A Deeper Blue (16 page)

“Brand New Companion” drew directly on Lightnin’ Hopkins’ influence, with Townes playing smooth, clean blues licks in a classic twelve-bar framework behind a well-crafted, slightly surrealistic lyric (“She cools me with her breathin’/Chases away those howlin’ bottles of wine”). Townes’ mastery of this form of Texas blues is evident in such lines as “She’s got arms just like two rattlesnakes/Legs just like a willow in the breeze,” and his performance is languid and comfortable, perhaps the most difficult part of pulling off a tribute to an accomplished mentor such as Hopkins.

In the three songs that close the album, Townes demonstrates another huge leap in his songwriting. In “Where I Lead Me,”

“Rake,” and, especially, “Nothin’,” he goes places no songwriter had gone before, and he achieves not just a new honesty and depth of vision, but an accomplished vocabulary with which to express that vision. “These are the precious things,” he sings in “Nothin’”; these are dark songs, coming from a deep, dark place within the artist, that take the listener to that place purely Don’t You Take It Too Bad

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through the strength of images created with an inspired amal-gam of language and sound. At this point in the development of Van Zandt’s craft, he seems to have achieved a sustained vi-sionary mastery that he had only previously accomplished in hit-and-miss moments.

“Where I Lead Me” has a driving beat that Townes accurately described as a “stomp,” and the lyrics blast through the dual worlds of darkness and light that Townes has inhabited so long.

He makes it clear immediately that the dual worlds will not merge, that they can only be bridged by an effort of will, if at all.

And Townes personifies this effort as a daily struggle between the dual sides of his own nature: “The boys upstairs are gettin’

hungry,” he says; “You can shout in the wind about how it will be/Or you can clench your fist, shake your head/And head to the country.” He is almost clinical: When it looks like “you’re not movin,” he says, you need to “keep it loose/don’t get excited/

It’ll pass before long.” He’s clear about how the two sides see one another: “Ask the boys down in the gutter/Now they won’t lie

‘cause you don’t matter,” he says. He knows where he belongs, and he tells himself what he has no doubt told himself many times before: “Roll down your sleeves, pick up your money/And carry yourself home.”

“Rake” addresses the duality, and the possibility of merging its two aspects, in a more fantastic context, personified here by the classic duality of the sun and the moon. The title character thrives in the night and curses the day, expressing the feeling of many sufferers of manic-depressive illness, except here the darkness is not depression, but life-infused mania, casting the rake into a vampire-like existence, while day “would beat me back down,” rendering him hardly able to stand. The rake’s self-awareness is sharp throughout. In the last verse, however, he gets a surprise when “my laughter turned ‘round, eyes blazing and said/ ‘My friend, we’re holding a wedding.’” Through some transmutation—like medication—the night and the day become bound together, and the sharp joys of the life of the night are turned into pain. “Now the dark air is like fire on my skin/And
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
even the moonlight is blinding.” A more vivid rendering of the manic-depressive state is hard to come by in modern verse.

“Nothin’” is a peak in Van Zandt’s artistic expression, one of his most starkly honest songs and one of the greatest poetic expressions of stark depression. “I didn’t really come up with it,”

Townes once said of “Nothin’”; “it came up with me.” According to Townes, he wrote the song immediately after he had finished reading
The Last Temptation of Christ
by Nikos Kazantzakis.

“I was in upstate New York, and I’d been reading that book and I finished it. Wow. And I put it down and picked up the guitar and I wrote that song, all at once.” The song is serious, and it is sad, but it reveals a self-knowledge and depth of hard-gained wisdom that make it ultimately a statement of strength in the face of the crushing depths of depression. In fact, the song seems to inhabit a world beyond depression, a realm of pure abstrac-tion, or of “nothing.”

When Townes sings “I stood there like a block of stone,” with simple, finger-picked guitar accompaniment, in a brooding minor key, “Knowin’ all that I had to know/And nothin’ more/And man, that’s nothin’,” it’s clear that we’re being taken someplace unusual, someplace where we’ll have to drop our preconcep-tions and follow our guide closely, because we won’t want to risk getting lost. “Being born is going blind/And bowing down a thousand times/To echoes strung on pure temptation”—this takes us outside the everyday experience of life and leaves us wondering how much further we can go; “Sorrow and solitude/

These are the precious things/And the only words that are worth remembering”—this tells us something we didn’t know, and aren’t sure we want to know, or are ready to know. The song leaves us with what seems like the memory of a vivid experience, and with a knowledge and understanding of something we might have known but couldn’t have expressed, and perhaps with a new way of looking at the world. We’re exhilarated, possibly somewhat frightened, and exhausted.

Van Zandt himself was exhausted after the sessions, and like always after a long stay in New York, he was glad to get back to Don’t You Take It Too Bad

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Texas, where he returned to the bosom of his friends in Houston and took up again an unrestricted courtship of his heroin habit.

In New York, while he was working, there were a number of factors controlling his heroin use. Back home, those restrictions disappeared, and he had the time, the money, and the access to indulge himself fully. It was during this period, from toward the end of 1970 well into 1971, that Townes sank further into this indulgence than he ever had before.

It very nearly killed him.

Delta Momma Blues
was released in time for Christmas. Van Zandt visited his mother and the family at home for the holidays, bringing copies of the new album, and Fran and the baby were central in the family festivities. While Townes’ relationship with Fran and the baby was loving, even tender—when he saw them, which was rare—it was strained. To Fran, Townes’ behavior was noticeably distant and erratic that Christmas. She knew the cause, but she felt that Dorothy and the rest of the family had no idea that Townes was using heroin regularly.

By early spring, Townes was settling into another of his peri-odic semi-permanent domestic arrangements, again at the place known as Truxillo, in an apartment with Rex Bell, Mickey White, and a friend called Bear. Townes had met a Houston girl named Leslie Jo Richards at the Old Quarter, and she too was a steady presence at the apartment. Darryl Harris and his brother, known as Smiley, lived nearby, and Leslie Jo was friends with them as well. Mickey White remembers her as effervescent and positive, happy and outgoing, a “real, natural woman,” White says. “We were always the first ones up in the morning, drinking coffee, and we spent a lot of time talking. Townes was on and off the road in the spring and early summer of 1971, and we became pretty good friends then. She was sweet, and still she tended to not put up with any bullshit from Townes. But he was extremely fond of her, and she of him.”

Richards told White something about Townes that struck him. “I had just learned ‘Don’t You Take It Too Bad,’” White re-106

A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
members. “And I played it for her, and she said, ‘you know, you play that really good. Townes, he gets really frustrated sometimes about his guitar playing.’ She said that one time he was trying something on guitar, and he stopped and looked at his hands and said ‘I just can’t get ‘em to do what I want ‘em to do; I can’t get ‘em to play what I hear.’”

That summer, Van Zandt returned to California to record his next album, his fifth, this time in Los Angeles. Jim Malloy was sharing production credit with Kevin Eggers. Kevin and his wife, Annie, had made the trip and were enjoying the California summer with Townes, and Guy and Susanna Clark were living in nearby Long Beach, so Townes had plenty of company and was enjoying an upbeat, productive period. The recording sessions had been going well for a few weeks, and Townes would often drive down to Long Beach to visit the Clarks. “One night,” Susanna remembers, “Guy and I had gone to the movies, and we came back, and all the lights were on and there was a Dolly Parton record playing, her first album. And Townes was there, waiting for us. He had broken in and climbed through the window and set himself down and had been playing that record over and over and over and over again the entire time that we were at the movies.”

Van Zandt soon invited Leslie Jo to join them in California, and she hitchhiked from Houston to L.A. immediately. Susanna Clark recalls that Townes was overjoyed when Leslie Jo arrived and moved into the comfortable condominium that Eggers had acquired as a base of operations.

One night not long after Leslie Jo’s arrival, Guy and Susanna got a phone call from Townes. “He called from L.A.,” Susanna recounts, “and he said, ‘Would you come and see me?’ And we said, ‘Sure.’ So we drove in, and he said, ‘I didn’t want to tell you over the phone, but Leslie was killed. She was murdered.’

And we just said, ‘Oh, God,’ and we all spent the evening weeping and weeping and weeping. Townes was really distraught; he couldn’t drive down there, he could hardly speak.”

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Leslie Jo had been at the studio with Townes late one afternoon. When Townes realized he had left something at home that he now needed, Leslie Jo volunteered to go back and get it.

As was her custom, and as was very common at the time, she set out hitchhiking. She was picked up by a man who took her onto a back road, stabbed her more than twenty times, then dumped her in a ditch. She was bleeding profusely, but still alive, and was able to crawl a considerable distance to a nearby house, where she started screaming for help as best she could. A woman came to the door, saw Leslie Jo dying before her eyes, and immediately went to call for an ambulance and the police. When she returned to the front door, Leslie Jo was dead.

Townes immediately blamed himself for Leslie Jo’s death, and he was never to escape this self-accusation as long as he lived. He soon began to idealize and mythologize his relationship with Leslie Jo in song, transmuting his sorrow, even as he pushed through the final weeks of recording in Los Angeles that summer. “What better way to mourn than to sing?” Susanna Clark says.

Townes returned to Texas, exhausted and deeply depressed.

For a couple of months, he lived in an area called Pasadena, southeast of Houston, “down on the ship channel,” says Mickey White. “It’s a real industrial area; the petrochemical industry.

‘The air is greener in Pasadena.’ [Townes] was living with this drug dealer and his wife, and I’m not sure exactly how the arrangement went down, but I know that Townes was really in love with her. At that point in time, he got really, really strung out. They had the highest quality dope, and he had as much as he could get his hands on. And the thing is, he continued to write songs. In fact, ‘Two Girls’ was written during that period.

‘Two lonesome dudes on an ugly horse’ is about two guys looking to cop. The ugly horse, of course, is heroin.”

During this time, Townes remained in touch with Fran. Fran recalls, “This is when he was giving so much of his stuff away, just giving everything away; his record collection and all kinds of stuff. He had an incredible record collection.” Fran delicately but
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
firmly tried to overcome Townes’ strained reluctance to visit J.T., who would be three years old soon. Not only could J.T. possibly give Townes a renewed sense of self-worth and responsibility, but J.T. needed a father. She recalls that J.T. often included an “imaginary father” in his games. “This imaginary father was incredible,” she says. “When J.T. would swing he would sit on the side of the swing and say he was saving room for his father to sit with him.” Townes usually offered a reason not to come visit; when he reluctantly would agree to come, he would never manage to firm up an actual time. He was still distraught over Leslie Jo’s death, and this period of depression was being both temporarily relieved and ultimately exacerbated by his heroin use.

Eventually, that fall, he did call and arrange a time to come by the house and spend the afternoon with J.T. That afternoon, Fran had a dark feeling. “I always had this intuition,” Fran says;

“I could always feel when Townes was really in trouble. J.T. knew that his dad was supposed to be coming that day, and he was just sitting with his hands folded waiting for him. Well, Townes didn’t come, and he didn’t come, and he still didn’t come.…

Townes was supposed to be at my house at three. I started calling around, and I tried to call over at Dotsie’s, at his mom’s, to see if I could get hold of him there. I didn’t get an answer, didn’t get an answer, then somebody finally answered the phone and said ‘he can’t come to the phone right now, and we’re leaving.’

And that
really
worried me.”

She waited at home by the phone until late that night, when she got a call from one of the Van Zandts, who told her that Townes had been rushed to University Hospital. “They said ‘he’s overdosed and we don’t think he’s going to make it, but he’s calling for you,’” Fran says. “He had overdosed on heroin. He overdosed in his mom’s house. She was out of town and he went and stayed there.”

Townes was staying at his mother’s place and some friends had brought over some particularly potent heroin. Pushing the limits, Townes shot up more than anyone else and overdosed, turning blue, his eyes rolling back in his head. One of his friends Don’t You Take It Too Bad

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called an ambulance, and they decided to wait with Townes until the last minute before the ambulance came before leaving the scene. Someone answered the phone when it rang, which turned out to be Fran’s call, then they decided to split right away. Some of them had seen ODs before; Townes was breathing when they left, and the ambulance couldn’t be far away. They gambled that it would arrive soon and that their friend would have some of his nine lives left.