A Deeper Blue (12 page)

So, whether Newbury brought Van Zandt to Clement in Nashville or Clement came to Houston and found Van Zandt, it was under Newbury’s covert but decisive management guidance that Townes signed a publishing contract with Hall-Clement.

“He must have had thirty songs at that point,” Newbury recollects. “And I’m not talking about just thirty songs, I’m talking about thirty great songs.” And Hall-Clement had a valuable advantage, from Newbury’s point of view. “The reason I signed him to Hall-Clement was because they said they’d record him.”

As Van Zandt later told an interviewer, “While we were doing the record, Jack was shopping it around. He had met Kevin Eggers.… [and] Kevin picked up the record.”

It was Clement’s old friend Lamar Fike who introduced Clement to the young New York businessman who owned Poppy Records, Kevin Eggers. Eggers had worked as an agent and had recently founded the small label specifically to record eclectic, unconventional artists. Clement had known Lamar Fike since his days at Sun, and Fike had gone on to travel with Elvis as one of his assistants and confidants. As Clement remembers,

“He called me one day and said that this guy Eggers was coming to town, and he was a really sharp guy, on the level and everything, and he might be interested in signing Townes. So he came to town and that’s what happened.” Clement and Malloy formed Silver Dollar Music jointly to publish Van Zandt’s songs, and Kevin Eggers made ready to record an album.

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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
Eggers recalls that Fike suggested that he meet with Clement, who played him the demo tape of “Tecumseh Valley.” “It was love at first listen,” Eggers says. “I told Jack I would be up for signing Townes to my new label, Poppy. We shook hands on the deal.”4

Clement and Malloy booked Van Zandt into Owen Bradley’s

“Quonset Hut” studio in Nashville early in the fall of 1968.

The recording, supervised by Malloy and produced by Clement, with Eggers keeping a close watch and offering constant advice, took four or five weeks, off and on. As Van Zandt told it, the studio environment was strictly controlled. “I was literally brought here, sat on a stool, and told to play the song,” he said.

“I was just kind of awestricken and had all these great players around me, and so I just played and they played whatever Jack wanted. I really didn’t have that much to do with it other than just sitting there and playing. They still weren’t sure in which direction to record me; it’s kind of toward country, but a little kind of underground country. ‘Underground’ was a term being used a lot then.”

Townes also recalled that, for much of the recording, his guitar was out of tune.

By Christmas, the album, titled
For the Sake of the Song
, after one of the record’s best songs, was ready for release. The cover artwork was a colorful, somewhat delicate Milton Glaser water-color. Glaser’s work—which included such well-known images as the rainbow-haired Bob Dylan silhouette on the poster inside the
Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
album—radiated class and brought an instant prestige to the whole package. Mickey Newbury wrote the liner notes with a comparable degree of class:

“Townes Van Zandt, the man,” Newbury wrote. “
He’ll
be remembered. They’ll talk about what he was thinking while his footsteps rang in his ears as he walked down the empty winter Denver streets. What he learned in that basement by lending a compassionate ear to a man who was more than just a janitor.

What he heard in those songs, ringing off the black walls of back rooms in Austin and Oklahoma City. What he got out of swap-ping old stories in a shack outside of Houston with an old man, For the Sake of the Song

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who has become a legend to blues lovers all over the world.” He went on to observe that “the tools of a writer are truths. And truth is knowledge. And knowledge is love. And a writer like Townes writes songs not only of love between man and woman, but between man and man. And man and God.”5

The production (“over-production, I would say,” Clement laughs today) of
For the Sake of the Song
reflects Clement and Malloy’s uncertainty over how to pigeonhole Van Zandt’s music, as well as their implicit belief that the songs needed to be bolstered with modern production techniques. In their uncertainty, they fell back on some of the clichés of the time: swelling, echo-laden vocal choruses; trilling harpsichords; dramatic percussion arrangements; lush organ chords; elaborate decorative guitar figures; and a general tendency toward the baroque rock style that was then in vogue. Van Zandt’s delicate acoustic guitar playing is virtually buried under such devices, and his voice sounds somewhat distant and uncertain, lost in reverb and filtering. For the most part, though, the songs themselves are strong.

Years later, Van Zandt said of “For the Sake of the Song,” “This is an old favorite song of mine. This has been a true blue friend through the blue moons.” It remained one of his most strikingly beautiful melodies, with a distinctly south-of-the-border flavor, and lyrically it shows a rapidly achieved advance over a song such as “Tower Song.” Townes’ lines fall into a simple rhyme scheme, but they also smoothly fall into sentences that wrap from line to line, a technique he would continue to develop. He is again addressing his lover, and again there is a conflict of values, but here he is much more generous and understanding of his partner’s point of view than he was in “Tower Song.” “Who do I think that I am to decide that she’s wrong,” he sings, as if in answer to his earlier piety. But there’s nothing he can do to help the situation between them now; the nature of their personalities will forever keep them apart. “All that she offers me are her chains,” he says; “I got to refuse.”

Another song that Van Zandt kept in his repertoire throughout his career is “Tecumseh Valley,” a lovely story song very much in
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
the folk ballad tradition, about a simple country girl who is ruined by life in town. For his first recording of the song, Townes was pressured into an unpleasant compromise regarding the lyrics. The lines “She turned to whorin’ out on the streets/With all the lust inside her” were changed to “She turned to walkin’ down the road/From all the hate inside her,” much to Van Zandt’s dismay. He recalled that the word “whorin’” “just horrified everybody; [it] couldn’t possibly be said on a record.” But if that was the game, Townes figured, he would play it. For now.

“I was a kid,” Townes said just two years later; “a stone freak from Texas. I wasn’t too happy with what they did with the album.” 6

The song “Quick Silver Daydreams of Maria” is a curiosity of Dylanesque psychedelia that the ponderous production rendered even more curious, and the same can be said of some of the record’s other songs. “Waitin’ Around to Die” suffers from ill-conceived production choices but still is one of the record’s strongest songs, along with the title song and “Tecumseh Valley.” The less said about youthful indiscretions like “The Velvet Voices” and “All Your Young Servants,” the better. On the whole, though, Townes’ first album showed promise for the artist.

With the recording in the bag, Van Zandt’s business affairs now progressed—or regressed, depending on the point of view—

rapidly. As Newbury recalls:

“
We all had a meeting over at the old Andrew Jackson Hotel—

Jack Clement, myself, the guy that was in partnership with Jack at that time [Jim Malloy], and Townes. The only person that knew that I had Townes’ management contract—and I don’t even know how he found out—was Kevin Eggers. And because Kevin wanted Townes’ management contract, he made a statement to Townes that I didn’t care anything about Townes…. So he offered me a hundred thousand dollars for Townes’ contract.

And I turned it down, and I tore the contract up in front of Townes. I first got on the phone and called Jay, and said, ‘Jay, this is what’s going on.’ I didn’t tell him about the money offer, but I just said, ‘I would like to be able to give Townes’ contract For the Sake of the Song

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back. If we don’t do it, he’s going to sign with this crook, and I don’t want him to do that.’ But he did it anyway.”

Many years later, Newbury still felt the sting. “We never discussed it,” he says. “I never discussed business or his career with him after that. It was the only way to remain friends.”

It is purely a matter of speculation now to try to divine the reasons for Van Zandt deciding to go with Kevin Eggers and the tiny Poppy label. According to Newbury, though, the reason was simple: the street-smart New Yorker, Eggers, conned the eager young artist—who happened to have a strong hedonistic streak—

with talk of “how we’re going to go out there and set the world on fire.” “‘We’re not with the establishment,’” Newbury recalls, was the thrust of the argument; “‘we’re not going to let these big guys roll over us; we’re going to do our own thing. We’re going to travel all over the world and we’re going to have a lot of fun.

We’re going to have a lot of women and a lot of booze and a lot of fun.’ I know exactly what he told him,” Newbury says.

Things did not work out quite the way Van Zandt might have hoped; at least not at first. “Townes had signed the contract with Poppy,” Fran recollects. “Everything looked great. He was supposed to get a big signing bonus, but he never got it. Well, there was a little bonus, but not much. Then the record came out, and nothing really came of it. He was on the road playing clubs more, because no real money was coming from the record contract. And the record didn’t sell, because they didn’t market it.”

Townes told an interviewer years later that when the album came out, “The underground station in Houston would play cuts off it from time to time because my mother would just constantly phone in a request. She would try to disguise her voice.

‘Could you please play that Townes Van Zandt song?’ ‘Yes, Mrs.

Van Zandt, we’ll play it as soon as we can get to it.’”

“One good thing about it was that I think for the first time he started realizing he might really have talent,” Fran says. “You know, people everywhere were starting to say nice things about him. And, God, he was writing beautiful songs.”

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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
Townes and Fran had separated at the beginning of 1968, as Fran returned to Houston and Townes stayed out on the road in Oklahoma and north-central Texas, but within a couple of months they got back together, both determined to give it another shot.

That summer, Fran announced that she was pregnant. “We were really excited about it,” Fran says. “Then, everything kind of started unraveling.” It was primarily the financial strains that worried Townes, she recalls. “He started feeling like a failure, like he was letting me down, and then like he was trapped.… So

… the rest of that pregnancy wasn’t very good. We moved from the apartment that I had while we were separated, into a roach-infested, horrible place, on Blue Bonnet. We scrubbed it down and made it nice and stayed there a couple of months. Then I found a really neat little house, and he kind of liked that.”

Fran’s pregnancy ushered in a period of intense stress in the marriage, even as she and Townes looked forward to the baby and made plans for their future together. “With Shell, if you were pregnant at that time, you had to quit,” Fran remembers.

“So I tried to hide it for as long as possible, because he didn’t have insurance, and I didn’t have insurance, and we had no money to pay for it. I wound up having a bad first part of the pregnancy and the doctor put me to bed for two months. I was just barely three months’ pregnant, and I had to quit…. this, I think, hurt him more than anything: first that his record contract sort of fell through, or showed no promise, and then that I didn’t have a job and I was pregnant.”

Townes’ and Fran’s son, John Townes Van Zandt II, called J.T., was born about six weeks early, coming as a surprise in the early hours of April 11, 1969. Fran had been to the doctor the day before and was pronounced well and right on schedule. She and Townes went out that night to a family party, celebrating Townes’ brother Bill’s engagement. “It was over at one of the cousins’ houses,” Fran remembers. “They really had fixed a great dinner, and it was really fun. It was one of the old family kind of parties. We went home and went to bed, and about two o’clock in the morning I woke up and … I had gone into labor. I didn’t For the Sake of the Song

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want to wake [Townes] up, so I kept thinking, this will go away, this will go away.”

Finally, at about six o’clock in the morning, Fran woke Townes up. “He jumped out of bed. He got so excited, he couldn’t find the keys. Then he couldn’t find the car. Then he jumped in the car and realized he had forgotten my bag, so he ran back. It was just like a cartoon. He drove out in the street—we lived in West University then, which was right beside the medical center—and he couldn’t remember the way to the hospital. We got in there and I had the baby about two hours after I got to the hospital.

[Townes] had a party that night at the house, which I didn’t find out about until later.”

With the birth of his son—a handsome baby with classic Van Zandt features, dark and angular—Townes manifested an increased reluctance to partake of a family life. He had decided firmly that he wanted to stay out on the road and play the folk clubs and coffee houses around the circuit, living simply.

For now, he continued to pursue his artistic desires by writing steadily throughout the domestic turmoil. As Fran recalls, “If I Needed You” was one of the songs that took shape in this rocky period. “When Townes wrote ‘If I Needed You,’ he sang it to me, and I thought it was the most beautiful song he’d ever written,”

Fran says. “I couldn’t even speak when I heard it…. I always felt like it was my song.”

If Townes wrote, or wrote part of, “If I Needed You” at this early date, he was to keep it mostly to himself for a while longer, and he was later to invent a colorful alternate story of the song’s inception.