They were recording at Clement’s studio the next day, and they asked Townes if he would like to sing something with Kimmie on the record. Townes readily agreed, and Kimmie picked her song “I’m Gonna Fly” to sing with him.
“We sent my brother out to pick him up” for the session the next day, Gracey recalls. “He made them go by his favorite weird little place to get whiskey, and by the time he got to the session he was well on the way.” Kimmie showed Townes the song, and they tried to run through it a few times, but Townes was unable to play the guitar. “We abandoned the concept of a live duet between the two of them,” Gracey said. “She sat next to him and squeezed his hand when it was his turn to sing a line, and he was able to get a take done. But he was both deeply moved by the song and drunk, so he kept crying when he came to the line
‘[the songbird] can only make one sound.’”4
The schedule for the November tour was as grueling as the previous European tours. Again, Townes and Harold flew to Germany a few weeks before the first shows so Townes could be with Claudia in Bonn. “At the weekend, we drove to my hometown, Darmstadt, where I had a nicer place. In Bonn we were sometimes sitting on the ‘banks of the old river Rhine’ watching the ships go by. In these days, he often used to play his song
‘Fraulein’ for me.”
254
A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
Claudia accompanied Townes on his trip through Germany: Berlin, Dresden, Solingen, Bonn, Hannover, Bielefeld, Utrecht (Netherlands), Munich, Wurzburg, Schorndorf, Nurnberg, Burghausen, Cologne, Bochum, and Offenbach. The performances were for the most part typical of this final period of Townes’ decline: often rambling, stumbling, drunken disasters. Claudia was certainly around Townes enough to understand what she could expect from a relationship with him. “She’s an intelligent woman,”
Jim Calvin says. “She knew what she was getting into, and she was willing to go there. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t gonna try and change him. She was gonna try and make sure he ate right, and things like that, which he needed…. She definitely loved the guy like crazy. And he talked about her all the time.”
“It was the second of December at Frankfurt airport when I saw Townes for the last time,” Claudia recalls. Townes and Harold flew to London, where Townes was booked at the Borderline on the next evening.
By this time, Townes was exhausted. His performance at the Borderline was a train-wreck, although somehow his utter sincerity managed to come through. There was a palpable sense in the audience that they were witnessing the real thing—a human being
in extremis
.
At one point, to lighten the mood, Townes related the story of “Katie Belle Blue,” saying he’d written three lullabies in his life: “One for a full-grown woman, who divorced me … I guess that one didn’t take [‘Lover’s Lullaby’]; one for money,” for his son, Will (“Hey, Willie Boy”), “who thought it was the stupid-est song he’d ever heard … and one genuine lullaby,” which he then played, haltingly. “Marie” followed, blending seamlessly into “Waitin’ Around to Die,” then “A Song For,” each song more stark and grim than the last.
After telling an old joke, Townes launched abruptly into
“Sanitarium Blues.” The audience had probably gone farther into Townes’ dark state of mind than they wanted to, and this harrowing spoken-word piece proved too much. There was nervous laughter at some of the most grim lines and a clear sense The Blue March
255
of relief when Townes finished the recitation and began the familiar “Tecumseh Valley.” At least the audience could sing along with this story of misery, disappointment, and untimely death.
As Harold helped Townes from the stage at the show’s end, audience members turned quietly away, cumulatively stunned and embarrassed by this display of frailty—and of mortality. If this wasn’t the blues, they’d never see the blues.
Incredibly, immediately upon returning from London and the exhausting month-long tour, Harold Eggers took Townes to Austin for a late-night recording session at Flashpoint, where the harrowing evidence of Townes’ final deterioration was committed to tape. Nothing from the session was commercially releasable; in fact, it was almost impossible to listen to the recordings without cringing or weeping.5
After the quick, grim detour to Austin, Townes returned to Tennessee, to his home on Old Hickory Lake. Five or six days before Christmas, weak and unsteady, he fell down the concrete stairs outside the house and hurt his hip so badly that he couldn’t stand up or walk. He had fallen recently in Germany, in the bathroom, and sustained a large bruise on his thigh as evidence, but this was much worse.6 After lying outside for an hour or more, he dragged himself inside and phoned Jeanene.
He told her he had pulled a muscle in his leg while tossing and turning in his sleep from a bad dream. Jeanene called Jim and Royann Calvin—to whom she had not spoken for some time—
and asked them to look in on him.7
Townes was clearly in great pain when Jim and Royann arrived at the lake house, but he refused to see a doctor. Jim, a big man, gently loaded him into the cab of their pickup truck and took him back to their house. Townes insisted to the Calvins that he had just pulled a muscle falling out of bed, and that it was getting better, but after a few days with Townes on their couch—unable to get up to go to the bathroom—Jim and Royann realized they were in over their heads. They had a wheelchair delivered so they could at least move him around more
256
A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
easily. They continued, first gently, then more insistently, to try to convince him to go to a doctor, but he stubbornly refused.
He was drinking steadily, as usual, and his mood fluctuated between very dark and very light. He had some new songs, some of which he had recorded demo versions of in Nashville with Jack Clement a few months earlier, and he was quietly determined to make the upcoming Memphis recording sessions, come hell or high water.
On December 23, from the Calvins’ couch, where he had been drinking and watching religious fundraising programs on television, morose and obviously in significant pain, Townes suddenly announced that he wanted to have a party. Jim Calvin saw this as a positive sign and phoned some friends, who came over with guitars. Townes perked up. “Man, he sat up, grabbed the guitar, and did his whole new album without stopping. I mean without taking a damn break.” He “couldn’t quit grinning after everybody left.”
But the high spirits didn’t last. Townes spent Christmas Eve and then Christmas Day still on the Calvins’ couch, by now absolutely despondent. “I was getting beside myself, you know, I’m sitting here arguing with him. I was mean with him even,”
Jim Calvin says. “After a while though, he decided he really wanted to see his kids. And he calls Jeanene up. He had a bi-cycle for Katie Belle and a hundred-dollar bill for Will, and he wanted to give them their Christmas presents. And she just said,
‘No, I don’t want you here. I’m busy. I’m having this big party here, and I don’t want you here, you’ll ruin it.’ And that left me and Royann just aghast. Like, oh boy, we don’t like Jeanene no more, what the hell is this? And he said, ‘No, no, no, no, that’s the mother of my children. Don’t you ever paint her in a bad light.’” Jeanene was firm in her determination to keep Townes away from the family when he was drinking.
When Harold Eggers arrived at the Calvins’ house at the appointed time a few days later to accompany Townes to Memphis for the upcoming sessions, Jim and Royann politely but firmly expressed their concerns to him about Townes’ condition. Egg-The Blue March
257
ers seemed to treat their concerns with some disdain. “He said,
‘Hey, don’t worry. I appreciate you looking after Townes, but I got him, I’ve been doing this for years. He just wants attention, and you guys were suckers enough to give it to him.’ And he didn’t realize; he just didn’t understand. But we had to load Townes into the truck, and it was painful; he was hollering in pain. And I was frankly relieved to not be responsible, because I felt like, damn, he would not go to the hospital, and we couldn’t make him.” Townes told Harold that he was going through with the sessions no matter what, and that he would see a doctor as soon as he got back, and they set out on the three-and-a-half-hour drive to Memphis.
Nobody knew for sure what would come of the recording sessions booked with Steve Shelley and Two Dollar Guitar at Easley Studio in Memphis for the last days of 1996. For
No Deeper Blue
, the last Townes Van Zandt studio album, the arrangements were done and most of the instrument tracks were laid down before Townes even arrived at the studio. All he had to do was sing the songs, with fewer chances for disaster, and a better chance to come in on budget. Understandably, that record had turned out to be somewhat sterile, despite some strong material. Now, in Memphis, every opportunity was being provided to make these sessions different. Whether or not Townes somehow knew that the upcoming recording would not be his big major-label break, but would more likely be his last record, is open to speculation.
Some of those involved in the Easley sessions had heard that Townes was in a wheelchair, but seeing his condition when Eggers wheeled him into the studio was a shock for everyone. He was pale and unshaven, gaunt, trembling. The writer Robert Gordon dropped by the studio and was stopped in his tracks.
“He was a very heavy drinker,” Gordon says, “and I remember when he took a shot during the sessions, you could hear it going through him. You could hear it moving through his blood going into his body and then out again. It didn’t change his behavior
258
A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
radically, but you could hear the change—in his slur. It was almost like this wave that went across him.”8
An engineer on the sessions remembers Townes and the group working for three days, starting each day around noon, working for two or three hours, then taking a break while Townes had a nap, and returning to continue around six or seven o’clock.
Townes and Eggers were at odds the entire time. “I was the mother superior with the stick,” said Eggers.
A look at the songs Townes planned to record gives an indication of his state of mind.9 One was the bleak, haunting “Sanitarium Blues,” which he had been performing on his last tours and had recorded as a demo in Nashville, as a spoken-word piece.
Townes sets a basic rhythm with his taut, metered speech, reciting in a sorry, broken tone the story of a man who would “as soon be dead” taken to an asylum against his will by people he knows are less sane than he himself is; he’s strapped to a table, hosed down and shot full of drugs, then given up on as incurable. The desperation in his voice is made all the more terrifying by the resignation his words reveal, the feeling that it’s too late to do anything but succumb. Clearly, this was not destined to be a hit record. Nor was “Screams from the Kitchen,” with the chorus “Goodbye to the highway, goodbye to the sky, I’m headed out, goodbye, goodbye.”
Another selection was one of Townes’ old favorites, Blind Willie McTell’s “Dying Crapshooter’s Blues,” the mere title of which seems to speak volumes, and which Townes, an avid gambler, was clearly interpreting autobiographically. Also on the list was a song that Townes wrote with Eric Andersen a decade before,
“The Blue March”: “Old Black Bush gonna carry me down/
Throw me into the burying ground/The ground be wet, my eyes be dry/Just don’t let me hear my baby cry.” The last song of the last evening session was a blues piece, with Townes, uncharacteristically, playing heavy solo electric guitar. There were technical problems with the recording equipment, which forced them to call a halt for the night, but everyone saw it as a way out.
They felt that they were pushing Townes too hard, “getting into The Blue March
259
territory that none of us could handle,” Geffen A&R man Ray Farrell said. Townes was not unaware of the situation. He told engineer Stuart Sikes that he would like to go back to Nashville and try to clean up in a detox program.
Early the next day—New Year’s Eve—Steve Shelley phoned Jeanene, who still controlled Townes’ business affairs, and told her they were cancelling the sessions. Townes hadn’t been told of the decision when Jeanene called him at his hotel to tell him, and while they were talking Harold Eggers came in and confirmed what Jeanene had said. She then spoke to Eggers and told him to get Townes back to Nashville and to a doctor, even if he had to drag him kicking and screaming. Before leaving Memphis, Townes phoned Claudia in Germany. “He told me that he had to stop recording because of his aching leg and that he wanted it to be checked by a doctor at home in Nashville,” she recalls. Eggers says he pleaded with Townes on the trip back to Nashville and finally got him to agree to go to a “convenient care” emergency center, Townes knowing that they couldn’t keep him there.
The doctor who finally examined Townes was alarmed. He told Townes that he was seriously injured, that he might have a blood clot from his injury, which could kill him, and that he had to get to a hospital immediately. Instead, Harold Eggers took Townes home to Mt. Juliet, then called Jeanene and told her that Townes had finally agreed to go to the hospital, but only with her. Jim Calvin drove Harold to the airport. According to Calvin, “Harold said, ‘Oh, Townes will be fine. Let’s all hope we make a bunch of money this next year, and we’ll get you guys out on tours, we’ll get you over to Europe this year with him,’ all this. Just pep talking, business talk more than worried about Townes. But I was worried about Townes.”
Meanwhile, Jeanene rounded up Will and Katie Belle and made the forty-five-minute trip out to Townes’ house on the lake. When she arrived there was a fire burning in the fireplace, as Townes always liked. She found him talking on the phone to Jimmy Gingles. Jimmy later said that Townes had called him and
260
A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
told him that he was “surrounded by spirits.” He asked Townes whether they were friendly spirits, and Townes told him that he thought so, but that he was afraid that they would push him into the fireplace if he bent down to stoke the fire.