A Deeper Blue (35 page)
back to Europe.
In 1993, the sessions originally recorded in 1974 to become
Seven Come Eleven
were finally released on Kevin Eggers’ Tomato label as
The Nashville Sessions
, to little notice. Also, an assortment of live recordings made in 1978 of Townes, Ruester, Jimmie Gray, and Owen Cody was released on the Sundown label as
Rear View Mirror
(which was to become one of Townes’ consistently best selling albums, containing as it does most of his best songs up to that point, beautifully performed with sympathetic musicians and straightforward arrangements). In 1994, a companion album of cover songs recorded around the same time with the same group was released as
Road Songs
on Sugar Hill.
In 1993, Townes told DJ Larry Monroe that he was beginning to believe that “If you do enough live albums, people will think you’re dead.”11
The pattern seemed well set, and the story of the next few years of Townes’ life is told in large part by his touring itinerary. After a break between December 1992 and March 1993,
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April started Townes off in the Midwest; July took him through England, Scotland, and Ireland; August and September found him back in Austin, and at Kerrville again; by October, he was back in Europe—Germany and Holland—then in November and early December he went to New York, Pennsylvania, and back to Texas—the Cactus Café on December 2 and 3—then, by December 6, England, Scotland, and Ireland again. (Of his just-completed European tour, Townes told Larry Monroe in a radio interview: “I had a good time. I don’t think I got paid, but I had a good time.”12)
The following year—1994—took up the same pattern. With Harold Eggers at his side, Townes was on the road playing gigs all spring, again concentrating on the British Isles, then the western United States; in the fall and throughout the winter it was back to Europe: Norway, Holland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Slovenia, Italy, then back to Britain. A December 12 gig in Perth, Scotland, was followed by a December 17 gig in Chicago, Illinois. A month later—January 15, 1995—Townes was in Hanau, Germany; the next week, he was playing the
Mountain
Stage
radio program in Charlestown, West Virginia, then was back at the Cactus in Austin.
Behind the still fast-moving story of Townes’ life on the road was the deteriorating reality of Townes’ family life. There was no chance of Townes settling into any kind of domesticity in the limited time between tours—usually from a few weeks to no more than a couple of months—and the time he did spend at home became increasingly contentious. Friends recall a number of incidents during which Townes—in a drunken state, hallucinating—frightened young Will. “You could have a conversation with Will when he was five years old just like you could with the most intelligent and educated adult you ever ran across,” Jimmy Gingles says. “But I remember one night, Townes scared Will to death. He jumped up and yelled ‘There’s spiders! They’re on the floor!’ And Will, he jumped up and grabbed onto my neck and just held on.”
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Will later recalled this period: “My early memories have to be bad, bad memories, definitely,” he says. “I don’t think he really understood that you need to treat a child differently than you do an adult. And to him it wasn’t anything, but to a six-year-old boy it’s scary, you know.”13 Another friend confirms this scenario. “He and Will were not getting along,” according to this account. “Will would call his daddy terrible names, and they would get in fights, and Townes would be just too drunk. So Jeanene made a very hard decision. She still loved him dearly when she did it, but she made the decision, and he signed all of his publishing over to her.”14
Townes had been out gambling at Merv Griffin’s new Riverboat Casino in Metropolis, Illinois, near the Kentucky border, with Jimmy Gingles one night in the early spring of 1993. Gingles traces the couple’s breakup to that night. “It was when he called her from my apartment,” Gingles recalls, “and told her he’d lost $1400. He was freaked out, boy, he was just sick. ‘What am I gonna tell Jeanene?’ And I told him, ‘Call her and tell her the truth,’ and Jeanene said, ‘Well, that’s just great! I just bought you a new truck’—which was a secondhand truck—‘and when you get back to Nashville, you can load your stuff up in it, and you can get outta here!’ And she said, ‘I want you to keep gambling, and I want you to keep drinking, because I bought some stock in Merv Griffin’s casino, and every time you lose, I win.’
That’s what she told him, point blank.”
Jimmy and other friends attest that the relationship between Townes and Jeanene on the whole was extremely volatile by this point. “The truth is the truth,” Gingles says, “and on more than one occasion, in front of me, over at their house, I heard Jeanene tell him, ‘I can’t wait ‘til the day you’re dead, because then you’re gonna be worth more to me than you ever was alive.”15
Other close friends experienced the same kind of volatility and explosiveness around Townes and Jeanene. Bob Moore recalls, “Jeanene actually told him she could hardly wait until he was dead, because he’d be worth a lot more dead than alive.
I heard her say that right to his face.” Moore balances his ac-228
A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
count by giving Jeanene credit: “She prepared the meals,” he notes. “Will was in school, Katie was a baby, and she acted like a housewife.”16
Moore does remember, however, what he thought of as a turning point in Townes and Jeanene’s relationship. During a visit at the house in Smyrna, Moore says Townes took him aside and told him something in confidence. “He said, ‘I got up the other morning and Jeanene put these papers in front of me and said, here, you need to sign these papers, and it turned out I was signing away my song catalog and everything else.’”
Townes told Moore that he had said to Jeanene, “You’re edging me out, aren’t you?’”
The story of Jeanene “tricking” him into signing his song publishing rights and all of his worldly possessions over to her became a part of Townes’ stage routine almost immediately. As he told it to a live audience at a 1993 taping of
The Texas Connection
TV show in San Antonio:
Those Stouffers breakfasts, those are dangerous little units, man.… I’ve gotten to where I love ‘em, and they’re so easy, and I don’t have to wash the dishes.
[My wife]’s gotten to where anything she wants me to sign, in the morning she just hands me one of them Stouffers and then pushes the paper over and,
“Sign this right here, Townes.” So far I’ve signed away all my entire publishing enterprise.
If I ever upset her, all I have left is this little john-boat—kind of a big rowboat—and a little, small motorcycle, and my guitar. And I’ve been thinking about, how am I going to tie this big guitar on that little motorcycle and park them both in that stupid boat? And sit out there on the lake and freeze to death. So watch out for them Stouffers.17
Townes elaborated in a later interview, when the interviewer noted that his song, “Katie Belle Blue” is “something your daughter’s going to have after you’re gone.” Townes replied, “She also has all the publishing and the Buick and this house and an acre Flyin’ Shoes
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of land. I signed all that over.” He went on: “I have a pickup truck, an eighty-nine GMC with a new motor and a good un-dercarriage, and a J200 Gibson. Everything else has been signed over. I keep the gig money and the family keeps the ASCAP, the publishing, and the recording money. It’s all set up.”
Townes continued that interview in a more philosophical vein. “Between taxes and liability insurance and this and that, we ain’t in it for the money, man … we’re out there for one guitar chord, one note, one beam of light in somebody’s mind. We travel 600 miles a day to do it. It’s not the money.”
By all accounts, Jeanene demanded that Townes leave the family home in Smyrna and find a place of his own.18 He ended up in a rented room at a place in downtown Nashville known affectionately as the Rock’n’Roll Hotel. “The Rock’n’Roll Hotel was some rented rooms over a restaurant that had been known earlier as Spence Manor, where music groups touring would be catered to, so everything they needed would be right there,” according to Bob Moore, who helped Townes move into a small, dark room there. “It turned out to be kind of a flop house,”
Moore says, “and when Townes was there, construction was going on and whoever had bought the place was turning it back into a restaurant. I thought at the time that there were some pretty sleazy people that came by.”
Townes’ life at the Rock’n’Roll Hotel tended to be as seedy and unpleasant as his surroundings—a “grubby place full of grubby people,” according to Susanna Clark. As one extreme illustra-tion, a friend recalls Townes telling about an incident there that he said forever put an end to his use of heroin, which he still dabbled with occasionally. “These two chicks—he wasn’t really with either one of them, they were just chicks he knew, and he always had people around, some were using him, some he was using, and I’m suspecting these were a couple of users—but these two chicks came in there with some heroin … and the one chick hit up the other chick, and she OD’ed. And as soon as she did, the one chick pulled the needle out of her arm, stuck it in her own arm, and took the rest of the dose. But Townes luckily
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had the knowledge of how to revive the chick that was OD’ing, so she didn’t die…. Then he told them to get their shit out of there, he didn’t want any of it, and he said he didn’t do any more heroin after that.”19
Bob Moore went through similarly traumatic times with his friend during the Rock’n’Roll Hotel period. “Townes fell over there one time and had to have his head stitched up,” Moore says. He agreed to go to nearby Vanderbilt Hospital, but he refused to go back to get the stitches out when the time came.
Bob took Townes to a girlfriend’s house. “I knew she could do it, although she’s not a nurse,” Moore recalls. “But he wasn’t going to get the stitches taken out, and she took the stitches right out of his head.” Another time, Townes phoned Bob from the Rock’n’Roll Hotel; “It was late in the night and he was frightened,” Moore says, “saying there were all these black demons surrounding him. But a white angel, he said, was standing between him and the black demons. I know once I heard Jeanene say that he’d be alright if he stayed on Zoloft.”
Townes spent much of the early spring of 1994 playing shows in Texas. He celebrated his fiftieth birthday with a party in Austin, he played the Cactus Café, and he played a “Writers in the Round” concert in Houston, among other gigs. Back in Boulder, Colorado, later in March, he recorded his second show for the
E-Town
radio program, which aired the following month.
By that time, Townes was back in Europe. He kept up a grueling schedule for the rest of the year: From Britain to California in the spring; from Texas to Scandinavia in the fall; then a stretch of shows in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, finishing the winter with gigs in Slovenia and Italy, then back to Britain, then back to the United States.
In the works for some months, a Final Decree of Divorce was granted to Jeanene Lanae Van Zandt from John Townes Van Zandt on May 2, 1994, in the Chancery Court for Rutherford County, Tennessee (“upon the Wife’s Complaint for Absolute Divorce … on the grounds of irreconcilable differences”).20 The Flyin’ Shoes
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Certificate of Divorce recorded that the last date the couple had resided in the same household was the first of April, 1993. That household—the “Ponderosa” in Smyrna—was now by decree
“divested out of the Husband and vested solely in the Wife.”
The centerpiece of the divorce decree, however, was the award to Jeanene of “undivided One Hundred Percent (100%) interest in all of the Husband’s right, title, and interest in and to the musical compositions, including but not limited to the copyright and all renewals and extensions thereof for the United States of America and all countries of the world”: and what follows is a listing of 126 Townes Van Zandt songs—divided by the three established publishing catalogs: Townes Van Zandt Songs (sixteen titles), Silver Dollar Music (fifty-nine titles), and Columbine Music (fifty titles).
Nor does the next paragraph of the decree fail to command attention: “Husband also assigns to the Wife, thus relinquish-ing, all royalties due the Husband as the so called ‘writer’s share’
of the above referenced compositions including all revenue paid from any publisher, administrator or licenses and all revenue, including but not limited to bonuses, payable by any performing rights organization, including but not limited to ASCAP.”
Susanna Clark voiced a common reaction among songwriters to this relinquishment of “writer’s share”: “That was an un-fair thing. You don’t get writer’s share from somebody, leaving somebody with the only source of income they had [being]
what they made on the road.” Clark continued this thought with a personal memory: “But even then, he would come over and, after he got off the road, he’d come over and give [Jeanene]
all the money he had in his pockets. I mean, he didn’t care anything about money. He was very drunk all the time there, and he signed every piece of paper she stuck in front of him. He didn’t read it.… I would say that she did do a lot of things to try to give him a home. But it was very difficult.”21
Townes’ on-stage cataloging of his remaining worldly possessions was always fairly accurate, as reflected in the official account of his “sole and separate property, free and clear of any
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claim of the Wife.” The decree lists “the 1989 GMC Truck and Camper, 1984 Honda Shadow Motorcycle, and the 1983 Starwind 22 foot boat and trailer.” But there was one other thing in which Townes remained vested; he retained “sole ownership in all oil lease and mineral rights presently in his name acquired through inheritance.” Through someone’s insistence—either that of a knowledgeable, sympathetic lawyer, a close friend, or, one might still reasonably imagine, Townes himself—the Van Zandt family inheritance—the “old money,” such as it was—was kept out of litigious hands and remained with Townes Van Zandt.
