A Deeper Blue (38 page)

Although the first shows were in Scotland, they flew straight to Germany, where Claudia met them at the Frankfurt Airport. “I cooked gulasch, Townes’ favorite German food. Townes visited my ill brother in the hospital. Then my other brother took us to the airport and we took the plane to London and then to Glasgow.” Claudia and Townes were inseparable for the rest of their time together. Her recollection of their itinerary is detailed: “I remember the show in Glasgow best, where Townes played on a laid-up ship [Renfrew Ferry], which brought a special atmosphere and mood to the show. Then we came back to London, where Mike Weston King picked us up at the airport. We went to The Blue March

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the Cambridge Folk Festival, where Townes played on two nights for forty-five minutes each. And we also met Peter Rowan, Chris Smither, Alison Krauss, and other artists there. After Cambridge, Townes played shows at some more English places before we left England and travelled to Ireland. There he played in Dublin first, at a very beautiful old place where most of the people seemed to know him from a long time ago [Whelan’s]…. After the gig[s], we had some days left like holidays. We spent these days in a very nice hotel at the coast together.”2

A few days after his last show in Ireland, Townes was in California, then Reno, Nevada, then back to California for a gig at the Ash Grove in Santa Monica that same month. In early September, he went into Flashpoint Studios in Austin with Jim and Royann Calvin and recorded five tracks, including one of Royann’s songs, “Love Is Where You Find It.” Two of the songs were released on a vinyl single in a limited-edition British pressing of 2,000 copies on the German label Exile: extremely creaky versions of Michael Weston King’s “Riding the Range” and Ewan MacColl’s “Dirty Old Town,” which had been a big record for Shane MacGowan and the Pogues.

Along with the Calvins, Townes played Eureka Springs, Arkansas, the last week of September, then, the first week of October, the Mucky Duck in Houston. There, Townes had a chance to catch up with someone he had not seen for some years: his second wife, Cindy. “Harold was there with him, being real protective. Townes had a half-pint, and Harold said, ‘Don’t let him have more than part of that, because he can’t handle it any more.’ And he was so skinny; he had shrunk. He wasn’t the tall guy that I remembered falling in love with.”

Cindy and Townes talked long into the night. “He said he had to go back on tour overseas, and he wanted me to go with him,” Cindy recalls. “For a minute I thought, yeah; I haven’t been overseas, and this was a chance to go. Then, at that point, the whole history came flashing back, and I’m looking at a man who’s basically withered away to nothing.”

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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
On June 23, 1996, Townes played his first and only show at Nashville’s venerable Ryman Auditorium—the “Cathedral of Country Music”—at a tribute concert for songwriter Walter Hyatt, who had recently been killed in a plane crash. This was Townes’ first major gig with the Calvins supporting him. They continued to rehearse together in preparation for some shows in Texas that fall. As Jim Calvin remembers, “This was the time when he was getting into ‘Sanitarium Blues.’ He was laying that on us, just starting to include that in his shows. He just did it like a poem. He never played the guitar with it.” The Calvins were not used to material as dark as “Sanitarium Blues,” but they were committed to Townes.

“Harold just showed up when it was time to go on the road,”

Jim Calvin says. “He would fly into Nashville and stay at Townes’

house for a day or two, make sure the truck was running good, and they’d take off. Or they’d meet up at some airport if they were going to Europe. Harold would be constantly trying to take care of business and keep Townes away from his bottle and stuff, or keep him from getting in too deep before a show, and that kind of business. It was definitely a love–hate thing by the time I met them. They’d test each other, but you could tell they were friends. They would have quit each other in disgust long ago if there wasn’t a whole lot more to it, I think.”

They kicked off their mini-tour of Texas at Rex Bell’s Old Quarter in Galveston, with Richard Dobson opening the show.

Dobson remembers that Townes “looked very tired.” Rex hosted them all at his beach house on the Bolivar Peninsula, across from the end of Galveston Island. “He’s just six months older than me,” Rex recalls marveling of Townes. “I’ve got thick grass at my house, and he stumbled and grabbed me, so I helped him across the yard. It was like I was helping an older person, he was so frail. And we were so worried about him, because he was just skin and bones, and he wouldn’t eat. Harold would hide his vodka, and then make him drink Ensure before he could have his vodka, so he’d just guzzle the Ensure so he could get his vodka.”

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Bell says the show was memorable: “Other than the fact that he was very weak, he really did a good show that night. He did as good as he could do in his physical condition. When he wanted to, he could still sing beautifully. His picking had slipped; as you remember, early in his career he was a fantastic guitar player. He wasn’t flashy, but he was just so pristine, so clean. But he made up for it in later years, in my opinion, with his sincerity about how he approached music.”

Jim Calvin recalls Townes and Rex enjoying their time together as if they knew it might be the last. “They were just the dear-est of old friends,” he says. “It was real pleasant. With Townes, there was times we were sitting around his house and he’d start swinging his arms, trying to keep these ghosts and demons away.

I mean he was seeing them, saying ‘Get away! Get away!’ But when we were over at Rex’s, I just never saw him so calm and relaxed and normal, you know. The demons were gone.”

At the next show, at Poor David’s Pub in Dallas, the demons returned. Townes’ friend Roxy Gordon lived near Poor David’s, and he and Townes began drinking early in the day. “I got the impression that he was enjoying to see how drunk they could get,” Jim Calvin says. “I mean, they were barely able to walk.”

Showtime came, and Townes was not at the club. According to Jim, that evening’s show was “by far the worst performance that I was ever associated with.” Royann Calvin remembers the scene as “the most hellacious time we ever had with Townes,” and she tells the story vividly:

We found Townes at Roxy’s house, and they had been drinking for about five hours, and smoking a little dope.… I think they had britches and stuff on underneath, but they were both wearing reindeer pelts when we got there. Normally Jim and I would do thirty to forty-five minutes. Well, we get through with our set, and Townes, sitting right at the edge of the stage, is screaming, “Play another one! Play another one!” Well, this kept up for an hour and a half. Finally I said, “Alright folks, in just a few minutes, Townes Van Zandt will be putting on a bril-250

A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
liant performance,” and we got off the stage and I …

set up his guitar, and he tries to get on his stool and almost falls face forward with his guitar in his hand.

So I catch him before he falls over, and he’s starting to get bitchy: “I told you I didn’t want to do this!”

He started doing some of his songs, except for half of it was in tongues, and half of it was just howling. He howled one song for fifteen minutes.

And I’m not talking about like, bad singing, I’m talking about literal dog howling.

Harold’s freaking out. He’s ready to pull him off the stage and turn on the lights and give everybody their money back. And I got up on the stage, turned off the mic, and said, “Townes, look at that little boy, sitting there in front of the stage.” There was a kid about nine years old there. I said, “This is someone who’s never seen you before, whose parents are fans of yours or they wouldn’t have brought him here at this hour of the night. Please, if nothing else, show this child something.” And he came to for a minute and played a few songs in a row without saying another word…. But then he went into the howling thing again.

The crowd is watching this with their mouths

open, and they’re just astounded, and some are disgusted, some are humiliated, and the little boy was figuring it was pretty cool, watching someone go insane right before his eyes. So that’s where we quit. I said, “Okay Harold, I give up, you win, turn on the lights.” And nobody wanted their money back. As soon as he finished, they all came up and talked to him, asked for autographs; the little boy bought an album, got an autograph. Nobody acted like anything weird ever went down. Several of them I even saw a couple days later. They showed up at the Cactus Café to try it again.

The Cactus gigs were better, but again, longtime friends and fans were concerned at Townes’ condition. Larry Monroe had Townes, Jim, and Royann in the KUT studio after the second night at the Cactus; Griff Luneberg, the Cactus’ manager, was there for the late-night session as well. Townes sounded tired and a little drunk—not completely out of it, but out of it enough The Blue March

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to elicit some concern. “I’ve had so many concussions in the last month that I can’t even count ’em no more,” he tells Monroe at one point. “I’ve lost about half my thinking process. I’m gettin’

to where I can barely catch airplanes.” He stops and asks Monroe, “Do you have any idea where we are now?” When Monroe assures him that they are “in the heart of Austin, Texas,” Townes says, “Oh good, I feel better.”

Townes plays a few songs with the Calvins, including a ragged

“White Freightliner Blues” and a wobbly “Lost Highway.”

Townes observes that “Hank Williams was such that it’s hard to comprehend. It’s a hard act to follow. You know, the one thing I’ve thought about Hank Williams—he was able to write the fun-niest songs and the saddest songs ever. I try to write funny songs and they come out dismal.” Monroe notes that many of Hank’s songs were based on his ex-wife, Audrey. Townes, not missing a beat, responds, “Well, where was she when I needed her?”

Townes cites his favorite music—Muddy Waters, Mozart, Lightnin’ Hopkins, the Rolling Stones, Hank Williams, and Bob Dylan—then tells the story of how he heard Dylan singing

“Pancho and Lefty” with Willie Nelson on TV for Willie’s sixti-eth birthday celebration. (Townes was asleep and Will ran in to wake him up when Dylan and Willie launched into the song, then, “I went back to sleep … back when I used to sleep in my own bed.”) Townes notes that Dylan, instead of singing “Livin’

on the road, my friend,” sings “Livin’ on the edge, my friend.”

About halfway through the visit, Luneberg—a friend of Townes’ for more than fifteen years—takes the microphone and, in contrast to Monroe’s easygoing style, asks Townes some direct questions. He starts by saying that it was great to have Townes at the Cactus the past two nights. “Thanks,” Townes says; “it’s kind of my home club—that and the Paradiso in Amsterdam.”

Then, Luneberg goes on: “People are always asking me …

Townes, how come you’re waitin’ around to die?” Townes dodges the question, slowly telling a story about the old man who inspired him to write “Waitin’ Around to Die,” but Griff tries again: “People are always asking me, though … I know you’re
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
happy most of the time, but people are always asking, ‘What’s wrong with Townes?’ And I’m going, ah, he’s gonna outlive us all.” Townes replies quietly, “No, I don’t think so.” Griff presses:

“I mean, do you feel tortured, or upset, or … ?” Townes says,

“Pretty much.”

Griff: I mean, if I was as revered as you are …

Townes: I’m not revered.

Griff: Well, you’re certainly revered. You’re nice to paupers and you’re nice to kings and you have no pretensions and that’s what’s beautiful about you.

Townes: I thought it was my eyes.

Griff: … We’re all concerned, but I think you’re gonna outlive us all. I just want to reconfirm that.

Townes: Well, I hope so.…

Griff: Okay, good.

Townes: … My goal is to write one song good enough to rock the Lord off of his throne and have him look down and say, “That was a good job. You just saved a little girl’s life.” If I could do that—

I don’t care about the money or anything along those lines.…

I wrote one perfect one and I recorded it and never sang it again.3 If I could write another one like that, everything would be okay. I could go back to the ranch. I could do anything.…

I’m gonna have to take better care of myself and all that if I’m gonna be able to do it.…

If I could just do something like that, then I could lay down and go to sleep [his voice cracks on the last word].

Before leaving for Europe, Townes and the Calvins recorded some tracks at Michael Catalano’s home studio in Nashville to round out a collection of live recordings that Harold Eggers was preparing for release on Sugar Hill, to be titled
The Highway Kind
.

With Royann playing tight rhythm guitar and singing occasional harmony and Jim taking soulful turns on mandolin and fiddle, they recorded sparse, grim versions of Hank Williams’ “(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle,” Roy Acuff’s “Wreck on the Highway,”

and Guy Clark’s “Dublin Blues.” During the session, according The Blue March

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to Jim, “Townes was getting loaded, and he was doing an okay job, but he wasn’t being as good as he was capable of, I’m sure.

I thought him and Harold was gonna be about done with each other that day. Townes was determined to have a good time.”

Around this same time, Townes ran into his Texas friends Joe Gracey and Gracey’s wife, singer Kimmie Rhodes, in Nashville.

Gracey had been a well-known disc jockey at Austin’s KOKE-FM

in the seventies, pioneering the “progressive country” format, and had turned to record production under the tutelage of Cowboy Jack Clement. Kimmie had been recording with Willie Nelson, and for her upcoming album, which Gracey was producing, she was featuring duets with Willie and with Waylon Jennings.