Townes and the group played gigs in Montpelier, then Burlington, then Green Mountain, which was the last show in New England before a final show at the Childe Harold in Washington, D.C. They headed for D.C. in the Colonel with just enough money to make it to the gig. White recalls, “So we walk into the Childe Harold, and the bartender sees Townes and says, ‘Hey, Townes, how’s it going, man? Good to see you. What are you guys doing here?’ And Townes says, ‘Well, we have a gig here tonight.’ And the bartender says, ‘No, we got somebody else booked.’ They’d never heard anything about it at all.” This was the final indignity inflicted by McCloud.
Dejected and tired, Jimmie Gray went home and Townes and Mickey went to Franklin, where Townes had left Cindy mind-ing the cabin nearly a year earlier. He had spoken to her on the phone a few times in the first months after he left, never suggesting that he would not return, telling her that he was staying here or there, writing songs with one person or another, but always remaining vague. Meanwhile, through horse owners she knew in the Nashville area, Cindy had gotten an offer to go to Florida to train some horses. “I took off for Florida with the
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horses, and then I met a man down there from Montreal who was pretty wealthy. He eventually—after a dozen roses and dinners out and this, that, and the other—encouraged me to go to Montreal with him and look at some horses up there, which I did. We ended up buying two thoroughbreds for him, which I then trained, and another horse that I got going for him that jumped pretty good, jumped five feet, so I got him going on five-foot fences pretty solid. I really ended up liking this guy, too. He was okay.” She wondered about Townes, but figured he would come back when he was ready; or, he wouldn’t. “Townes and I never really broke up. He just never came home off the tour, and then I went and did my thing with the horses, and somebody snatched me up.”4
When Townes and Mickey pulled up to the cabin, they knew that Cindy was gone. “He really loved Cindy,” White says. “I think he still thought that maybe there was something salvage-able there.” Townes decided to stay for a few days and see what he could learn about Cindy’s whereabouts. She had left Geraldine with Mike Ewah; most of her belongings, including clothes, a trove of photos and mementos, and some saddles and other riding gear, were still in the cabin. “I’ll never forget, there was a jar of Ragu and one little thing of spaghetti, and we cooked that up and ate it,” White recalls. “We went out and cut some wood, so we were staying kind of warm, and Townes had this little bitty TV, and we watched the Godfather saga. So we were kind of hanging in there. We had just a couple of bucks, and we kind of bummed here and there for a little whiskey. We’d drive into Franklin to get a pint in the morning.”
At some point, Townes hooked up with some dealers from Nashville, staying at their house and indulging in his old heroin habit. “He was staying in the house and I was staying in the Colonel,” White recalls. “I was getting a little pissed because I wasn’t getting in on any of the goods, but I knew that it was going on. And after three or four days, maybe even a week or so of Still Lookin’ For You
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staying around this junkie house, Townes and I saw the benefit of getting away.”
Back at the farm, on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Townes and Mickey were visited by some locals that Townes knew.
“These hillbilly guys came by,” White says, “and they had some whiskey with them, and Townes ended up getting in an arm-wrestling match for another pint that they had. And he won.
Townes was a great arm wrestler…. He understood the leverage, and he was really good at it. He could go in with guys that were much bigger than him and beat them handily. In fact, it was the only thing he was good at gambling on, arm wrestling.”
With their options running out, Townes and Mickey were hoping for some good luck. “That afternoon, the phone rings—
thankfully the phone hadn’t been cut off—and it’s Cheatham calling from Austin,” White says. “He had just opened up a little folk club and ice cream shop called You Scream, I Scream. And he said he wanted Townes to come down and play his grand opening. So Townes said, ‘yeah, sure.’ Cheatham said he’d pay for Townes’ ticket and Townes could go down to the airport and pick it up.” At that point, Mickey, desperate, grabbed the phone away from Townes. “I said, ‘Cheatham, if you don’t pay for my ticket, I will crawl down there and wring your fucking neck.’ He said, ‘Okay, all right, you get a ticket too.’ I would have been stuck with nothing, absolutely nothing. And of course, Cheatham had been the one that called me to offer me the job in the first place.”
Townes phoned John Lomax, who picked up the two forlorn musicians and took them to the airport. “We left the Colonel there at the farm and blew into Austin,” White recalls. “We showed up at You Scream, I Scream, and it had been well promoted, and the joint was packed, and we played really well. It was like we’d found a home. Townes and I clearly understood at that point in time that we had just moved to Austin, Texas.”
Summing up his impressions of Townes’ feelings about returning to Texas, Mickey White says, “He felt pushed out of Nashville; ev-180
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erything was totally bankrupt in Nashville, and the pull in Austin was that there were gigs there, and he got such a huge reception and everything. And of course Cheatham had a place for us to stay, a big house on the near north side.” The Austin scene at that time was vibrant. “Guys like Butch Hancock and that whole
‘Lubbock mafia’ had invaded, Jimmy Dale Gilmore and all those guys,” White says. Texas had recovered from the oil bust in the late seventies and was starting to benefit from rising oil prices, and a real estate boom was under way in Austin, generating a lot of construction jobs. “A lot of hippie carpenters were making really good money and going out and supporting these clubs,”
clubs like Antone’s, Spellman’s Lounge, the Austin Outhouse, Soap Creek Saloon, the Hole in the Wall, and many others.
Austin provided Townes with a stimulating variety of places to play, he was surrounded by friends, and he was living comfortably in Cheatham’s large house. However, by all accounts, he was not writing, and he was drinking heavily. Peggy Underwood remembers: “Many times, he would show up at gigs too drunk to go on.” Along with Cheatham, Underwood was also lining up gigs for Townes, which at that point was not a difficult task.
The difficult part was seeing that Townes followed through. “I used to have to manage him,” Underwood says, “and I would set these things up and get money in advance, and then he would show up and be too fucked up to perform.” Not long after settling back in Austin, Townes took up with Conni Hancock, a striking, dark-haired singer and guitar player and a well-known member of her father Tommy Hancock’s popular Supernatural Family Band. “He was being pretty straight when he started hanging out with Conni Hancock,” Underwood recalls, “then he started hanging out with Blaze down at Spellman’s.”5
Blaze Foley was the name adopted by Michael David Fuller, who at this time was essentially an itinerant living on the streets on the fringes of Austin society. Foley grew up in West Texas singing in his family’s gospel ensemble, the Fuller Family Gospel Singers.6 As Peggy Underwood recalls, “Townes somehow met Blaze in New York, but Blaze had been hanging out in Houston Still Lookin’ For You
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some, and it’s probably because of Townes that Blaze wound up showing up over here [in Austin]. Blaze was a street person.
He’d live on the street, or on someone’s couch if he was lucky.
Blaze and this guy, Rich, used to have horrible fights, because they would both want the same couch.” Foley had been writing songs and performing for the past year or so in Houston and Austin, and was known as much for his eccentric lifestyle and habits—such as decorating his clothing and belongings with duct tape—as for his music, although he was a sensitive writer with a rich baritone voice.7 He shared with Townes a fondness not only for drinking, but for outrageous behavior while drinking, and he would share an orbit proximate to Townes’ for most of the remainder of the decade.
On December 6, 1980, Van Zandt played one of the last shows at Armadillo World Headquarters, opening for Taj Mahal. “It was one of those things that helped solidify that we were in the right place, in Austin,” Mickey White says. “It was really a terrific gig, with screaming, foot-stomping, encores.”
Two nights after the Armadillo gig, on December 8, Mickey White was at Spellman’s playing pool when a friend came in and told him that John Lennon had just been killed. “I remember looking up in disbelief, then looking back at the pool table and sinking the eight ball,” White says.
The next day, a memorial gathering was held at Zilker Park.
One of the attendees was a Corpus Christi native, a diminutive twenty-three-year-old brunette named Jeanene Munsell. Munsell was living in south Austin, where she had worked over the summer for a landscaping business and was currently collecting food stamps. She had previously worked as a “cocktail bunny”
at Austin’s White Rabbit disco, and had been living with a man associated with the White Rabbit, an establishment alleged to have Mafia connections. She had been mistreated, and she had gotten into some trouble with the law during this period. After more than three years of living with this man, she had recently
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“escaped” from him. It was a rough time for Munsell, but she was tough, and she was determined.8
At the memorial that day with her friend Gradi Sterling, Jeanene happened to see her ex-boyfriend with a woman in a mink coat (“at a John Lennon thing, wearing a mink coat! What the hell!”). Jeanene was suddenly inspired to want to meet the handsome guitar player that Gradi had recently told her about, whom she knew through John Cheatham. They left the gathering and went to You Scream, I Scream, where Gradi figured Townes was likely to be found. She told Jeanene they had imported beer, ice cream, and folk music. “I can’t imagine a worse combination,” Jeanene says. “I was a punk rocker. I was hanging out at the Continental Club … I was a wild thing. Folk music to me was like people dancing in matching costumes, you know, like yodeling or something. I didn’t know what she was talking about, folk music.”
At the club, Gradi spotted Townes sitting at a table with “four or five beautiful women all around him,” and she pointed him out to Jeanene. “So I walk over,” Jeanene recalls, “and here’s this, like, drunk, greasy … it looked like he hadn’t bathed in at least a week or two.” Jeanene sat near Townes, and he soon approached her. According to Jeanene, he said to her, “Darlin’, do ya gamble?” She allowed as how she did, because “I was liking him; he was charming me.” Extremely drunk, Townes proceeded to play a game with her in which he dealt three cards, one of which was an ace, and “whoever gets the ace has to kiss the other.”
After “pecking” for a few hands, Townes wanted to go somewhere else with her. “He was so drunk,” Jeanene recalls, “that I said, ‘man, I can’t take you to any bar. We’ll get arrested!’” They ended up at the Continental Club, where she knew someone she thought would get them in, and the familiar greetings that Townes got from people in the club were Jeanene’s first indication that Townes was a well-known figure in Austin. At the end of the night, she took him home with her.
“I already had it in my head that he’s mine,” Jeanene says.
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remained up, doing things around the house. Finally, Townes asked her, “Are we gonna get laid or not?” Jeanene responded,
“You are way too skinny and dirty to lay me,” beginning what she called “the eight-day war.” She insisted that Townes eat something and take a bath; he said, “Well, I ain’t takin’ no bath,” and Jeanene replied, “Well then … you ain’t gonna get laid.” She cooked him steak, eggs, and hash browns, which he
“wolfed down,” then they went to sleep. They spent a second night together, at Cheatham’s house. As Jeanene put it, “no washy, no fucky.” Eight days went by—“and he’s a-stinkin’,”
Jeanene recalls—before Townes relented and bathed. As Jeanene bluntly summarizes, “I cleaned him up … then I fucked him.”
Townes moved in with Jeanene, with Mickey White occasionally crashing on the living room couch, and they began what Jeanene refers to as “a three-month bar-hopping tour” of Austin. “You gotta meet Blaze,” Townes told her; “You gotta meet my buddies!” She says she was “just trying to keep up, and keep him out of jail, and keep food in him. He was my assignment.
God had given him to me. I had to take care of him.”
Jeanene reminded Mickey of Leslie Jo Richards. “They had the same kind of spunky attitude,” White says. “They were kind of the same size and [had] the same kind of hair. They were both real feisty girls. My gut feeling when he met Jeanene was that she’d be somebody who’d take what he could dish out with relative impunity. I think that’s kind of what Townes required.”
Some of Townes’ other friends seemed less able to understand Townes’ attraction to Jeanene. One old friend believes that Jeanene simply “didn’t have anything going” and “saw a dollar sign on Townes’ forehead.” Her speculation was that Townes
“wanted it so nobody would want to be around him or mess with him. And believe me, none of us wanted to hang out with Jeanene.”9
There wasn’t much money for Townes and Jeanene to worry about in the bleak months following John Lennon’s murder, at the gray dawn of the Reagan era. Townes and Mickey were play-184
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ing in Austin and Houston, making a few hundred dollars on a good night, but little of that money lasted long. Mickey, however, was making plans for something more expansive. He had recently seen an uncle of his dying of cirrhosis in a hospital, causing him to begin to examine his own intake of alcohol. “I’ll never forget walking into that room and realizing, hey man, alcohol’s serious business. I’d seen guys fall by the wayside behind heroin and cocaine and speed and all that kind of stuff, but it was the first time I’d seen somebody really fall by the wayside on alcohol, seeing that it took that long to do it but that it was just as bad.” He was determined to get back on the road, and he discussed the idea of a west coast tour with Townes.