“Once, I remember, Will was really little, and he bumped into the downspout on a gutter, and all these red wasps came flying out of it, and he was terrified of it. Then, later, these yellow jackets showed up down the bottom of the hill, and I said, ‘well I’ll get rid of them, I’ll just pour some gasoline down in their hole, and that’ll kill them,’ and Townes said ‘No, if we don’t go down there, no harm will come, and there’s no need to kill them.’ He was incredibly spiritual. He made you constantly appreciate the balance of nature.… It was like he’d already been where I was and he knew the way better than I did.”
At the folk festival in Staunton, Virginia, Townes was on the bill with the country-folk singer George Hamilton IV, “an extremely nice gentleman,” as Bob Moore recalls. “He had recorded
‘I’ll Be Here in the Morning’ years and years ago. And this is just Townes’ second trip after being in the treatment center in Huntsville. It was almost like George Hamilton could sense it, that Townes was so nervous. We had to go by a liquor store to get there, which was hard. He was just trying to get it over with; he hadn’t gone on yet, and George Hamilton IV came over and said, ‘You know, Townes, there’s a chord or two I can’t remember on “Close Your Eyes I’ll Be Here in the Morning.”’ I know that he knew it, but he was just being incredibly perceptive.”
On the drive back from Staunton, Moore recalls that Townes talked a great deal about his parents, seemingly examining their
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lives as a source of strength. “He said that when [his mother]
died, he realized that his first instinct was to call her to tell her that his mama died,” Moore says. “And he told me about his father, that before he died … his father, he looked at him, and said, ‘It’s a rough old world out there, and I’m not sure you’re ready for it.’ And he said that when he started doing music in clubs, he was doing Bob Dylan stuff … and his father told him,
‘I believe you have a good start, and if you’re going to do this, you ought to write your own songs.’”
Townes got his sea-legs back on a European tour that spring, turning in a series of excellent performances in the U.K. and Germany. He continued to tour through the end of 1989 and into 1990, but he stayed closer to his old home axis, Tennessee and Texas. He was not drinking, already now for the longest period of his adult life.
Around this time, Kevin Eggers approached Townes and Jeanene with the idea of re-recording all of Townes’ material in pristine new studio versions, including duets with some major artists. Jeanene had already learned enough about Townes’
previous arrangements with Eggers that she was wary. As one writer later reported of the projected sixty-song, multi-CD box set project, “Jeanene says her husband only began work on the much-delayed set after Eggers agreed to ‘make good’ contracts for Poppy and Tomato back royalties.”17 At any rate, the sessions were arranged at the Fire Station studio in San Marcos, Texas, in the early spring of 1990. Eggers would produce, with Eric Paul as engineer, and he brought in a crew of top-notch musicians, including Augie Meyers on accordion and Ernie Durawa on drums, both associates of San Antonio stalwart Doug Sahm; the great New Orleans bassist Irving Charles; guitarist John Inmon from Jerry Jeff Walker’s Lost Gonzo Band; plus the parade of guest artists that began to line up: Doug Sahm, Freddy Fender, Jerry Jeff Walker, James McMurtry, Kimmie Rhodes, Emmylou Harris, and Willie Nelson, among others.
Among the first of the duet tracks recorded were Freddy Fender’s beautiful bilingual Tejano take on “Pancho and Lefty” and No Deeper Blue
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“Quicksilver Daydreams of Maria,” joined by Ruben Ramos and the Texas Revolution and Fender’s Texas Tornado bandmates Sahm and Meyers; and Sahm’s own sparkling Texas-perfect, laconic reading of “Two Girls.” Some of the recording shifted to Nelson’s Pedernales Studios, including the session for Willie’s mellow duet with Townes on “No Lonesome Tune.” After a few weeks of steady work the sessions became more sporadic, apparently due to financial issues troubling Eggers.
A few days after his forty-sixth birthday, Townes appeared on Larry Monroe’s radio program on KUT in Austin. As they talk, Monroe notes Townes’ sobriety, saying “A lot of people know you had a drinking problem. You’ve been clean and sober for a couple years, now, right?” Although Monroe overstates the timeframe, Townes responds, “Oh yeah, I’m doing real well.…
It’s a whole different ball game.” Townes then plays a new song, and it’s instantly clear that he has not lost any of his abilities as a songwriter.
“Marie” is as harrowingly good as anything Van Zandt ever wrote, using a first-person narrative—using it in a straightforward, prose-like manner new to Townes’ songwriting—to tell the story of a homeless couple and, more broadly, to address the issue of homelessness. Townes had exhibited concern for the poor and homeless since his childhood, and he still made it a habit to give money—often his entire earnings from gigs—to street people.
Over a familiarly melancholy finger-picked minor-key chord pattern, Townes tenderly sings the story of a nearly broken homeless man and his pregnant girlfriend, Marie (“In my heart I know it’s a little boy/Hope he don’t end up like me.”). Marie dies in her sleep one night (“just rolled over and went to heaven/My little boy safe inside”); the man lays her body “in the sun” and hops a freight train, concluding, “Marie will know I’m headed south/
So’s to meet me by and by.” Townes’ simple, concrete writing and deadpan delivery perfectly evoke world-weariness without ever crossing the line into sentimentality, and “Marie” stands with
“Snowin’ on Raton”—a very different kind of song—as among the best of his work from the 1980s and ’90s.
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Townes tells Larry Monroe that he was in San Francisco with Guy Clark when he wrote “Marie.”18 “One morning this song just kind of … there it was,” Townes says before going on to confirm that he wrote the song for Blaze Foley. “I had a gig here, it would have been a year ago, the first of February, when I played that frozen weekend at the Cactus. I couldn’t wait to get down here and play it for old Blaze. Then the news came.” Monroe asks about Townes’ current “extensive” recording project, and Townes describes the proceedings: “It’s gonna be sixty or sixty-five songs, it’s gonna be on Tomato, it’ll be a three-CD set of all my songs, all re-recorded,” he says. “We have about forty-one songs so far, and we go back in to start and finish up in about two weeks.” In fact, while more work was completed on the project, Kevin Eggers’ financial problems once again intervened, and it would be years before any of the recordings saw the light of day.19 Townes later told an interviewer, “It’s either going to be a giant tax write-off, or some company with a lot of money is going to release it.”20
Two months later, Townes embarked on an adventure that had the potential to expose him to a whole new audience and a new phase of his career. The band Cowboy Junkies—who made a national impact with their debut album,
The Trinity Sessions,
in 1988—were booked for a twenty-five-city tour to support their newly released third album,
The Caution Horses
, and they needed an opening act. “We felt a little weird, because we felt that we should be opening for Townes, you know, if art was the criteria,”
according to Junkies’ songwriter and guitarist Michael Timmins.
“But we realized at that point that obviously we had the draw, and he was more than happy to do it. We were [traveling] in a bus, and he asked us if he could get on the bus as well, because it would make it a lot easier for him. So that was great, because we really got to know him. It’s a pretty intimate setting, a bus, buzzing around North America.”21
The tour kicked off on the first of May at Toad’s Place in New Haven, Connecticut, one of the more intimate venues of the tour, No Deeper Blue
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which included a mixture of bars and theaters. After a theater show in Pennsylvania, they played the Beacon Theatre in New York City, then Boston and Springfield, Massachusetts, then Lisner Auditorium in Washington, D.C. The tour progressed across the south—Atlanta, Tampa, Birmingham, and other stops—
then jumped back north to Ann Arbor, then headed west to St.
Louis, Chicago, and Minneapolis, among other cities, then up into Canada for multiple dates before hitting Portland, Oregon, then Saratoga, California, then a final show at the Paramount in Austin at the end of June.
“There’s always something on the bus during a tour that catches on, and everybody gets addicted to it,” Michael Timmins says. “On that tour, it was craps. Townes was a big craps player, and he taught us all to play, and we played nonstop.”
Timmins wrote a song about the trip, which he called “Townes’
Blues.” The song documents a stretch of their tour bus trip from Boulder, Colorado, to Houston, Texas, a trip that Townes had taken many times. “It was an overnight drive, and we played craps the whole time. The longer you play, the more you lose or the more you win, and you just have to be lucky enough to stop when you happen to be winning.”
Timmins notes that the “in” joke in his song is the reference to the Raton Pass. “Throughout the whole tour, during Townes’
show, he’d play his song, ‘Snowin’ on Raton,’” Timmins says.
“Before that song, he’d always introduce it as, ‘You know, the Raton Pass is the quickest way to get from Colorado to Texas, and I’ve travelled it many times.’ Just coincidentally, we happened to be doing that trip from Colorado to Texas, but our driver decided that he didn’t want to go through the Raton Pass, he wanted to stay on the superhighway. So he went all the way around and all through Kansas. And about eighteen hours into the trip, Townes is saying, ‘If we took the Raton Pass, we’d be there by now!’”
Timmins remembers Townes being mostly—but not entirely—
sober for the tour and turning in excellent performances. The band was aware of Townes’ history of drinking problems, and they had concerns, but, Timmins says, “There was absolutely no
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problem. He might have gotten drunk a couple of times on off days. But he certainly never missed a show and he never screwed up a show and he was never too drunk to play, that’s for sure.”
Townes did better at the theater shows than at the bar shows, where the crowds were often not paying close attention to the opening act, but on the whole his sets were well received. “I think it was, for Townes, a pretty sober period…. He would certainly go through periods where he was pretty dark … not mean or anything like that, just very inward. You can hear that in the songs, and you could see it in his personality at times…. He’d often give fairly cryptic but—as a songwriter, for me—pretty incisive descriptions of how he came to write certain songs…. I think what he taught me was that no matter how lyrical or poetic a song is, it should always be grounded in a place or an event.”
Townes was writing during this period, and he expressed considerable satisfaction that he was doing so again after a “dry spell”—a “dry spell” that included “Buckskin Stallion Blues,”
“The Catfish Song,” “Snowin’ on Raton,” and “Marie,” among others, but that was in fact much less prolific than his great creative burst in the late sixties and early seventies. One of the songs Townes began working on during the tour was “Cowboy Junkies Lament,” a light, surrealistic ballad with dark undertones, in the style of “Two Girls” and “You Are Not Needed Now.” Townes later said it was the only song he ever wrote specifically
for
anybody.22 As Timmins recalls, “He said, ‘I’m writing one about you guys.’ He said, ‘I’m almost done, but I want to finish it up.’”
A month after the tour ended, Townes sent Timmins a tape of the finished song. Timmins says the band, “flattered and blown away,” tried to decipher the lyrics together, but couldn’t figure it out. “So one day I called him, and I said, ‘Townes, you got to tell me, give me a hint … what’s it about?’ And he said, ‘Well, the first verse is about you, the second verse is about Margo, and the third verse is about Pete.’ That was it. And when I went back and started to look at it, it began to make sense.”
Timmins pegs “Cowboy Junkies Lament” as “a very Townes song. There’s a lot of insides, and a lot of cryptic comments and No Deeper Blue
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turns of phrases that begin to make sense. Townes was an observer. That’s what he did. He was a very quiet man. He would sit there and he would take in what was going on around him.”
Bob Moore remembers Townes stopping in to see him in the midst of the tour. “He just looked worn out,” Moore says. By the time Townes returned to Nashville in July, he was exhausted.
And he was drinking again, after nearly a year of sobriety.23
He was only home for a matter of weeks before hitting the road for some gigs in the south and the west, most with Guy Clark and Robert Earl Keen, including a show at one of Townes’
old stomping grounds, the Chautauqua Park in Boulder, Colorado. The recording of that performance displays Townes as close to the top of his game as he had been in some time. If he was drinking again, it was not evident that night. Townes is clearly in good spirits; he notes how glad he is to be back in Boulder, at Chautauqua, where he spent so much time in his youth (“We used to stay in cabin one-eleven,” he notes; “Forty years and I’ve come about fifty feet.”). He also gives spot-on readings of some old songs—“Fraternity Blues,” “Lungs,” (“a blues song,” Townes says), an amazing, precise “Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold”—and several newer songs, including a beautiful “Snowin’ on Raton,” a lovely, lilting “Buckskin Stallion Blues,” and a brand new composition called “The Hole,” a surrealistic yet honest account of Townes’ struggle with his demons.
In September, Townes headed for a destination as far from home as he could get: Australia and New Zealand. He played a series of shows across New Zealand, including Auckland and Wellington, then flew to Australia for gigs at the Rose, Shamrock & Thistle (known as The Three Weeds) in Sydney; Moruya Hall, a small town five hours down the south coast from Sydney (where he played for his largest crowd of the tour, a group of about 300, most traveling a considerable distance to see him); and Madigans in Melbourne.