Booze and ramblin': the blue, wandering life of Townes Van Zandt

Booze and ramblin': the blue, wandering life of Townes Van Zandt 

An album of unreleased recordings by the late country singer has been released on what would have been his 75th birthday – and you won’t find many songs as sad as these

Rebecca Bengal

Townes Van Zandt’s All I Need, the first song on the new, posthumously released album Sky Blue, seems to begin mid-sentence, mid-strum. Like almost everything he wrote, there’s an insistence and fragility in the strumming, stark and lovely and clarion. “Tried everything, set me free / Chains keep playing tricks on me and all I need is a place to lay ’em down.” It’s one of 11 songs on the album, all previously unreleased recordings by Van Zandt, released last week on what would have been the the 75th birthday of a musician whose songs lay somewhere in the territory between folk, blues and country.

It’s not really hard to imagine Van Zandt at 75: he was an already-old soul, but perhaps the longwinded jokes and tall tales he told on stage would have been stretched even further. Townes never imagined himself growing old, and many people who knew him well were surprised he lived as long as he did. “I think my life will run out before my work does, you know?” he said once. “But I’ve designed it that way.”
Van Zandt was 52 when he died of a heart attack in 1997. It was New Year’s Day, a fact that puts him in the company of Hank Williams, with whom he had in common a drinking problem, tall, slim good looks, and an intimate acquaintance with the well-bottom darkness of the human heart. In the 2004 documentary Be Here to Love Me, Emmylou Harris talks about the time she walked into Gerde’s Folk City in the late 60s and saw Townes on stage: “I thought he was the ghost of Hank Williams, with a twist.” It’s likely Van Zandt was at Gerde’s because one of his heroes, Bob Dylan, used to play there.

He was a folk musician well schooled in the songbook of murder ballads and hymns – his friend Steve Earle recalls getting good-humouredly heckled by Van Zandt when Earle admitted he didn’t know the traditional ballad The Wabash Cannonball. But early on he fell under the spell of fellow Texan Lightnin’ Hopkins, whose country blues and distinctively rhythmic finger-style picking influence is particularly evident on songs such as Rex’s Blues.

You can’t get much bluer than a Townes Van Zandt song. His first real song is also his bleakest ballad, Waitin’ Around to Die, sung with a high straining whinny and twang: “Lots of booze and lots of ramblin’ / It’s easier than waitin’ around to die,” the refrain of “waitin’ around to die” eerily evolving as the song progresses from imagined possibility to reality. Harris, on her first encounter at Gerde’s, was struck by the “high lonesome sound” in his voice. Like Lightnin’, Van Zandt delivered comic preludes before laying in wrenching melancholic verse; he dealt in contrasts. Around the same time he wrote Waitin’, he was in Dallas learning joke songs for beer-drinking crowds.
Kris Kristofferson described Van Zandt as a “songwriter’s songwriter” – both high praise and an acknowledgment that Van Zandt still had not had his due. Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris all had hits with Van Zandt’s songs. Harris chose what she calls one of her favourite love songs, If I Needed You. Since then, covers of his best-loved songs such as To Live Is to Fly, Tecumseh Valley, Marie, and I’ll Be Here in the Morning, have come from all corners – John Prine, Lucinda Williams, Nanci Griffith, his dear friend Guy Clark, Jason Molina, Andrew Bird, and First Aid Kit. Last year, Charlie Sexton turned in an eerily pitch-perfect performance as Van Zandt in the film Blaze.

Van Zandt wrote behind motel blinds that mimicked the night, claiming that Pancho and Lefty – later a No 1 hit for Haggard and Nelson – came to him through one of those seedy hotel windows, while a manager recalls that on one tour he collected the Bibles from every nightstand drawer and carted them around in his luggage. “I’ve been in six or seven mental hospitals and 10 or 12 alcohol hospitals,” he told an interviewer in 1994. The official diagnosis was bipolar disorder and a long-held alcohol and drug addiction. He asked the same interviewer if she could help him through “a vale of tears”.
Perhaps the borders between reality and fantasy had become blurred. For someone who was able to see through the darkness clearly enough to articulate it, Van Zandt seemed to have a profound mistrust in his own imagination, or perhaps it was that the recklessness of his desire spurred him to try to match that imagination in the real world. He wanted to know what it felt like to jump from a fourth-floor balcony, and the only way to really know was of course to jump from a fourth-floor balcony. That was early in life, before he took an itinerant path, carting around his first two albums as he hitchhiked across the country.
In 1971, he was on his way to Houston from San Francisco when the musician Joe Ely picked up “this tall scarecrow-looking guy” thumbing rides in Lubbock, Texas. Ely was shocked to find that Townes seemed to be carrying no clothes, just a bag of records he’d been hauling with him along the highway, through the desert. Van Zandt gave one to Ely who took it back to his future Flatlanders bandmate Jimmie Gilmore. They listened to it again and again. “It made us question what a song could be,” said Ely.
A couple years after that encounter, Van Zandt showed up in Georgia, at the home of his friend Bill Hedgepeth, a writer. It was here he recorded the songs featured on the Sky Blue album, which feel now like a secret window on Van Zandt’s music. It was a stark and intimate interlude, a remapping of the well-trodden path of the solo wanderer. As funny and uninhibited as he allowed himself to be in real life, Van Zandt shows stunning restraint in these powerfully quiet, minor-chord songs. The new album includes the never heard Sky Blue, and a reworked rendition of Blue Ridge Mountains (Smoky).

Sky Blue also includes a rare version of outlaw anthem Pancho and Lefty, less spirited and more solitary than Nelson and Haggard’s, mixed with envy of Pancho’s dramatic death, and an empathy for the slow spooling out of Lefty’s life. In this rendition, it becomes a long look at loneliness and what it means to outlive your youth: “She began to cry when you said goodbye / and sank into your dreams.”
Van Zandt once told the writer Don Leese that he wanted “to examine and possibly alter the state of grace in which I live, and thereby the state of grace of anybody who listens”. In the early 90s, his friend Roxy Gordon, a Native American writer and musician, wrote about the “perfect darkness” of Van Zandt’s music: “So now I’m thinking maybe Townes Van Zandt’s time is at hand. I hope so ... But of course, it don’t make any difference. Townes Van Zandt knew all the time and the rest is just gravy anyway.”