A Deeper Blue (9 page)

In February, Harris Williams Van Zandt’s mother, Bell Williams Van Zandt, died at the age of eighty-two. Bell Williams was a strong, matriarchal figure, and she was a favorite of Townes’ in particular, powerful yet benevolent and plainspoken. A family story illustrating her tough, enduring qualities has Bell being struck by lightning three times over the course of her life. “She was always very important to him and to the family,” Fran recalls. “She was a central figure.”

March brought Townes’ twenty-first birthday, which he celebrated quietly with the family at his uncle’s fishing camp in Galveston. At this milestone in his life, it looked to the Van Zandts as though Townes was at last adjusting and following a course that they could be comfortable with. Townes was doing well in school; he would finish the semester with four B’s and one C. And he had reached a decision that made both Mr. and Mrs. Van Zandt very happy. Townes and Fran had decided to get married right after the semester was over. And in case Fran’s family felt any trepidation about their daughter marrying a young man so recently released from psychiatric treatment, as Fran recalls, “When Townes asked me to marry him, his dad came over to my mother and said, ‘I would cut off my arm before I would let them get married if I thought he was going to hurt her.’”

Townes had remained in close touch with his friend Bob Myrick, who had always encouraged the couple’s marriage.

“One of the reasons I became really close with Townes and Fran is because they were thinking about getting married,” Myrick says. “But a lot of people were against the idea, thinking Townes would be such a shit to her. Everybody kind of said, ‘Holy shit, you don’t want to be married to that guy. That guy’s crazy. He’ll Waitin’ for the Day

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be an alcoholic in five years.’ But Tom [Barrow] and I totally stood behind him.”5

In late August, Myrick, Tom Barrow, Tom’s wife Joyce, Luke Sharpe, and some other out-of-town friends arrived in Houston for the wedding, which was preceded by a few nights of getting reacquainted and partying. One of those nights, when Fran and her bridesmaids had gone shopping, Myrick recalls that “Townes suddenly said to Tom and Joyce, ‘let’s play strip poker’; which we did. I think the whole thing was that Townes wanted to have Fran and the girls walk in on us, which they in fact did. Barrow’s wife was losing big at the time, and Townes and I had a side bet that the first guy that makes eye contact with Barrow’s wife is the loser … and suddenly Fran walks in, to the general entertainment of all.… Townes was just completely untrammeled by normal rules of decorum.”

The night before the wedding ceremony, August 25, 1965, Townes and Fran, along with family members and friends who were to be in the wedding, went to the church for the rehearsal.

After running through the ceremony, the preacher signed and dated the marriage license and, according to the plan that both the Van Zandt and the Petters families had agreed to keep quiet, the marriage was made official that night because of a new military draft law taking effect the next day. In 1963, President Kennedy had changed Selective Service regulations so that married men were placed one step lower in the order of call-up than single men, spawning a rush of so-called “Kennedy husbands.”

Now, Lyndon Johnson’s new Executive Order number 11241

stated that “men married on or after August 26, 1965, with no children, are … considered the same as single men in Class 1-A with regard to order of call.…” Townes got in as one of the very last “Kennedy husbands,” and remained eligible for draft call-up only in the fourth order of call, after “all delinquents, volunteers, and single and newly married men [age 19 to 26, oldest first] in Class I-A were selected for induction.” Had the marriage taken place the next day, he would have been considered the same status as single men in Class I-A and would have been near
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
the top of the list of young men headed for Vietnam.6 Few at the ceremony the next day knew that Townes and Fran were already officially married. “My mother thought it ruined the wedding,”

Fran says, “but she got over that quickly.”

After the “rehearsal,” a large dinner was held at the prestigious Petroleum Club, an oil-industry insiders club in downtown Houston. Fran remembers this as a very special evening, an elegant affair with some fifty guests. “We danced and laughed,” she recalls.

“I can remember one of our Baptist friends having her very first frozen daiquiri. It was huge, and it looked like a giant snow cone in a dessert glass. She drank it too fast, and when we looked back at her, her nose was in the glass. It was a great evening.”

The next day, August 26—a hot, sunny day—Townes and Fran’s wedding took place at the River Oaks Baptist Church in Houston. “There were about four hundred guests,” Fran remembers. “We had friends from college and from high school, and also lots of relatives stand up with us and as ushers. The whole affair was very nice, and fairly calm; just lots of visiting and laughter. There was no big dinner, dancing, or drinking; it was in a Southern Baptist church, so [there were] just light snacks, cake, and punch.… After the wedding, Townes and I were whisked away in a limo to the Warwick Hotel. It was quite the hotel in the sixties. We had a beautiful suite, champagne in the room, a fruit plate, snacks. It was gorgeous.” Photographs from the next day show Fran in a stylish brown suit and pillbox hat and Townes in a maroon blazer and gray slacks, suitcases in hand on their way to their honeymoon. On a side window of their hired limousine, along with tin cans tied to the bumper, someone had scrawled “Bye Mama!” and “Fran and Van.”

After a short, quiet honeymoon in Aspen, Colorado, the newlyweds settled into a small second-floor garden apartment on Briarhurst Road, just south of Westheimer Boulevard, less than a mile from the Van Zandt residence in River Oaks, but in considerably more modest surroundings. On a visit years later, Fran points up at the apartment balcony and smiles fondly. “It was a one-bedroom apartment, and it cost a hundred and twenty Waitin’ for the Day

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dollars a month,” she says. “We had a little hibachi stove on the balcony where we barbecued a lot.”

Fran recalls their early married life vividly, and she recalls it as a happy time. The young couple were attending the University of Houston full time, and they both had friends there and around town, but their lives were very much centered in their families. Fran says, “[Townes] was very much into people. His mom and dad came over all the time, and we went over to their house all the time. We all went to Galveston almost every weekend. We’d go fishing, and every Friday night was game night.

His mother liked to play mah jong, and we all hated mah jong.

Townes always liked to play hearts or spades, and so did his dad.

His mother couldn’t cook, so his dad usually was the cook, or all of us chipped in and did something, but we went out to eat as much as anything. My parents and his parents were good friends, so we would all go eat Chinese food on San Felipe.”

According to friends and family, Townes seemed happy. According to Fran, though, there were times during this period when “it was like a dark cloud” would pass over him. He would want to be alone for a few days, sometimes for a week, but then his dark moods would pass. Otherwise, he participated fully in and seemed genuinely to enjoy the time with his family. If he was drinking, he was hiding it.

Fran and Townes, both animal lovers, kept an assortment of pets in the small apartment. “We had a dog named Reefus,” Fran says. “Reefus was a mutt, and she had a tremendous overbite and was just ugly, but we thought she was beautiful and we loved her.” They also had a piranha, which they had tried to give to Townes’ brother, but Bill wasn’t interested in adding a predator to his tropical fish tank, and they ended up keeping it. Another notable pet was a monkey named Pookens, whose death Townes memorialized in verse. “Townes wrote a poem called ‘The Passing of the Pookens,’” Fran remembers. “It was four verses, and at the end of each verse it said how much the monkey loved meal worms. It was real cute. We put him in a
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
shoebox with a cross on top of it, Townes read the poem, then we put him in the dumpster.”

Naturally, the young couple struggled to keep body and soul together. But Harris and Dorothy Van Zandt helped considerably, supporting the newlyweds almost completely at first, while both Fran and Townes were still in school, and remained generous always. “They paid for our apartment and food,” Fran says.

“But there were times we were so poor.… I can’t eat macaroni and cheese to this day. Macaroni and cheese was like nineteen cents a box, and we’d have enough money to buy three boxes of it but we didn’t have enough for the butter and milk, so it was just water. One time we had about fifteen dollars in the bank.

[Townes] was always pretty compassionate. If you said you liked something, whatever he had, he gave it to you. There was a woman we knew, a single mom with a baby, and she was broke.

So he wrote her a check for fifteen dollars, which was everything we had. I asked him why he didn’t write it for ten dollars, but he wrote it for everything we had.”

While Townes was ostensibly attending classes (he failed one class and withdrew from another in the fall semester) and settling into a straight, domestic life, his interest in music was undiminished. Indeed, he played with a renewed passion and discipline, keeping up a regular regimen of practice whenever he could get a few hours alone. He also began more and more to seek out some of the live music that flourished in Houston and throughout the Gulf coast region. Fran recalls a long trip to hear a blues band one night shortly before they were married: “We drove to New Orleans … about a two-and-a-half-hour drive. And we danced and just had a great time and came back very late.

It was probably three o’clock in the morning before he got me home. We came home and my mom and his dad were on the phone talking to each other, scared to death.”

Before long, the couple’s growing need for income converged with Townes’ growing desire to play music for a paying public.

“That’s really why Townes went out and started playing guitar Waitin’ for the Day

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and singing in public,” Fran says. “It was to get the ten dollars a night.”

The Jester Lounge on Westheimer Boulevard was one of no more than a half-dozen small nightclubs or coffeehouses in Houston that featured folk music. They were small rooms with tiny stages where mostly local acts would play for tips or for five or ten dollars a night. “At the time, the Jester was very cool. It was a real folk music club,” recalls John Carrick. Carrick, along with his mother, who was known as “Ma” Carrick, ran another of Houston’s seminal folk clubs, the Sand Mountain Coffeehouse, and also was among the group of local regulars who played the few—“three or four,” according to Carrick—folk venues in Houston. “What we didn’t know then,” Carrick says, “was how cool the Jester was. Here’s a short list: Townes played there, and he was one of the kids, you know. I think that was the first place in Houston that Jerry Jeff Walker played. K.T. Oslin was a regular there, and Guy Clark. A lot of the blues guys played there, including Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin’ Hopkins, and a lot of musicians that people had never heard of but that were just phenomenal.

Townes was one of the first around doing any stuff he’d written, although at first they were just kind of goofy talking blues songs, like ‘T-Bird Blues’ and ‘Mustang Blues’ and stuff like that.”7

“[T]he first place I played was a club on Westheimer called the Jester Lounge,” Townes later recollected.

That was the first place I ever got paid real money for singing. This guy, who turned out to be Don Sanders, came up to me in there and said I also oughta try this place called Sand Mountain. I went over there with him and we did a short little set. Mrs. Carrick was at her desk keeping an eye on the proceedings, and the place was almost empty at the time. There was this song I used to do at the time called “The KKK Blues,” and I sang it that night. It was a talking blues about dropping out of the second grade to join the Ku Klux Klan, and the guy said “you got too much education.” Then I did another one called

“The Vietnamese Blues,” which had a chorus line about leaving Vietnam to the Vietnamese. Anyway,
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
I got through singing and Mrs. Carrick said, “Well, that was real good, but we just don’t do things like that around here.” I said, “Well, this is a fine place, but I just can’t stay here then.” Next day she sent Don as an envoy again and she said she wanted us to come back. That was the beginning.8

Townes recalled meeting Guy Clark around this time. “He was at the Jester before I played there, and then [he] joined the Peace Corps. I started playing there, and then he came back [and] we met.…”9 Fran also recalls Townes and Guy meeting sometime in mid- to late-1965. “Guy was just one of these ten-dollar acts like Townes was. It was kind of an immediate friendship. Guy lived not too far from Sand Mountain, in a one-room apartment. Susie, his first wife—Susan—came in to Sand Mountain. She was a little-bitty cute thing, kind of feisty. And Guy just kind of fell for her right off. They started dating and got married and had a baby. So, all of us were just kind of hanging out there.”

Since the mid-1950s, the local folk scene had been centered in the Houston Folklore Society and in the powerful personality of its leader, John A. Lomax Jr., the well-known folklorist Alan Lomax’s brother, the other son of the legendary patriarch John A. Lomax Sr. The senior Lomax had collected cowboy songs in the 1920s and discovered Leadbelly and made field recordings of dozens of other American roots musicians all over the South, and he remains one of the most important figures in twentieth-century American music scholarship.

As John Lomax Jr.’s son, John Lomax III, recalls, for folk singers in Houston, the Folklore Society “was the only place to go, really.” The society met monthly and held events in local clubs and coffeehouses or occasionally at the Jewish Community Center. “The meetings of the Houston Folklore Society consisted of about ten minutes of business, then the rest was essentially what they now call ‘pass the guitar,’” says Lomax.