A Deeper Blue (32 page)

In a typically literate and perceptive article in the June 7, 1987,
New York Times
, Robert Palmer paid prominent tribute to Townes, comparing him outright with Hank Williams: “both men live in their music, as if singing and writing and being human were the same thing and all as natural as breathing. Their songwriting craft and vocal musicianship are exceptional, but what you hear is beyond all that; it seems to be the direct, untrammeled expression of a man’s soul. You can hear the South and Southwest in the accents, the casually mentioned names of towns and rivers, the music’s unforced swing. But the highway runs from one end of America to the other, and for men like these the highway is heritage and home.”12

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At My Window
was finally released—complete with a display quote from the Palmer article and a cover sticker displaying the famous and soon famously overused Steve Earle quote about standing on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in his cowboy boots proclaiming Townes “the best damn songwriter in the whole world,” much to Townes’ dismay. A nervous-looking Townes made an appearance on the Nashville Network TV program
New
Country
with most of the session band from the album, including Jack Clement on keyboards and dobro.

Keith Case, a well-established Nashville agent who also worked with Guy Clark, had started booking shows for Townes, which caused Mickey White some consternation. “He started squeezing me out, because it was more practical and easier for him to get Townes around without shipping a duo or a trio,”

White says. “I was a little bit pissed at Townes because he didn’t really step up and say anything about it.”

Townes turned forty-four on the road, and he continued to bounce from east coast to west coast all year—still working with Guy on many shows, including a series of joint radio appearances in California. This touring regimen, while meant to keep him moving and in a stable condition—which it did for some time—

was beginning to wear on Townes. Once destinations outside of the United States began to enter into the arithmetic of the road, the “getting there” became harder and harder, requiring more of an effort at compensation from Townes, and that compensation was again taking the standard form of heavier and heavier drinking. It was showing in his performances—which could, as always, be brilliant one night and disastrous the next—and it was showing in his personal life, as he struggled with the knowledge of his family responsibilities even as he traveled the world far away from them.

In October 1988, Townes set off for a brief series of gigs in New Zealand, accompanied by Mickey White. “Jeanene is the one,” White says. “She called me up and said look, Townes is trying to pull up and keep from drinking, and he’s got this little tour in New Zealand, and I think it would be a good idea if you
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
went along. And Townes just kind of let it happen. I don’t think he was really enthusiastic about it. But we had a good time, the reception was good.… This is when I was playing my very best, at the top of my game,” White says. “We were in New Zealand for about ten days, and they took really good care of us.” Upon his return, after a show with Guy Clark at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco and an early December show in Louisville, Kentucky, Townes was home for only three months before going back to Europe.

The months at home were a mix of attempted domesticity and minor tumbles back into the wild life. “In those first few years when they were out by the airport, he’d get Will off to school, and Jeanene was learning the music business from Jack Clement,” Lyse Moore remembers. Nashville agent Pam Lewis had taken on a management contract with Townes, and Jeanene was serious about getting Townes’ business affairs in order, much as John Lomax had been, although she had a much larger stake in the outcome. But Townes also spent a lot of his time at home drinking with his friends, including his good friend Jimmy Gingles—a Kentucky native living in Nashville and working as a club DJ and as a magician on the side. Gingles recalls the house on Town Park Road more as a scene of good-natured but sometimes edgy partying than of domestic bliss. One night, after hours of drinking tequila with Jimmy and a houseguest from Texas, Townes had gone to bed. Out of the blue, the houseguest, drunk, lost his composure and head-butted Jimmy.

“I just left,” Gingles remembers. “I walked up the street and called a taxicab.… Townes called me the next morning and wanted to know what happened to me and everything, so I told him what happened. Well, he got a little irritated that his houseguest had pulled a stunt like that.” Townes spoke to his houseguest, who had been so drunk that he’d forgotten everything that happened the night before. “This guy carried a .25

automatic revolver with him all the time, which I didn’t know,”

Gingles continues, “and this guy couldn’t remember nothing from the night before, and there was a creek that ran beside his No Deeper Blue

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house, and [Townes] said, ‘Y’all got in an argument … you took a shot at him, and he’s somewhere down in the creek.…’ And he had this guy walking up and down the creek looking for my corpse.… Townes wanted to teach this guy a little lesson on trying to be a human being.”

Bob Moore recalls one night at the Town Park Drive house:

“We were in the house and drinking, and Townes picks up the BB gun, which was a gift from Susanna and Guy from a long time before,” Moore says. “And he shoots out one of the lamps that were mounted on the wall. Then he hands it to me and says, ‘I bet you can’t do that.’ So I did. Then we started shooting other things in the house.” Jeanene, struggling to hold things together, was not amused. “She tried to keep him motivated, but he was way past that,” according to Jimmy Gingles. “In all fair-ness,” Bob Moore says, “Jeanene put up with a lot.” But Jeanene could only put up with so much; she also knew that she had to try to help Townes stay alive. Around this time, with help from friends, she began to look into treatment options for Townes’

alcoholism.

Townes invited Bob Moore to go on the road with him toward the end of 1988, and they travelled extensively in Moore’s new Honda Civic, with Townes doing most of the driving. “We hit the Birchmere, near Washington, D.C.; we went to New York City, to a place called the Wetlands Preservation; and to Café Lena in Saratoga Springs, and to Buffalo,” Moore remembers.

“Once we drove over to Columbia, South Carolina, about 500

miles I guess. And we went to Austin, Dallas, and Houston two or three times.” One long drive was extended in an odd way.

With a gig in Burlington, Massachusetts, set for the next night, Townes opted for an adventure. “I think both of us knew that

‘MA’ was the abbreviation for Massachusetts, rather than Maine,”

Moore says. “But we pretended it wasn’t, and instead, we went to Maine.” They made it all the way to Bangor, Maine, “and as we got farther and farther up the road, we realized, there’s nothing here. But I knew, I’m pretty sure I knew, I mean, neither of us are stupid. He had some friends near Portland who had a res-208

A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
taurant named Pancho’s Choice, and I think that he wanted to see them, so we went and visited a little bit then drove on up to Portland and spent the night. And about midday the next day, we realized we’d better get back. And he made the show.”

The first week of February 1989, Townes was booked at Poor David’s Pub in Dallas, then at the Cactus Café in Austin. As he and Moore were getting ready to set out from Nashville, Peggy Underwood called from Austin to tell Townes that Blaze Foley had been shot and killed.13 He was thirty-nine years old. “We decided that Jeanene and Will and all of us would go down in their van,”

Moore remembers. “When we stopped in Texarkana to sleep, it was like, sixty degrees and raining, but when we woke up the next morning, it was solid ice all over everything. And I think it’s about a hundred and sixty miles from Texarkana to Dallas, and it took us thirteen hours to get there. The heater didn’t work in the van, and Will was in my sleeping bag, and most of our clothes were covering up the rest of him. But Townes drove all the way.

And, I mean, it was stress city. But he was so determined that he wasn’t gonna miss the gig. He was really serious.”

Austin writer Michael Corcoran beautifully describes the day of Blaze Foley’s funeral, an icy February 4 in the Texas capital:

“At the jam-packed service, guitarist Mickey White passed out the lyrics to ‘If I Could Only Fly,’ Foley’s trademark song, and as the ragtag congregation sang those words about wanting to soar above human limitations, the song grew spiritual wings.…

Someone at the gravesite busted out a roll of duct tape, Foley’s favorite fashion accessory, and folks started adorning the casket.

Some of his friends made duct tape armbands or placed pieces over their hearts. Kimmie Rhodes started singing an old gospel song as the casket was lowered, and the tears nearly froze before they hit the ground.” 14 Photographer Niles Fuller recalls shooting some pictures that day of a very somber Townes Van Zandt

“looking into the tent where Blaze’s duct-taped and white-flowered casket lay.” 15 Lyse Moore recalls that “[Blaze] was a wonderful soul and spirit; that’s why Townes loved him. You know, No Deeper Blue

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if you’re true of heart, Townes would love you; if not, he’d just play with you a lot.”

Soon after their return to Nashville, Townes and Jeanene—

with concerned input from Guy and Susanna Clark—decided to make another attempt at drying Townes out. This time, they were all determined that this was going to be a serious effort. In fact, it would be the most serious, sustained effort of Townes’ life, and it would be the last serious, sustained effort. As Susanna recalls, “He was picked up in a limo and taken down to Huntsville, Alabama. And when he got back, they had done a good job.”16

Townes entered a full forty-five-day detoxification and rehabilitation program, which involved treatment at a number of different facilities. Jeanene visited on most weekends, as well as for a “family week” near the end of the program. One weekend, though, Susanna Clark visited Townes at the request of Jeanene.

“There was a reason for my going,” she says.

They had put him on these very powerful barbitu-rates that were making him crazy, because they said he was having hallucinations. And I said, “I don’t think you are.” I said, “What are they?” And he said, very quietly, “Well, one of them, I looked out my window and there was an Indian woman and her

husband, an Indian man, and a little baby Indian.

And the little baby Indian was sitting in the tree.

And a plane flew over, and the little baby Indian pointed up at the plane and said, mommy, what’s that, what’s that? And the mommy said, oh, that’s just some humans who think they can fly.” And so I said, “Townes, those aren’t hallucinations. You’re seeing spirits. That’s real.” And he said, “Really? Oh, that gives me hope.” I said, “You’re connected to another part of the world.” And he said, “Oh, that makes me feel so much better.… That gives me a reason to stay sober … knowing that I’m connected to a spiritual world, now I have something to look forward to when I get out of here.” … He was convinced that he wasn’t crazy after all.

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Mickey White thought a great deal about the issues facing Townes as he fought his alcoholism, and he and Townes discussed many times the concerns surrounding both of their struggles. “He’d spin out his lines and his bullshit and all that kind of stuff,” White reflects, “but after you’d traveled hundreds and hundreds of miles … you’d get some pretty animated, honest introspection coming from him. I think that people who recover from alcoholism with things like AA, the twelve-step approach, tend to be the most successful. But Townes, he was so completely about his spirituality, that that was going to be the vehicle that was going to lead him to recovery.”

White believes that Townes’ bipolar disorder was a real factor, but that it wasn’t always clearly evident because Townes was

“always drunk.” “Townes’ main problem was that he was an alcoholic,” White insists.

I think that it makes it a little harder for people to recover if they suffer from clinical depression, because when they quit drinking, it just becomes so much more evident. And true, people have recovered who had much more serious, deep-seated psychological problems than I think Townes ever had. People tend to make that a reason that Townes couldn’t recover, but I think that the main reason was that he was never motivated to in the first place. And I don’t think that that had to do with his depression as much as it had to do with his world view, and just the way his life developed, and his outlook on certain things. I think a lot of that had to do with death taking people away from him and things like that.… I think that he believed in Armageddon. I think that he believed in redemption. I think that he was raised on that stuff and it created a conflict he never could really reconcile.

Bob Moore recalls that when Townes came home from Huntsville, he was changed. “Somehow, they got through to him,”

Moore says. “And I realized that if I want to be around him, I can’t drink. And he was very supportive of that, and until he died, he was very protective of me.”

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Townes played a scheduled show at the Bottom Line in New York shortly after being released, staying with his friend, the folk singer Eric Andersen. The gig was well attended and successful, but Townes was somewhat tentative and uncomfortable with his sobriety. He returned to Nashville before his next series of gigs, and he asked Bob Moore to accompany him. ” I said yeah, and we went up to the Birchmere and then to a folk festival in Staunton, Virginia.” Moore says. “And then after that, pretty much, any place he went that wasn’t too far to drive, we went together. And, you know, we just talked and talked.”

Moore was impressed to the core by Townes’ gentleness and kindness, which he began to take particular note of during this period of sobriety. “He taught me so much,” Moore says.