A Deeper Blue (5 page)

Founded in 1858, Shattuck Military Academy, in Faribault, Minnesota, was one of the oldest and most respected college prepara-tory boarding schools in the Midwest, known for rigid military discipline and strong academics, all situated on a classical-looking campus dominated by massive greystone Gothic buildings.

In addition, Shattuck administrators were used to dealing with

“hot articles”: they had, for example, seen fit to expel young Marlon Brando in 1941, his senior year. On the other hand, Hu-26

A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
bert H. Humphrey III graduated in the Class of 1961, and a great many graduates went on to positions of prominence.

“Shattuck was a mix of kids that were probably good citizens before they came to Shattuck, and also kids that had had some sort of run-in in their hometown,” classmate Todd Musburger recalls. “Nothing real serious, usually, but probably the parents or the school saying, ‘we think your son would do better in a military school,’ or strict parents saying, ‘I’m gonna straighten you out.’ … And some kids were just dropped on Shattuck’s doorstep because of parents that had money and sent them away. But when Townes arrived, my thought was, well, maybe something had happened.”

Another classmate, Marshall Froker, has a similar recollection. “There were a lot of stories floating around,” he says. One was that “Townes had gotten into some kind of trouble back in Barrington. There were various versions of it, that there had been some row with another kid, and it may have involved a girl and it may have involved something that happened on the school property, and may have concerned his family enough, or may have gotten him in the kind of trouble where going off to military school is the way you avoid having a police record or ending up with probation or in some kind of disciplinary situation. But he wouldn’t talk about it.”16

Townes’ good friend from college Bob Myrick asked Townes about Shattuck some years later, and Townes told him simply, “I did that for dad.”17

At any rate, Townes Van Zandt joined the Academy Class of 1962 in the fall of 1960 to start his junior year of high school.

The conflicts he was beginning to experience in his life surely became important ingredients in what must have been a very complex decision, however it was taken.

According to Townes, at Shattuck he got “a real serious private prep-school ivy-covered education.”18 He also got an intensive introduction to military discipline. “When we were there,”

says classmate Froker, “it was a full-bore Army ROTC program.

It was ‘cadet this’ and ‘cadet that.’” Junior “new boy” cadet Van Where I Lead Me

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Zandt was assigned to room with a young freshman from Oklahoma named Luke Sharpe, with whom he shared an interest in athletics. “He was a football player and a wrestler, and I was both of those things,” Sharpe recalls. “So we got along in that regard. Plus he was from Texas, I was from Oklahoma, and in Minnesota that’s a pretty good bond.”19

Academically, Townes started out fairly well at Shattuck.

Grades were given on a numbered scale, from 60 up to 100, and in his first semester, Townes scored an 83 in English and in Spanish, a 79 in geography, a 73 in algebra, and an 81 in military training.20 “In classes, we were grouped by perceived ability,” says Sharpe. “Townes wasn’t a number one. But he wasn’t bad: number two, maybe number three, that would be Townes.

But I have to say, our number ones were pretty good guys. A lot of Stanfords, a lot of Harvards.”

Townes’ grades slipped somewhat after his first semester; he would only receive one more “honor” grade (higher than 80) at Shattuck, an 85 in sociology and economics. That senior-year high point came along with a 74 in English and a 72 in trigo-nometry, among other mediocre marks. He scored 133 on the Hermon-Nelson IQ test in 1960, and 128 the following year.

Townes took the SATs in January 1962, and scored an impressive 614 on the verbal test and 556 on the math test. When he took his College Board exams in June 1961, he listed the University of Texas, the University of Colorado, and Northwestern University as his first choices for college. On a “vocational interest” test in 1960, Townes’ highest rating was for “musician (performer),”

followed by “real estate salesman.” Just below that was “artist,”

and below that, “lawyer.”

According to Townes’ brother, who attended the Academy years later for his freshman year, Townes was a popular student who had a number of mentors among the faculty, including the headmaster, who seemed to take Townes under his wing, and the football coach. Bill remembers his rebelliousness manifest-ing itself even on the wrestling team. He recalls a time that all the wrestlers decided to shave their heads. “Townes went the
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
opposite route and grew his hair down to his shoulders. And this was before the Beatles and stuff, so it was really outland-ish,” Bill says. He adds that his brother was also interested in the dramatic arts at Shattuck, and he vividly remembers Townes being in a play, where he sang “Down in the Valley” and played a Snidely Whiplash-style villain.21

All of Townes’ classmates remember him as a good athlete.

His Shattuck records show that he played football and baseball and wrestled, as he had done since junior high school. Froker played football with Townes and recalls, “In his junior year, he was probably still developing and a little bit on the lean side.”

Luke Sharpe remembers the “tall, rangy, 147-pound or so” Van Zandt as a good, but not great, wrestler as well. “Townes was okay,” Sharpe recalls. “He was quick enough. But athletics didn’t consume him. Music was the deal, always, with Townes.”

Musburger recollects the musical environment at Shattuck at that time: “The guitar was not mainstream music. I think most of us were Miles Davis lovers and Dave Brubeck lovers. Some of the kids from the South would come in with Bo Diddley records, but this is still the time of ‘A Summer Place’ and the Lettermen and Johnny Mathis. Music had not taken off; there was just a smattering of rock getting through to us.” Marshall Froker recalls that Townes “would just play guitar a lot, and I would hang out in his room. He listened a lot to Josh White, and he liked Elvis, and a lot of whatever was going on in blues-based rock’n’roll.

He had a very good record collection.” As Townes’ roommate Luke remembers, “He had an Elvis Presley collection that was unbelievable. And he was my introduction to Leadbelly, whom I had never heard. There was a little bit of Leadbelly, and a lot of Southern blues-type stuff. Ray Charles too.…”

Froker recalls:

In fact, one of my roommates that year, he and I played around with the bongos. Townes heard us once and walked in with his guitar. As I recall, we were sitting around the room and he said “Why don’t you play along with me?” He would play some Where I Lead Me

29

stuff on the guitar, and I would sort of pick it up on the bongos, and it worked. I remember a staple for us was “I Got A Woman,” things like that. It was the early sixties, and there was some R&B floating around. And there was a Johnny Cash album freshly out called
Ride This Train
, and Townes covered a few things from that. There was a song he did called

“Train I Ride,” I think, and he did some Elvis and some Gene Vincent things.…22

In between songs he didn’t want to talk much, he just would sort of look down at his guitar and try to work through the changes. He’d sit there for awhile and there’d just be this silence, and then he’d say, “okay, let’s do this one,” and he’d try something else…. One time, I actually performed with Townes at some minor social function involving the St. Mary’s Hall girls. It was our junior year, and I remember he did “Train I Ride,” he did “I Got A Woman,” and he did some other things. He was a big hit with the ladies, as you can imagine.

Townes would often discuss music with his friends, and Sharpe recalls one occasion when he became involved in a conversation about folk music. “There was a little bit of folk music around, like the Kingston Trio and the Lamplighters and Peter, Paul & Mary, and someone asked, ‘Do you play any folk music?’

And Townes didn’t answer directly, but he got into how there just wasn’t any good cowboy music around anymore, not exactly putting down the folk music that was out there, but quite impassioned about how good that old stuff was, and he mentioned Hank Williams and some others…. Joan Baez was just getting started, and I think he might have been conscious of her, and I think he liked her.” Dylan was around as well, but

“not in general circulation” yet at Shattuck, he recalls.

Sharpe recalls that while Van Zandt never got into serious trouble at Shattuck, “he was well known as a rebel. Townes didn’t care, he learned certainly enough, he was smart enough for that, but he didn’t pay any attention to the basic rule of a police state, which is, you obey the little rules, you shine your shoes, look nice, turn out well, hit all your appointments on time, and then
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
you can break the big rules. Well, Townes was a scofflaw at every point. So consequently he was not too highly regarded by those in power. Townes was just a law unto himself,” Sharpe says. “The time that we lived together, we were juniors, and they didn’t really bear down on you hard until your senior year. But Townes was his own counterculture when I lived with him, certainly. He did lots of drinking, which didn’t bother me too much. Then he got into glue sniffing and so forth in his senior year. But always, Townes was a hedonist, first, last, and always….”

Sharpe recalls the rebellious Van Zandt forming a clandestine group called The Syndicate. “I think it was mostly a figment of Townes’ imagination,” says Sharpe. “But I was a member, nomi-nally. There was a group called the Crack Squad there…. It was a precision drill team kind of deal. They were the crème de la crème of Shattuck society. Well, Van Zandt, ever with the feel for the counterculture, developed The Syndicate, which was his version of the underworld. Who knows how many people were in it….” According to Bill Van Zandt, The Syndicate “would play music, very loud, right next to the Crack Squad practices and try to mess them up. And at the school there was a tradition about the Crack Squad, where new boys couldn’t even refer to them.

You had to pretend they didn’t exist…. And Townes went out of his way to try to violate that rule whenever he could.”

“I would sum up Townes’ attitude like this,” says Marshall Froker. “He was the guy who stood there in formation in his military hat … and he managed to wear it at just the right jaunty angle so as not to cross the line.” Musburger remembers Van Zandt committing various minor infractions, many stemming from the rather repressive social structure the young cadets labored under, but nothing too serious. “If we wanted to go see a girl, we had to write a letter, and the girl had to go down and put us on the list. That was called ‘calling.’ We went ‘calling’

to St. Mary’s.” Froker elaborates: “Basically the interaction was highly supervised, very controlled, but you could sneak around, and a lot of guys did. There was a St. Mary’s girl who was really taken with Townes in his senior year. He was a good wrestler, Where I Lead Me

31

and they had a tournament up in Minneapolis, where she lived.

Between matches, the two of them went off to some janitor’s closet somewhere and got it on. I heard that from a couple of different people who swore it was true.”

Some of Townes’ other later proclivities surfaced at Shattuck as well. One of them was gambling. Says Froker, “if you went into Townes’ room, it wouldn’t be long before he pulled out a deck of cards and said, ‘come on.’ Most people, including myself, knew that Townes was a pretty good poker player…. Most kids that age, we’d be sort of conservative—even though it was just pennies or whatever, it was real money—but he would just really go for it, and raise and raise again and again. He won a lot because people would generally just back down.”

Luke Sharpe recalls driving with Townes to Indiana in Mrs.

Van Zandt’s Thunderbird in their junior year, and reflects that

“he was certainly indulged, and he was offered every opportunity, which Townes, in my opinion, resolutely rejected.” Luke and Townes grew apart after their junior year, and for very specific reasons. “I was just more of an organization kind of man. I had done well in the military, been a floor officer, et cetera. I had been there longer than Townes had been. So I was much more of an institutional kind of boy than Townes. Senior year, we lived in different dorms…. And by then he was doing a lot of glue.”

Townes had most likely started sniffing glue sometime in his junior year, but as a senior, it became habitual. Glue-sniffing among teenagers in the mid-1960s was not terribly uncommon, especially where alcohol was hard to come by and before marijuana became more widely available. But it was—and is—a dangerous intoxicant, and the pursuit of that kind of a serious “buzz”

represented something of a dividing line between students just looking for fun and those with more extreme proclivities.

As Sharpe puts it, “Even among the guys who were not following all the rules, he was still pretty out there. He was pushing it.” Somehow, an incriminating photograph of Townes appeared in the Shattuck yearbook at the end of his senior year:

“Townes with a tube of Testors [glue] jammed up his nose,” as
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
Sharpe recalls. “He did graduate and move right along, notwith-standing those pictures in the yearbook,” but, Sharpe says, “it was trouble.” Other classmates recall, similarly, if in less graphic detail, that Van Zandt indeed graduated in spite of some vague, questionable circumstances. Shattuck records show that he graduated ranked at number twenty-two in a class of seventy-six students.

Harris Van Zandt came up with a way to help his son focus his energies that summer: he sent Townes to Pecos, in West Texas, to work with a seismograph crew in the oil fields. Mr. Van Zandt most likely intended to effect in his son what had been effected in him when he worked in the oil fields as a young man: a strengthening of character. But it’s possible too that he was testing him. Townes had graduated from military school—