A Deeper Blue (22 page)

A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
up in Clarksville looking for Townes. As Townes recalled, “They wanted to have a barbecue in Clarksville … because Uncle Seymour’s barbecues were kind of famous.” The cold weather prevented a barbecue, but the crew set up to shoot Townes playing in Uncle Seymour’s tiny house. “There are all those arc lights coming through his little windows,” Townes remembered; “Seymour said it’s the only time his house has ever been warm in December.”19

On the first day of shooting (which appears as the second of Townes’ sequences in the film), with Phyllis Ivy20 washing dishes in the background and Uncle Seymour sitting by the kitchen pantry next to Townes, Townes interviews Seymour for the film crew (“Unc, you had a birthday lately didn’t you, on July twelfth, and you were … thirty six?” Townes grins at Seymour. “I was seventy-nine,” Seymour says. “Born in 1896.”).

Townes talks with Seymour about his career as a blacksmith and Seymour talks about horses and horseshoeing and blacksmith philosophy, then indulges his propensity for preaching. He leans toward Townes, looking directly at him.

“People condemn whiskey, but they have no right to,” Washington says. Townes smiles. “Because when God created the heaven and earth, He created all things, and He also created bar-ley, and rye, and if He didn’t think those things were good for man, He wouldn’t have let them grow.” This gets a whoop from the assembled hippies off-camera, and Townes gives a hearty

“Amen!,” grinning.

“He also created cattle of the fields, and birds of the air, and food for us to subsist on,” Seymour continues. He’s looking right at Townes, gesturing with his hands. “But He didn’t mean for us to eat so much of it that it’s detrimental to us, or will make us sick.” Townes looks straight ahead, smiling, his cowboy hat pushed back on his head. “And the same thing applies to whiskey, or beer, or anything you drink.” Townes looks down at the floor; Seymour continues preaching directly to him with a gentle insistence. “You don’t have to drink a barrel of whiskey because you see a barrel sitting there.” He is emphatic. The camera White Freightliner Blues

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zooms in closer. “You drink a little bit of it and then stop, and ask God to give you the knowledge to do that.”

Townes begins to play a song on the guitar, finger-picking the opening bars of “Waitin’ Around to Die.” Seymour listens attentively, hears the refrain, and leans over to Phyllis. She says something, reassuring him, and he listens more closely. Phyllis sways gently to the music, eyes closed, cigarette burning. Seymour, right beside her, is gazing intently, nodding his head as he listens. The camera is on Seymour now; he is listening intently, seemingly full of understanding. He nods his head; “That’s right,” he mouths silently. He looks grim. “A friend said he knew where some easy money was,” Townes sings. “We robbed a man and brother did we fly.”

Seymour’s eyes are red, filling with tears now. He has a look of dead seriousness, of grief, on his face. “They told her they’d take care of me/They drug me back to Tennessee/And it’s two long years of waitin’ around to die.”

At this, the tears fall from Seymour’s eyes, down the lines of his world-weary face. He wipes them away with the palm of his hand; Phyllis puts her hand on his shoulder and leans over and says something to him, then she wraps her hands around his and holds them. Townes goes on with the song, singing, as always, with his eyes closed. Seymour Washington shakes his head sadly at the last lines of the song, and the tears stream down his cheeks as the final minor chord fades into the air.

The next day, the crew shot footage outdoors, including a sequence where Townes stages a “fall” down a “giant rabbit hole”

in the yard behind Goat Hill. “This whole thing occurred …

starting on the Sunday after Mickey White and Rex Bell and I had had a real successful gig at Castle Creek, a club on Lavaca,”

Townes said. “So by the time Sunday came, we were into the celebrating.”

Cindy recalls that the shooting of the film was interfering with their heroin shooting: “I remember us trying to do a dodging act with some of those people who filmed that, because we were doing heroin then and we didn’t really want them to
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
know, so we were dodging them. Finally these people had us cornered, and I said to Townes, ‘Why don’t you just let them come over?’”

Heartworn Highways
—which wasn’t released until 1977—is revealing in a number of ways. As far as Townes Van Zandt is concerned, the film shows clearly that he was far and away the most charismatic of the musicians he was associated with, including Guy Clark, Rodney Crowell, Steve Young, Steve Earle, Charlie Daniels, and David Allen Coe, among others. Clark—who has roughly the same amount of screen time as Van Zandt—is shown to be a craftsman (literally, in a sequence showing him repairing a guitar), serious and workmanlike, and it is evident that his songs are carefully written and effectively performed.

He is clearly the center of the somewhat motley gathering of songwriters surrounding him. But Townes shines with a naked energy and makes an immediate, direct connection with everyone around him, whether he’s performing or just clowning around. And he eclipses all competition musically with “Waitin’

Around to Die” and “Pancho and Lefty.”21

Cindy has a less-than-sanguine summary of the Clarksville period:

It’s a good thing I was fourteen years younger than him, because I ended up really kind of babysitting

… you kind of start to realize what you’re dealing with, living with an alcoholic.

There was one time I remember—and this really kind of sums it up—I had fallen and sprained my ankle. I was on crutches, and Smiley and Darryl came over, and they had some real good heroin. We’d all been drinking, and they told Townes, “don’t do your regular dosage.” Well, he balls up his regular dosage anyway and shoots it on up. Next thing I know, he’s out—he’s turning blue. I’m on crutches, but I’ve got Darryl and Smiley and all these experienced druggies, and they all know to start shooting him up with salt water. And I have to deal with this…. Those people doing that movie wanted me to talk about that in the movie, too, and I just didn’t really want to. You see your husband OD in front of White Freightliner Blues

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your own eyes, you know, it’s not really something that you want the whole world to know.

Peggy Underwood offered a rosier reminiscence: “Everything was fun then because we were young and, I don’t know, we would just do whatever Townes did. It was just a lot of fun, a lot of craziness.”

John Lomax III moved from Texas to Tennessee in 1973. He knew most of the Texas singer–songwriters in Nashville, including Guy Clark and Townes, and he rented an apartment outside of town, not far from Old Hickory Lake, where Guy and Susanna held court. “I realized I wanted to be in the music business,”

Lomax says, “and I had built up enough credibility by writing about music for three or four little underground papers. I had a couple of things in
Creem
. I came up here [to Nashville] because I had gone to New York and L.A. and I couldn’t stand the thought of living there.” Lomax had originally come to Nashville with Texas guitarist Rocky Hill, brother of Dusty Hill of ZZ

Top, for a recording session. Lomax recalls, “He was really into the symbolism, the parallels between Leadbelly and my grandfather and him and me.”

Lomax liked Nashville, and he got a job as a publicist with Jack Clement’s Jack Music Incorporated. He worked at JMI for the next few years, absorbing as much knowledge of the music business as he could, and continuing to write. “I was beginning to understand that what I wanted to do in the music business was be a manager. I think I was born probably with some sort of genetic ability to tell if something’s really really good or if it’s only average, some sort of sense, because the family’s had it for all these years.”

Based on what he had learned of the situation, Lomax blamed Kevin Eggers for what he saw to be the stagnant state of Van Zandt’s career. “Kevin was totally inept at being able to function in any way other than to get some records into the pipeline, collect the money, and keep it,” Lomax says. “So I decided, I’ll be
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
his manager, and I’ll just tell everybody that this is the world’s greatest songwriter, and we’ll ride off into the sunset and count our money. What could be easier?”

Townes and Lomax agreed to proceed with this new management plan. It is easy to imagine that Townes might have felt the same kind of fascination with the symbolism of being under the wing of a Lomax as Rocky Hill had felt, particularly given Townes’ grounding in the Houston folk and blues scene that the senior Lomax had mentored in the sixties. So now, for openers, Townes agreed that Lomax would place an ad in the classified section of
Rolling Stone
magazine: “AMERICA’S GREATEST songwriter, Townes van Zandt Fan Club, News, pictures, rumors, lies.

Box 12542, Nashville, TN 37212.”

“I got something like 150 letters,” Lomax says. “And they were all amazingly literate. By this time, I had worked as a record company publicist for some years, in the country business, with Don Williams, Charley Pride, the Stonemans, and all these people that Jack worked with.… So I was used to getting fan mail. But these were like the Rhodes scholars of fan mail: eloquently written letters talking about Townes’ music in great detail; saying how he’d saved their life, by listening to one of his songs.” Lomax started mailing out “just write-ups on what was happening,” he says,

“and I’d throw an itinerary in there and send it out.”

This early publicity effort was an encouraging experience, but Lomax knew that he had other issues to address. Most immediately, he knew he had to get Townes out on the road more regularly. He hired Bobby Cudd, an agent out of South Carolina with good connections, who took Townes on and quickly booked some dates. “He started getting Townes back on the folk circuit and broadening the base a little bit,” says Lomax. “You could go play almost anywhere if you had a record out in the shops and a bit of a rep, which Townes had developed in spite of Kevin and despite any effort ever being made to systematically do something, because of the sheer brilliance of the work and the word of mouth that would ensue from somebody that was that good.”

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The next step was to work on landing a new recording contract. “I knew we had to get a real record deal, because by then I was going, ‘Wait a minute, aren’t we supposed to be getting publishing statements and royalty statements?’ I started realizing the shell game that was going on. There was simply no accounting.”

Lomax became determined to get to the bottom of Townes’ financial dealings with Poppy Records and with Kevin Eggers.

The final step was going to require a bigger leap, a more momentous commitment. Lomax believed that, in order to move his career forward, Townes would have to move to Nashville.

Townes had already considered the possibility. He had been relatively rootless and drifting for long enough; Clarksville was no longer a viable option; he had “kind of decided” that Cindy

“should have some kind of home base instead of couches and suitcases.” So Townes and Cindy moved to Nashville late in the summer of 1976, “to get my songs heard and recorded by other artists,” Townes said.22

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Dollar Bill Blues

T
HEACTUALGENESISOFTOWNES’decision to move to Nashville came during his last trip to the Rocky Mountains.

Out in the wilderness for a week-long ride, he and Cindy made a serious, sober assessment of his career. Townes knew that, artistically, things were stagnating for him. He felt that he had some responsibility to try to resuscitate his muse and revive his career, to get back to the buzz of writing and recording new material, and of connecting with his audience on the road. He and Cindy decided that a move to Music City would give Townes the best chance of getting things going again. He also wanted Cindy to be comfortable. He always tended to spend his gig money on the road, but royalty payments from recordings were a dependable, renewable source of income, and he realized that “to have money coming in the mail box is a real treat.”1 This is exactly what his new manager, John Lomax, was telling him as well.

Townes and Cindy agreed that they didn’t want to live in the city proper, but would look for a place in the country not far from town. The “place in the country” was something that Guy and Susanna Clark and many of Townes’ other musician friends
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in Nashville had sought for years and not found, and they realized that they might not succeed in this quest. Mickey Newbury and the Clarks had small houses on Old Hickory Lake just east of Nashville, but anything viable farther out had proved elusive.

In a stroke of good fortune, however, within a week of arriving in Tennessee, through a friend of Steve Earle’s named Bobby Walker, Townes and Cindy found a cabin in Franklin, about twenty miles south of the city. “We found this eight-hundred acre place for thirty dollars a month,” Townes said at the time.2

“We have electricity and running water, sometimes, but no insulation.” An old friend of Townes’, Michael Ewah, who was half Eskimo and half American Indian, soon moved into the cabin across the creek, as a “co-caretaker” of the property.

As Cindy recalls, “The place was on back there in the woods, and they grew tobacco on the farm, so the big tobacco barn that they hang that stuff in was between the two houses, and there was a little creek kind of through the center of it all. And there was an old rock wall that was originally the county border.” Standing on a pleasant, grassy rise in a stand of trees, with a small barn and some dilapidated outbuildings, the house itself was a rough wooden shack with a metal roof. “There was two bedrooms and then one long kitchen in back of the bedrooms, and the front porch was about the length of both bedrooms,”