A Deeper Blue (11 page)

Van Zandt closes with the well-known “Trouble in Mind” and Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” In forty-five minutes, Townes has covered his ground. His ground would expand and his roots deepen considerably over the years, but he remained centered in roughly the same place we see him this night.

In January 1966, Harris Williams Van Zandt died suddenly of a heart attack. He was fifty-two years old. His unexpected death was a shock to Townes, as it was to the rest of the family, and it seemed like a piling-on of hardships so soon after all Townes had just been through, and after all the family had just been through with Townes. The eldest son took his father’s death particularly hard, which in turn compounded his mother’s grief.

Dorothy had been looking after Townes closely since his return to Houston. She was scared for him, and she felt responsible for what had happened to him, though it almost surely had been her husband’s decision to send Townes to Galveston. But she was heartened by his return to school and by his marriage
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
to Fran, with whom she shared a close relationship. Harris Van Zandt’s funeral, at River Oaks Baptist Church, was attended by hundreds of people.

“Townes never really talked about how much losing his dad affected him,” Fran says. “But he went into a deep depression right afterwards. At first he just clung to me real tight, then it was like he had to get away, like it was unbearable. After that, he decided, ‘now I’m going to find out about my music.’ After his dad died, he really got committed to writing songs.”

It was also at this point—as the war in Vietnam raged and U.S. troop levels were sharply on the rise—that Townes determined that he wanted to join the Army. He went to a recruiter to sign up, Fran recalls, “and one of the things they ask is, ‘Have you ever been in a mental hospital?’ And of course he had been.

So he had to get a clearance from the doctors, and they wouldn’t give it to him. That is when they wrote this letter, which said that he was an acute schizophrenic and was only marginally adapting to life.17 I will never forget that sentence, because Townes looked at that and said, ‘I’m crazy.’ I said, ‘No, you’re not. It’s just making you 4-F.’ It was one of those kind of mixed blessings. We didn’t have to worry about his going to war, but at the same time there was some desire to keep him out of trouble, I think. That doctor also said that he thought that Townes should be allowed to wander and find himself, which was kind of counter to what everybody thought, [which was] that Townes needed more structure. Amazing. So Townes took that to mean,

‘okay, maybe it’s time for us to go on the road.’”

Fran had gone to work for Shell Oil right after graduating from college, in August 1966. Now, early in 1967, she quit her job and prepared to accompany her husband in an old RV they had bought. “Townes was an incredible craftsman, and he had great decorating talent, and he and his mom got in this old thing and redecorated the whole thing. She was just dying that we were doing this, but she kept up this great face. She hired some of her upholsterers and stuff to redo everything. Townes redesigned the inside so we would have maximum space to Waitin’ for the Day

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move around, and so we could have more people in it…. we toured Texas and Oklahoma, all through the Hill Country and Dallas–Fort Worth and Oklahoma, playing lots of little clubs like the Jester, that kind of ten-dollar-a-night thing. We didn’t have an agent or anything. There was just this guy, Mack Webster, who knew a lot of the club owners. There was a circuit you could get on. Beaumont, Texas, was a big spot, and a lot of the college towns, because they would always have clubs.”

The couple stayed on the road for three or four months, and then it started to wear thin. Fran says, “He had made a real point to try and make it work, really work. We were going to make a living with this. But it wasn’t working. It was making him a nervous wreck. Anytime we were doing well financially and he didn’t have to worry about that, we were happy. But as soon as he felt that the pressure was on him to feed me, it was too much.

So I came back and stayed with my parents for a while, and Townes went back on the road. I was just devastated. I mean, I worshiped him; I just worshiped him. And I was scared for him. Then I went on back to work. I thought the one thing we needed for sure was some income. And he wound up coming back because the Jester and Sand Mountain were really starting to do something.”

So they kept at it. “Townes was writing a lot,” Fran says, “and he was taking a few courses, and working in the places around town … and I was supporting us. It was still good during that time; we were still having a lot of fun.”

One of the songs Townes wrote during this time was “Tower Song.” As Fran remembers, “We were living [in the apartment]

on top of Sand Mountain when he wrote it, sitting in a chair, and I was laying on the bed reading. As soon as he got through writing it, he said ‘listen to this and tell me what you think.’ I can remember the conversation; I said, ‘It’s a beautiful song, but what are you trying to tell me?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know if it’s about you or not.’ He said ‘I never try to tell anybody anything, it’s all what they hear.’”

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In “Tower Song,” a “poet” speaks—preaches, really—to his lover about her fears, her demanding pride, and her ideas of

“faith and love and destiny” which are “as distant as eternity from truth and understanding.” The singer seems to set up his righteous “poet’s tears” and “drunken smile” against the woman’s uptight, conventional ideas of love and responsibility, which he says serve to build a wall between them, between their “lives and all that loving means.” “You built your tower strong and tall,” he tells her; “Can’t you see it’s got to fall someday?” “That was funny,” Fran says, “because I said to him, ‘I wonder whose towers those really are?’”

“Tower Song” is a well-crafted love song, if somewhat pious in its assumptions and outlook. It is much more in the commercial folk tradition than “Waitin’ Around to Die,” yet still reveals a depth of thought unusual for that tradition. It very clearly shows the influence of Bob Dylan’s writing circa
Another Side of Bob
Dylan
, and comparing it with the more blues-oriented “Waitin’

Around to Die” illustrates a dichotomy in Townes’ early songwriting that remained quite solid for some years: it is easy to separate Townes’ Dylan-influenced songs from his blues-influenced songs. The clearest sign that Townes’ songwriting is maturing comes later, when those two lines of descent merge and become something uniquely his own.

Townes and Fran were clearly growing apart, and it was not only financial strains that were tearing at the relationship. “When he did something, he hid it from me,” she says. “That was one of the things that started to become real apparent. He didn’t want me to be part of his ‘bad’ life. I was like the ‘good’ side, and then he had this dark side that came out other places.” She recalls one time that Townes told her that she had to remain “straight”

so he’d have someone to come home to.

“He couldn’t stand me to say a cuss word,” she remembers.

“He had this great respect for women, the way I saw him. I would go to parties and stuff, but one time he said he was so proud of me because I sat on the side and I never participated in anything Waitin’ for the Day

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that went on. He thought that I was like this queen there.” But problems were arising more regularly in close quarters on the road. “He had trouble because [touring with him] kept me in both sides of his life, as opposed to having me set apart in this other side. That was starting to scare him,” Fran says.

“I was getting horrified, because that’s when he started smoking marijuana and stuff. And I just didn’t do that. I loved the music; I loved hearing him. But it was very different for me to see all these different kinds of people he was involved with. I was far from being a hippie. So, the whole hippie thing, knowing Guy and all that sort of thing.… What I started seeing was lots of waste going on, and that’s what I started seeing Townes doing to himself.

“That is also when we met Mickey Newbury and Jack Clement, here in Houston. Mickey Newbury had been at the club and they met, then Mickey introduced him to Jack. So when they signed a record deal, boy, it looked like something really good was going to happen.”

7

For the Sake

of the Song

S
TRANGERTHINGSHAVEHAPPENEDINthe annals of the record business, but the story of Townes Van Zandt’s first record deal is bizarre even by industry standards. Mickey Newbury, a native of Houston, was at this time one of Nashville’s most prolific and successful songwriters and one of the artists who was breaking away from the staid, straight “Nashville Sound” and paving the way for the more progressive music of Roger Miller, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and others. Newbury had been writing songs for Nashville’s most prominent publishing company, Acuff-Rose, since 1963, and had had his songs recorded by Elvis Presley, Eddy Arnold, Ray Charles, Tom Jones, Joan Baez, and dozens of others, as well as recording his own albums, first for RCA, then for Mercury, and finally for Elektra. Newbury’s success as a songwriter peaked in 1968 with a song not at all characteristic of his work, but one that remains one of his best known: “Just Dropped In (To See What Condi-72

For the Sake of the Song

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tion My Condition Is In),” recorded by Kenny Rogers & the First Edition. With his wide experience in the business and a strong artistic ear, Newbury knew a good song when he heard it, and during this period he had the clout to do something about it.

In addition to writing and recording, he was producing records with his partner Jay Boyett in Houston at a small facility called Jones Studio.

As Newbury recalls, Van Zandt came to Jones Studio to record a demo record at the beginning of 1968, a step that he decided he needed to take if he were to advance his career beyond small clubs. Newbury recalls, “Jay brought me [Townes’] stuff and asked me if I thought we could do anything with him. I said, ‘Hell, I don’t know, but he sure deserves it.’ When I heard it, it just knocked me totally down. I can remember ‘Tecumseh Valley’ was one of them…. It seems like, if I’m not mistaken, even that far back, I want to say ‘Our Mother the Mountain’ was one of them. I know that within that first year or two, he wrote

‘Quick Silver Daydreams of Maria,’ ‘St. John the Gambler,’ ‘Our Mother the Mountain.’ I know those were all written in those early, first years.

“Jay didn’t think too much of him, because he was listening to his voice and he didn’t think that Townes’ singing was very good. I was just the opposite,” says Newbury. “I was coming from a completely different place. You know, I liked Bob Dylan’s singing. To me, it was the way the song was interpreted, the phrasing and the interpretation. Townes had kind of a sleepy kind of a delivery that really was appealing to me.”1

Newbury and Townes quickly became friends, and within weeks, Newbury says, “we signed him to a management contract, although Townes never actually knew I was his manager, because I was a silent partner with Jay Boyett. It’s hard to maintain a friendship with somebody that you’re managing, and I valued our friendship.” Newbury says that he told Townes that he should go to Nashville. “I just said ‘Sure,’ Van Zandt later recalled. “I was a real seriously rambling folksinger in the old sense of the word, you know, guitar over your shoulder. I wasn’t
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
even thinking about records or publishing deals. I was just kind of, ‘Sure, I’ll go anywhere.’”2

“I took him to Acuff-Rose first,” Newbury explains, “because I felt an obligation to them. It was exactly as I figured it would be; it went right over their heads. I took Kristofferson over to Acuff-Rose, too, and it went right over their heads. So I took him to Bill Hall, who was a really good friend of mine. He was Jack Clement’s partner, at Hall-Clement.”

Jack Clement was already something of a legend in the recording business. A Tennessee native, he had started out playing bluegrass music as a Marine stationed in Washington, D.C., in the early 1950s. He ended up in Memphis in 1954, where he served as master of ceremonies and sometime-singer with a big band that played at the Eagle’s Nest, where Elvis Presley was playing some of his first gigs. Clement soon became involved in recording some Memphis performers, including Billy Lee Riley, whose record he took to Sam Phillips’ Sun Studio to be mastered. Phillips ended up hiring Clement as his first staff engineer/producer. Clement recorded Roy Orbison, then his legacy was established when he recorded Jerry Lee Lewis’ monumental

“Whole Lotta Shakin’.” He produced some of the classic Johnny Cash records, and he wrote a number of hits for Cash, including

“Guess Things Happen That Way,” “Ballad of a Teenage Queen,”

“It’s Just About Time,” and “Katy Too” (the last co-written with Cash). In the early 1960s Clement partnered with Bill Hall in a recording and publishing venture in Beaumont, Texas, that found quick success with Dickey Lee’s recording of “Patches.”

Lee also wrote the country standard “She Thinks I Still Care,”

which was published by Hall-Clement.

Clement moved to Nashville later in the 1960s, where he teamed up with Jim Malloy, built two successful recording studios, and settled into producing records and publishing songs.

As Clement recalls, he and Malloy were looking for songwriters and performers, and one of the first things Clement did was go to Houston, where he went to see his old friend Bill Jones, whom he knew from his days in Beaumont, and who owned For the Sake of the Song

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Jones Studio in Houston. Clement recalls, “He kept telling us about this writer named Townes Van Zandt, how great he was, and that he’d sit there with a bottle of wine and drink and sing all night, all these wonderful songs. And they played us some tapes that he’d made. Then Townes came in and we met him and we decided, ‘Yeah, we like this guy.’ Mickey [Newbury], he was in on it too; he was very much supportive of Townes.… So he did have a lot to do with getting us interested in him. But he didn’t bring him to Nashville, we went there [to Texas]. And then I came up with this deal with Kevin Eggers, which was a big mistake, to produce a record.”3