Jeanene was granted sole custody of Will and Katie Belle, and Townes was ordered to pay “One Thousand Forty Five Dollars
… per month … in compliance with the Tennessee Child Support Guidelines based on the Husband’s monthly net income.”
Townes was awarded “liberal visitation” rights. Both Townes and Jeanene were required to place their respective stocks and bonds in trust for the children’s education.
Bob Moore remained close to Townes during these months, and he has further recollections illustrative of this period of dis-solution and decline. “Once I was gonna take Townes to the airport. He was going back to Austin, going to a treatment center, and when I came in he was lying on the bed and I didn’t know if he was alive or not. He sort of sat up and asked me to go get him some vodka, which was in walking distance. I started just bringing miniatures back, and I soon found out that wasn’t enough.” Moore asked Townes about his flight arrangements, and Townes managed to phone the airport. “He was calling the airline about his flight, and even as sick as he was, he was very courteous with the customer service person at the airport. She was having trouble understanding him because he was slurring his words. But the flight he was supposed to be on started with
‘DT’, and she could never understand him, so finally he said,
‘detox,’ which was where he was headed.”
Before he could take that flight, in early June of 1994, Townes was admitted to Vanderbilt Hospital. Bob recalls that the ongoing construction at the Rock’n’Roll Hotel had been having del-Flyin’ Shoes
233
eterious effects on Townes for some weeks. “They were tearing out all sorts of stuff to remodel the place, and he had to move from one room to another,” Moore remembers. Susanna Clark recalls that Townes had a brown blanket, “and he would wake up in the morning and all this white stuff, which it turned out was asbestos, would be all over his blanket. He was breathing that in every day.” In addition, “What finally got Townes into the hospital was he had left some Chinese food with shrimp in it out overnight, and he had gotten up and eaten that, and he had bad food poisoning.”
Bob Moore happened to know one of the nurses attending Townes before he was admitted to the Hospital. “She said that she had been working there at Vanderbilt for years, and she said she had never seen anyone come in in as bad a shape with DTs as he was.” Apparently, Townes did not reveal to the doctors that he was an alcoholic. Susanna says, “They found him on the floor having seizures, and they didn’t know what was happening.” Susanna was at home recovering from dental surgery and was unable to do anything. “And so I called Jeanene. Jeanene was—and I don’t blame her, you know, she was pretty tired of dealing with his things, but he was in the hospital—and I said,
‘Jeanene, get down there and tell them he’s an alcoholic. Lie to them; you know, tell them you’re his wife.” Jeanene agreed to go. Once the doctors realized “that they had a late-stage alcoholic on their hands,” according to Susanna, “they had him in a room that had a glass wall so that the nurses could keep an eye on him at all times. And apparently they were giving him such strong drugs to make the withdrawal seizures not come that he had to be on a respirator.” Bob Moore recalls visiting his friend in the intensive care unit, “in some room where it was almost perfectly sterile, and you had to put on all this stuff over your shoes and wear a gown and wear a mask.”
Detoxifying an alcoholic in Townes’ “late-stage” condition can be a difficult endeavor, but it is one that is routinely undertaken for alcoholics every day in hospitals and other medical settings, and the detox regimen that Townes was put on at Van-234
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derbilt was not unusual. Within a two-week period, the patient would face up to a week of medical detoxification, with close observation of side-effects and other medical problems and a protocol of healthful eating followed by a full physical and emotional rehabilitation regimen. In the full program, psychiatric problems would be brought to the surface and dealt with once the alcoholism was addressed.
In the eleven years of their marriage, Jeanene had been through numerous attempts to dry Townes out, but none had been as harrowing as this one. Part of her reaction to the stress of this extreme situation was to blame the hospital staff. “[T]hey almost killed him,” she reported later, “and he was in intensive care for six days. The doctor told me that if we ever tried to dry Townes out it would more than likely kill him.”22 If Jeanene was distinguishing between the possible circumstances of Townes trying to detoxify on his own—at home—versus doing it under medical supervision—at the hospital—her point could be salient. If she simply believed that Townes could never dry out, that he was doomed, it is possible that she was either misinformed or mis-understood what the doctor was telling her. A physician familiar with dealing with families of alcoholics suggests that it would be reasonable to imagine a situation in which a conversation between an alcoholic patient and his doctor might go like this: “‘If you continue drinking you are going to die.… However, if you quit on your own you will die too. You need to come in and be detoxed in a hospital.’ A lot of alcoholics will relate this story by saying, ‘[The doctor] said if I quit drinking I would die.’”23
Rex Foster—a Texas folk musician with roots in the pioneering 1960s psychedelic band Rachel’s Children—became friends with Townes when they were both in the alcohol rehabilitation program at Starlite in the eighties (where they also formed a short-lived musical group called the Starlite Drifters). Foster summarized his view of Townes’ struggles with recovery by noting that “He was doing the best that he could…. You know, I think that Townes’ destiny ran itself out, and part of the map of that destiny was that he had some trouble in recovery that Flyin’ Shoes
235
he couldn’t quite get past. But he’s not unusual. See, that’s the thing. Townes is not unusual. He is a unique artist, and a unique human being, as we all are. But in his final demise, and in this burden that he carried all his adult life, he is not unique at all.
He’s very textbook, actually.”
“When he got out, he had pneumonia from the hospital,” Susanna Clark says. “Jeanene took him home with her and helped him, kind of nursed him back. But he was drinking, sneaking little sips in…. We weren’t going to let him go back to that place
[the Rock’n’Roll Hotel], so Guy and I sold him our house on the lake.” Guy and Susanna had lived in the modest, cabin-like house on Old Hickory Lake—in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, about fifteen miles northeast of Nashville—for some years before moving back into town, and the house had been the scene of many an hour of partying and music-making.24 “Oh, it was so nice at the lake house,” a friend remembers. “Wood floors, a fireplace—
and Townes always liked a fire going, no matter how hot or cold it was, and he’d always keep a pile of wood out there.”
“We called it the ‘Bayou Self,’” Jimmy Gingles recollects. “We had a nice sign somebody made that said ‘Bayou Self,’ but somebody stole it.… It was a place he could relax, although he always had people out there. He had a great library there, you know.
He really enjoyed everybody coming by, and it was super good for him.”
As he had when he lived near Lake Travis in Austin, Townes indulged his fondness for sailboats, keeping a small, two-man Snark at the house on Old Hickory Lake. Gingles recalls, “We would go out on the Snark and he would teach me sailing stuff—
you know, ‘Comin’ about!’ And he gave me a book on sailing.
He was a good sailor.” Townes kept his twenty-two-foot motor-ized Starwind—the
Dorothy
—on J. Percy Priest Lake, just south of Mt. Juliet (the “Town Between the Lakes”). “Most of the time, what he would do is, he would just motor it out and anchor it.
Just to get away,” according to Gingles.
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
This was, of course, a troubling period for Townes’ children, especially Will. “Will got on a kick when he came out to the Bayou Self,” Jimmy Gingles remembers. “He got a can of spray paint and was spray-painting obscenities in the street. One of the neighbors called and the cops came out, and they made Will go scrub down the street.” Katie Belle, still a baby, felt less direct impact, but Townes mourned what he considered his doomed relationship with both of his children. “Townes used to cry over her, because he said he knew he was gonna die at an early age,”
according to Gingles.
According to Townes, while he was still living at the Rock’n’Roll Hotel, he had a dream that woke him up late one night. In the dream, he told himself, “You’re too old, too tired, too road-weary.
You know what to do; you don’t need to take any orders about anything from anybody.” He concluded: “You need to go to Ireland and make a record with Phillip Donnelly.”25 Donnelly—an Irish guitarist who had been a staple Nashville session man for some years before returning to Ireland and becoming a producer—had played guitar on
Seven Come Eleven
(
The Nashville Sessions
) and
Flyin’ Shoes
, and Townes and he had kept in touch over the years.
Townes got up in the middle of the night and phoned Donnelly, who answered the phone and immediately and enthusiastically agreed to produce Townes’ next record—in Ireland.
As Townes had played more and more shows in Ireland in the 1990s, he had come to enjoy and appreciate the Irish people, the pubs, the music, the countryside, and the idea of Ireland.
“People from Ireland and people from Texas … can both get real sad,” Townes said, explaining his affinity. Both peoples “re-bound,” he went on, “when they realize they’ve got the blues forever.” Townes told an Irish writer of his affinity for Shane MacGowan—leader of the Irish punk band the Pogues and Ireland’s greatest living songwriter—and said that one of the songs on the new album was written about him.26 MacGowan’s own affinity for what he called “piss artists”—great artists who are Flyin’ Shoes
237
also alcoholics (he cites James Joyce, in particular)—makes it easy to imagine his reciprocal affinity for Townes.27
“Most of the songs were pretty much written by the time I got over,” Townes said. Townes and Harold flew to Ireland in May.
Phillip Donnelly met them and drove them from Dublin to Limerick, where they had booked ten days at Xeric Studios. The musicians were “top of the line players,” according to Townes.
“Donovan played harmonica. That was the first time I got to meet Donovan. He’s really good guy and a very fine harmonica player.”28 Donnelly led the effort in the studio and played guitar.
The musicians were Irish, except the bass player, Sven Buick: Robbie Brennan and Fran Breen on drums, Brendan Hayes on keyboards, beautiful pedal steel guitar work by Percy Robinson, Paul Kelly on fiddle, Mairtin O’Connor on accordion, Brendan Reagan on bazouki and mandolin, and Declan Masterson on penny whistle and Uileann pipes. Townes overdubbed his vocals and did not play guitar at all—an absence that is felt on the final recording more acutely than Donnelly must have imagined during the sessions, even though it was his only option, given Townes’ unsteady condition and declining instrumental skills. “The whole ten days was a real treat,” Townes said; “And it was just me and Harold and the boys. After that Harold and I went on a twenty-day tour of Ireland and England and then back home. And Phillip got down to the mixes and all that.”
Townes had been playing many of the songs on the album for some time before recording them. He had played “A Song For” live on the air on Larry Monroe’s Austin radio program late in 1993, saying “Wait ‘til them Irish guys get ahold of it!” The song leads off the album, setting a somber tone. Jeanene later wrote to Townes that she remembered “waking one morning to find your writing pad on the coffee table. You were still asleep so I felt safe sneaking a peek. As I read the words to what later became ‘A Song For,’ I was brought to tears.… It was so tragi-cally beautiful. You came running from the bedroom and asked,
‘What’s wrong babe?’ I said Townes, this new song is so beauti-238
A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
ful. It’s bound to be my favorite. You replied, ‘Song my ass, that’s a suicide note.’”29
In an interview on German radio, Townes was asked to play a song “even more desperate than ‘Nothin’’.” He plays “A Song For,” saying “It’s beautiful in a way, in its own way. It’s a song for somebody, I’m not sure who. I don’t think it’s for me, because of my daughter, Katie Belle, and my son Will, and my son J.T., and my friends.” The song is as grim as anything Townes ever wrote, a final declaration of resignation, of having reached the end of the road, “weak and weary of sorrow.” Townes writes of trembling and stumbling, saying directly, “I’d soon as be dead.”
The conclusion indeed sounds like last words, from the schizophrenic “myself going crazy the way that it does” to the final
“too late to wish I’d been stronger.”
Another song that Townes had been playing for some time before recording was “BW Railroad Blues,” which he explained to Larry Monroe was about his friend—the best man at his wedding to Jeanene—the artist, Bo Whitt, who had recently committed suicide.30 “Blaze’s Blues” had also been around for a while. Townes always said he wrote it on Blaze Foley’s guitar, and it springs from the saga that Townes often recounted of his adventure with Blaze in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, just days after Townes’ son Will was born. “Hey Willie Boy” was written—
quickly—on commission for an album on Sugar Hill Records of fathers’ lullabies to their children;31 “Katie Belle Blue” is a more finely crafted song—one of Townes’ best late compositions—and a beautiful tribute to his daughter: “There’s no deeper blue in the oceans that lie/As deep as the blue of your laughing eyes.”
“Marie” appears in a crisp, well-recorded take; “Lover’s Lullaby,” “Cowboy Junkies Lament,” “The Hole,” and “Niles River Blues” (a studio composition) are similarly well done. “Billy, Boney and Ma” is a bizarre turn for Townes, a darkly humorous fantasy with an Irish spirit and an Irish studio treatment. “Goin’