for themselves. “Each song was different every time it was played, depending on the circumstances,” Rowland says.12 For example, they might stretch
“Brand New Companion” out into a swinging jam that merged smoothly with a ragtime-jazzy “Cocaine Blues,” and Townes might decide to sing some of the verses of “Cocaine Blues” in French. Or Dylan’s “Man Gave Names to All the Animals” could become a reggae romp, with Townes playing a bongo part on the back of his guitar and Ruester vamping and cavorting like a funky Django Reinhardt. The group was feeling comfortable enough, and having enough fun, to try almost anything.
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
As they made their way from town to town, the musicians became close; they exercised the same proclivities that Townes and other musicians on the road had always exercised—drinking, drugs, gambling, and women—but they managed to maintain a focus on their nightly performances that had been absent on some previous tours. The quality of the music was inspiring this focus, which in turn was driving the quality of the music.
Enthusiastic reactions from their audiences reinforced the entire creative cycle. Things were going well on the road for Townes.
Things were going well professionally for a number of Townes’
contemporaries in the mid-1970s. Mickey Newbury—who recorded a string of classic albums in the first half of the decade—
had spearheaded a revolution in songwriting and recording that had ensured country-oriented artists the same kinds of artistic freedoms that rock artists had been enjoying. Artists who had only a few years before been considered outsiders in Nashville were experiencing an insider upwelling of their own, the “Outlaw” movement, led by Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Bil-lie Joe Shaver, among other—primarily Texan—progenitors. In 1975, Nelson’s home-grown-in-Texas
Red Headed Stranger
helped solidify the movement and shifted the center of country-music gravity away from Nashville and toward Austin.13 Still, in Nashville, Kris Kristofferson had followed through the door opened by Newbury, and his success in the early seventies had blown the door off its hinges.
Guy Clark—who in the early seventies had a minor hit with Jerry Jeff Walker’s recording of his song “L.A. Freeway”—finally recorded his own album for RCA in 1975. Rodney Crowell landed a publishing deal in the early seventies, then in 1975
he moved to Los Angeles to sing and play guitar in Emmylou Harris’ band. Harris would record a number of Crowell’s songs, including “Till I Gain Control Again,” “Ain’t Livin’ Long Like This,” and “Bluebird Wine.” Harris’ first album,
Pieces of the Sky
, was one of the top records of 1975. The following year, she had a number-one record with her cover of Buck Owens’ “Together Dollar Bill Blues
161
Again” and won a Grammy for her second album,
Elite Hotel
. In 1977, this success rubbed off on Townes Van Zandt when Harris recorded “Pancho and Lefty” on her third album,
Luxury Liner.
Reviews of the album inevitably drew attention to Townes’ song, and the song received healthy FM radio play. The stars seemed to be aligning.
While Townes was on the road that spring and fall and Kevin Eggers was working on re-issuing Townes’ old Poppy albums on Tomato, Lomax was at work on
For the Sake of the Song
, a book of lyrics, sheet music, photographs, and essays on Townes that he had arranged to have published at the beginning of 1978 by Wings Press in Houston, a small publishing house run by Lomax’s brother Joseph. Lomax felt that the book “would give us a way to promote Townes to a whole ’nother audience, the literary audience, the poetry audience, the libraries.” Lomax wrote an essay, and he and Townes “spent quite a while choosing all the songs, and he wrote little blurbs about each one.14 I tracked down the sheet music on all the songs and got the pictures together, some of which I took and some I just gathered up.” He also commissioned a biographical essay by the writer Lola Scobey.
“Townes carries the terror and the sorrow of a sensitive man who has looked into the abyss and seen.…the abyss,” Scobey wrote. Her essay quotes an article by the writer Bill Hedgepeth—
a friend of Townes’—who quoted Townes discussing his depression. Townes describes the torment and actual physical pain he experiences in his most severe bouts, and he mentions his recurring desire to chop off his hands. Scobey also quotes Townes summarizing his early life—including the claim that he “had a nice childhood and all that. I don’t remember it, but that’s what I’ve been told.” She summarizes his career and notes his recent rave reviews in
Crawdaddy
,
Esquire
, and
Rolling Stone
, all the result of Emmylou Harris’ recording of “Pancho and Lefty.” She also mentions the other artists who have covered Townes’ songs: Doc Watson’s “If I Needed You,” Robin and Linda Williams’ “None But the Rain,” and Steve Young’s “No Place to Fall.”
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
In discussing Townes’ six Poppy albums, Scobey notes that the records have been “caught up in multifarious distribution deals”
and that they have been “virtually unpromoted.” Lomax echoes this in his Introduction, writing that Townes “has received no coherent management, advertising, booking or financial support during his career. His records have been pressed in limited quantities, sold, then never reissued.” On a more personal level, Lomax writes that Townes “has alienated friends, exasperated promoters, and flabbergasted club owners with his sometimes eccentric behavior,” but that there is an “eternal quality to his music and lyrics” such that “everyone I have ever introduced to his writing has emerged from the experience as a full-fledged convert.…”15
By the end of 1977, Lomax was able to include in the songbook an impressive compilation of critics’ quotes from publica-tions from all over the country. An article in the December 1977
issue of the small British publication
Omaha Rainbow
mentions the songbook and notes that, thanks to John Lomax, Townes’
“career is on the upsurge after years of bad luck,” and speculates that “maybe Townes Van Zandt’s time is at hand.” In the same article, Townes mentions the fact that his previous record company “couldn’t get their distribution together, and had zero promotion.” But he goes on: “Getting that record out on Tomato
[
Live at the Old Quarter
] meant to me that all the mire that the business end of my career got wedged into was finally evaporat-ing. I was out of the chute on a brand new horse, right?” He says that, with the live album and the songs he’s going to be recording soon for his new album, “something’s got to give, and it ain’t gonna be me.”16
In mid-December of 1977, Townes signed 500 “limited-edition” hard-cover copies of
For the Sake of the Song
in two long sessions, 250 books a sitting.
Townes had been having a difficult time writing songs for the new album. His last batch of songs had come before the aborted
Seven Come Eleven
sessions in Nashville in 1974. Cindy says, “I remember him saying that he’d wake up nights and his hands Dollar Bill Blues
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would just be burning. He’d shake his hands, like he was trying to shake something bad out of them.” At Townes’ request, Cindy took him to a motel in downtown Nashville and dropped him off to stay and write for a couple of days. “At that point, he’d come up with part of ‘Flyin’ Shoes,’” Cindy recalls. “When he came back, he’d finished it, and he played me the whole song. It was really pretty.”
Townes told Cindy that the song was inspired by hours of gazing at the cold waters of the Harpeth River in the dead of winter. Later he elaborated, saying the song was about the dying thoughts of a soldier lying on a cold battlefield as the winter sun descends. Whatever the subject and inspiration, “Flyin’ Shoes”
is one of Townes’ most beautiful, enigmatic songs, full of despair and hope, somehow in the same breath. It was the first and is probably the best of the small crop of songs he wrote while sitting beside the Harpeth, where he went regularly seeking inspiration and peace.
Besides the natural beauty of the spot, as Townes was well aware, the Battle of Franklin had raged there. Townes’ day-dream of a wounded soldier inspired him to write the song.17 It is the dying soldier’s voice speaking in the first verse, a kind of dreamy despair immediately and happily tempered by no less than the certain knowledge of eternity. The second verse takes one of Townes’ favorite themes, the seasons, and turns it into the young soldier’s last, brief, sentimental reflection that there won’t be another winter for him. The third verse seems to rise into the skies with the moon and take the cosmic perspective that Townes had by now mastered, with the “silver sails” of the moon setting among the quiet hills.
In the end, besides “Flyin’ Shoes,” Townes brought few new songs to Nashville for his new record, deciding instead for the most part to re-record most of the material from
Seven Come Eleven
, which, after all, remained unheard on record by the public.
Lomax credits Kevin Eggers with landing Chips Moman to produce Townes’ new record. The legendary Memphis producer got his start at Stax studio, then in 1965 started his own record-164
A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
ing studio, American. Part of American’s studio package was a top-notch house band that included guitarist Reggie Young, bassist Tommy Cogbill, keyboardists Spooner Oldham and Bobby Emmons, drummers Gene Chrisman and Eddy Anderson, and the young stringed-instrument wizard Randy Scruggs. American soon turned into a hit-making factory for various labels and various artists, including Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, and the Box Tops. Between November 1967 and January 1971, American produced some 120
Billboard
-charted hits; during one week, there were twenty-eight records from American on the charts, all with the same musicians playing on them.18 In 1969, Moman sealed his legend by overseeing Elvis Presley’s career-reviving sessions at American, which produced
“In the Ghetto,” “Suspicious Minds,” and other classic recordings. He had moved his operation to Atlanta for a while, then just recently to Nashville. Now, Chips and his boys were ready to work their magic on the music of Townes Van Zandt.
The sessions were about to get under way when Mike Ewah and Townes, both drunk, set out in Townes’ pickup truck on the muddy road from the cabin, with Ewah driving. They hadn’t gone far when the truck crashed into a tree. “Townes was in the passenger seat and got thrown into the dash,” Cindy says.
“Mike took the steering wheel in the sternum. But Townes got the worst of it.” With Cindy’s help they made it to the emergency room and found out that Townes had a broken right arm—with possible nerve damage—and needed stitches to close a gash on his cheek.