A Deeper Blue (15 page)

this time as “I’ll Be Here in the Morning,” again with a stronger, more direct arrangement of acoustic guitars, standup bass, and harmonica. Just as he had re-recorded “Tecumseh Valley”

more to his satisfaction on his second album, so he now hoped to record definitive versions of these strong songs, now more enlightened about recording techniques and production values.

He also chose to record a more stripped down, intimate version of “Quick Silver Daydreams of Maria,” now styled as “(Quicksil-96

A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
ver Daydreams of) Maria,” both because he hadn’t been completely satisfied with the first recording and because he didn’t have quite enough high-caliber new material to fill the record.

In fact, though, the songs he had assembled over the course of the previous few tumultuous months included some of his finest work. A case in point is “Lungs,” with the opening lines “Won’t you lend your lungs to me?/Mine are collapsing/Plant my feet and bitterly breathe/up the time that’s passing.” The song continues over an insistent bass-drum beat and minor-key strum, with a strong dobro accompaniment: “Breath I’ll take and breath I’ll give/pray the day ain’t poison/Stand among the ones that live/in lonely indecision.” There is a relentless quality to the progression of the verses; nature is invoked but there seems to be a power growing that is outpacing nature, an apocalyptic power, all couched, as Townes prefers, in a language of dreams. In this case, there is also a religious element, with invocations of the devil, of salvation, and of Jesus, an “only son,” with “love his only concept.” Townes is treading in new territory, and the maturity of his songwriting powers is clearly ready to support his ideas.

“Columbine” is another Colorado song, referring to Colorado by reference to the state flower and, as always, to nature. “Don’t You Take It Too Bad” represents another leap forward in Van Zandt’s songwriting prowess. The conversationally direct progression of verses seems effortless, punctuated with beautiful, intangible images like “how soft the time flies/past your window at night.” He performed this song for his entire career.

The recording of the album, which was eponymously titled—

an attempt both to keep the artist front and center and to draw the attention of an audience of those many who had still never heard the first two albums, or heard of the artist at all—was accomplished smoothly and quickly, and Van Zandt was as satisfied as he had been with any of his previous recorded work. The album cover was another Milton Glaser design, featuring a simple Sol Mednick photograph of Van Zandt seated at an old table in an antiquated-looking kitchen, booted feet crossed, his head resting in his hand, elbow on the table, eyes closed, cigarette Don’t You Take It Too Bad

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in an ashtray, a bust of Shakespeare in the ironwork above the oven, pots and pans and implements hanging from the ceiling.

Townes celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday in March, hitchhiked to Long Beach, California, to visit Guy and Susanna for a few weeks, then went back on the road in support of the new record.

During this period, Eggers was booking Van Zandt through an informal network known as the Bitter End circuit, after the famous New York City folk club, through which the booking originated.

The venues were college coffee houses all over the country. According to guitarist Mickey White, who frequented the circuit, it was a relatively lucrative, steady arrangement for folk artists, lasting from around 1968 until it trailed off around 1972.

The artist would either go up there [to the Bitter End] and audition or submit an audition tape or their records, then all these student leaders from the student centers from colleges all over the country would look through the selection or call up and say, “who can you get for us this week?” and that kind of thing. And you’d work five nights a week.

It was great for folk singers. There wasn’t a whole lot of money in it, but it was government money, it was guaranteed. You’d get your little VIP card for the lunchrooms at the college there, you’d stay in a dorm room or in a VIP guest house, and you’d play there for five nights, in the same spot, which was pretty cool. The idea was that you’d come in on Tuesday night, especially if you were an unknown, and by Saturday night, you’d have kind of built up your crowd. Then you’d do the big gig on Saturday night to a packed house, then go down the street and do it at the next joint.

Plus the other thing was, like for Townes and a lot of people that really benefited from that, when you got close to a city, you could go into the clubs in that city and play there. So once the Bitter End circuit folded, you’d already built up your market in these areas, so you could go back, go into Chicago and Minneapolis and all these places that you’d played, and you’d already have a crowd that knew you.6

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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
It was during these tours that Van Zandt worked at honing his performing craft, and at the same time living out what had become his ideal existence: the life on the road, the life of the wandering folk singer. And colleges provided fertile, easy grounds on which to meet women, another pursuit from which Townes gained much enjoyment and which came easily to him.

He never had to seek out female companionship; on the con-trary, he was now enjoying the kind of star treatment that he had always dreamed of, since seeing his sister’s girlfriends’ reactions to Elvis Presley on television. When he played on his home turf—the clubs of Houston—his reception tended to be grand and exalted.

The young Houston folk singer and guitarist Mickey White had started playing at the Old Quarter in the summer of 1970, which is when he met Van Zandt. Rex Bell knew that White had a fondness and an affinity for the finger-picking guitar style, so he suggested that White check out Townes, who was by this time an accomplished finger-picker. White recalls that, when Van Zandt was coming to Houston, the expectations were great at the Old Quarter. “Townes would call up and say, ‘Hey Dale, or Rex, I’m leaving Montgomery, West Virginia, or wherever, and I’ll be there in two nights. Can I book a gig?’ So Dale would immediately put the word out, ‘
Townes is coming
,’ like the Messiah or something. And whoever was booked on that night—and it might well have been me—was immediately fired.”

White remembers clearly the first time he heard Van Zandt play that summer. “I walked in,” he recalls, “and Townes was sitting up there on the little stool … in his white pants and his kind of square-toed boots, singing these tunes. I think it was probably two or three songs into the ones that I heard when he played ‘You Are Not Needed Now,’ and that was the one that really blew me away. He had a couple of other new ones, and most of the stuff that I was hearing, I was hearing for the first time, including ‘Who Do You Love?’ which also really blew me away.

I’d never seen anything like that, that slappin’ guitar thing that Don’t You Take It Too Bad

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he did with his finger picks.… I’ve never seen anybody do that lick like Townes.”

White was attracted by Van Zandt’s understated sense of showmanship as well as by the artistry of his songs and the skill of his playing. “Townes was playing a five-nighter at the Potpourri Coffeehouse, which is now the Cactus Café, in Austin. It was one of those Bitter End circuit gigs, so he opened up on Tuesday night and played through until Saturday night.

Well, I went there on his opening night, and man, I’ll tell you what.… I thought I was impressed at the Old Quarter, but when I saw him in a packed house, in a much bigger venue with a better sound system, better lighting, and all that kind of stuff, and with Townes standing up … it was just really something.

Townes, when he was standing up for all those gigs, he was kind of long and lanky and lean, and he had this little slouch, this Hank Williams kind of slouch that he used, with his guitar slung fairly low, and he was impressive. He could get up in a venue …

with between a hundred and two hundred people, and he was without equal. If it got a little bigger than that, he’d tend to, in my opinion, kind of lose it.” And as the gigs did get bigger, White says, Townes grew more interested in working with supporting musicians.

Van Zandt had worked with sidemen occasionally when he grew tired of being on the road alone. Rex Bell, who had been playing bass with Lightnin’ Hopkins off and on, was enlisted to play bass in support of Townes on many gigs during this period.

“He took me with him just because he liked me, really,” Bell says. “He didn’t really need a bass player.… Most of the time we were not touring, but playing gigs and coming back, playing gigs and coming back, and Townes would take off and go to New York for a few weeks and come back and we’d play some gigs.… Then there were three or four tours that I was involved in … where we went out and stayed together for months at a time. For one of them it was almost a year. Townes and I did two tours together, just he and I, and Mickey did a couple of big tours. We played the entire east coast; I remember we played
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
New York City College and the Pratt Institute, and we went all through North Carolina. We played a lot of college gigs. Townes was really locked into that college circuit, and that’s where the big money was back then, better than the clubs.”7

The college audiences loved Townes. “He was a star everywhere we went,” Bell goes on. “We sold out lots of shows and the girls lined up like it was Elvis. Everywhere he went, it was a packed house, and not one person talked. He had a way of politely taking a room over with his intensity and with his comedy.

He was so funny. And it was natural. Townes was one of those people, he opened his mouth and he got your attention.”

As part of the promotion for
Townes Van Zandt,
Townes did guest spots on radio stations, including one late in October on DJ Bob Fass’ show on the pioneering underground station WBAI-FM in New York City. The Fass show was fairly represen-tative of the FM radio appearances Townes made during this period. The format gave Townes a comfortable hour-long setting in which to play and chat quietly with DJs like the laid-back Fass, one of the classic FM voices of the seventies, and that was time enough to settle into a comfortable pace reminiscent of an evening playing and talking in someone’s living room, which suited Townes. He brought some friends to the studio for the show, including his current girlfriend from Houston, Gretchen Mueller, and he was mellow and relaxed. Among the songs he performed were covers of Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “Hello Central,”

Jimmie Rodgers’ “Hobo Bill’s Last Ride,” Stonewall Jackson’s

“’Cause You’re Mine,” the Carter Family’s “Engine One-Forty-Three” (which he was soon to record under the title “FFV”), and the traditional “Farther Along.” He unveiled some of his own new songs as well, including one called “No Deal,” which he introduced as “a true story.”8

Susanna Clark remembers Townes writing “No Deal” the same weekend that Guy wrote “L.A. Freeway.” She and Guy and Townes were returning in Guy’s Volkswagen bus from a camping trip in the California hills; Guy was driving with Susanna next to him and Townes sitting in the back. “There was no seat in the Don’t You Take It Too Bad

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back,” she remembers, “and Townes was kind of squatted down and … he just all of a sudden said, ‘What do you think about this?’; and he goes [singing] ‘No deal, you can’t sell that stuff to me’ … and he went on. He had written the whole song.… It was just amazing. And we just went, ‘God!’”

On the Fass radio show, Townes also gave an early performance of a song he’d written a couple of weeks before: “You Are Not Needed Now.” While he did not mention it this night on the radio, he did mention consistently when he played the song later that he had written it “for Janis Joplin,” on the occasion of her untimely death earlier that month. Mickey White recalled the setting and the story of the song:

[Townes and Joplin] had met years before in Houston. Of course, the song’s more about other things, but it was prompted by her death. “Allison laid an egg on me” is a cool story. Townes was just hounded to the ends of earth by groupies, right? “Whispering women, how sweet did they seem? Kneelin’ for me to command.” No truer words were ever spoken.…

But there was this one girl, a college girl, Allison, and she took this little eggshell and cut out one side of it and put a little scene, like a winter scene or something like that, that she had hand-crafted with toothpicks and stuff like that, inside this eggshell, and she gave it to Townes as a gift. It was in Montgomery, West Virginia, doing one of those college gigs, and it was there he heard about Janis Joplin.

I stayed in the same dorm, between the “blankets made of wool,” with the “trains going by every half an hour.” These tracks went right through the middle of town, and the little campus dorms were right next to them.

With Kevin Eggers based in New York City, and with Townes now reasonably well established in the New York folk scene, it was decided that the next album would be recorded there, at Century Sound Studios, with an experienced producer named Ron Frangipane producing as well as doing arrangements.

Townes had been out playing regularly for months and had a
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
handful of strong new songs, most of them well road-tested, as well as some older songs he now wanted to record for the first time. The time seemed right to get the record done while there was still some buzz about the previous record, and so that it could be on the shelves in time for Christmas.

For whatever reasons, Van Zandt had put off recording some of his earliest compositions, including songs as significant as

“Tower Song” and as relatively inconsequential as “Turnstyled, Junkpiled,” until these New York sessions in 1970. He also decided to record his old “theme song” collaboration with Cado Parrish Studdard from Austin, the tongue-in-cheek “Delta Mama Blues,” then decided to name the album after that song (although the album title was
Delta Momma Blues,
while the song retained the “mama” spelling). At the last minute, the old Carter Family song “Engine One-Forty-Three” that Townes had performed for years under the alternate title “FFV,” was added to the recording list, which, with the handful of new songs he had ready, filled out the album nicely.