A Deeper Blue (7 page)

and treated for cuts and bruises and a cracked rib.”

Other times were less harrowing, but perhaps just as indicative of Van Zandt’s later proclivities. “I can remember one time driving up on the Hill. Townes had that Chevy 409, and we were just so cool. We had just been waving at our friends, who were inside one of the little gathering joints up on the Hill. I don’t remember him having a drink at all, we were just cutting class, and he drove into the back of a police car. So, my God, what smart-aleck thing did Townes say to the cop? He says, ‘What were you doing backing up?’”

40

A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
Bob Myrick confirms that throughout this time, Townes continued to be immersed in his music. He was listening to Hoyt Axton and Dave Van Ronk records intensely, Myrick remembers, and a lot of Delta blues. “He also played a lot of Jimmy Reed, a lot of John Lee Hooker. He was amazing; he’d hear a song and he could just pick it up in a matter of minutes. He spent a lot of time learning the guitar, drinking Bali Hai and playing at home.” Myrick also remembers Mississippi John Hurt, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Lightnin’ Hopkins records being objects of intense study by his roommate. By the time the Beatles came along in 1964, “It didn’t affect us much,” Myrick says. “Townes liked the Beatles, but he never played any of their songs.”

It was also during this time that Bob Dylan’s first records were making their way onto the scene. “I introduced Townes to Dylan,” recalls Myrick.

I remember the gal I was going with, her name was Hobie … and she introduced us to Dylan’s first album. I took it home, I played it, and Townes and I looked at each other and said, “I don’t know.” And we started playing it, and playing it, and playing it, more and more. And we loved it. And then we got into the lyrics. One of the first songs off that album that Townes learned was “One Too Many Mornings”; he played that a lot.

Every time Townes would play—sometimes he’d

play around Boulder a little bit; I managed a little place later on called Barefoot Charlie’s, and he would play there—he’d always play “One Too Many Mornings.” Another song that he particularly was interested in on that first album was “In My Time of Dying.” He latched onto that like it was an old friend. “In my time of dying, I don’t want nobody to mourn …”. And “Gospel Plow,” that was another favorite of his. He had started to write some of his stuff by then too. He’d write down lyrics frequently, but it was really more of a collegiate type of thing.

No Place to Fall

41

Myrick remembers hearing the beginnings of some songs that Townes later developed more fully—for example, an early version of what was to become “Tecumseh Valley.” “Sometimes I would ask Townes, I’d say, ‘What do you really mean by that lyric?’ and he’d say, ‘Whatever you want it to mean.’ He would seldom explain his lyrics.”

Of the songs that Van Zandt continued to play throughout his life, his most “collegiate” song was “Fraternity Blues,” a funny talking blues piece which is one of Van Zandt’s oldest surviving compositions. It is also a model for some of his other early songs: the talking blues form, taken straight from Woody Guthrie by way of Bob Dylan, always featuring droll humor combined with deft timing, good rhythm, and a personal point of view.8

“He wrote that while we were roommates,” Myrick says of “Fraternity Blues.” “Townes’ father was a Sigma Nu, and Townes actually pledged Sigma Nu, although that was never something that he really wanted to do. He did it for his father.… And he never got past pledge; he never went active.… Franny was a Kappa Kappa Gamma, pretty much the number-one sorority on campus.”

Myrick remembers witnessing one of Townes’ most bizarre college pranks. “We were all drinking very heavily,” Myrick says.

Sigma Nu was having a formal dance, and another friend that worked at Tulagi’s with us named Woody, and Townes and I, we were drinking right next door in the annex, and we were pretty ripped. We weren’t really going to partake in the dance because it was all formal, and we had our grubbies on, and Townes and I went over to the fraternity for the sole reason of getting a pitcher of punch and taking it back to the annex, and the actives started giving him a ration about being a horrible pledge and not giving a shit.… Townes had put his pledge pin in his pocket, and he walked over to the punch bowl, and some of the actives started giving him shit again, and he stuck his pin right into his skin, kind of bent it around and stuck it right in, and it started trickling blood, and he says, “There.” At the time, we thought it was funny. Maybe it’s a little pathetic now, but it shocked them right into silence.

42

A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
Van Zandt’s roommate also remembers an increasingly clear underlying element in Townes’ temperament. “Townes was kind of a dark fellow,” he says. “That’s the way he looked at life.

He
knew
it was that way. It was almost like Tennessee Williams’

Suddenly Last Summer.
He was about that dark. We both liked Tennessee Williams and would talk about him now and then.

Townes kind of looked at life through
The Glass Menagerie
.”

Myrick tended to avoid engaging Townes’ darker tendencies, instead focusing on his strong sense of humor. Fran tended to do the same. According to Myrick, Townes’ dark pronouncements

“often came out, especially with women, as almost pious. We used to call him a pious pig. Franny’d say ‘Oh, Townes, don’t be such a pig.’ But when he played music, it was a different ball-game. He had a lot of feeling. We knew that there was a sacred side of Townes, the inside of Townes, that he seldom revealed.

He was able to see life the way it was.”

Myrick recalls that starting during this period, when he and Van Zandt went to bars, “Townes wanted to go to the raunchi-est, skuzziest dives ever. He was just more comfortable with those people. He was very uncomfortable with college types, although he made some good friends. But if we were in Denver, we would be on skid row.… He liked real people; he couldn’t abide with hypocrisy in any way. He wanted nothing but honesty from people, and he found that in aristocrats and in winos, but mostly in winos.”

A rift that had long existed in Townes’ life was starting to widen that year at Colorado. “He wanted to be faithful to what the family wanted of him,” Fran says, but he was also “trying to figure out what he wanted to be himself.” She recalls the atmosphere of the times, in the early and mid-1960s, particularly among college students, as being full of philosophical examination of the status quo and serious reevaluation of priorities.

But Townes’ sensitivity, the depth of his questioning, raised the stakes for him. “It seems like at that time, he knew he was meant to do something else, but he just didn’t know what it was,” ac-No Place to Fall

43

cording to Fran. “He wanted to please the family, but he also wanted to stay true to himself. And it was a real battle.”

Fran makes clear, as do Townes’ siblings, that it wasn’t that the family was putting explicit pressure on Townes to pursue any particular course. “He just felt the implicit expectation,”

Fran says. “There was very definitely etiquette taught to them, but not necessarily that they had to be something or somebody in particular.” Bill Van Zandt also says he never felt that kind of pressure from the family. He recalls that their father “would encourage us to find our own way. I got the feeling that Townes put some pressure on himself, like he wasn’t living up to expectations in certain areas. And that would really get him down.”9

This conflict was playing itself out in a number of ways in Townes’ life. “Townes was always abusing something,” Fran says, dating it back to his glue sniffing at Shattuck. She describes his drinking at college as binge drinking. “It wasn’t that he did it all the time,” she says. “It was just that when he did it he would go off and really do it.” Myrick sees it differently. “Fran didn’t really like him drinking like that. She’d go out and have a few drinks, but she wasn’t a big drinker. She was a very, very serious student, an A student, and an extremely smart, extremely intelligent woman.

So when we got down to the real nitty-gritty, get-down-and-dirty party, she’d usually leave, or she wouldn’t even come.” It is possible that Fran was simply not aware, because Townes kept it from her and she kept herself from it, that he was in fact drinking every day, a pattern confirmed by his roommate and others.

Also emerging in Townes’ life at this same time was the pattern of extended periods of dark depression, of what became complete withdrawal from society, followed by periods of ex-ultation, confidence, and social command. “He would be just very happy, and in real party moods,” Fran remembers, “but then he would go off and want to be by himself. He would be overly reclusive.” Again, Fran felt that Townes was not so different from many other college students in his behavior; certainly not different in kind, if perhaps more intense in degree. But the trouble came to a head early in the spring semester of 1964

44

A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
when Townes decided he needed to leave school and travel for a little while.

“Townes wanted to go ‘on the road,’ as he would say,” Fran recalls. “His family called it ‘running away.’ He called it ‘going on the road.’ . . He left school in the middle of the semester to do that. For some reason, he loved Oklahoma, and he went to Oklahoma, where another guy [Luke Sharpe] from Shattuck lived….

And there was this thing in him of wanting to know what poor people lived like, you know? Because any time he went out, he was always sort of going among the downtrodden.”

Van Zandt’s closest friend at college was a formidable, gregarious young man named Tom Barrow, who had also been at Shattuck with him.10 “Tom was valedictorian at Shattuck,” says Myrick, “but he was a real rebel too. I’m not sure why Townes and Tom ended up both at the University of Colorado; maybe that was planned, maybe it wasn’t.” Barrow graduated with a degree in architectural engineering, “which was a six-year degree,” says Myrick, “and he had a 4.0 average. He had the ability to do many things. And it happens that forgery was one of those things. So Tom forged a letter to the dean, from Mr. and Mrs.

Van Zandt, saying that it was okay for Townes to drop out of school for the semester. He was just trying to get his parents off his back, and he just wanted to play guitar. He wanted to work at playing the guitar.… And, of course, drink.”

Townes withdrew from school on March 6, the day before his twentieth birthday. He was away from school for two weeks, having hitchhiked to Oklahoma and back, and somehow his family got wind of his absence. They were already aware of his drinking binges and his mood swings, and of his prior “running away,” and they knew that this behavior was becoming a problem, but now the extent of the problem was becoming clear to them. Townes’ sister recalls that a doctor from Boulder had called the Van Zandts, concerned that Townes could be suicidal.11 At any rate, the Van Zandts made a quick, unplanned trip to Boulder. “They flew in by surprise,” Myrick recalls. “We had had a party the night before, and everybody was on the No Place to Fall

45

floor, and this and that. I won’t get into the party, but he had been sniffing glue. All night. And he had passed out. And suddenly his parents are at the door. I stagger out, and I’m just be-wildered. I just can’t believe they’re in town. But they’d gotten wind that he was trying to drop out of school with the forged letter, and now we’re trying to pull Townes off the rug with glue stuck to his sideburns.… So perhaps that explains why they said,

‘You’re going to the hospital.’”

Harris and Dorothy took Townes back to Houston with them, fearing for his safety. Bill Van Zandt was in the ninth grade at Shattuck, and he recalls that “I thought he came home because he was just kind of burned out, but he was actually suffering from clinical depression of some sort.” Fran recalls that Townes’

father called her from Houston. “He called me in Colorado because he was really feeling like something was seriously wrong with Townes. He said, ‘I don’t want to upset you,’ but he was telling me that they had put Townes in the hospital. He said, ‘I know you love my son, but I want you to think about that, because I’m worried that he is not good enough for you.’ We both were bawling on the phone, just crying and crying. I said, ‘No.

He’s too good. I know he is good.’ He said, ‘I know he wants to be.’ He was struggling so much, he was actually crying on the phone with me.”

The Van Zandts drove Townes from their house in Houston down to Galveston, on the Gulf of Mexico an hour south of the Bayou City. One of Dorothy’s brothers, Townes’ Uncle Donny, had a fishing “camp” on Offat’s Bayou on Galveston Island, where the family had spent many weekends, but this visit had no such pleasant overtones. Townes’ parents took him straight to the Titus Harris Clinic, part of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (now part of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences) at the University of Texas Medical Branch, where on March 14 they had him admitted for psychiatric evaluation and treatment.12

5

Sanitarium Blues

U
TMB-GALVESTONWASINTHE 1960Sand still is one of the best medical and psychiatric facilities in the country.

In 1964, the physical plant at UTMB was a collection of Victorian brick buildings mixed with some drab additions from the 1930s and the early 1950s, nestled into a palm-shaded campus in the northeast corner of the city. The old main building, a monumental redbrick known as Old Red, was built in 1891 and survived the Galveston Storm of 1900. Just west of Old Red was the Galveston State Psychopathic Hospital (later renamed the Marvin Graves Building), the first building in Galveston built to house psychiatric patients. Dr. Titus Harris was the first Director of Psychiatry there, and his colleague Dr. Abe Hauser was the Assistant Director. Together, they had established the Titus Harris Clinic for psychiatric inpatients in 1929.1