A Deeper Blue (20 page)

130

A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
Of the performance overall, Willis believes that “it’s Townes at his best. He had a lot of great performances, but this is one where he finally had it all together. He was straight, tending to business, and singing. The place was packed, and more than that, it was packed with people who were used to hanging out there…. Basically, like they say, when Townes played, it was like he was playing for friends.”

“It was a stellar performance, actually,” recalled Dale Soffar.

“It was bright and sober. In the early days, Townes didn’t have a lot of problems. He had his problems but he was open to the fullest, and he was bright and alive and whatever happened, happened.… I can listen to that CD, and I’m at the club. The buses going by and the way the room sounds.… It is a great memorial to that club.”

Musicians would usually play the Old Quarter “for the door.”

According to Soffar, “The door was usually a dollar, two dollars, something like that. Not much. And they’d make maybe a hundred and twenty-five bucks, something like that. And we’d pass the pan around.” Instead of the traditional passing of the hat, the Old Quarter utilized a beat-up hospital bedpan. In the six years the Old Quarter was open, not only did young folk and country artists such as Guy Clark, Rodney Crowell, Lucinda Williams, Eric Taylor, Nanci Griffith, Richard Dobson, Vince Bell, and Steve Earle accept offerings from that bedpan, but so did Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, Big Walter Jenkins, Juke Boy Bonner, and other established black artists who at that time were not commonly seen in predominantly white clubs. Hopkins in particular had a close relationship with the club, appearing regularly for years.

“Dusty Hill was playing bass with me, back before ZZ Top,”

Rex Bell recalls. “And Dusty’s brother Rocky was playing with Lightnin’. Well, when Dusty got more famous with ZZ Top, Rocky had his chance too, because he was a writer and player, and he actually groomed me and said ‘I can get you this job playing with Lightnin’.’ So I bought all of Lightnin’s records and I started playing, and then he slowly slipped me into some gigs Highway Kind

131

with Lightnin’. And after I played a few gigs with Lightnin’ I started hiring him at the Old Quarter.”

One of the new songs recorded that night at the Old Quarter was “Rex’s Blues,” written for Rex Bell. With the simplicity of a nursery rhyme, the five chorus-less verses lead the listener through the heights and depths of a man’s life, from birth to death, through darkness and light, and give us a concise, complete picture of the man, with all his faults and in all his glory.

This all transpires in twenty short lines, sung over an achingly simple structure of two alternating chords, with a beautiful, simple melody line finger-picked from the chords like lush, round grapes picked from the vine.

Shortly after the Old Quarter recording was made, Townes played a guest spot on Don Sanders’ radio show on KPFT in Houston, and while hanging around in the lobby during a break, he met a striking young strawberry-blonde girl who was doing volunteer work at the station. She was an experienced horsewoman and had been riding and jumping in shows since she was a child.

Townes mentioned his recent excursion on horseback in the Colorado mountains, and the conversation became animated as they explored their mutual interest in horses. The girl was Cindy Morgan.

“I was fifteen, fixing to turn sixteen,” Cindy recalls. “It was a big deal because I had to talk my mom into letting me leave school, leave with this man. Mama was very good about it, actually. At that point, we were talking about me dropping out of school, that maybe a month before I turned sixteen and I could drop out if I wanted to. She had remarried and lived with my stepfather, and I didn’t like him, so I wasn’t living at home, I had my own apartment in town. But I was a youngster. By the time he finally found out how old I was, I think I was sixteen, but I was fifteen when we met.”23

Later that summer, Townes took Cindy back to Colorado with him.

10

White Freightliner

Blues

T
OWNES’FRIENDCHITORECALLSFIRSTmeeting Townes in Colorado in the early seventies:

We’re sitting in this bar in downtown Aspen, and I’m drunker than shit, and Bob brings over this guy.

And this guy has big old patches of hair missing out of his head, because he’d gotten a haircut from a bunch of cowboys. And they used sheep shears.

I mean, if he was a real cowboy, that would have never happened. So Bob says, “Hey, Chito, this is Townes Van Zandt.” I was totally not impressed. But that’s how I met Townes.

Townes wanted to be a cowboy in Montana and

sing his songs around the campfire…. But he never was a cowboy, he didn’t know shit about horses, and he never fuckin’ went up more than a week into the mountains, ever, if that. Jesus Christ, do they have a liquor store up there? The only way I would go up in the mountains with him would be that we had
132

White Freightliner Blues

133

enough goddamn booze, and how long would that last? Think about it.1

For years, to maintain a sense of balance and perspective, and to escape—or at least quiet—some of his more pressing demons, Townes had sought and found comfort in the mountains of Colorado. Townes would base himself with one of a network of his Colorado friends, including Bob Myrick near Aspen, Chito near Boulder, and others in Crested Butte and elsewhere. “Generally,” Mickey White says, “his records would be released in the fall, and he’d come down from the mountains and start touring to support the album.”2

Bob Myrick rode into the backcountry around Aspen with Townes a number of times, occasionally accompanied by one or another of Townes’ old girlfriends from his Colorado days.

Myrick remembers the Maroon Bells region as one of Townes’

favorites. The two peaks of the Maroon Bells rising above the Maroon Creek valley are among the most famous sights in Colorado, and some of the trails around the Bells are notoriously challenging rides. A Park Service trail sign refers to “The Deadly Bells” and offers a warning against loose, unstable rock that

“kills without warning.” The Bells earned this “deadly” reputation in 1965, when a series of accidents took the lives of eight hikers, and it was surely this reputation that attracted Townes as much as the scenic beauty of the region.3

That summer of 1973, Townes’ companion was the fifteen-year-old Cindy Sue Morgan, a far more accomplished horseback rider than Townes, but no match for his other proclivities. The two stayed with a friend of Townes’, then set up camp in the woods outside of Crested Butte. “We rode from Crested Butte to Aspen,” Cindy recalls. “If you drive it, it’s like a hundred and fifty miles around, but as the crow flies over the mountains, it’s just twenty-five miles. And it’s very beautiful country.”4

In Cindy’s expert estimation, Townes was a moderately skilled horseman. “He knew how to saddle up the horses and pack them. He got them all packed up good.” But Cindy soon
134

A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
understood what Townes was doing. “I was so young back then, I didn’t realize what an alcoholic I was dealing with,” she says.

“It was kind of a godsend to get him up in the mountains, where there’s not a liquor store handy. He would have his vodka or whiskey or whatever he was drinking at the time, but he’d moderate himself pretty well, because he only had so much.”

As Earl Willis recollects, the purpose of Townes’ trips to the mountains was to dry out from his heroin habit as well as from alcohol. Willis says, “His way of kicking the habit was to go cold turkey, which he did a number of times. He’d go out in the mountains to clean up his act. He had a half interest in a horse out in Colorado, and he’d go and load that horse up with supplies and ride out into the mountains. He’d come back straight, then turn around and go back to Houston and start all over.”5 The heavier his use was at a given time, the longer he would try to stay out in the backcountry when summer came. “First it would be a couple-weeks’ run out there, then he’d have to come back,” according to Mickey White. “Two weeks is enough to make you feel pretty shitty once you get away from it. And then, the next time he’d come back, if he had a little more time in Houston, the doses would get a little bigger, and next trip he’d try a three-week run.

So finally, about the time we were all finishing that epic of the Houston experience, he was strung out.”

After his first trip to Colorado with Cindy, Townes indeed stuck with his pattern and returned to Houston and to his habits. Mickey White says, “Even before he’d go play a gig, he would go score. And he would shoot up, then he’d go play.”

White had a sober approach to the music business, as well as a desire to see Townes’ career move forward. Around this time, he began taking on some booking and management duties for Townes, and it was due to this intervention that Townes was still playing a full schedule of club and college shows, including his first appearance at the new Kerrville Folk Festival in Kerrville, Texas, and a wintertime trip back to Minnesota for shows at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Townes’ musicianship was not affected by his heroin use to nearly the degree it was by White Freightliner Blues

135

his drinking, and he had actually learned to moderate his intake when he was on the road.

After another series of gigs in Houston, Townes took Cindy and Mickey to Austin. It was during this visit that Townes first learned Cindy’s age. “I made the mistake of telling Mickey,”

Cindy remembers, “and Mickey instantly beelined it to Townes—

‘Townes, you know your girlfriend’s only fifteen?’ But he was fine with it. We weren’t separating. We were joined. It was one of those relationships where you never leave each other’s sides for five or six years.”

Cindy turned sixteen in January 1974, and Townes celebrated his thirtieth birthday two months later. He spent the next months working the circuit: colleges, clubs, and coffeehouses.

He had a developed a small batch of new songs, and he was able to refine them quickly on the road. He spent a few weeks in New York City, playing some club dates and staying with Kevin Eggers, who was simultaneously trying to set up a new record company and making arrangements to record Townes’ next album.

The Late, Great Townes Van Zandt
was selling fairly well and was still getting FM radio airplay, and Eggers knew that there had to be a followup. He knew that Townes’ career couldn’t survive being put on hold while he settled his business affairs. He and Townes came up with a list of songs for inclusion on the upcoming record, and Eggers finagled and soon finalized plans for recording with Jack Clement in Nashville.

Eggers accompanied Townes to Nashville for the sessions at Clement’s studio, Jack’s Tracks. Townes got along well with Cowboy Jack, but Clement continued to consider Eggers a nuisance in the studio. Overall, the recording went fairly smoothly, thanks to the solid working relationship between Townes and Clement, straightforward arrangements, a good crew of professional musicians, and strong songs.

Some of the songs they recorded had been in Townes’ repertoire for some time, such as “Rex’s Blues,” “No Place to Fall,”

and “White Freightliner Blues.” Others demonstrated advances into new territory for Townes. “Buckskin Stallion Blues,” beau-136

A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
tifully enigmatic, with a meandering melody, is in an almost childlike realm of pure song, with meaning sublimated to a flow of dreamlike feelings; “The Snake Song” is one of Townes’ most vivid pieces of imagistic writing; “Pueblo Waltz” is a languor-ous love song that offers the familiar-sounding, soft speculation “Maybe we’ll move to Tennessee/Leave these Texas blues behind/See Susanna and Guy.”

Another song that Townes had been performing for some months—and would keep in his stage sets almost continuously for the rest of his life—was “Loretta.” A joyous barroom song addressed to a perfect dream of a barroom girl, “long and lazy, blonde and free,” the piece shows Townes at his most insouciant. Loretta tells him lies that he “loves to believe,” she spends his money “like waterfalls,” but she asks of him only what he is glad to give: “Darling, put your guitar on/Have a little shot of booze/Play a blue and wailing song.” What more could a barroom troubadour want?

The album was going under the working title
Seven Come
Eleven
, and unfortunately, by the time recording was wrapping up, the project had the feeling of a crapshoot gone bad.6 As part of his finagling, Kevin Eggers had arranged to delay paying any recording studio fees until after the sessions were complete, and Jack Clement had fronted Eggers more than $6,000. The sessions ended, and it was immediately clear that the project had hit a major roadblock when Eggers revealed that he couldn’t come up with the money. Clement insisted on being paid before he would turn the tapes over to Eggers. “We cut that record in my studio,” Clement recalls, “and Kevin never paid the studio bill. So I kept the tapes—for years. And he never did pay me.”7

Years later, John Lomax III (who was to take over Townes’ management within a couple of years) said of the record, “It would have been a major piece in the puzzle and made the whole picture easier to understand.”8

Resigned and glad to escape the pressures of the Nashville sessions and the attendant business worries, Townes returned to Texas for a “mini-tour” with Mickey White that included a White Freightliner Blues

137

second trip to the Kerrville Folk Festival and, on a bill with Taj Mahal, a benefit for the ailing bluesman Mance Lipscomb at the new Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, which was to become the headquarters of the nascent “cosmic cowboy”

movement. Later that summer, Townes and Cindy returned to Colorado, and that Christmas he took her to meet his family at the home of his sister, Donna, and her husband, Ron, in Mobile, Alabama. The visit was pleasant, polite, and low key. Townes’