Keith Glass, an Australian singer–songwriter and recording artist, booked the tour, and remembers meeting Townes at the
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airport when he arrived in Australia. Glass drove Townes to the Koala Hotel and left him there to rest. First, though, Glass says, Townes “insisted on scouting the street to purchase a walking stick, as his leg was troubling him.” Townes began having attacks of gout around this time, not unusual in heavy drinkers; he was photographed carrying a walking stick in subsequent years. Glass arranged to meet Townes later in the day. “When I came back, he had already drunk the entire contents of the room’s mini bar—every small bottle of whatever. I had neglected to remove it; I was told he was no longer drinking. He blamed the need to do this on the fact that I had turned up in dark sun-glasses at the airport and it had freaked him out.’’24
Once Glass established himself as a fan of Lightnin’ Hopkins, Townes became more comfortable with his host. Townes asked to go to a Chinese restaurant, where he ordered a steak, then to a strip club. “Townes had purchased a stemmed rose under plas-tic from one of those people that come around tables, and we wandered out of Chinatown up to Kings Cross, the seedy red-light, strip-club area, to go to this place,” Glass says. “It was in a side street and really sleazy looking.… The price of admission was a five-dollar can of Victoria Bitter beer, which everybody clutched through the show of about six girls, grinding away on the table tops.” They retired early, however, and went to the zoo the next day. “Townes had an almost childlike fascination with the Australian animals, especially the Tasmanian Devils; he went ape-shit,” according to Glass. “I realized later it was because of the cartoon character.”
Glass found Townes “a bit antsy” and in need of distraction from drinking on his days off. “One day, I resolved to get him out of any reach of alcohol, at least until the show.” Glass decided they should go fishing, and Townes insisted on renting the smallest rowboat they had; “I went along with it, but I doubt we ever made it more that a couple of hundred yards away from the jetty. But for the next four hours we dropped a line over the side, took bets on imaginary scenarios, and sang David Olney’s song, ‘Jerusalem Tomorrow.’”
No Deeper Blue
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Townes was drunk for the show that night, but “still, the crowd hung on every word.” The other gigs went better, particularly the Melbourne show. “I had a support group to take the babysitting pressure off,” Glass says. “The two [Melbourne]
shows were the best. Townes pulled out some new songs and was telling great stories.”
Townes was turning in some stunning performances during the earliest years of the 1990s. In contrast to the many shows he struggled through in the late eighties, he seemed to briefly achieve a higher level of consistency, along with a new—and still growing—depth of world-weariness that showed in his voice as well as his playing. As always, humor played a prominent part in Townes’ performances, as it did in his personality, and as he progressed into the “late” period of his craft, the humor became more clearly a yin to the yang of the dark side of his nature. Finally, the humor became a struggle to sustain, and for the most part it fell away. But for a while in the very early nineties, Townes seemed to be once again running on all cylinders in many of his performances.
Townes’ show at the Quasimodo in Berlin in October 1990—
later released as
Rain on a Conga Drum
—is one example of a nearly flawless performance from this period. The writer Michael Hall recalls that Townes was “sober, which was a surprise” as well as
“soulful and funny, which wasn’t.” A show in Roscrea, Ireland, on the last day of August 1991, is another example of Townes near the top of his form. The shows on the brief British tour that included the Roscrea gig featured John Stewart, Peter Rowan, and Guy Clark playing before Townes, then a solo performance by Townes, then Townes and Guy playing together, telling stories, joking, and trading songs, projecting honest good humor.
Townes was clearly in good spirits throughout, and in good voice, and his playing and delivery were focused and incisive. A show in Munich in late October 1992 was similarly solid, and included a surprise performance of one of Townes’ earliest compositions,
“Waitin’ for the Day,” a song Townes played only rarely.25
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
But as good as these and other isolated performances were, this period was as uneven as any in Townes’ career. Michael Hall contrasts the 1990 Berlin performance with what unfortunately became more of a typical performance, a night at La Zona Rosa in Austin two and a half years later, remembering that Townes was “so drunk he couldn’t finish a single song during the entire abbreviated set. Embarrassed fans started filing out after fifteen minutes as he fumbled with chords and slurred his words into gibberish. Some stuck it out to the end, feeling guilty for watching.” After the show, Hall writes, “he collapsed.” According to Hall’s account, immediately after the La Zona Rosa show, Townes consented to let his friend Steve Weiner “take him to a Nashville treatment center—but not before having a drink in the Dallas airport. ‘Amigo, I’ve been drinking for thirty years,’ Townes told him. ‘You can’t feel guilty that you can’t stop me.’”26
14
Flyin’ Shoes
A
TAHOTELINDUBLIN,while on tour at the end of October 1990, Townes printed on a sheet of wrapping paper, in his usual all-capital-letter style, the lyrics to a song he titled “Ruester’s Blues,” then he signed it, wrapped a package with the paper, and sent it to his friend Danny “Ruester” Rowland in Kentucky. Ruester was always glad to hear from Townes, who was fairly good about keeping in touch as he traveled, but these lyrics were somewhat disturbing. “Don’t want to be here when the reaper comes,” the song begins; “Don’t want to hear his machine no more/Don’t care where he’s goin’/where he’s from/I just gotta be away from here.” The second verse—illustrated with Townes’ drawing of a moon with a face—is equally dark: “Tired of the rising/tired of the felling [
sic
]/Forgotten the moon/the sunshine too.” He goes on with a personal message offering at least some grim hope: “Seems all my friends be ripe for plantin’/Listen my friend, good luck to you.”1
Townes Van Zandt—road-weary yet needful of the freedom of the road and almost always
on
the road—careened down that same road toward his fiftieth birthday and didn’t pause to look
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back. The years of touring—and the years of heavy drinking—had for some time been manifested in Townes’ singing voice and performing style, but now the damage was becoming more starkly reflected in his deeply lined face and his increasingly frail, seemingly shrinking body as well—his “skin like iron” and “breath as hard as kerosene.”2 The toll Townes was paying was evident in his whole demeanor. Photographs from the nineties show a man who looks considerably older than his late forties or early fifties.
The Townes Van Zandt who was performing Hank Williams’
“Lost Highway” regularly in the nineties sounded like he had lived the song in the deepest, most intimate way. At least once—
at a show in Manchester, England, in 1994—Townes introduced
“Lost Highway” by quietly saying “This has nothing to do with me,” but the audience sensed something different as they listened to his dry but passionate reading of the song. The spirit of Hank Williams was close by.3
Townes had grown into some of his older songs by this time; he was able to invest them with a new sense of truth. For example, his performances of “To Live’s to Fly” in the early to mid-nineties had a
gravitas
that earlier readings lacked. Similarly, later performances of “Waitin’ Around to Die” cut closer to the bone.
Later performances of “Nothing” could be chilling, even terrifying. As the chances for good performances seemed to deteriorate with Townes’ condition, songs like these touched audiences all the more deeply, often to the point of inducing tears. Townes also became more and more prone to weeping on stage. Sometimes he would attempt to turn an emotional collapse into a joke. He would often play “Old Shep”—the chestnut about a boy who has to euthanize his faithful dog—as a dark comedy, mock-ing the song’s melodrama; then, part way through the song, he would actually break down crying; then he would turn around and laugh at his own emotionalism, which came finally as a relief to uncomfortable audiences as well as to Townes, who many people correctly sensed was struggling to get through his set.
It got worse. Many performances from this period feature Townes talking considerably more than he plays—sometimes Flyin’ Shoes
223
offering long, rambling stories, sometimes stumbling through songs, fumbling chords and forgetting lyrics. He often acknowledged to the audience that he was talking too much, and he would invoke the advice his mother had given him about performing: “Play, Townes; don’t talk. Play.” At least once an audience member shouted back, “She was right!” During this period, an audience might collectively guess that they were at a train-wreck of a show if they found themselves listening to Townes doing a twenty-minute, part-talking, part-singing version of
“The Shrimp Song,” barely able to get through a line without some absurd distraction.4
As a credit to Townes’ perseverance and ingrained professionalism, however, for a while, the good performances could still be very good. On a brief tour through the Netherlands in the fall of 1991—with Jeanene (who was pregnant with their second child) and young Will along and time for sightseeing, including a trip to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam—Townes left behind him a trail of good shows.5 A gig at the Milky Way in Amsterdam was captured by a Dutch film crew, and the film shows a solid, confident performance. Mickey White—who had not played with Townes for three years—was in Europe at the time and came to see his old friend at the Milky Way. Townes invited Mickey up to play some songs (“I really think he did that for me,” White says), which ended up being the last time the two played together. White was concerned about Townes’ physical condition, but heartened by his performing energy and focus.
“As the years went on, singing became more and more difficult for him physically,” White reflected. “On the other hand, his ability to entertain became more and more seasoned.”6
White believes that Townes was more in control of some of those “train-wreck” performances than a casual observer might have thought. “He was building his legend,” Mickey says. “I’ve seen Townes sober as a judge before a gig, and he’d go up there and right in the middle of the second song he’d stop and start talking, and I’d know exactly what he was doing. He hadn’t taken a drink all day long, but he had to do what he felt was
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the best thing to maintain interest. He would never do that at big gigs, only at the gigs he played on a regular basis—Anderson Fair, Cactus Café, places like that.” White recalled one particular example, a gig in Arkansas booked by Townes’ friend Linda Lowe. “He blew that big gig, but the reason he did that was because she was just hanging on to him so much, and she was so nervous about this gig she was promoting.”
While in Holland, Townes was interviewed on Dutch MTV.
The interviewer asked him, “Are there any goals left for you?”
Townes reflected for a moment. “Well, I’m gonna do this new album, with all new songs,” he responded slowly. “And then, uh, you know, I mean I have a lot of goals.…” He paused, very thoughtful, and gazed downward. “You know, I’m a father, and, uh, that’s a goal in itself. That kind of stuff.” He seemed to be taken aback somewhat, and within just a few moments, the depth of thought with which he was addressing the question became compelling. Then, he seemed to realize that he was getting too “heavy,” and—just as he would do in a performance—he quickly lightened the mood, concluding, “But I’d like to write some songs that are so good that nobody understands them.
Including me.”
Townes finished 1991 and started 1992 on the road, back and forth between the United States and Europe. Jeanene later told an interviewer that she had essentially been Townes’ road manager since Will was born and “Townes decided he didn’t want to leave me and Will to go on the road, so he fired his band and the three of us hit the road together for five years.”7 Jeanene and Will accompanied Townes on numerous trips, both in Europe and in the United States. Townes was at home in Tennessee, though, on February 14—Valentine’s Day—when Jeanene gave birth to a lovely, dark-haired daughter whom they named Katie Belle (with a nod to Townes’ paternal grandmother, Bell Williams Van Zandt). Neither Townes nor Jeanene took a long break from business after the birth, however. From their new home in Smyrna, Tennessee—
which they jokingly called the Ponderosa after Jimmy Gingles re-Flyin’ Shoes
225
marked that it looked like the ranch house on
Bonanza
—Jeanene had been working for some time on consolidating her and her family’s interests in Townes’ catalog of songs.
“By 1987, I was the business manager and song plugger,”
Jeanene said. “In 1992, Townes gave me half interest in the publishing.…”8 On February 16, 1992, records show that Jeanene obtained a
Certification of Transfer of Copyright from Townes Van
Zandt to Jeanene Van Zandt for “Blaze’s Blues” and 13 Other Titles.9
This was one of the first steps in what was to be an ongoing effort by Jeanene to secure her financial position, and thereby to ensure that her family—Will and Katie Belle—were taken care of should anything happen to Townes, the family’s only breadwinner.
The breadwinner was back on the road the week after his daughter’s birth, on the west coast, then in Canada, then playing some Texas gigs with Guy Clark—at Gruene Hall, then the La Zona Rosa gig at which Michael Hall described Townes as “so drunk he couldn’t finish a single song”10—then—after the afore-mentioned detour in the Nashville alcohol treatment facility—