A Deeper Blue (19 page)

“madly in love” with Townes. Dobson recounted a drive from Nashville to Austin that September with Townes and Gloria.

Townes had brought along his recently acquired fiddle and spent the entire trip trying to play “Farewell Tiawatha.” “His fiddling was painful to the ears but he was clearly enjoying himself,” Dobson says. “Gloria was not so amused.” The unhappy traveling companions wound up at a friend’s house in Austin, where they slept on the floor. The next morning, Gloria, furious that Townes had refused to get a hotel room, took a cab to the airport and flew back to Nashville.14

Van Zandt played a series of gigs in Austin and was back in Nashville by October, but returned to Texas more than once before the end of the year. He was in Texas when he got word that Skinny Dennis Sanchez had died in October. “He died onstage playing bass,” Townes later recounted. “Though he knew he had this bad heart disease he kept playing bass and drinking, a little cocaine every so often, weed and cigarettes.”15 Guy Clark later immortalized Sanchez in his song “L.A. Freeway”: “Here’s to you old Skinny Dennis/The only one I think I will miss.”

The album that Van Zandt had been working on in Nashville over the course of those months was finally released at the end of the year with the title
The Late, Great Townes Van Zandt
.

124

A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt

“I think the title was a joke of Kevin Eggers’,” Townes later said. “A lot of my friends saw it at the music store and tried to call my mother. She didn’t believe it was me on the back cover.

When she and my aunt went to buy it in Houston they had this argument with the hippy in the store. She said it wasn’t Townes Van Zandt, he said it was, and she said ‘I should know, I’m his mother!’”16

As far as Mrs. Van Zandt was concerned, it’s very likely that her son’s new album title represented a possibility that had been too close to becoming a reality for her to appreciate the joke.

Even at the time of its release in late 1972, the story of
The Late,
Great Townes Van Zandt
was the story of “Pancho and Lefty,”

which was to become Townes’ best known, most successful song, and “If I Needed You,” which was to become his second-most successful song. Other songs on the album were strong, particularly Townes’ homages to family life, “No Lonesome Tune,” and to Leslie Jo Richards, “Snow Don’t Fall.” His covers of Hank Williams’ “Honky Tonkin’,” Guy Clark’s “Don’t Let the Sunshine Fool You,” and, finally the old country chestnut—the first song Townes learned on the guitar—“Fraulein,” are pleasant recordings, as is the wonderful collaboration with Susanna Clark, “Heavenly Houseboat Blues.” The other songs on the album are less impressive. But “Pancho and Lefty” left an immediate impression, which was reflected in FM radio play very shortly after the record’s release.

“I’m not sure how ‘Pancho and Lefty’ came about,” Townes once mused, “but all of a sudden it was there and I was beginning to write it down. I remember thinking at the time I was writing it that it wasn’t Pancho Villa. It was the first song I’d ever written with any reference to Mexico because I haven’t spent a lot of time there. A lot of people from Texas are real close to it and associated with it, while I’ve lived in Colorado and the mountains.”17

Townes was on the road in Texas with his friends Daniel Donut and Gretchen Mueller; he recalled sitting down in a motel Highway Kind

125

room outside of Dallas for the express purpose of writing a song.

By evening, he had written “Pancho and Lefty.” “It came to me pretty fast,” he later said. “It was an afternoon.” He played the song at his gig that night. As he later recounted, the Dallas songwriter B.W. Stevenson was “one of the three or four people in the crowd,” and Townes spoke to him after his set. He recalls Stevenson telling him of the new song, “Boy, that’s gonna be a beautiful song, but it’s not quite finished.” He says, “So I went home that night and wrote the last verse.”18

However, at least one friend recalls that Townes had started working on “Pancho and Lefty” at the time of his overdose and hospitalization in Houston a year earlier. “I’m almost sure that he wrote ‘Pancho and Lefty’ right in the hospital,” Dale Soffar said later. “When he came out of the hospital, he came over and sang that song.” Soffar and others close to Townes believed that the song was closely related to his overdose and near-death experience, and that the story’s two protagonists are Townes’ expression of the two sides of his personality. Townes said, “I think of it in a lot of different ways.”19 Indeed, the masterstroke of the song is its willful ambiguity and mystery. Of all of Van Zandt’s songs, it is the one most open to interpretation, and the one most rewarding in this openness. However, a look at the song’s structure is revealing.

The first verse stands apart from the rest of the song as a pro-logue, a statement that ties the story that follows to the teller on a personal level. And it’s clear who the storyteller is: it’s Townes, speaking to himself, and barely recognizing himself:

“Now you wear your skin like iron/And your breath’s as hard as kerosene.” He’s losing himself, or losing the side of himself that his mother would recognize. The presence of the mother in

“Pancho and Lefty” reinforces the closeness that Townes felt toward his mother. The line “You weren’t your mama’s only boy/

But her favorite one, it seems” reflects a sentiment that Townes’

family was familiar with. Townes and his mother were very much alike, and Townes’ brother, Bill, had always believed that Townes was his mother’s favorite. The inevitable transformation
126

A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
that haunted Townes’ life with Fran—the “bad” Townes taking over from the “good” Townes—was becoming reality, “as you sank into your dreams,” he sings. In the rest of the song, those dreams come to life as a wistful fantasy of bandits and federales, betrayal and regret, the story firmly based in this dichotomy, which he seemed to be experiencing clearly and in stark relief.

As for the recording of “Pancho and Lefty,” Townes was not pleased that the Spanish trumpet part had been placed so far down in the mix. “It’s one of those things,” he said, resigned.20

Early in 1973, while “Pancho and Lefty” was finding still wider airplay on FM radio, Poppy Records filed for bankruptcy and ceased operations. When the dust settled, United Artists owned the label’s assets but would not be issuing records under the Poppy imprint any time soon. Kevin Eggers’ accounts of the details of the transaction are less than revealing, but it is clear that money changed hands. Eggers landed on his feet and decided to lie low. Meanwhile, Townes Van Zandt was without a record label. He headed for Texas that spring.

After making the rounds in Houston, Van Zandt played a string of gigs around Texas. Peggy Underwood, a young lawyer in Austin, remembers meeting Townes at a gig at the Saxon Pub there. “He was with a girl named Donna Gay, a real pretty girl from Houston.

They were arguing, and it got bad, and at one point he had Donna Gay down with a knife at her throat in the kitchen of the Saxon Pub. Later, he started talking to me, and we went outside, and next thing I knew he ripped my shirt off. And then he went home with me. I don’t know why, he just did. He told Donna Gay to head back to Houston, and he moved in with me.”21

Life in Austin took a similar course to life in Houston. “He pretty much drank all the time, and shot heroin as much as he could,” according to Peggy Underwood. “He’d shoot up cocaine too. This was the first time I ever saw anybody shoot up drugs.

He and [a friend] were shooting up bourbon and Coca Cola.

Bourbon and Coca Cola. Somebody said they’d seem him shoot up vodka before. He would talk to his mother, he would get on Highway Kind

127

the phone and call his mother and cry and cry and cry. He’d talk for an hour or two, talk to her and cry, and I’m sure she was crying on the other end too. His mother told him he had to be the man of the family and he wasn’t capable of being the man of any family.”

Peggy remembers Townes being depressed continuously during this time, with no periods of mania. “I was with him on his twenty-ninth birthday, and he thought he was going to die because Hank Williams died when he was twenty-nine. We were hanging out with Jerry Jeff Walker and Murphy, his wife, at their house, and they were talking about Hank and all that ‘Hank Williams syndrome’ crap, that you have to die young and leave a good-looking corpse and all that. I laughed about it, it was so ridiculous, but Townes was obviously taking it seriously.”

That Van Zandt was more than capable of good performances during this period of depression and inebriation is clear from the recordings made at the Old Quarter in Houston that July.

After a fire in the club early that year, Rex Bell had left the business to Dale Soffar and joined his fellow Texans in Nashville

“to try the singer-songwriter thing.” Soffar rebuilt the club and kept it going with mostly the same audiences and artists who had frequented it for years, including Townes, who continued to play there regularly.

Earl Willis was a chemical engineer with a love of music and ties to the recording business through his friendship with Jack Clement; he was also a regular at the Old Quarter and friend of Townes. Willis had developed an idea for Townes’ next album.

He believed that Townes never came across as well on his records as he did in front of a live audience, and that he should record live.

“Townes and I talked about it a lot,” Willis recalls. “This was not too long after he had written a whole batch of fresh new songs. There weren’t a lot of live albums then, and we decided that he should try to sell Kevin on doing a live album.” With Poppy in bankruptcy, Eggers was not free to pursue the idea,
128

A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
but Willis decided he would buy some recording equipment and record Townes himself. “I was ready to get a new tape deck anyway,” Willis remembers, “so I told Townes, for my part of it, that I had seen this 3340 Teac, which was one of the first four-track recorders that was halfway portable. It wasn’t really that portable, it was heavy, and I had to carry it.”22

Armed with the Teac and Electrovoice 635A low-impedence microphones, they chose the Old Quarter as the natural location for the recording, and Soffar booked Townes for a Thursday through Saturday-night stand in July, “so that we’d have a night to kind of work it out and a couple of nights where we could pick the best stuff,” according to Willis. Van Zandt promised to take the recording seriously, “and he did,” says Willis. “He stayed reasonably sober and relaxed and was enjoying himself, but he still had that edge of performing; not just playing, but being aware of the recording. He did it. He played every song he ever did, and we recorded them all. We had several cuts of some songs. For some of the new ones, we wanted to be sure we got a good one.”

The Thursday night recording turned out to be unusable because of the prominence of the sound of the rumbling air conditioners. “This was July, and oh man, it was hot,” Willis says.

“With the air conditioners running it was hot at the Old Quarter; with them off, it was
really
hot. The second night, Townes decided to change strings between sets because he was sweating on them so much. But we recorded two sets Friday and two sets Saturday, so we had four sets, and we cut out a seven-and-a-half IPS

sample and sent it to Kevin. Then I didn’t hear anything.…”

Willis sent a copy of the finished tape to Eggers along with a letter detailing the technical specifications of the recording and making suggestions as to the final mastering. Originally, Willis had experimented with dubbing in a bass guitar track on one cut, “Darcy Farrow,” with Dusty Hill laying down the track in Willis’s Houston apartment, but in the end he decided not to use that cut. “Nothing should be added,” Willis wrote to Eggers in the transmittal letter. “Discarding the first night’s tape due to noise,” he wrote, “seventy-five recordings were made of forty-Highway Kind

129

four different selections. Sixty of the recordings seem to be as good technically and artistically as those on the tape copy.” He recommended to Eggers that the same Teac 3340 on which the original recording and copying was done be taken to Nashville and used to play the tapes into the board at Jack Clement’s studio so that no quality would be lost because of any misalignment of the machines. After the tracks were mastered onto a sixteen-track machine, adjustments to tone, equalization, and centering were made, but nothing else was done to the original recordings.

Eggers decided early on that he wanted Townes to record another regular studio album, and that he was not going to use the Old Quarter recordings. It wasn’t until 1976 that Willis heard from Eggers again. “I had moved up to Ohio, working at a chemical plant, and Kevin tracked me down there and asked me if I would be interested in trying to put together an album out of the tapes. I said I had to stay where I was, but if I could do it there, I could do it…. And he said, ‘see what you can come up with and I’ll pay for the tape and studio time.’”

Willis found a small studio in Lima, Ohio, called Northwest Recording Studio. Benny Young was the engineer. “I had all these fifteen and a half IPS quarter-track tapes, and they had the capabil-ity to play them…. What we did was we spliced where we needed to. There was a lot of extraneous noise; somebody would drop a beer mug or stuff like that that would ruin your continuity, so we dropped out that kind of stuff. Mostly, we picked the best cut of a song from the three or four we had, then used that. The album, the original album, was a double record. When I set it up, it wasn’t gonna be a double, but we got real good cuts,” Willis says.

Among the songs that were recorded but did not make it onto the eventual double album were Van Zandt’s own “Silver Ships of Andillar,” “St. John the Gambler,” “Columbine,” and

“If I Was Washington”; The Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers”; Hank Williams’ “(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle Blow”; Dylan’s “Little Willie the Gambler”; Jimmie Rodgers’ “Waitin’ for a Train”; “Darcy Farrow”; and Townes’ old “Dream Spider.”