A Deeper Blue (10 page)

“My dad was extremely democratic, and they were all very democratic, and everyone got a song or two.… No matter if you were wretched or professional; the whole concept was you were Waitin’ for the Day

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doing this for fun, and numerous beverages were served. They used all the members’ houses.… My dad would sing some in that setting. He would get up and sing real folk songs
a capella
, and sometimes he’d accompany himself with an axe and a big chunk of wood. He would stroke it with these big
whack
sounds, [singing] ‘take this hammer …
whack
!’ With this big fuckin’ log, and it would go flying everywhere, to show how it was rhythmic. And he would talk about where the songs came from and how he learned them from his dad, who learned them from whoever.

“Guy Clark came through there when he first came to town,”

recalls Lomax. “My dad had a show with Lightnin’ Hopkins—he managed Lightnin’ at the time—and Guy had just showed up in town, and he went to a meeting, and they said, ‘Oh, we’re having a show day after tomorrow, do you want to play?’ And he did, and Lightnin’ was there. Guy was a little nervous.”10

Lightnin’ Hopkins was in fact a regular fixture on the Houston club scene throughout the sixties, and it was through the influence of Hopkins and other black musicians like Mance Lipscomb and Josh White that the young Townes Van Zandt left the more purely white, commercial folk path and set a more deep-rooted, blues-oriented course, something that some of the other young, white folk aficionados felt ill-equipped to attempt, but that Townes seemed to take to naturally.

Van Zandt had discovered Hopkins’ recordings when he was in high school, then began listening more seriously in college, copying guitar licks, slowly mastering his finger-picking technique, and gradually absorbing the nuances of his style and, critically, his attitude. As he later told the story, one day at the University of Houston, he spotted an ad in the paper for Lightnin’s appearance that night at the Bird Lounge. Townes recalled that he was dumbfounded, never imagining that Hopkins was still alive and could actually be seen at a local club. He saw the show, and then met Lightnin’, sitting at his table and chatting with him, somewhat in awe.11

Rex Bell was another aspiring folk singer, and he played bass with Hopkins during this period, later going on to play a long
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
stint with him. Bell recalls that it was actually he who introduced Townes to Lightnin’. “Mrs. Carrick introduced me to Townes,” Bell remembers. “I was her perennial opening act.… I think I got paid six bucks or something. So she introduced me to Townes upstairs there at Sand Mountain, and she left the room.

And immediately Townes threw open the window, and he had a gallon of wine on a rope, and he pulled it up, and we both took a swig of wine, and we were friends from then on. It wasn’t too long afterward that I introduced him to Lightnin’.”12

Fran recalls that Townes was a big fan of Lightnin’s, and that he got to know him on a personal level to some extent.

I remember one time it was announced in the paper that Lightnin’ Hopkins had died. It was Sunday morning, not even eight o’clock, I don’t think. We got the paper and Townes read it and got real upset.

We got in the car and drove over. Lightnin’ lived in an apartment close to the University of Houston.

We knocked on the door, and old Lightnin’ always had these bodyguards, these people around, so they opened the door and we went in and Townes said,

“Oh, my God, Lightnin’. They said you were dead.”

And Lightnin’ just says, “I don’t think so.” So we sat there and they played guitars and talked for hours.

Lightnin’, you know, was drinking white lightning whiskey all the time.

Soon, to save money and to be closer to what there was of a folk music scene, Townes and Fran moved into the tiny apartment above Sand Mountain, and Mrs. Carrick became their landlady. Many of the young folk singers in Houston had lived in that apartment at one time or another, according to John Carrick. “The deal was, you’d live up there, and in return, you’d clean the club and you’d get a little bit of money.” Townes became “kind of the house act” at Sand Mountain, opening shows for many of the more well-known acts that passed through, Fran recalls. “That’s when he and Guy Clark got real close.” Clark had in fact just returned from training for the Peace Corps: “I had a brief fling at it, but I didn’t actually go anywhere. I just did the training program,” Clark remembers.13

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“We both started writing about the same time,” Clark says.

“But Townes just did it in a way that raised it to a level of art, or poetry, whatever you want to call it, rather than just rhym-ing ‘moon, June, and spoon.’” While Bob Dylan’s writing was inspiring folk musicians everywhere, Townes’ inspiration was more direct. “Townes was right there,” Clark stresses, “and while you couldn’t be Townes or write like Townes, you could come from the same place artistically.”

Darryl Harris was another musician playing the folk clubs of Houston at the time. He had attended Milbey High School in Houston with Fran. “I was a guitar player,” Harris recollects. “I played some kind of schlocky flamenco and classical stuff. I was playing at the Jester Lounge, and I went out to the Jester one night, and Townes was playing there. He was with Fran, so that’s really how we met.… And when Townes and I met, we were both going to the University of Houston, so we would then run into each other occasionally on campus. We’d run into each other and then we’d sort of talk each other into not going to class.”

Harris recalls, “Townes and Guy were probably the most popular guys who played there, but most of the people there were pretty good. Although when I first saw Townes out at the Jester, he was pretty awful, really; pretty drunk. The stuff he was playing made me kind of wonder. Sometimes you hear people play and you wonder how they could ever imagine it being possible to have any kind of career in music. That was really sort of my response the first time I ever heard him.”14

Another singer on the scene at the Jester and Sand Mountain, who was writing his own songs, was Jerry Jeff Walker. Townes was impressed and inspired by Walker’s songwriting; Fran was less enthusiastic. “Jerry Jeff was over at our apartment one day,”

she recalls. “He was from New York, and back then there wasn’t a lot of mixture of the South and the North. Jerry Jeff had such a different sense of etiquette; he really had none.” She recalls one day when “He was sitting at our dining room table eating, slumped over, not talking to anybody, and he had his hat on, and Townes’ mom and dad came over,” she says. “Jerry Jeff
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
didn’t stand up, didn’t take his hat off, didn’t even look up. So Townes’ dad wouldn’t let his mother sit down, and he called Townes outside and said, ‘This guy has insulted your mother.

How could you allow that to happen?’ That is the sense of honoring women that Townes was brought up with.… [Townes’ parents] always wanted to hear Townes sing, but if Jerry Jeff was on the bill too, they wouldn’t come.”

Fran remembers clearly that it was also during this time that Townes wrote the first few batches of the songs that would make up his lasting body of work. “In the first apartment we lived in there were two walk-in closets,” she says. “The little one off the bathroom he decorated with posters, music posters, and made into his own little studio. There was just enough room to have a chair and a little amplifier and a little tape recorder, and a little table. You had to step in sideways to be able to sit down. That is where he started writing his first songs. He loved going in there; he would shut the door and stay there for hours.” They had a small antique pump organ in their apartment, and Fran would often help Townes write out his music. “I would sound it out [on the organ] and write it because I knew music, although I could only do the treble…. That was for the first five or six songs.”

The songs came quickly. “‘Waitin’ Around to Die’ had to be within the first two or three songs, maybe the second or third,”

Fran recalls. “It wasn’t the first one I heard. He might have written it first, but I think he didn’t sing it for a while, he kind of just held it.… ‘Turnstiled, Junkpiled’ was another early one.”

Fran was overjoyed by this creative outpouring, but she was taken aback by “Waitin’ Around to Die.” She asked Townes where such a song had come from. “He just said he didn’t know,” she says. “He would often just wake up in the middle of the night and write, and sometimes he described it like it would just tumble out of his brain and down his fingers.”

“My first serious song was ‘Waitin’ Around to Die,’” Townes said in 1977, a statement he repeated many times when performing the song. “I talked to this old man for a while,” he continued, “and he kinda put out these vibrations. I was sitting at Waitin’ for the Day

65

the bar of the Jester Lounge one afternoon drinking beer, thinking about him, and just wrote it down.”15

“Waitin’ Around to Die” is indeed a serious song for a young man with Townes’ early background to have written, but unlike many “serious” songs that young folk singers come up with, it bears the weight of its seriousness almost effortlessly. It takes its subject, a young man, through a life of misfortune, from a childhood marked by his father’s beating of his mother and the mother’s desertion, to an adolescence of deceit and abandon-ment at the hands of a woman, to imprisonment for robbing a man, always with the almost offhand refrain, “it’s easier than just waiting around to die.” Finally, after spending two years in prison, the young man is resigned to a life of destitution with his new “friend,” codeine, a drug of poverty and desperation, and he ends, “together we’re gonna wait around and die.”

This is a bleak vision indeed, but it is handled so deftly that there is no sense of it being maudlin. The simple three-chord progression in a minor key perfectly reflects the direct simplicity of the storytelling, Van Zandt’s delivery is entirely straightforward and unaffected, and the poetic sensibility shows an already well-honed maturity—the use of the place names in each verse: Tennessee, Tuscaloosa, Muskogee; the offhand vernacular: “she cleaned me out and hit it on the sly”; “we robbed a man and brother did we fly”; and the fine-tuned balance of the verses—so that all of these things add up to a stunning personal vision of something much deeper than mere folk music. “Waitin’ Around to Die” is the blues: starkly personal and universal at the same time. It’s the kind of song that instantly differentiated Townes Van Zandt from his contemporaries, and that often left audiences stunned, as Fran had been.

“He had lots of fun ones, too,” Fran says of those earliest songs. She recalls his various talking blues numbers as “just so comedic; and he always sang that New Orleans song for me. It just drove me crazy because I thought
his
music was so much better. Every time he sang it I would think, ‘oh, don’t sing that again.’ It was the ‘Three Shrimp’ song: ‘I saw three shrimp in
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
the water … ’. That was from an Elvis Presley movie,
Girls, Girls,
Girls
. If he played ‘Waitin’ Around to Die’ he would always play

‘The Shrimp Song’ afterwards.”

This juxtaposition of serious material and more light-hearted songs and banter was from the very beginning a hallmark of Van Zandt’s performances that lasted throughout his career. Indeed, the balance between dark and light, exalted and ordinary, sacred and profane, was from the beginning central to Townes’

writing as well as his performance.

A recording of one of Townes’ earliest performances at the Jester, in 1965, provides a glimpse of exactly what kind of ground Townes was treading in those early days.16 Townes opens his forty-five-minute set with his own “Black Crow Blues,” an early meditation on an early death: “Don’t mourn your young life away … /lower me down with a quick-said goodbye/pour in the black Texas mud.” The black crow image is tacked on in the final verse, reminiscent of Van Gogh’s
Cornfield with Black Crows
, portentous and somewhat pretentious as well. Townes follows this song immediately with a joke, a somewhat involved story about a nun drinking a martini, deftly clearing away the portentous and the pretentious. Another early original follows, “Badly Mistreated Blues,” a vaguely Hank Williams–inspired comedic number with the refrain “As a matter of fact, sweet mama, I’m sick of you.” The crowd seems to follow Van Zandt faithfully down the path he lays out for them, and the mood is light enough that he feels that he can bring out another serious number, “Colorado Bound,” the earliest of his Colorado songs, wherein his lover leaves him and he retreats to the purity of “some lonesome canyon” in Colorado. He again lightens the mood with “Talkin’ Karate Blues,” then follows with a traditional Carter Family song,

“Cannon Ball Blues.”

Townes is fully warmed up at this point in the set, and the recording makes clear that the crowd is as well. His self-deprecation, his humor, his dry tone, and his timing are as much responsible for this as the quality of his lyrics.

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Townes continues into the heart of his set with a Lightnin’

Hopkins song, “Hello Central.” Townes’ Hopkins-inspired guitar playing is clearly well studied and fairly well developed, although without the subtlety of his later playing. There’s a bluesy crack in his voice reminiscent of Hank Williams, illustrating clearly the mix of styles he’s attempting. Next is another early original song, the somewhat undistinguished “Louisiana Woman,” a simple, cautionary blues about the women of New Orleans (“Well, I guess I better do a dirty one,” Townes says by way of introduction). “Talkin’ Thunderbird Blues” is next (with lyrics slightly less developed than they became as Townes performed this throughout his life), then Jimmie Rodgers’ “Blue Yodel No. 1 (T For Texas),” where he shows his lack of yodeling skills. Another joke follows, this one about a gorilla catcher, again rather long and involved, then two more forgettable early originals, “Mustang Blues” (“I’m gonna take a Greyhound/leave all the drivin’ to them”) and “Talkin’ Birth Control Blues” (“real life savers … depending on how you look at it”).