A Deeper Blue (23 page)

Cindy remembers. At first, when Townes had gigs, Cindy spent a lot of time alone at the house, but it wasn’t long before she got to know a woman who owned a horse farm just down the road.

Eventually, the woman hired Cindy to work with her horses a few days a week.3

Through Guy Clark, Townes and Michael Ewah had known each other at Bronco Newcombe’s stables in Aspen, and they had explored the backcountry on horseback together in the Rockies a number of times. At the farm, they were able to continue their outdoor rambles. “Townes and Mike would hunt off that property,” Cindy says. “Mike would go out in the back ponds up there. Turtles, big turtles, come out of them back ponds, and Mike would catch them and make turtle soup. And Geraldine
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killed skunks. But Mike was really a hunter, living off the land.”

Ewah also did volunteer work for the Humane Society, rehabilitating hawks that had been injured. Cindy recalls, “he had to …

kill the little chipmunks that are up there in Tennessee for food for the hawk while it was cage-ridden. Finally, when it was able to come out of the cage, he would keep it on his hand and get it to where he’d send it to tree when he’d see a chipmunk.” As a reminder of their precarious financial condition, Cindy says, “I remember the three of us cutting up a lot of trees off that land and selling them for firewood for spending money.”

The most notable feature of the property was that it was located on the site of a Civil War battlefield. The Battle of Franklin, one of the bloodiest, most savage battles of the war, took place on a bitter cold November 30, 1864, in the woods and hills surrounding the creek and the adjoining Harpeth River.

“If you walked back to the end of that property, you could see the Civil War redoubts on top of those hills, from the Battle of Franklin,” Cindy recalls. Townes was already keenly interested in American history, and he was fascinated by this intimate proximity to past events. He took time to read up on the history of the battles of Franklin and Nashville, and particularly on the flamboyant Texan John Bell Hood, the Confederate general who commanded the Army of Tennessee at these battles.4

Meanwhile, John Lomax was at work. “We started to get Townes out on the road again, mostly by himself at this point,” Lomax says. “I would go out a little bit, but not much, because managers really don’t belong on the road. But I was trying to get a record deal. I believed I had to get Townes away from Kevin and had to get him with a record company. And it was hard, because Townes didn’t know about business at all. He was sort of trying at this point, but really he just wanted to be the troubadour, the mythic figure.”5

Van Zandt returned to Houston in June for a three-night stand on a bill with Hoyt Axton at Liberty Hall, promoted by Lomax as “The Return of the Hemmer Ridge Mountain Boys.” Townes Dollar Bill Blues

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was glad to have the boisterous support of Mickey White and Rex Bell, and was glad to be playing his old home town again.

According to Lomax, “I knew Bob Claypool would give me a bunch of ink with the
Post
and he did a big feature. We got him on the radio, on one of the hip stations where he came on and played live, and we actually got a TV spot—‘The prodigal son returns home, three nights at Liberty Hall.’”

With his ear to the ground, and after a few unsuccessful attempts at deals, Lomax heard that Kevin Eggers was working again with Earl Willis’s live recordings of Townes at the Old Quarter, and that Willis had edited and mixed the tapes in preparation for a release. “Kevin got some more money from somewhere,” Lomax says, “and suddenly he got Tomato going.”

Tomato Records was a United Artists-backed revival of Eggers’

concept for Poppy Records, which was to feature an eclectic array of artists. Townes was willing to give Eggers another chance.

Lomax and Eggers talked about how they might work together to do three things. The first was to release the Old Quarter recordings, with liner notes by Lomax. Next, Lomax was intent on re-releasing all of Townes’ old Poppy albums, which were now out of print and very difficult to find. Then, for the final stroke, Townes would record a new album, which they would release, of new songs, to which they, along with Townes, would jointly hold the publishing. Coinciding with these releases would be a publicity blitz that included a special limited publication of a songbook of lyrics and sheet music for a handful of Townes’

songs, along with photos, critical testimonials, and a specially commissioned biographical essay. “Then we go to the labels and say, here’s this great artist, you can probably acquire all his stuff from this scoundrel for dirt and give him an override, and you’ve got this momentum, and you’ve got the next Dylan,”

recollects Lomax. Lomax didn’t particularly like Eggers, but he felt that his utility to this business plan was unavoidable.

“Then I started asking Kevin questions about financial statements, things like that; ‘What’s the deal on the publishing, anyway?’” Lomax says. “I wanted to have a publishing company,
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me and Townes. I was going to go after every single song and get ‘em all back to Townes. I would run it, and we would each own half, and we’d live happily every after. I was supposed to be the publisher for all the songs on the album we wanted to make, which was
Flyin’ Shoes
. And I couldn’t get a straight answer on anything from Kevin.”

The first of Townes’ and Cindy’s two winters in the cabin in Franklin was long and very cold. “We stayed pretty warm with the coal stove and the wood fireplace,” Cindy says, “but it was bitter out there. We had a pump that ran running water through a hose, and it froze up. We’d go to Lomax’s house and bring back five gallons of water to brush our teeth and wash and make coffee with.” As Townes told an interviewer that spring, “for a month or two eighty percent of my energy went into wood. I had dreams of wood at night.”6

By the spring of 1977, the couple settled into a routine at the cabin that had both a positive and a negative impact on Townes. After the episode that required his hospitalization in Austin two years before (and another brief hospitalization in Nashville shortly after the move), he was back on his lithium prescription, and his bipolar disorder was relatively in check.7

He was happy living a quiet life in the country, chopping wood, mending fences, building a cattle guard for his driveway, watching the cows and horses on the surrounding properties, fishing, and just watching the weather change. But, while he and John Lomax were going forward with their plan to advance his career, and he was still playing gigs, he was not writing much, and he was drinking more and more. Heroin was not readily available to Townes in Tennessee, but, through Michael Ewah, he had an occasional supply of Dilaudid, which Townes would inject, maintaining his narcotic self-medication habit. And, while cocaine was in vogue around the Nashville scene during this time and was not unknown to Townes and Cindy and their acquaintances, alcohol was still the drug of choice, and Townes fell quickly to indulging his familiar fancy.

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“He had a daily schedule,” Cindy says. “At seven a.m., he’d wake up, and the first thing he’d do was call Susanna. He’d un-plug the phone the rest of the day, but, by God, he’d wake up and call Susanna first. Then he’d put his glasses on and sit there and read quietly until nine-thirty, and he’d be at the liquor store at ten on the nose and get his first jug of the day. But as soon as he’d take that first drink, the glasses would come off and he’d be a different person. He’d be mean, sometimes, or just crazy. It was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” It fell to Cindy to make sure that Townes was taking his lithium and vitamins every day, but there was little she could do to keep Townes sober.8

John Lomax realized that first winter that Townes’ drinking was going to be a problem. “I didn’t say, hey, you got a problem…. I didn’t feel like it was my right to run somebody’s personal life.…

He wasn’t missing dates. He never missed a date. But when I say I was Townes’ manager, I like to put quote marks around it. I managed to keep him out of jail, I managed to get him to shows, but he was an unmanageable person, even then.”

“I was outside on the porch, probably smoking a joint or something,” Cindy recalls, “and Townes and Michael were shooting dice inside. Next thing I know, I hear, ‘Hey baby.’ And I look around, and he’s got blood coming out of his mouth. And Mike Ewah comes out from behind him, a big old smile on his face, and I can’t believe what I’m seeing. He’d gotten Townes’ gold tooth out with a little pair of pliers. They were gambling and Townes bet his gold tooth. And Mike got the tooth…. I was pissed.”

On a few of the tours that Bobby Cudd booked around this time, the singer–songwriter David Olney opened for Townes. Olney remembers, “Cindy traveled with us. She was just unbelievably good-looking, with fiery red hair, very devoted to Townes. And, traveling with them in the car, it was her and him in the front seat and me in the back seat, and I might as well have been in the trunk.”

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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
Olney recalls a gig in Little Rock where the entire audience consisted of a half-dozen people. “I was gonna open for him,” Olney says. “And before the show we were talking to these people who had driven all the way from Texas. Then I went on and it turned out that they were the only people in the place. I did my set, then, as Townes was getting ready to play … these five or six people who had driven all the way from Texas got in a fight, a fistfight, and were all thrown out of the place.” Olney and Townes were stunned. Townes laughed. “There goes my audience!”9

That spring, Van Zandt hit the road for a nationwide tour with a newly recruited team of side men. Guy Clark suggested to Townes that he might like to try out a veteran guitarist who had worked with him, Danny “Ruester” Rowland. Rowland had worked with a number of musicians and songwriters, including the prolific Nashville songwriter Billy Edd Wheeler (who wrote

“Jackson” for Johnny Cash and June Carter, among other songs) and was a seasoned instrumentalist with a sensitive ear. Along with Rowland came bassist Jimmie Gray, who had played drums in Waylon Jennings’ original band the Waylors in the sixties,10

and fiddle player Owen Cody, who had toured with Billy Joe Shaver and recorded with Freddy Fender and Rod Bernard for Huey Meaux’s Crazy Cajun label in Beaumont, Texas. Professionals all, the trio played some gigs with Townes late in 1976

and was road-tested and ready to tour by the spring of 1977.

Also landing in Nashville around this time was Kevin Eggers’

younger brother, Harold. Harold Eggers had knocked around in Austin on the fringes of the music scene and had come to Nashville to find some more solid work in the music business. Harold had met Townes years before, as a teenager, at gatherings hosted by Kevin. When they reconnected, Townes, no doubt taking counsel from Kevin, offered Harold a job as his road manager.

John Lomax concurred with this seemingly inevitable development—Townes needed somebody on the road to keep him out of trouble, and he knew that wasn’t going to be him—and Harold enthusiastically accepted the job. He would have a chance Dollar Bill Blues

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to hone his skills during the upcoming tour, which was to begin shortly after Townes’ thirty-third birthday.

By this time, too, Tomato Records was up and running with the long-delayed release of Earl Willis’ live recordings of Van Zandt from the summer of 1973, a two-record set titled
Townes
Van Zandt Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas.
The package, designed by Milton Glaser around a shadowy black-and-white photograph of Townes, shirtless and wearing a straw cowboy hat, was an auspicious kickoff for Van Zandt on his new record label. The pristine recordings of the young Townes at what already could be seen as the peak of his powers would be cited as an example of his best work for years to come. At the last minute, Kevin Eggers changed his mind about using John Lomax’s liner notes for the album and went with notes written by Willis instead. It could be argued that this move was a signal of Eggers’ re-emerging ascen-dancy—and Lomax’s growing marginalization—in Townes’ business affairs. But, in any case, the release of the
Old Quarter
album was a significant step. Next, Townes hit the road.

After a few local shows in early April, Townes left Cindy in Franklin and flew with Harold Eggers, Danny Rowland, Jimmie Gray, and Owen Cody to Los Angeles for a week of gigs.

The schedule was intensive: April took them from L.A. back to Nashville, then to two nights each at the Quiet Night in Chicago, Bunky’s in Madison, Wisconsin, and the Blue River Café in Milwaukee; then it was on to Larry Joe’s in Augusta, Georgia, Gilley’s in Dayton, Ohio, and the Great Mideast Music Hall in Louisville, Kentucky. May saw the group at Michigan State University in East Lansing, in Long Island, in Boston, and at the Lone Star in New York City and the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C. Then it was back to Boston, then to St. Louis. Townes played solo at the Kerrville Folk Festival on May 26, then the group reunited in Nashville and flew back to California on the first of June. They played the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, then headed up the coast to Seattle.

After a gig at the Euphoria Tavern in Portland, Oregon, Harold Eggers checked into a local hospital with a badly swollen knee,
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
and the tour started catching up with the musicians. While visiting and arguing with Harold in the hospital, Townes took all the money they had made on the tour so far, which he carried around with him in cash, and he threw it out the window. Even at this early point in their relationship, Eggers had begun to fall into the role of caretaker for Townes, seeing that he made it to gigs, didn’t drink too much, and didn’t give all his money away. Harold would perfect this difficult role over the next twenty years.