A Deeper Blue (21 page)

mother seemed to like Cindy, whom Donna remembers as

“pretty” and “shy.” Everyone realized that she was considerably younger than Townes, but Cindy recalls that, “like everybody else, I’m sure they thought I was twenty-three or twenty-four, not sixteen or seventeen.”

A series of coincidences and whims led Van Zandt, Mickey White, and Rex Bell to the idea of a winter tour of the Rocky Mountains. White and Bell had been accompanying Townes at gigs off and on, and Mickey had been growing more intent on booking a proper group tour. Rex came up with a name for the group: the Hemmer Ridge Mountain Boys. “It was just a joke name,” Bell recalls, “but it stuck because we didn’t have time to think of anything else.”9

White began to look into booking some gigs in resort towns in Colorado and Wyoming. Both Townes and Mickey were well acquainted with the pleasures of these mountain towns, which included plentiful top-quality drugs, party-hungry young women, and high-stakes gambling. When Townes’ and Rex’s friend Johnny Guess showed up with a newly purchased used motor home called the Blue Unit, Townes immediately convinced Johnny to come with them on the tour, with the Blue Unit as their mode of transport. By the end of December, with a handful of shows booked at lodges and barrooms from the Grand Tetons down to Aspen, Townes, Cindy, Mickey, Rex, and Johnny had set out north from Texas in the Blue Unit. After a stop for a gig in Chicago, they headed for Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Rex’s girlfriend, Mary Baldwin, flew to Denver and drove to join the crew
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
in Jackson Hole in time for the first gig of the Rocky Mountains tour, a two-week stand at the Mangy Moose Lodge at the Teton Village ski resort starting on New Year’s Day 1975.

Also flying in was Richard Dobson, whom Townes had invited along to play some guest sets. Dobson was to tape-record hours of conversation, partying, and playing and take copious notes which he would later work up into a memoir,
The Gulf
Coast Boys
. The book provides an engaging first-hand look at the goings on inside and outside the Blue Unit, and strongly suggests that the actual act of getting up in front of an audience and playing the gig for a few hours each night was taking a back seat to the drinking, drug taking, and general mayhem that occupied most of the participants’ waking hours.10

Tales of whiskey, cocaine, and LSD indulgence during the Mangy Moose gig—not to mention the covert heroin use by Townes, Mickey, Rex, and Mary—and the raucous gambling, drunken skiing, and freewheeling carousing, were followed by a speed- and booze-fueled drive down the Rockies to Denver.

Most of the money that “the boys” earned from their first two weeks was gone already, and they continued to spend what they had on liquor, pot, and other immediate necessities.

Townes was protective of Cindy when it came to heroin; he made it clear that he did not want her to try it. “I’d given up trying to keep up with them drinking when I ended up puk-ing my guts out in front of the Silver Dollar Saloon down on Westheimer in Houston,” Cindy says. “I was getting into bars and no one was questioning my age, but at that point I wasn’t drinking. After a while, I figured out what was happening with the heroin, and I started wanting to see what that was all about.

He’d tell people, ‘Don’t you dare ever give Cindy any smack.’

But finally, Rex’s girlfriend Mary gave me some.”

After a couple of shows at the Oxford Hotel in Denver—one of which included an impromptu fiddle solo by Townes that cul-minated in him smashing the fiddle in front of a small, puzzled crowd—the troupe headed for Crested Butte. As Dobson wrote in
The Gulf Coast Boys
, “Excess for its own sake had achieved White Freightliner Blues

139

a momentum all its own.” He describes Townes as “by turns droll, maudlin, lugubrious, gentle, caring, vicious” and recalls that sometimes “toward the dawn hour, listening over muted snores, I could hear the faint sound as he unscrewed the bottle, followed by the chink and flare of his Zippo lighter, holding the night together while the others slumbered on.”11

The final gigs of the Rocky Mountains tour were at the Pioneer Inn in Nederland, Colorado, which the Blue Unit reached only after a harrowing trip through the mountains in a snow-storm. Richard Dobson had met a woman named Mickey Sweet (whom he called Maggie in his book), who with her dog, Dumpster, joined the crew for the trip back to Texas. “We were really excited to be getting back to Texas,” Mickey White recalls. “I think one of the things that really frustrated both Townes and myself is that we were putting forth this effort to keep it going, to keep Townes out there in an overall business strategy, and nobody else—the money, the powers that be—nobody was paying any attention to us at all.”

By 1975, the Houston scene had died and the Nashville scene was withering, but the music scene in Austin was flowering.

Townes and Cindy had returned to Texas from another trip to the Colorado mountains early that summer with a dog named Geraldine, a mixed shepherd–husky who would remain their companion for some years to come. “Somebody’s mother had her and gave her to us,” Cindy remembers. “She was a big dog, but she was very dainty. You could tell that she was used to being in the house with a little old lady. You know, for being a big dog, her tail didn’t go out of whack and knock over lamps and all that.” In September, Townes taped a performance for the
Austin City Limits
TV show, then decided to accept his friend John Storbot’s offer to live in his trailer in Clarksville, on the west side of Austin, while he was out of town.

Clarksville was originally established as a community for ex-slaves shortly after the Civil War, and it remained an “outsiders”

community. Many Clarksville residents picked cotton or farmed.

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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
The city of Austin had at one time attempted to push the black population to the east side of town, and had pressured blacks in communities such as Clarksville to move by curtailing services.

Clarksville residents still used kerosene lamps and outhouses well into the 1950s and ’60s, and the community remained isolated. In 1968, residents unsuccessfully protested a plan to build a highway along the Missouri Pacific Railroad, on the western edge of Clarksville. The completed MoPac Expressway split Clarksville in two, and dozens of homes were relocated.12

According to Mickey White, “The streets weren’t paved. You’d go up Westlyn and take a left on 12th and down and you were just literally in another world. The black people and the white people lived right across the street from one another, they got along, and there was no bullshit.”

As Cindy sums up the scene: “Clarksville was basically a place where we were all on heroin, all shooting.” Peggy Underwood remembers accompanying Townes to Austin’s East Side to buy heroin. “I thought it was exciting to go to the East Side with him to score, which, now that I look back on it, I wonder how I could have been so stupid. It got real scary, but that’s the way he liked it.”13

Most of Townes’ contingent in Clarksville came and went, but the group included Cindy, Rex and Mary, Mickey, Chito—

whom Townes had convinced to move back to Texas—and his girlfriend Mary Ann, Darryl Harris and his brother Smiley, Phyllis Ivy and Phyllis Peoples, two old friends from Houston named Suzy Terrell and Linda Miller, a friend named Kathy Tennel, and occasionally Richard Dobson, Peggy Underwood, and a few others. The group felt comfortable in Clarksville: Townes was pleased to be living a spartan existence in the barely furnished trailer—which they called Goat Hill—with some chickens to look after; the liquor store was around the corner, and the phar-macy sold syringes and codeine cough syrup. “One time, Phyllis Peoples went to get her codeine cough syrup and crashed her car into the front plate-glass window of the North Loop Pharmacy,”

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Underwood remembers. “They didn’t do anything to her; she just walked in and got her codeine cough syrup.”

Notwithstanding cars crashing through plate-glass windows, the white hippies found themselves able to live somewhat anonymously in Clarksville, and they were occasionally able to bond with their black neighbors. Mary Ann and Chito lived in an apartment across the street from seventy-nine-year-old Seymour Washington, a lifelong blacksmith whom everyone called Uncle Seymour, just up the street from Townes’ and Cindy’s trailer. Linda Miller lived in an old house across the street from the trailer, and next door to Uncle Seymour was a friendly, older black woman named Rosie. “Uncle Seymour was kind of like our patron,” says Underwood. Washington’s small house and yard became something of a neighborhood gathering place, and his simple hospitality toward and empathy with his young white friends quickly grew into a bond. Mickey White recalls that some of the older black neighbors felt uncomfortable about Uncle Seymour “because all the whites hung out at his house, and there was grumbling here and there about that.”

It so happened that the two women from Houston, Suzy Terrell and Linda Miller, were both former girlfriends of Townes.

Furthermore, the two women happened to have in common the experience of having Townes live with them for some months, then go away on tour for a month or two, then, on his return, ignore them—not call, not speak to them, just leave them “cold turkey.” Mary Ann recalls that most of Townes’ girlfriends left
him
,
he
didn’t leave
them
, but these two were among the few whom
he
had left, and left cruelly. Yet here they were in Clarksville. Suzy was considerably younger than Townes, had lied about her age and become a stripper in Houston, and had developed a serious heroin habit. One night in Clarksville, Suzy finally confronted Townes. Mary Ann recalls: “Suzy was real drunk and came home about one or so in the morning. Everybody was out on the porch talking, and she went over there—and this was a good two or three years after it happened—and she said, ‘Townes, I want to ask you something.’ He said, ‘what?’ And she said, ‘Why’d you
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
do that to me, why’d you just totally ignore me when you came back in town?’ And he had a classic answer. He said, ‘Because I was falling in love with you.’ But it was a destructive relationship. They were both hell-bent on destruction.”14

The story of Linda Miller is more tragic. “She was totally devoted, committed, in love with Townes,” Mary Ann remembers.

She was taking a bus every day to a methadone clinic across town. One day, coming back from the clinic, she fell from the bus and was injured. As Mary Ann recollects, “They gave her a whole big bottle of Percodan—synthetic morphine—and she went back to her house in Clarksville and started taking those pills. She was seen wandering around the neighborhood naked, and a couple of days later she was dead.”

Mary Ann is one of a number of Townes’ friends with a vivid recollection of the contrast between the two apparent sides of Townes’ personality. “Townes was hilarious, quick-witted, charming, a one-hundred percent woman charmer and all of that,” she says. “But as I told the movie people that came here, he could be really mean-spirited when he was drunk or on codeine.”

In October 1976, Townes and Cindy attended the Country Music Association convention in Nashville along with Guy and Susanna Clark. Townes was drinking heavily all evening, and toward the end of the program, he went up on stage with Guy, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Jeff Walker, and others for a large-group singing finale. Townes decided to try to stand on his head, repeatedly falling and trying again, crashing into equipment, instruments, and other people on the stage. “I woke up with a hangover and went into hiding from all my friends for a week or two. Guy practically disowned me,” a writer quoted Townes as saying after the incident, adding that Guy must have “come to the conclusion that I’m from the wrong side of the tracks.”15

In fact, Guy was not indulgent of this kind of behavior, and he and Susanna were steering clear of Townes, although Townes and Susanna continued a close friendship by phone.

It was during this period that Townes reached a point where it became crystal clear to those around him that a dangerous pa-White Freightliner Blues

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thology was at play in his life. Townes told a writer about the incident shortly after it occurred, describing how he and Rex Bell, in a fit of “alcoholic derangement,” had been climbing through dumpsters and covering themselves with filth, then going to bars and clubs where they were acquainted with the managers and demanding money for pints of vodka, threatening simply to hang around in their disgusting condition if they didn’t comply. Early in the morning after a night of this extreme behavior, someone found Townes unconscious in one of the dumpsters and called an ambulance. “The next thing I knew,” Townes told the writer, “I was lying on a stretcher in a hospital with a bottle of, like, pure Valium running into my arm.” 16

In fact, Townes was taken to Brackenridge Hospital in downtown Austin.17 He was admitted to the alcohol and drug abuse treatment ward, where he went through only ten days of a forty-five-day detoxification and rehabilitation program before checking himself out, although not before being placed on a lithium regimen. It is common for people with bipolar disorder to reject lithium, or any other drug that smoothes over the highs and lows of their condition, and Townes had been no exception since he was originally placed on medication at the hospital in Galveston more than ten years before. When he left Brackenridge, Cindy took on the responsibility of trying to keep him on his regimen.

The film
Heartworn Highways
would immortalize a rosier side of the Clarksville experience.18 The novice director, James Szalapski, had originally approached John Lomax III for advice on who he might include in a documentary on the “new wave” of country music coming out of Nashville. Lomax suggested that Szalapski could focus on the Nashville-based Texans associated with Guy Clark. Part of the premise that emerged from the film was that these new country artists had as strong a connection to family, simple living, and, apparently, strong drink as the traditional country artists did, and that these things were reflected in their music. That December, Szalapski and his film crew showed
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