A Deeper Blue (30 page)

Peggy Underwood was a good friend of Lana Nelson’s, Willie’s daughter, and Peggy suggested that it would be a great song for Willie to cover. Lana agreed, and played the song for her father during an evening recording session. Willie liked it so much he Still Lookin’ For You

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immediately learned it, then, late that night, woke Haggard up and had him come to the studio to record the song. The recording was done on the first take, and Haggard claimed it was the only song he’d ever recorded before he really knew it.15

Once Peggy Underwood had come through with this success for Townes, and once some real money started to come in, she naturally became more interested again in seeing that Townes’

business affairs were being run properly. “After ‘Pancho and Lefty’ happened,” she recalls, “we tried to get Kevin [Eggers] off the publishing. They had a corporation, and Kevin hadn’t paid his corporate taxes … he wasn’t helping Townes at all, and then all of a sudden, he’s gonna make all this money from Willie and Merle’s record. If he wanted to still be part of the publishing, he could have been paying the franchise or the corporate taxes in New York City.”

Peggy tried to do the same kind of investigating that John Lomax had done to get to the bottom of Townes’ publishing and recording contracts, and she ended up hitting the same brick walls that Lomax had. “Basically, we got this other lawyer and we were trying to get Kevin out, but it didn’t ever happen,” she says. “I was trying to legally get him off the boat so that Townes would own it again. [The publishing] should have reverted to Townes when Kevin didn’t keep the corporation going.”

The income that Nelson and Haggard’s recording of “Pancho and Lefty” generated for Townes was a windfall. “When

[Jeanene] first hooked up with Townes, he was just mainly getting gig money,” Underwood recalls. “But he was getting some pretty good mechanical royalties” from “Pancho and Lefty.” Underwood also profited from the record, through a “handshake deal” that recognized her part in making the record happen.

“When that money started coming in, we were still hooked up, and he was still paying me my part,” Peggy says. “We bought a big old sailboat, and we would all go out on the lake and ride around. Jeanene had never had anything like that.”

During this time Jeanene attempted to retrieve some cash from their account through the Nashville accountant who was
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taking care of Townes’ financial affairs. “And there wasn’t any money in that account,” Peggy recalls. “That guy hadn’t filed any tax returns for a few years, and he’d been sticking all the money in his pocket. If that happens here, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“I heard that Townes looked for me for a couple years, didn’t know where I was,” Cindy says. “At one point, I went from Montreal to Nashville to get my things.” Cindy returned to Texas at the end of 1982 and stayed at her mother’s house, north of Houston, while her mother was going through a divorce. “He finally tracked me down and showed up,” Cindy recalls. “I didn’t really want a divorce, at that point. But Peggy had drawn up our divorce papers, and I remember him coming up finally, with his hands shaking, wanting me to sign them. He said that maybe he’d gotten somebody pregnant. He wasn’t sure. I thought, well, who am I to stand in the way? There’s a child. So I signed the papers.”

Peggy Underwood had taken care of Townes as a friend for some years, and it was Peggy whom Townes turned to when he needed to find Cindy. “She knew I was taking care of his business and that he wanted to be divorced and was looking for her,” Peggy remembers. “She called me from Canada and I told her about everything. He didn’t care, but Jeanene wanted him to get divorced.” The divorce was finalized in Travis County, Texas, on February 10, 1983. Townes celebrated his thirty-ninth birthday a month later.

That same week, the doctors caring for Townes’ mother determined that her cancer was inoperable, and gave her roughly six months to live. Her eldest son married the nearly-nine-months-pregnant Jeanene Lanae Munsell a week later, on March 14, 1983, in a small outdoor ceremony, with his friend Bo Whitt, an Austin artist, as best man. “It was almost like a present to my mom,” Townes’ sister Donna says, “so she knew they were married when her next grandchild was born.”16

The very next day, Townes flew to Nashville for an appearance on Bobby Bare’s TV show. Before he left, Jeanene gave him Still Lookin’ For You

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one piece of advice: “Whatever you do, Townes, don’t say ‘I just got married and we’re having a baby.’ Pick one or the other.”17

Townes had known Bare for some years, originally through Mickey Newbury, and Bare—another prolific and creative Nashville rebel—had recently released an album that included a version of “Pancho and Lefty” as well as songs by Guy Clark and J.

J. Cale. On the show, Bare asks Townes about the story behind

“Pancho and Lefty,” and Townes tells of writing the song in a motel room outside of Dallas while both Billy Graham and the Guru Maharaji were appearing in town. He says there were no hotel rooms within forty miles of the city, so he was forced to stay way out of town, and, with nothing to do for three days, he wrote the song. “I used to say it was about them,” Townes tells Bare, referring to Graham and the Guru, “but I don’t say that anymore.”

They talk about Willie and Merle’s cover of “Pancho and Lefty,” and about the video that Townes appeared in briefly. (“I was the captain of the federales,” Townes says very seriously.

“All I had to do was look at people in contempt and disgust.”) They also discuss Emmylou Harris’ “If I Needed You” and what it’s like to have a song in the charts. Bare says, “You can’t gear your life to those charts, it’ll drive you nuts,” to which Townes quietly protests, “I’m
already
nuts.”

As they wrap up their on-air chat, Townes says, “I’m supposed to mention that my wife Jeanene and I are having a baby any minute.” He goes on: “There’s a law in Texas where once you get divorced you can’t get married for thirty days, and it was getting close. We got married a couple days ago, but it was getting close, and I thought, well, we could always go up to Oklahoma. And I phoned my mom and I said, ‘Look, with this thirty-day law we might have to rush up to Oklahoma to get married.’ And she said, ‘Now don’t you do that, Townes; you don’t want that baby born in Oklahoma.’”

William Vincent Van Zandt—a healthy, handsome baby—was born to Jeanene and Townes on March 24, ten days after they
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were married. Townes left town almost immediately after the birth, accompanying Blaze Foley on an ill-fated trip to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, ostensibly to record an album, but in fact to spend an inebriated week in a motel room. The escapade cul-minated in a paranoid Blaze tearing his motel room telephone cord out of the wall and both Townes and Blaze being arrested for disorderly conduct.18 Townes managed to talk himself out of the situation and caught a bus back home.

That July, when Will was four months old, Townes took Jeanene and the baby to the old family “fishing camp” in Galveston to spend a week with his sister and his mother, who were there for the month. Dorothy was weak, but alert and determined. “We all knew at that point she was dying,” Donna says. “Over the years, she had taken a lot of things to my uncle’s place. So, we spent part of that month cleaning out, room by room, drawer by drawer, just making sure we got her things out of there so my Uncle Donny wouldn’t have to worry about it.”

To Donna, who believed that she knew the extent of her brother’s alcoholism, Townes seemed fairly “in control” as she puts it. “To look at him, he didn’t seem drunk. He didn’t seem different. But his mind … depending on the time of day, his mind was not as sharp as it had been.” After Townes, Jeanene, and the baby left, Donna was cleaning their room and made a discovery.

“Over in back of the bed, kind of out of sight, there was a little bottle of whiskey. I didn’t tell my mom because I figured she didn’t need to worry about that. But he didn’t look like a drunk. He just kind of sipped a lot, I think.” Donna had seen her brother perform in Boulder and in Denver and had tried to gauge his condition by the quality of the performances. “There were some of the songs he wrote early on that were real intricate and difficult for him to sing when he was having problems with the drinking.”

Townes’ “drinking problems” came to a head at the end of that month. Very likely at the urging of his dying mother, or in some attempt to please her, Townes called Peggy Underwood, who took him to the Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Treatment Center at Brackenridge Hospital in Austin, where Townes voluntarily Still Lookin’ For You

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checked himself in on July 27. According to hospital records, Townes claimed that he had been in treatment eleven times previously.19 The attending physician’s notes state that Townes “has been drinking for 15 years but he states that it has not really been a problem until 10 years ago,” and that he “stated further that it is not really a big problem.” Townes reported that he was drinking a pint of vodka every day. He said that his wife and his friends had encouraged him to admit himself. The doctor quotes Townes:

“I’ve just got to straighten up—I’ve been crazy all my life.”

Of Townes’ mental status, the Brackenridge doctor’s notes state that “He admits to hearing voices, mostly musical voices. He denies any suicidal ideations. Affect is blunted and mood is sad.

Judgment and insight is impaired.” Townes initially expressed some confusion about where he was; his speech was “rambling,”

and he walked with a “stumbling gait.” On his second morning in the hospital, he was “more alert,” and he told the doctor that

“he will probably be staying for detox and does not want to stay for the program.” Townes requested and signed his own release that same day. He was discharged “AMA [against medical advice]/

Unimproved” on July 30, after only three days in the hospital.

Willie and Merle’s record of “Pancho and Lefty” hit number one on the charts that same week. Townes had a scheduled “end-of-the-month rent gig” at EmmaJoe’s the same night he checked out of Brackenridge, a Saturday. According to Townes’ friend Larry Monroe, the well-known DJ at KUT in Austin, Townes had a rough time getting through his set that night. In the midst of

“If I Needed You,” he forgot the lyrics and was stuck, founder-ing. Blaze Foley was in the audience, and he “glided gracefully to his side and sang the words for him, then harmonized with him as Townes got back on track.”20 Monroe believed that he had witnessed an “energy transfer” from Blaze to Townes. Townes continued the performance, and made it through.

Dorothy Townes Van Zandt passed away two months later, in September 1983.

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No Deeper Blue

T
HECALLOFTHEROADdid not cease for Townes after the birth of his second son; indeed, it grew stronger, just as it had around the time of the birth of his first son. Once again, Townes’ self-destructive behavior was alarming his friends and family, as he was made explicitly aware of through the intervention they attempted before his mother died. The hospital had proven too strict a regimen and he again convinced himself that the road would make him “free and clean,” as it had before.

“Townes would go into rehab for other people, not for himself,”

according to Mickey White. “Anybody who’s recovering can tell you, you can do that until the cows come home, but until you do it for yourself, you’re not going to be saved.”

Townes did not want to go back out on the road by himself, so early in 1984, he decided to form a band. He got back together with Mickey White and called in two friends, the Waddell brothers, Leland and David, to play drums and bass guitar, respectively. To change things up, Townes and Mickey decided to add Boston native Donny Silverman on flute and saxophone.

“Townes always had a plan, some kind of direction,” White says,
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“and the plan was, this time, to put together a band. We’d go out on the road and get tight, and then go into the studio and cut an album.”1

The band began rehearsing around Townes’ fortieth birthday.

Mickey was “musical director” of the group, and there were often disagreements about arrangements, tempos, and other issues. White recalls, “I’d had experience with bands and producing records and all that kind of stuff … so I was kind of being bullheaded about that. Leland had his own ideas about how things were going to be; David had his; so a lot of the rehearsals would become these arguing matches. But in between, we did come up with some pretty good arrangements on those songs.”

The group played in Austin, Dallas, and a few other spots in Texas. After a series of gigs at Anderson Fair and Hermann Park in Houston, it became clear that the full “blues band” approach was not working, and the Waddells were dropped.

“A lot of it was because we drank too much, a lot of it was because we couldn’t agree on an approach to playing. It wasn’t Townes’ strong suit, playing with a band. It could have worked, in the long run, but only with a lot of compromising,” says Mickey White. White, Silverman, and Van Zandt continued to play as a trio, gradually expanding their territory outside of Texas. “We kind of really got good about July of 1984,” White says. “My last drink was July 31, 1984. I was really rededicated.

I was really stable, and I wanted to really take care of some business and book some good tours, and get us back up into Gerde’s Folk City and places like that.” White—with some intervention by Harold Eggers2—booked a tour of east coast clubs for the following spring.

The first stop on this outing was an important one. The gig was in Nashville, at a club called Twelfth and Porter, on April 17, 1985. “This was kind of a ‘welcome back to Nashville’ gig,”

White says. “Rodney [Crowell] and [his wife] Roseanne [Cash]

were there, Guy and Susanna were there, and Neil Young was there.” Young was in Nashville recording and his attendance added a lustrous buzz to the already auspicious evening. Accord-198