Townes Van Zandt didn’t divide life into categories. He didn’t have a career, a personal life, and a social life. To him, they were all one and the same. “I set out to be a broke-down, rambling, gambling folksinger, and that’s what I did,” he once said. He achieved his ambitions wholly: Few other humans wrote as well, gambled as recklessly, rambled as freely, or broke themselves down as desperately as the late, great Townes Van Zandt did.
Van Zandt died of a heart attack on New Year’s Day while lying in bed recovering from a broken hip. He was 52. In a memorial service at the Belmont Church on Jan. 5, songwriter Suzanne Clark characterized the gaunt, charismatic Texas native as “a noble, wild soul.” Others participating in the musical tribute, which packed the church with the famous and the unknown, described him as kind, gentle, loving, playful, unpredictable, ornery, and, in a quote from one of his songs, “forever blue.” There were tales of bawdy behavior, of binges, of bets won and lost, of songs that touched the heart, of angels and devils, and of an inner pain that nothing or no one could ease. “He went into the dark, scary places we couldn’t go,” said Steve Earle. “Sometimes I think he went there so we didn’t have to.”
Van Zandt had been recording in Memphis the week prior to his death, working on an album for Geffen Records with producer Steve Shelley, drummer in the rock band Sonic Youth. While working in the studio, Van Zandt complained of chronic pain in his upper leg. When an examination revealed a broken hip, Van Zandt returned to Mount Juliet to stay with his ex-wife, Jeanene Van Zandt, to recuperate. His longtime friend, songwriter Guy Clark, was visiting at the time of death; he and Mrs. Van Zandt were in the living room when the Van Zandts’ 4-year-old daughter, Katie Belle, rushed into the living room from her father’s bedside, telling the two adults, “Daddy’s having a fight with his heart.”
The timing of Van Zandt’s passing is cut with the same ironic fatalism that defined his work. After 15 albums on various independent labels, his Geffen release would have been his first for a major record company. His career seemed marked with bad luck: He recorded the bulk of his early, landmark work for two labels, Poppy and Tomato; the former went out of business, while the latter had difficulty setting up effective distribution. Thus, the most influential of Texas folk-country songwriters created albums that were nearly impossible to find, even as his legend loomed large. His knack for disappearing to or residing in remote areas without a telephone (and other modern conveniences) didn’t help matters. “I never cared much for business,” he had said. “I left that to other people. I figured my job was to write good songs.”
Those songs—precise, poetic, foreboding, and as peculiar as they were pretty—leave Van Zandt with a legacy that likely will grow while the music of many of his better-known contemporaries fades away. His love songs tended to be about comfort and redemption, while his story songs were often character studies of doomed outcasts. In everything he wrote there loomed a metaphysical sadness and a natural grace; his melodies had an effortless beauty, while his weary voice held within it the betrayals and shattered dreams of a thousand lost lives.
He was born John Townes Van Zandt on March 7, 1944, in Fort Worth. His father was in the oil business, and his family carried a pedigreed cache in Texas. One of his ancestors helped frame the state constitution, and Townes Hall on the University of Texas campus was named for a member of his family. “It takes a certain kind of person to blow all that off,” Van Zandt once said. His family moved often because of his father’s work. By age 19, he’d been uprooted seven times and had lived in five states. “Then I started traveling,” he liked to say. He began performing in Houston in 1965, and he moved to Nashville in 1966 at the encouragement of Mickey Newbury. His first album, For the Sake of a Song, came out on Poppy Records in 1968, and with it his legend started.
His image was that of the wily, frail drifter who sought to soothe his troubled soul with songs, travel, drink, and the intimacy of friends. He occasionally spoke of a consuming depression that sent him into spells of “total loss of meaning and motivation,” he said. “There’s no cause for it I’ve been able to find. There’s been a lot of times when depression with me just became physical, it hurt so bad. It was wrenching me apart, wrenching my brain apart, my whole body, to the point where I was holding my head and screaming.... I have the feeling, a very strange feeling, that if I had a machine and could just chop my hands off, then everything would be fine.”
That pain apparently impelled him to write, to run, to drink, to hide. In performance, he referred to what he called “my four basic food groups: whiskey, cigarettes, guitar strings, and driving.” Asked about reports that he’d once been pronounced dead, Van Zandt confirmed that it actually had happened twice. Many more times, he fell into convulsions—in private, in public, and onstage. He once bet a gold tooth in a card game and lost. With a few gulps of Southern Comfort as his only anesthetic, he instructed a friend to pull out his tooth with pliers, only to discover afterward that the man had extracted the wrong tooth.
He spent his share of time in jail, usually because of drunkenness. During the memorial service, former manager John Lomax recalled one arrest in Boulder, Colo., when Van Zandt, frustrated by his inability to get a drink in a crowded bar, called in a bomb threat from a pay phone within the club and then took advantage of the cleared-out room. He was on a first-name basis with the police in Austin, Texas, he once told Tennessean reporter Thomas Goldsmith. “They’d say, ‘Townes, do you need the cuffs tonight?’ I’d say, ‘Uh, yeah.’ ”
Van Zandt quit drinking for a period in the late 1980s. In an article published in the Nashville Scene in 1988, he told writer Brian Mansfield that if he hadn’t put down the whiskey, “I probably wouldn’t have been here 10 years from now.” Suzanne Clark, in the memorial service, spoke of her friend’s alcoholism. “When I told him he drank too much, he’d say, ‘Hey, babe, there are sober people in India.’ ”
As with Jimmie Rodgers or Robert Johnson or Charlie Parker or Hank Williams, stories of Van Zandt’s life eventually will fade, while the music will keep saying what it has to say. His legacy extends beyond such enduring songs as “If I Needed You,” “To Live Is to Fly,” and “Pancho and Lefty.” His influence on other writers is immeasurable—nearly every folk-influenced songwriter to emerge out of Texas in the last 30 years points to Van Zandt as a teacher and an inspiration. “If you call Buddy Holly the father of Texas rock ’n’ roll,” Michael Martin Murphey has said, “then Townes Van Zandt is the father of Texas folk.”
Guy Clark began writing songs after hearing Van Zandt in a Houston nightclub. Mickey Newbury has identified him as a singular influence. “Townes is the best writer I’ve ever heard,” he told me in an interview three years ago. “I knew that 25 years ago. He was writing songs nobody else could do. His songs blew me away emotionally. I’m not talking about craft. He just moved me. There’s not another living songwriter that’s influenced me but [him].”
The list goes on, of course. Joe Ely has told of picking up a skinny hitchhiker outside of Lubbock, Texas, in the early 1970s. The man carried no clothes, only a backpack full of his own LPs. He gave one to Ely, who played it for his friends Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock. That album had a profound and lasting effect on the songwriting of all three of them, Ely said. Nanci Griffith was 14 when her father first took her to see Van Zandt perform in Austin; he told her that they were going to see “the greatest folk songwriter our state has ever given birth to.”
Steve Earle was 17 when he first saw Van Zandt perform. He had hitched a ride from San Antonio to Austin to crash a musical birthday party for Jerry Jeff Walker. For the next two years, whenever Van Zandt toured Texas, Earle followed him from show to show. In the years since, nearly every published article on Van Zandt has included a famous quote by Earle: “Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.” Fewer people have heard Van Zandt’s perfectly characteristic rejoinder: “I’ve met Bob Dylan’s bodyguards, and if Steve thinks he can stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table, he’s sadly mistaken.”
Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell, Nanci Griffith, Lyle Lovett, and Guy Clark all performed Van Zandt’s songs during the memorial service. “I don’t know if I can get through this,” Clark said before singing Van Zandt’s “Don’t You Take It Too Bad,” then quipped, “but I booked this gig 30-some years ago.”
At the service, the songwriter’s eldest son, J.T. Van Zandt, told of hearing of his father’s death while riding in his pickup truck on his way to fish at Corpus Christi Bay. At first, he thought the announcer said his father had died after jumping from a train, which he thought would have been fitting. He was glad to learn Van Zandt died while lying in a comfortable bed, with loved ones nearby. Recently, the two had driven to Alaska together, in a winding road trip through the West and Canada. Along the way, the elder Van Zandt spoke of a white angel that had appeared to him in Europe and across America, offering comfort by wrapping him in the soft down of its large wings. The younger Van Zandt wasn’t sure what to make of this, since his father at other times had spoken of seeing goblins and haunting figures.
After a particularly powerful performance at a church in Juneau, Alaska, J.T. listened as his father conversed with a local shaman. He didn’t understand much of what the two said, but he could see that they communicated deeply and intuitively. He recalled being stunned when he heard the woman tell Van Zandt that the reason he didn’t fall off his stool that night, as he often had onstage in recent years, was because a white angel hovered behind him, protecting him. For the son, it confirmed that his father maintained a rare and strong connection to the spiritual world. “I’ll always have the hum of his wheels in my heart,” the son said of his late father. “He was a beautiful man.”
