Omaha Rainbow : Issue 15
Townes Van Zandt is no longer such a well kept secret, known only
to a handful of dedicated fans. Thanks to
his new manager and long-time friend, John Lomax (III.), who has spent
the past 18 months disentangling Townes' business affairs, and artists
like Emmylou Harris and Hoyt Axton who have brought his songs to the attention
of the music world, his career is on the upsurge after years of bad luck.
I met John Lomax, a Texan and son (correction: nephew) of the noted
folklorist Alan Lomax, in Nashville
and after updating and adding to my limited knowledge of Townes he took
me to meet him. The last part of the
journey was quite hazardous as we left the road and followed a path across
open fields, avoiding large boulders,
and crossing bridges that seemed likely to collapse as we drove over them.
For over a year now, Townes Van Zandt has been living in a sparsely
furnished wood cabin on a patch of land in remote woodland country, 18
miles outside of Nashville. He lives there with his young Texan wife,
Cindy, and a large dog of uncertain origin called Geraldine.
Townes Van Zandt's forefathers were among the drafters of the Texas constitution. There is a Van Zandt County and the law school at the University of Texas is named Townes Hall. His great-grandfather was one of the founders of Fort Worth. It's in this city that
Townes begins his story . . .
I was born in Fort Worth, Texas, where I lived till I was 8; Midland
till 9; Billings, Montana, till I was 12;
Boulder, Colorado, till I was 14; Chicago till 15; Minnesota till 17; then
back to Colorado till 9; Houston till 21 and then I started traveling!
Simply nobody wanted me, nobody would have me. Well, my mother
had me, but not for very long, five or ten
minutes! No, that's not true -- my father was in the oil business,
that's why we travelled around so much. I got out
of high school in Minnesota -- I went to a private military school for
two years, which I think has a lot to do with my somewhat multifrantic
behaviour. Then I went to the University of Colorado for awhile,
then finally dropped out of school and became a folk singer. College
was, well, I sorta went off the deep end at the University of Colorado.
I was apparently not stable enough to go there. I hit that
place like a saddle bronc hits the arena -- coming right out of military
school and all. No way it could last, and it didn't.
So I went to Houston and started singing. Got into town about
a year after the folk boom had died down, like in
1966, and the first place I played was a club on Westheimer called the
Jester Lounge. That was the first place I ever got paid real money
for singing. This guy, who turned out to be Don Sanders, came up
to me in there and said I also oughta try this place called Sand Mountain.
I went over there with him and we did a little short set.
Mrs. Carrick was at her desk keeping an eye on the proceedings, and the
place was almost empty at the time. There was this song I used to do at
the time called "The KKK Blues," and I sang it that night. It
was a talking blues about dropping out of the second grade to join the
Ku Klux Klan, and the guy said "you got too much education."
Then I did another one called "The Vietnamese Blues" which
had a chorus line about leaving Vietnam to the Vietnamese.
Anyway, I got through singing and Mrs. Carrick said, "Well,
that was real good, but we just don't do things like
that around here." I said, "Well, this is a fine place,
but I just can't stay here then." Next day she sent Don as an
envoy again and she said she wanted us to come back. That was the
beginning. I just started getting more and more gigs and then I ran
into a guy who wanted me to make a record. That was all because of
Mickey Newbury. To tell you the truth, I hadn't even thought about recording
up to then. Jack Clement produced it and it was sold to Poppy Records,
and I've been playing gigs and making records ever since.
My musical influences were Elvis, Ricky Nelson, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and the Everly Brothers .....it started off with country, then Elvis and those guys, then a little jazz, then blues further into high school, Lightnin' Hopkins mostly, and Bob Dylan around the time of "Times They Are A' Changin'." I started listening to topical folk songs, but it definitely started with Elvis.
I remember the first time I realized you could make a living just playing the guitar was watching the Ed Sullivan Show. That just flipped me out. I liked Elvis, he didn't quite seem real you know, he made it possible for a whole lot of people to make a whole lot of bread. There were stars before him but they had sort of round edges, you know.
I started writing funny songs, not dirty songs, but funny bar room
type just to get the audience. I was
playing these beer joints and used to play folk songs and it got a bit
rowdy. They wanted some funny songs and I hadn't got any, so I wrote
some. Then I wrote serious songs. It used to be a problem that
they were too serious, but when it was most serious it was too serious
for a lot of people. Ten years ago a lot of club owners would tell
me to play faster, more up tempo, more comedy. They meant I needed
a band I think.
My first serious song was "Waitin' Around to Die." I talked to this old man for a while and he kinda put out these vibrations. I was sitting at the bar of the Jester Lounge one afternoon drinking beer, thinking about him, and just wrote it down .....Sometimes I don't know where this dirty road is taking me/Sometimes I can't see the reason why/But I guess I'll keep rambling/Lots of booze and lots of gambling/Well, it's easier than waitin' round to die.
I've never really written with anybody because I just can't. My songs come out at times, like, when I'm in upstate New York in a motel room and it's freezing out and I don't know anybody and the gig's not been going very good and I haven't seen anybody I even know for weeks ..... a song will come out. To sit down and write with somebody, I've never even considered.
Well, I wrote one song with two other guys when we were a trio about eight years ago. We weren't a trio, we were called the Delta Mama Boys. I was a house act in this club in Austin, one of the other guys was the manager of the club, the other guy of the trio was a good friend of mine. I would do my show and then, during the intermission, we'd do one. Just kid around, play some Woody Guthrie songs, this that and the other. We wrote a couple of songs, but the only one that's ever been recorded was 'Delta Mama Blues' which I had on an album called "Delta Mama Blues." That was our theme song --real light. It was about ..... the time I was playing in Oklahoma City I met these two guys that was in the army, stationed at Fort Sell(?), Oklahoma. Everytime they got out on leave at the weekend they armed themselves with a jug of Robartuss & DM (?) Cough Syrup. Some kind of Dextamethoropin Hydorbromide drug store high, you know what I mean? Anyhow, they called it delta mama, and I wrote "Delta Mama Blues": I just never have tried to write anything real serious with anybody.
Also the songs are ..... I don't figure out what I want to say then work out how I'm going to say it. All of a sudden, there it is, it pops up into your brain. Then you step back and decide about it. You block out everything else that comes along. Some songs are about feelings, some are autobiographical, some are things you want to say, and then there are story songs that are unrelated to you and sort of drift in from elsewhere.
I'm not sure how 'Pancho and Lefty' came about, but all of a sudden it was there and I was thinking at the time I was writing it that it wasn't Pancho Villa. It was the first song I'd ever written with any reference to Mexico because I haven't spent a lot of time there. A lot of people from Texas are real close to it and associated with it, while I've lived in Colorado and the Mountains.
I learned to differentiate between notes. I played the same, not chords, but chord patterns for a long time. Then I started to listen to Lightnin' Hopkins just over and over again. He uses more notes than chords and that's kind of a different way at a guitar. The first time I really got serious about playing the guitar was doing the blues, that will always be the biggest influence.
I learnt to finger pick from one of Hoyt Axton's records. One of the first songs I learnt to finger pick was "Cocaine Blues," and I got the arrangement off his record. He's always been a favourite of mine. I played with him a couple of years ago. It really blew my mind when he recorded 'Pancho and Lefty.' He's a really good guy, I'm great friends with him.
I guess I met Guy Clark a couple of years after I started playing. He was at the Jester before I played there and then joined the Peace Corps. I started playing there and then he came back, we met, and we've been good friends ever since.
Skinny Dennis met Guy when Guy came out to California to get his publishing deal together. Guy was real serious, real conscientious about it, and to support himself while looking for the deal he worked at the Dobro factory, and also in a bluegrass group that came together in Long Beach. I can't remember if they were called anything, but it was a trio. Guy played rhythm guitar and sang, another guy played banjo, and Skinny Dennis played stand-up bass. Long Beach is real heavy duty. It has all the disadvantages of Los Angeles and none of the advantages, a real crazy place.
So Dennis became good friends with Guy and Guy, from there, moved
to Nashville. The group kind of split up
because the banjo player thought Guy and Dennis were too rowdy. He
once made the comment that the only
reason they played was for an excuse to drink. Guy said, "Man,
I don't need no excuse to drink!" So the group fell apart. Guy
got his deal and moved to Nashville, then six months later Dennis decided
he would follow suit. They were living in Nashville for, I guess, a year
and a half.
Guy had this house in Nashville next to Mickey Newbury and I used to stay there and Dennis, Richard Dobson, Rex Bell and Mickey White from Houston and David Olney who showed up from North Carolina. Four or five years ago there seemed to be more camaraderie between singer songwriters, that group of people. There used to be two or three houses where everyone lived. I can remember drinking vodka and playing guitar all day long. Nobody had proper jobs. The whole crew would come over. You don't see that anymore, everybody's got their own place now.
One time Dennis and some of them contracted with Mickey Newbury to
landscape his garden, build some sort of
Japanese fountain, or something. Mickey left town for a week and
they got their money out front. They bought beer and got drunk, then
the last two days they got real panicky and thought they ought to get something
done. So they ordered two tons of gravel which was just dumped by the drive
on Mickey's yard and it blocked the driveway. They looked at it,
freaked out, took the rest of the money, went to town and got drunk again.
They never came back again and Mickey returned to find his driveway
under gravel. As Guy had kinda set them up, he phoned him and he
couldn't believe it, and wouldn't talk to him for a month.
It's
been a long time since we all hung out together. I was living with
Guy and Susanne in East Nashville cutting "The Late Great" and
it was a little house, a real tense shotgun-type house. It was real
hot, we were real broke, and we spent a lot of time just sitting about
the house. It got so intense one day that Guy just nailed himself in his
room to get away from everybody! He used big 16 pin nails and later
had to climb out through the window because he couldn't get the door unnailed
-- he'd used about five nails. Finally we had to break the door down.
That was the "Late Great" record, I think the title was
a joke of Kevin Eggers. A lot of my friends saw it at the
music store and tried to call my mother. She didn't believe it was
me on the back cover. When she and my aunt went to buy it in Houston,
they had this argument with the hippie in the store. She said it
wasn't Townes Van Zandt, he said it was, and she said, "I should know,
I'm his mother!"
During that same kind of time when we were broke, we decided we'd have to go to town and get some money from Mickey Newbury, and it was decided that I would phone Mickey. I was kind of humming and hawing, thinking of a way to ask for the money, and he said, "By the way, Townes, I think you might have a cheque over at Acuff Rose." "Oh, really!" We raced over there and rushed to get it to the bank because it was Friday, and in the morning we were broke again. We had 500 dollars, but all we had to show for it was a 20 dollar violin. I don't know where it went -- food and drink, I guess. We'd been broke for so long that when we got it we just went crazy.