The accident did not change the scheduling for the sessions.
Moman’s feeling was that he had plenty of guitar players who could cover Townes’ parts, so long as Townes could sing. Cindy says, “even once the bone healed, they said the damaged nerve would only come back an inch a month, all the way down his hands. It was right as we were just starting to do
Flyin’ Shoes
, and he did not have the full function of his finger-picking.”
Phillip Donnelly, Billy Earl McClelland, Randy Scruggs, and Moman himself covered the album’s guitar duties admirably, and Dollar Bill Blues
165
the entire ensemble sound that Moman and his band created in the studio brought a breath of fresh air to Townes’ music. Moman deftly assembled a full-bore studio band sound, with layers of electric guitars, pedal steel guitars, mandolins, and harmonicas, underpinned with solid Memphis-style drums, percussion, and bass guitar, augmented by a small group of buoyant, soulful backup voices. The sessions were loose and fun—and were inter-rupted briefly by the birth of Moman’s daughter—but the actual recording was taken care of expeditiously. Cindy spent time at the studio during the sessions and became friends with Chips and his crew, many of them sharing an interest in the popular recreational substances of the time. The results of the recording process were clearly positive, and everyone involved was pleased when they heard the final mixes of the album, which they agreed would be named
Flyin’ Shoes
, after what everyone considered Townes’ best new song.
The opening track, “Dollar Bill Blues,” was another of Townes’ more recent compositions, written after the move to Franklin. The song is styled essentially as a traditional drinking song, with a sea-chantey-ish “early in the morning” refrain, but with a somewhat sinister minor-key cast. Cindy shows up as a
“red haired thing,” whom the singer is going to buy a diamond ring—“early in the morning.” For the subject matter of murder, thievery, gambling, and drinking, and no doubt particularly for the line “Mother was a golden girl/Slit her throat just to get her pearls,” this was the one song of Townes’ that his mother said she did not care for.19
“Snake Song”—one of the batch from
Seven Come Eleven
—is another particularly striking song—again set in a stark, minor-key atmosphere—that shows a new focus in Townes’ writing.
Again in the style of the traditional folk song, with a strong flat-picked bass line, the metaphor of the snake goes deeper and deeper, from the straightforward “You can’t hold me/I’m too slippery” and “I got poison/I just might bite you” to the more abstract “Ain’t no mercy in my smilin’/Only fangs and sweet beguiling,” and to the stark, pure poetic imagery of “Solid
166
A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
hollow wrapped in hatred/Not a drop of venom wasted.” “The Spider Song” is a more directly personal song, a song of the familiar struggle against the dark forces lurking inside the human psyche, and, through Townes’ use of a very simple metaphor, one of his best songs addressing that struggle. “Pueblo Waltz”
is a different kind of song altogether. The mood is soft, wistful, conjuring up a comfortable relationship between the singer and his green-eyed lover, all wrapped in a comfort that we, the listeners, all seem to be sharing as friends with Townes. The evocation of Susanna and Guy has an even more direct effect than the evocation of Loop and Lil in “If I Needed You,” another instance of the listener being brought closer to the song through a kind of conspiratorial personal inclusion.
Two of Townes’ finest songs from this period were recorded both for
Seven Come Eleven
and
Flyin’ Shoes:
“Rex’s Blues” and
“Loretta.” A comparison of the versions recorded for each of those two albums shows the similarities between the approach that had been taken to recording Townes throughout his career so far—that of Kevin Eggers and Jack Clement—and the approach taken by Chips Moman on
Flyin’ Shoes
. While different in many details, the overall results were remarkably similar for both producers—except that
Flyin’ Shoes
was successfully released to the public, while
Seven Come Eleven
would not be released until years later.
“Rex’s Blues” fares well on both recordings. The first features acoustic guitars, a soft-plucked banjo, a loping string bass, brushed snare drum, and an insouciant vocal from Townes resting in the center of the mix. Halfway through the song, background voices chime in for half a chorus, then go away. There is some uncertainty as to what the banjo is meant to evoke, and what relation the background voices have, but on the whole it’s a pleasant recording. Chips Moman’s version begins with an acoustic guitar and a moody pedal steel, then falls easily into a country gait, set by a deft Memphis-style rhythm section. The groove is rhythmically complex, but flows, and the song builds gradually until the final repeat of the first verse. There is more Dollar Bill Blues
167
of a sense of clarity and certainty in this recording than there is in the first version. The Moman version is better, but it’s a close call. The two recordings of “Loretta” show more differences.
The
Seven Come Eleven
take is upbeat, with a fiddle-driven Cajun feel that makes perfect sense for the song. The sound is bright and clean, but the background voices again seem out of place.
Moman’s take is slower, more thoughtful, with a moaning harmonica and stately strummed acoustic guitar. He also employs a background vocal ensemble, but sparingly and with more of a country feel, and well integrated as the song builds with steel guitar and organ, and the rhythm section again takes up the beat and lopes the song to its close.
It is interesting that “At My Window” and “Buckskin Stallion Blues” were both recorded for the
Seven
sessions but not used for
Flyin’ Shoes
, and “Two Girls” and “White Freightliner Blues”
(versions of which were also included on
Live at the Old Quarter
) were not included on
Flyin’ Shoes
, but
Flyin’ Shoes
does include a rather redundant version of Townes’ cover of Bo Diddley’s
“Who Do You Love?” the definitive take of which was Townes’
solo version on
Old Quarter.
Flyin’ Shoes
was the end of the line for Lomax and Townes.
There was in fact a new momentum building from the release of the live album, the impending re-release of the old albums, the songbook, the new record, the Emmylou Harris cover, and a batch of good national press. But Kevin Eggers had reasserted himself in Townes’ life and business affairs, and Townes was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, as always, especially with the new Tomato label in the picture. According to Lomax, Eggers sensed that he—Lomax—was getting too close to uncovering the shady money trail related to Townes’ previous recordings and publishing, and Eggers got nervous. “I was fixin’ to find out who was stealing the money and where it was going,”
Lomax says.
Lomax understood that, to take care of the publishing business, “you just need to get somebody to administer it and make
168
A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
sure that you’re getting paid. They make sure the money comes in, they take a cut, and we get the rest.” Kevin Eggers now had brought Jack Clement’s old friend and former Elvis Presley confidant Lamar Fike back into the picture and was pitching him to Townes as an excellent choice for a new manager. “Kevin talked about Lamar Fike, and Elvis’ publishing, as a model. But the whole Elvis thing was that he lost out on so many great songs because they wouldn’t give up the publishing. When you stop and think about what he could have done, with that kind of talent, if he’d had the sense to just get all these fucking parasites off of him.” Lomax told Townes that he thought that Fike was
“nothing more than Kevin’s pawn.”
But Townes trusted Eggers and went along with his plans. “I met with Kevin and Townes and they said, ‘Well, Lamar’s going to manage Townes, thanks very much. Give us a bill for what we owe you, and see you later.’ Kevin would get Townes drunk and get him to sign. God knows I’ve never seen the documents, but he must have had him sign something at some point. Then I was ousted, which was a little bit after
Flyin’ Shoes
came out, because it came out and Kevin had the publishing, not me.”
Lomax was angry, but resigned. “I managed to keep him going, I managed to get a bunch of records out again and really stir the pot and get him back in the public eye,” he says. “I convinced a lot of people that this was an amazing talent. There was a lot of momentum. First of all, all the negative momentum was reversed, and the forward momentum built, and all these records came back out, and who knows if they would have ever come back out again if I hadn’t been in there prodding.”
Years later, Kevin Eggers also reflected on this period, starting by noting the dual nature of Townes’ personality—a “brilliant and unique” side and “a side that was determined to degrade himself and everyone around him.” A writer who interviewed Eggers for the
Austin Chronicle
writes, “Eggers says those demons kept driving Van Zandt back to him at Tomato when other labels weren’t interested in signing him. He maintains that Van Zandt’s reputation for poor sales figures and self-destruction led Dollar Bill Blues
169
him to be written off as damaged goods by the music industry at large. In fact, Eggers says Van Zandt’s mid-Seventies heroin habit was so bad that Van Zandt offered him the publishing rights to the songs on his first four albums for $20. ‘I didn’t do it and told him that if he sold [those rights] to anyone, we’d never talk again,’ recounts Eggers.”20
Despite the management turmoil, Townes was soon back on the road, with gigs booked by Fike. “It was Lamar that kind of at that point broke up the old ladies going on the road with the band,” Cindy recalls. “He made me stay at home while Townes went off, and that was the end of our being joined at the hip, basically. We had done everything together, then you’ve got one manager that says, no, she can’t go with you anymore.” Cindy continued her work with local horses, but soon was heading into town and hanging out at bars, spending her sixty-dollars-a-week allowance drinking beer. She missed the daily closeness of the past nearly four years. They had their ups and downs, but she loved Townes and wanted to be with him.
After discussing the matter off and on for more than a year, after some gentle but firm prodding from his mother, and after having the requisite blood tests and obtaining the necessary license, on September 15, 1978, John Townes Van Zandt took Cindy Sue Morgan to the Williamson County Courthouse in Franklin, Tennessee, where they were married in a civil ceremony.
Townes invited Rex Bell up from Houston for the occasion, and Bell witnessed the brief, simple wedding. Danny Rowland loaned the couple a turquoise ring for Cindy to put on during the ceremony, but shortly after Townes reported the happy news to his mother, she presented Cindy with another ring. “His mother at that point saw that we had been together that long, and she was kind of pushing him to marry me,” Cindy says. “So she was real happy, and she gave me the ring that Townes’ daddy had given her. She told me that, back in 1944, when Townes was born, his daddy went and got this beautiful ring and brought it to her in the hospital as a maternity gift. It’s my understanding
170
A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
that he paid thirty-five hundred dollars for it in 1944, so the ring has some value to it, I do know that.” Cindy, wearing the ring a quarter-century later, describes it as “a beautiful six-point star sapphire set in platinum, with a flaw that gives it depth.”
She describes their wedding day as “no different from any other day, because we’d already been together for three years.”
“Out at the farm, we had an outhouse that could be spooky at night,” Cindy remembers. “That was the only time in my life that I really felt the presence of something that I could not see. And I pretty well figured out that it was a Civil War person. He would stand in the kitchen at the back door towards the outhouse. And I’d go into the kitchen and I could just feel him. He was watching me. And when I pulled the truck out, there would be like this
sssshht
going across the road in the headlights. Like a transparent light. I always knew he’d be there. And I’m thinking it was probably one of those Civil War guys just checking me out, because I was this young, twenty-one, twenty-two-year-old girl, with a lot of kinetic energy, and I’d go back in the back yard and lay out there nude sometimes, sunbathing, and … you know.…”
One night, Townes and Cindy returned to the cabin after dark. “I felt something in that cabin, man,” she says. “It wasn’t in our bedroom or in the other bedroom, it was in the kitchen.
Townes kept saying, ‘no, no, no, no, it’s nothing.’ Then later, he was up by himself, reading. Evidently it was a fairly sober day, because he was there reading at night. But suddenly, the bookshelf pops out of the wall, and wham!—everything hits the floor. I had to just laugh when he told me. He paid attention to this guy after that.”
Townes’ son, J.T., was nine years old when he came to stay with his father and Cindy in Franklin in 1978. J.T. had seen his father only briefly and sporadically, whenever Townes visited him and Fran in Houston, and he was eager to get to know him better.
Once he had arrived, though, J.T. says his father “did his best to scare me to death.” Townes was confrontational, badgering Dollar Bill Blues
171
J.T. with unanswerable questions; he drank heavily and used drugs openly throughout the visit, which was “pretty grotesque, a frightening eye-opener to the lifestyle of a songwriter to a sub-urban Houston kid,” according to J.T.21
On the second day of J.T.’s visit, he joined Townes and Michael Ewah in a nearby hollow as they drank from a bottle of vodka and took shots with a BB gun at a bird on a wire. J.T. offered to take a shot, and his first shot hit the bird squarely, bringing it down for Ewah’s hawk to eat. “Townes was so proud,” J.T.