A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
twenty-six-acre park in the Flatirons, covered with woodland and gardens and laced with mountain hiking and horse trails.
Guests are housed in cottages, and a lodge, and other beautiful, turn-of-the-century buildings dot the grounds. Donna recalls,
“My mom and both her sisters and all my cousins and Townes and Bill and I would go. The daddies would drive us all up, leave us here, and then they would come up when they could for a long weekend or for their vacation, and then come back later in the summer and take us home.” In the six or eight weeks Townes spent in the mountains each summer were the roots of his lifelong love of nature and the outdoors, and of Colorado in particular. Those summers were times Townes relished, and times when he thrived.
In September 1956, Townes started the seventh grade at Lin-coln Junior High in Billings. A friend remembers serving with him as a class officer. “I was president and he was vice-president,” says Todd Musburger, who later attended high school with Townes in Minnesota. “Ultimately, we were removed from office, both of us, just for too much goofing around, basically.”
According to Musburger, Townes “made a real positive impression as a fun, funny, sociable, gregarious guy.”7
That same fall, something happened that changed Townes Van Zandt’s life, changed the lives of young people all over America, and ultimately changed American culture. It was Sunday night, the ninth of September, and Townes’ sister Donna could literally feel the excitement. “It was such a big deal,” she remembers. “I don’t know why we picked my house, but that’s where we all ended up. We all watched it. All the girls screamed.”
It
was Elvis Presley’s first appearance on Ed Sullivan’s television show. Elvis sent a startling jolt through American youth, including the young and impressionable Townes Van Zandt. He later remembered, “I just thought Elvis had all the money in the world, all the Cadillacs and all the girls, and all he did was play the guitar and sing. That made a big impression on me.”8
Three months later, Townes asked his father if he could have a guitar for Christmas. As Townes later told the story, his father No Lonesome Tune
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told him he could have a guitar if he learned to play “Fraulein,” a sentimental country hit of the time, as his first song.9
Townes readily agreed. He got the guitar for Christmas, and by New Year’s he had learned “Fraulein,” which he proudly played for his father and which he continued to play for the rest of his life.
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Where I Lead Me
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ITHINAFEWYEARS,THEguitar became for Townes Van Zandt the key to the form of expression that was to become his life’s work. Learning the instrument and playing and singing along with the radio and with records quickly became for him something more than just entertain-ment. Once he’d learned “Fraulein” for his father, he began dili-gently soaking up the music around him and seeking out more.
“My musical influences were Elvis, Ricky Nelson, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and the Everly Brothers … it started off with country, then Elvis and those guys …” Van Zandt said.1
Later, he started listening to jazz and blues, then to folk music.
But his grounding was in the great, vital melting pot of country and western and early rock’n’roll that bubbled with such creative fervor in America in the 1950s and early ’60s. Townes had been absorbing it all with great interest and enthusiasm since he was a child and would ride with his father as he drove across the countryside visiting the oil fields, listening to Lefty Frizzell, Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, and Roy Acuff on the car radio.
According to Van Zandt, while Elvis had inspired him to take
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up the guitar, “In the long run, Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell probably inspired me more, they probably went in deeper to my consciousness.”2
Radio in the post-war years was flourishing, as were all kinds of recorded music, and a number of the artists who later inspired Townes were just beginning to make an impact: Hank Williams and Lightnin’ Hopkins both made their first commercial recordings in 1946; in 1950, Woody Guthrie’s
Dustbowl Ballads
was re-released to a growing new audience of young folk music enthusiasts, the same year that Leadbelly’s old chestnut “Goodnight, Irene,” recorded by the Weavers, was the most popular song of the year; in 1952, Harry Smith’s monumental
Anthology of American Folk Music
was released on the Folkways label and began to seep into the underground consciousness; Hank Williams died at the age of twenty-nine in the back seat of his baby-blue Cadillac on New Year’s Day 1953, and his rise to lasting fame was launched in earnest; and Sam Phillips was just starting to record blues, country, and the beginnings of rock’n’roll music at his little studio in Memphis, and was putting the records out on his fledgling Sun label. This was the rich musical milieu into which Van Zandt was stepping and hoping to find his place.
As the early rock’n’roll explosion was peaking, and as Townes was gradually growing more proficient on the guitar and more interested in making his own music, Pure Oil again transferred Harris Van Zandt, this time to Denver, Colorado, and the family moved to Boulder in 1958. The Van Zandts were already familiar with the area, having spent so many summers in the woods of Chautauqua.
They all liked the Boulder area—which is about twenty miles northwest of Denver—and they settled in quickly. In September, Townes started at Boulder High School, and his sister Donna started as a freshman at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
As a young teenager, Townes naturally began to display some of the qualities that he would carry with him throughout his life. Along with his high intelligence came an increasingly high degree of sensitivity. “Townes felt things more than the rest of us did. It was deeper, somehow,” his sister recalls. “You and I
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
would hear about a starving person and go about our lives, but it would just break his heart.”3 One time, as part of a business trip, Harris took Townes and Bill along on a hunting expedition with a client. As Bill recalls, Townes shot a deer, then, devastated, began to cry. Later, Townes’ brother “heard mom and dad trying to console him, tell him things were all right, because it was really upsetting to him.”4
A similar story, recalled by a friend, goes further back in Townes’
childhood. When Townes was five or six years old, his parents took him to a restaurant where there were live lobsters in a tank, and he was told he could pick out his own lobster. “So he thought that he was picking out a pet to take home, and he went, ‘Oh, boy.’ He was thinking, ‘Oh, boy, I’ve got a new pet. I can’t wait. I can’t wait.’ And when they sat the plate in front of him … he was terribly upset. They were at a big round table with a lot of other people, and his father was sensitive enough to realize what had happened. He leaned over and said, ‘I know, Townes, I know. Just try to hang in there.’ And Townes would never forget it.” 5
In school in Boulder, Townes also began, typically, to show signs of rebelliousness. It was the rebelliousness of youth, and it was the dawn of an era of rebelliousness, but it was also the seed of a rebelliousness that was to mark Townes’ adult personality.
His brother remembers an early instance of the relatively innocent variety of rebellion. “When he was in high school, he went out with my mom, shopping for school clothes. And he bought a very, very bright red pair of pants, a bright green pair of pants, and a bright yellow pair of pants. I mean, just real neon colored green, red, and yellow. And he started wearing them…. I don’t know why he would do that, because he was kind of shy in a lot of ways.” Bill recalls that the colorful pants started a trend.
“Other kids started wearing them,” he says. “The school got all upset, and one day they called mom and told her to come get him and make him change his clothes and not wear those pants back again. He liked to poke his finger in the eye of authority.”6
Townes continued to play the guitar and sing—Johnny Cash songs, Hank Williams, some Elvis numbers, some folk songs—
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for himself and now more and more for the family and occasionally for friends. “He would go up in the mountains with a friend, and they wouldn’t take any food,” Donna recalls. “When they got hungry, they would look around for somebody’s campfire and they would play their guitars in exchange for food.”
But mostly his playing was confined to family gatherings, of which there were many. Harris and Dorothy traveled with Donna, Townes, and Bill back to Texas whenever they could, and they always made it for the family gatherings that were a big part of their lives. “They would always have a family talent show. Townes would play the guitar and be at the center of it,”
notes Bill. Another story has Harris sometimes secretly putting Townes’ guitar in the trunk of his car before going to a family get-together. When Townes was approached and asked to play, he’d say he didn’t have his guitar with him. “His father would say, ‘Yes we do,’ which would infuriate Townes, but he would always agree to play.”7
One summer in these years, Townes fell off a horse while he was camping in the mountains, and he broke his finger. “He said he would have much rather broken a leg,” Donna says. “It’s very difficult to play the guitar when you have a broken finger.”
Townes maintained a solid B average in high school,8 but before he was able to settle very comfortably into life in Boulder, Harris delivered the news that the family would be moving yet again, this time to Barrington, Illinois, outside of Chicago. This was not a move that anyone in the family wanted to make; nevertheless, in the middle of the 1958−59 school year, Townes started at yet another new school. Donna remained at college in Boulder, now a sophomore, relieved to be staying put.
Dorothy, Donna, Townes, and Bill again vacationed in Boulder that summer, joined later by Harris, who was beginning to feel the mounting pressures of his position at the oil company and seemed to really need the vacation.
There is a story that one day Townes came home from school to find his father very upset, weeping, because he had had to lay off thousands of company employees that day.9 “My dad
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
had that kind of a job, particularly in Illinois,” Bill remembers.
“When there was dirty work to be done, my dad had to go and negotiate and do things like that. That’s the kind of thing that gave dad ulcers. He really loved people, but he had jobs where he had to confront people and do some things that weren’t pleasant.”10 This pressure and frustration was to have a predict-ably negative effect on Harris Van Zandt’s health. It also brought a dark element into the life of the family that did not escape the darkly inclined teenaged Townes.
Even with all the upheaval, and even with his growing reputation as something of a rebel, Townes continued to do well in school, had a decent social life, and continued to read widely.
He also continued to seek out records to feed his growing interest in music, and he continued to practice the guitar. By the late fifties, the guitar was becoming a very popular instrument with young people all over the country. By 1958, more guitars were being sold in the United States than ever before; the Kingston Trio sold four million copies of their recording of the old folk standard “Tom Dooley”; and the new folk boom—the
“folk scare,” as some remember it—reached its first early peak. A young University of Minnesota student whose family name was Zimmerman began performing at a coffeehouse in Minneapolis that year, billing himself for the first time as Bob Dylan. The time was ripe, and as a musician, Townes was in a crucial formative phase, internalizing the music, seeking guidance wherever he could find it, and practicing incessantly. That year one of his friends dared Townes to take the stage at an upcoming school talent show and show them all what he could do. With a swag-ger and a swallow, Townes accepted the dare.
Dorothy Van Zandt drove her son from the Van Zandt house on Biltmore Drive to the school that evening and waited outside in the car while he went inside with his guitar. When his turn came, Townes played three songs, a natural if somewhat eclectic mix of Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, and Hank Williams. The girls screamed when he sang, “because it was in vogue at the time,”
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Townes figured. “I went through the crowd, everybody patted me on the back, and I got instant acclaim in my junior high,”
he said. “I fell in with all the best guys and girls immediately.”11
And he had his first taste of what he’d sensed when he first saw Elvis on television: the thrill of stardom. Townes’ mother later said that she had secretly observed the performance from outside, looking through the ground-level window of the basement cafeteria on her hands and knees. This was Townes Van Zandt’s first public performance.12
Townes coasted through his classes at Barrington High School, not particularly inspired. He was getting B’s and C’s, with a few A’s in English, social studies, and physical education, but he was still not well settled—understandably—and, according to his siblings, he was desperately craving stability.13 “Townes was afraid we were going to move again,” Bill recalls, “and he wanted to go to the same school his junior and senior years. So his junior year he made the decision to go to Shattuck, a boarding school.” Donna also recalls the decision to attend Shattuck being Townes’, and she also says that he was simply seeking some kind of stability.
A classmate and friend of Townes at Shattuck says he couldn’t imagine Townes “seeking that kind of rigidity.”14 Another classmate at Shattuck had a similar impression. “I got a feeling that all wasn’t well at Barrington High, and they saw the need for more structure for young John Townes. I’m afraid they offered Shattuck up, and Shattuck was good for what it was, but Townes was a pretty hot article.”15