A Deeper Blue (37 page)

Down to Memphis,” “If I Was Washington” (which Townes told a writer he wrote “a couple of wives ago”32), and “Gone Too Long” round out the collection on a lighter note. The album, Flyin’ Shoes

239

which took its title from “Katie Belle Blue,” was called
No Deeper
Blue
, and was released in November 1994. The cover art was a painting by Bo Whitt’s widow, Jeanette (Jet) Whitt, called
Snake
Eyes
, of a colorful Townes Van Zandt, an ace of broken hearts up his sleeve, throwing a pair of dice, coming up with snake eyes.

Neil Strauss wrote in
The New York Times
: “When it comes to putting out new albums, Townes Van Zandt is often too busy living his songs of pain and desolation to record them in the studio. Though this Texas songwriter has never stopped performing since the 1960’s, as many as 10 years have elapsed between his albums. Last week,
No Deeper Blue
(Sugar Hill), his first studio recording in seven years, was released.” Strauss cites the record’s

“half-spoken stories” and “sparse ballads,” and quotes Townes on his dream that was the origin of the project: “From the time I had that dream until somebody handed me the finished cassette was about a year. I can’t believe I pulled that together.”33

In mid-1994, Townes told an interviewer about his immediate plans: “We’re going to Texas to this studio that we know real good and just make up songs and call it
Sky Songs
.… I’m pretty good at that sometimes with, you know, a little shot of hooey (picks up mini-bottle of vodka). I can really do it. There’s three on the new record (
No Deeper Blue
).” He goes on to say that he wished Ernest Tubb had recorded “Don’t You Take It Too Bad,”

“but he died.” Then he concludes the interview with an expression of surprise: “You know, I don’t have any idea where I got this shirt or that jacket. I just woke up with them on. Plus I got a big lump on my head and a broken toe.”34

Not only did Townes continue to tour incessantly in 1995, but he stepped up his schedule. In January, he covered Germany, West Virginia, and Texas. In February, he was in California, Nevada, and the Pacific Northwest, then Alaska. In March, he was touring the Northeast; in the summer, it was back down South, then back to Germany, then back out West, then back to Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium. In September, Townes played a benefit at the Bluebird Café in Nashville for a local den-240

A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
tal clinic—one of Susanna Clark’s favorite charities—along with Guy, Steve Earle, and Emmylou Harris.35 That fall, he returned to western Europe, then closed the year playing Renfrew Ferry in Glasgow and the Borderline in London.

Townes’ son J.T. accompanied his father and Harold Eggers on their trip through California and the Pacific Northwest to Alaska in February 1995. As he had in the past, J.T. got a close look at Townes at his best and at his worst. “You couldn’t control him,”

J.T. said of his father during this period. “A lot of my role on the road with him would be to ration out his vodka with water.

There were times we were left in awe trying to figure out what Townes’ magic was under this totally unmanageable shell of a forty-five to fifty-year-old stubborn-ass traveling songwriter.”36

According to J.T., Townes was “a total spoiled brat” on the road.

During the time J.T. was with Townes, he recalled that, many mornings, “when I’d wake up, he would be on my bed, sitting on the foot of my bed with his head in his hands nodding back and forth going, ‘ … bitch,’ and crying. And a lot of that was the alcoholism—the ride that that takes you on is pretty unpleasant, but he had that even before the alcoholism.”

J.T. believes that Townes’ great writing was done before his addictions got the better of him, that “alcoholism didn’t take effect until the last ten years of his life,” adding: “I’ve never seen someone more able to in the worst circumstances, in the worst stage of personal abuse, be able to … convince someone that they were not only not able to help him, but that they had lied to themselves as well, and that their life was a sham and that they should also start drinking heavily.”

A more sublime moment came for J.T. when Townes played the Northern Lights Church in Juneau, Alaska, in February 1995.

J.T. recalls his father believing that he sometimes saw “white angels or goblins.” “I would always dismiss it as dementia,” J.T. said.

Harold Eggers had made the Juneau show’s promoter, an Alaskan songwriter, aware that “she was going to have a big role in making sure the show went down, because Townes at this point was like having five kids under five years old on your hands.” J.T. told Flyin’ Shoes

241

the woman that he would disappear a half-hour before the show with Townes’ bottle of booze, and that Townes was not allowed to have a drink before going on. At show time, Townes started to scream, “If I don’t see ‘T, I ain’t going on”; but, according to J.T., “he was too skinny to fight this big Alaskan songwriter chick and she just pushed him out there.” Townes received a thunder-ing ovation from the crowd, “and he became very humble and played the most amazing show on the whole tour.”

Townes got through the gig, then, before he had a chance to have a drink, “the promoters brought this old Alaskan shaman up to meet him, because she had something to tell him. She told him through an interpreter that the only reason that he was able to balance on his stool all night was because there was this angel supporting him from behind with her wings spread.”

Townes looked at the shaman and told her, “I dig; I’m hip.”

On German radio in November 1995, Townes answered questions from the program’s host, a woman named Sabina. “We get home on December the fourteenth,” he told her. “It’s funny, Sabina, you get home, and boy—you wake up: ‘Where’s my guitar? Where’s the suitcase? Where we going?’ And I realize, I’m in my own room.

The only thing to do is feed the dog and feed the birds. That’s it.

And nothing to do for three weeks.” Townes goes on: “It’s been a long tour, and it’s still going. It’ll be through Christmas. I try to get them to book me through Christmas. I’d like to spend Christmas in Morocco, or somewhere else. Anywhere but home.”

Then, this exchange:

Sabina: What do you think was the most challenging, the hardest time in your life?

Townes: I can’t think of an easy one.

Sabina: You think life is hard and not sweet?

Townes: Well, it’s hard and sweet. Like rock candy.37

In November 1995, in Hanau, Germany, a small town near Frankfurt, Townes first met an attractive young woman from Darmstadt named Claudia Winterer. Townes invited Claudia, an
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
executive in a bank in Bonn, to some of his upcoming shows in Cologne then Krefeld. The two spent hours talking after the Krefeld show. “That night, Townes asked me to join him on the rest of tour,” Claudia recalls. They met up again in Bonn.

“We fell in love with each other. We travelled together to Berlin, Dresden, and other German cities. One week later, Townes called me at home from England, in December, and we met again in London, where he played two shows in a club called the Borderline.”38

Townes returned home and started 1996 on familiar ground, playing January gigs at the Cactus Café in Austin, the Mucky Duck in Houston, and Poor David’s Pub in Dallas. He spoke to Claudia on the phone frequently, joking to friends that his monthly phone bill was higher than his rent.39 That March, Claudia accepted Townes’ invitation to visit him in Tennessee.

She arrived in Nashville the day after Townes’ fifty-second birthday. “Townes and Richard Dobson picked me up at the airport,”

she recalls. “It was wonderful to stay with Townes at the place where he lived and to see what he had been telling me so many times on the phone before, his dog Feather and the beautiful red cardinals he used to feed every morning.”

Among the many local friends to whom Townes introduced Claudia were Jim and Royann Calvin. The Calvins were Townes’

neighbors in Mt. Juliet, and both were accomplished bluegrass musicians. Jim had been a member of the New Christy Minstrels in the late 1980s; he married Louisiana native Royann and they formed a duo—Royann on guitar and Jim on mandolin and fiddle—playing gigs at the Bluegrass Inn and other Nashville establishments. Bill Monroe came to one of the Calvins’ shows and even played with them; they became friends, started visiting at Monroe’s farm, and ended up “still playing shows, but also three or four days a week out with Bill Monroe,” Jim Calvin recalled,

“driving him to the Opry on weekends, Royann cooking and cleaning, me mending fences and feeding the cows, and writing songs and picking with Bill in the evenings.” The Calvins played several shows with Monroe before his final illness, and as a duo Flyin’ Shoes

243

toured Louisiana, Florida, and Texas. Townes met them through mutual friends at a Mickey Newbury show in Nashville. They realized they were neighbors and became friends quickly after jamming at Townes’ house on the lake.

Jim recalls, “He was really impressed with our music, but he started to go through a couple of his songs, and we had no idea.

We knew ‘If I Needed You’ and ‘Pancho and Lefty,’ and that was about as much as we knew about Townes Van Zandt at the time.

But that didn’t bother him, that we were innocent to his legend.”

Jim and Royann threw a big party for Townes and Claudia at their house in Mt. Juliet. Jim remembers, “I said, ‘Now let’s put on a good show for this girl, she’s from Germany, man, she’s never probably heard this heavy-duty picking like we do here at Polecat Hollow.’ We just pinned their ears back, and boy, Townes was just so thankful for this great show for Claudia. We had barbecue and he ate all this food and everything—more than anybody had seen him eat before—and they just had a hell of a time.” Townes and Claudia stayed in the Calvins’ guest room that night. According to Jim, “Good grief, he was a new man when he was around her. He stayed sober enough to drive.”

Townes also introduced Claudia to Susanna Clark and to Bob Moore. He took her to his show at the Bluebird Café, then she and Townes drove to Texas and met Harold Eggers in Austin.

“We stayed at Harold’s place, where we also met Townes’ son J.T.,” Claudia says. “I enjoyed it very much to see father and son together.” Before leaving Austin, they stopped at Butch Hancock’s place for a visit. Then they drove to Santa Fe, New Mexico, for Townes’ gig at the Old Santa Fe Music Hall with Guy Clark on March 21. “It was a great show,” Claudia recalls, adding that Townes “got standing ovations.” They visited late into the night with Guy, then Claudia had to return home.

Townes played shows primarily in Texas that spring, including a May gig at the Old Quarter in Galveston, a cozy new version of the old Houston watering hole run by that establishment’s original owner, Townes’ old friend Rex Bell. A June performance at the Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia, was star-244

A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
tling to long-time fans and frightening to the club’s owner, who questioned Harold about Townes’ health and safety and got the standard response: Townes was just “on medication.” In a radio interview, Townes gave away this common ploy: “‘He’s on medication’ is usually just an excuse my road manager uses to get me out of trouble.”40

15

The Blue March

T
HATSPRINGOF 1996, TOWNESwas surprised to hear from Steve Shelley, the drummer for the New York band Sonic Youth, that members of the group were interested in making a record with him. A major label, Geffen, was backing the project through its Ecstatic Peace imprint, which was an outlet through which members of Sonic Youth could sign and record artists that they thought deserving. After recording some bands that didn’t make much of an impression, they sought out Townes.

Shelley’s side project, a duo/sometime trio called Two Dollar Guitar, was to back Townes on the sessions, which Shelley would produce. The idea had potential, although there were downsides.

Geffen A&R man Ray Farrell, who was in charge of the project, had looked into Townes’ last few recording efforts, had spoken to people involved, and had some idea of what he was up against. Townes Van Zandt clearly was not a well man. There was already some sense that the planned sessions might turn out to be not only a physical and emotional drain on Townes, but also a financial drain on the label. They weren’t sure that Townes would like the idea of playing with the young musicians
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
in Two Dollar Guitar, or how their styles would mesh. Farrell brought Townes down from Nashville to Memphis in early fall to discuss the project and meet the band, and he had doubts that any of it would work out.

Townes was frail and shaky when he met Farrell and the band in Memphis, but he seemed to enjoy himself, staying up late talking and playing poker. Even with the research he had done, it was eye-opening for Farrell. He hadn’t realized that Townes always traveled with a “caretaker”—Harold Eggers—and with Eggers absent on this trip, Farrell had to learn quickly to fill that role. Farrell remembers Townes being emotionally up and down, but warm and friendly. One night at dinner with the group, Townes suggested that they all write a song together, on the spot. Townes threw out the first line, then they went around the table until everyone had contributed lines and they eventually played the idea out. Farrell was impressed by Townes’ ability to create this atmosphere, to make everybody part of the party.

A few days after he returned home to Nashville, Townes let them know that he was ready to go ahead with the project. He was flattered that these young musicians wanted to play with him. He had heard Mudhoney’s recording of “Buckskin Stallion Blues,” and been very happy with it, and proud. “I’m the mold that grunge was grown in,” he had said.1 The recording sessions were scheduled for the end of the year.

Later that month, Townes and Harold returned to Europe.