A Deeper Blue (13 page)

For two or three months after the baby was born, things held together. “Then the pressures came back,” according to Fran.

It was at this point that Townes started dealing with the new pressures by turning to new substances. For the first time, he started shooting heroin. Even though he already was keeping odd hours and eccentric company, and again (or still) drinking steadily, the change in his lifestyle was drastic. Fran caught on quickly, and she became worried. “After J.T. was born, the one
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
thing that made me not able to tolerate his lifestyle was that I just didn’t want it around our baby,” Fran says. “I would come home and he would have drugs in the house with the baby right there. At that point I started to have a different focus. I told him I would not tolerate it. I couldn’t live that way. That really started the final split.… I never actually saw anything but pot at first, but I started finding out that he was going way off the deep end. I would get phone calls late at night to come get him, and I would have to go get somebody to take care of the baby and then go find Townes. He would be in some just God-awful places. Then I knew. I didn’t know
exactly
what it was that he was doing at first, but I knew it wasn’t just pot…. He needed more help than I knew what to do. It was one of those things:

‘how do you love him best?’”

Townes and Fran soon agreed that they could no longer stay together. Even if Townes’ daily drinking and his blossoming heroin habit hadn’t made family life impossible, the increasing presence of other women in his life had made the marriage untenable for Fran. One of the women Townes was seeing during the months after J.T. was born was a quiet, dark-haired girl named Bianca, a native of Corpus Christi who had just dropped out of high school in Houston. “He was just strikingly handsome; very dark and brooding,” Bianca says. “It’s funny, I didn’t even know at first that he was a singer and songwriter; he didn’t tell me, somebody else told me, and somebody else told me that he was married and recently separated and everything. I was only fifteen or sixteen when we met. I looked older and I told everybody I was twenty-two, so it wasn’t
exactly
like Townes was sleeping with a fifteen-year-old, although he was; he just didn’t know.” Whatever Townes knew or didn’t know at this point, he did seem to accept that his marriage was over, and he took up with other women freely.7

The breakup of the marriage, according to Fran, “was not one of those things where one of us got angry and said we were going to leave the other one. It just gradually happened. Then, there was nothing else to do.” This was the end of Townes’ ex-For the Sake of the Song

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periment with “respectable” family life. It wouldn’t be his last attempt to settle into such a life, but it would set the pattern for his future attempts.

Ultimately, according to Bob Myrick, “Drinking and playing guitar was Townes’ number one thing, and Fran was not. I guess for a while there everybody figured that it would all work out, and that Townes would be a good guy. Townes actually joked about that. He showed me some pictures of their wedding and pictures of him back then when he had really short hair, and he laughed and said, ‘This is my good-guy days.’”

“Fran was his rock,” according to Mickey Newbury. “If they had stayed together, Townes’ life would have gone in a different direction, and he would have been a different person, and he still would have been a great writer. But I don’t think Fran could stand the lifestyle.”

That summer, Van Zandt was far away from Fran and the baby, in Malibu, California, where Kevin Eggers had brought Jack Clement and Jim Malloy to record his second Poppy album,
Our
Mother the Mountain
. “Kevin Eggers wanted us to go to Holly-wood to do it,” Jack Clement recalls, “because he thought it was hipper, and that the people out there might get into his music more than people here [in Nashville]. [Eggers] was trying to take it in a little more of an esoteric direction than I would have.” Bob Myrick accompanied Townes, staying with him, Eggers, and Clement in a large beach house at Malibu Pier, partying every night and working in the studio every day for three months. “We used a few different studios,” Clement says, “and we worked pretty hard. Kevin sort of tried to control things, and he got his way very often, just by pushing for it, really pushing, even with some of the more off-the-wall stuff, but we got pretty much what we wanted on [the recording].”

Clement and Eggers assembled an impressive group of studio musicians for the sessions, including guitarist James Burton, drummers John Clauder and Donald Frost, and Charlie McCoy
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
on bass, guitar, harmonica, and keyboards, among a dozen or so other first-rate musicians.

“Don Randi, the keyboard player, was really the big guy in the studio,” Myrick recalls. “He’d look at the song, and he’d have the arrangement in five minutes. This guy was an amazing musician. We’d go in, and Jack and Jim would do their things, getting the production stuff all set up, and then Randi would point at somebody and the harp would come in, then this guy would come in, then that one, and they had the arrangement.

It was very professional.… They dubbed all those strings in later, so I didn’t hear all that.”

From the first notes of the second album, it’s clear that a more focused vision is at work than existed on the first album. The tracks feature well-integrated string arrangements, understated flute and harmonica, simple and crisply textured acoustic guitars, some well-placed autoharp, and generally a more subtle, less self-conscious approach than that that mars the earlier effort. The songs on the album are a mix of older material, like the ballad “St. John the Gambler”; love songs written for Fran, such as the opener, “Be Here to Love Me”—a fine example of the recorded arrangement complementing, not distracting from, the song itself—“Like a Summer Thursday,” “Second Lover’s Song,”

and “She Came and She Touched Me,” all somewhat melancholy songs cataloging Townes’ feelings as he and Fran grew apart; and some fine newer material.

As with the first album, this release took its title from one of the record’s best songs, one that Townes had been holding onto for at least a couple of years. “Our Mother the Mountain” is a beautiful, dark, minor-key ballad in the style that Townes had been cultivating of songs that seemed as though they could be Elizabethan folk ballads (“a lady in waiting she stands ‘neath my window”; “no trace of my true love is there to be found”; and the refrain “singing tur-alur-ali-o”) but that were clearly of an entirely modern mindset. The arrangement—just acoustic guitars; a heavy, deep, bass; subtle strings; and a bass flute—is an understated success. “Tecumseh Valley” (which Townes re-recorded For the Sake of the Song

85

for this album, with the original lyrics intact and with a more sympathetic arrangement) was one of the earliest of these faux folk ballads, and “St. John the Gambler” is another, although both are simpler and more literal than the dark poetry of “Our Mother the Mountain.” Lines such as “her skin fits her tightly”

and “her eyes turn to poison/and her hair turns to splinters/and her flesh turns to brine” mark the modern influences, if not of Dylan then of some of the modern poets that Townes had been reading since his school days. But the achievement represented in “Our Mother the Mountain” is Van Zandt’s own pure meld-ing of his form—the song’s musical structure and mood—with his content—the dark, mysterious, surrealistic atmosphere of the lyrics: the song as pure dream.

More in the vein of a nightmare than a dream, and darker still than “Our Mother the Mountain,” is “Kathleen.” Townes’ friend Chito—with whom he shared not only the experience of the onset of bipolar disorder but also of treatment at Galveston—harkens to “Kathleen” as the embodiment of the dark depths of manic-depression. He asks rhetorically, “You don’t know Kathleen, do you? Well, I know her, and Townes sure knew her. She’s real, and when you go down to see her, you’re really going down.”

“Maybe I’ll go insane,” Townes sings, “I got to stop the pain/

Or maybe I’ll go down and see Kathleen.” One of the most pure and plain-spoken of the songs on the album, another darkly minor-key rumination, “Kathleen” turns around what would become one of Townes’ dominant themes: nature. And it is clear that nature is leading Townes to the depths. “The moon is come to lead me to her door,” he sings; “The waves, they take my hand/Soon I’m gonna see my sweet Kathleen.” “You don’t want to go,” Chito observed, “but on the other hand you
do
want to go. You
have
to go, and there’s comfort in that.”

In “Snake Mountain Blues” Townes again occupies the timeless persona of the balladeer. Again working in a minor key, briskly this time, he is dwelling on the inevitable early death of the drunken poet, on the inability of his “yellow-haired woman”

to appreciate him, and on the notion that, once he dies, she will
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
move on with hardly a thought of him. Another ballad, far more sentimental, “My Proud Mountains” also focuses on the life and death of a rambling poet. The song is one of a series of Colorado songs (like the earlier “Colorado Bound”), where Colorado is the fondly remembered home to which our hero will return to die.

Townes seemed relatively happy and energetic during the period encompassing the recording sessions. “I liked the coast,”

Townes said later; “they laid this car on me. I’d get up every morning and cruise up and down the coast highway with the radio playin’ loud classical music.”8 There was a small contingent of young women in Malibu who fell in with the group, and the Texas troubadour seemed intent to make the most of it. Nights were spent partying, drinking, getting high, and entertaining the guests and one another. While Townes had his darker moments, they passed quickly in the compressed rush of events surrounding the album project. He felt slightly more involved in the recording process than he had been for his first album, according to Clement; although “in no way did he seem inclined to exercise any control,” he felt at least more a part of the “creative team.”

As a sidelight, Myrick remembers Townes’ playful yet competitive nature emerging in a game that he continued to play for the rest of his life. “Kevin and Townes were really close friends then,”

Myrick says, “but they used to play a game that would get Kevin absolutely irate.” The game was known as “the slap game” and

“Townes played it a lot,” Myrick says, “and he played it with everybody. The guy slapping you puts his hands on his waist, and you put your hands out in front together, like you were praying, only you’re pointing them directly at the person. And the person hitting can flinch, and pretend, but cannot move his hands off his waist unless he comes through with the full swing. But Townes was so quick, he’d just beat the shit out of everybody. He had such quick reactions when he was young, and even into his thirties and forties. Townes could slap you four or five times before you could even move! And Kevin was especially slow. Townes would beat the outside of his hands until they were damn near For the Sake of the Song

87

black and blue! It was a game, but it was kind of a weird, sadistic game. And it was a game that Townes never lost.”

Van Zandt and Myrick hitchhiked from Malibu back to Houston later that summer when the recording sessions were completed, a journey not without its memorable moments. Somewhere between Los Angeles and Lubbock, Myrick remembers, “we got picked up by this black family, and they had like eighteen kids, and there’s us, two guys and a guitar, and we could hardly fit in the car. And they were just really good folks. Of course, I was not used to that, at all. I was a little apprehensive. We were long-haired hippies. And we went to this little black bar, a real dive, somewhere between Lubbock and Houston. It was real small, it had no name, there was just an old screen door and a little bar set-up. But Townes just loved that; that’s exactly what he preferred.”

Another hitchhiking tale, also from the stretch of highway between Lubbock and Houston, is told by Joe Ely, who in 1969

was a young musician following in the tradition of fellow Lubbock native Buddy Holly, struggling to find his own voice. As Ely tells the story, he was driving toward Houston from Lubbock when he stopped to pick up a hitchhiker. They didn’t talk much, and when they arrived in Houston, the hitchhiker reached into his duffle bag, which contained not clothing but record albums, and presented Ely with one of the records. The hitchhiker turned out to be Townes Van Zandt, and the album was Van Zandt’s brand new release,
Our Mother the Mountain
.

Ely listened to it, then listened to it some more with his friend Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and they decided that they too wanted to write and perform songs like that.

Before Poppy released
Our Mother the Mountain
in the fall of 1969, Van Zandt visited Kevin Eggers at Eggers’ home in New York City, where Eggers had booked Townes for a series of gigs at some of the clubs in Greenwich Village, including Gerde’s Folk City, where the young Bob Dylan had gotten his first big-city break.9 “I first came here [to New York] after the folk thing was
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
dead,” Townes said later; “So they called me country-folk.… Who knows?”10 The shows were lightly promoted, but Van Zandt’s striking songwriting skill and dry, masterfully understated performances were well received by the Village folk crowd, and Townes became known as someone to pay attention to.

Townes returned to Texas, always glad to be back home after a stay in New York City. He played small gigs at the familiar clubs in and around Houston and drifted briefly from friend to friend, on “the couch circuit,” as he and his friends called it.

Later he played shows in Austin with his friend Cado Parrish Studdard and some other on-again, off-again musicians, calling the impromptu group the Delta Mama Boys, in honor of a then-favorite illicit high, Robitussin DM cough syrup, which they called Delta Mama. One of the few songs on which Townes ever collaborated with a co-writer was written with Studdard, and it later became the title song for the album
Delta Momma Blues
.