Homage to Townes
Monday, May 18, 2009
Steve Earle has a new record out — "Townes" — a tribute to his friend and mentor, the legendary Texas singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt. I can't tell you how many rounds it'll make in my CD changer, or how long it might stay in yours. But the album makes an impression. "Townes" is a bit like taking in an exhibit of great paintings at a museum. You feel an emotional resonance, deep in your body, long after the singular experience is over.
Delicate, bruised and spare, "Townes" works as a piece of art because it is informed by deep understanding. Steve Earle knows the music of Van Zandt intimately. And he knows the soul of the man — the jaggedy genius who created that music.
From the very first song — "Pancho and Lefty" — Earle presents Townes' lyrical majesty in musical sound-paintings that reveal the tortured, lonesome (and yes, sometimes hopeful) aspects of Van Zandt's essence. Earle, who at 17 first met Van Zandt in Houston, invites us to see Van Zandt in all his contradictions, to know the man who wrote like an angel even as he was tortured by demons. Van Zandt died at 52, in 1997, after decades of self-abuse.
Earle opens his version of "Pancho and Lefty" playing finger-picked acoustic guitar — and he plays it sharp, by intention, to let us recognize the current of unsteadiness and precariousness beneath the beauty. Earle adorns "No Place to Fall" with the ghostly, majestic moan of a harmonium, so that the song flickers simultaneously with tenderness and desperation. Some songs work better than others, of course — but the most memorable ones blaze with colors that pulse.
Earle, a Central Texas native who returns to Austin today for a record-release party at Waterloo Records, has wanted to make this record for years. He'd tipped his hand, a decade ago, when he penned the song "Fort Worth Blues" — his personal goodbye to Townes — and debuted it live at an all-star Van Zandt tribute show on "Austin City Limits." Earle brought a lot of tears with that song, drawing from his deep understanding of the man.
"This record is not based on Townes' records," says Earle, a two-time Grammy winner. "It's based on my memory of Townes performing these songs live. I don't claim it to be accurate — but I do stand by it, in terms of the impression it made on me. Sometimes, it was kind of scary ... the experience was a lot more intense than I thought it would be. ... And what I found out, recording this record, was that I'm a lot more Townes Van Zandt than I thought I was."
Should've been there
"Most people who know about Townes found out about him in the 1990s," says Earle, speaking over the phone from his apartment in New York City. "Truth is, he toured much more in the 1990s more than he did in the 1970s. And by that time, you were seeing a performer with, you know, diminished skills, (diminished) physical capabilities. It wasn't so much that he was too drunk — he was too drunk sometimes in the '70s, too — but at his best, he didn't play or sing as he did when he was 30 years old.
"He was 31, I think, when I met him in Houston in 1972. He was one of the best solo performers I ever saw. And I knew, then, that I was seeing somebody who had made a decision to work really hard at something at an incredibly high level without any consideration whether he was going to get compensated for it. That's mind-blowing. That's life-changing.
"It's funny. We were members of a cult. And everybody around him ... Guy Clark, Jerry Jeff Walker, everyone ... knew they were around something really, really special. It was obvious. He was often the youngest person (in that circle), but he was the absolute center of the universe for all those people.
"Townes knew how good he was, too. I mean: I know Bruce Springsteen a little bit and Bob Dylan a little bit, and one thing I can say about both of them is that Bob Dylan knows he's Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen knows he's Bruce Springsteen. Townes knew he was Townes Van Zandt. He worked too hard at writing songs at an incredibly high level not to know."
Boots on the table
For most of his life, Townes Van Zandt was indeed a cult figure in American music — the great Texas poet, a sensitive writer, a self-destructive writer, who never received the acclaim his friends thought he deserved. Yet at the end of his life, Townes could be "explained" to new fans with these words from Steve 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."
Two decades later, Steve Earle brings up the statement without prompting: "Do I believe (Townes) was a better songwriter than Bob Dylan? No. Do I believe he deserves to be mentioned in the same paragraph? Absolutely. And I think Bob Dylan believes that, too. You know, Bob never had any trouble letting people know who he was. Townes needed a little help.
"So: I said what I said. I wrote it for a blurb, for a sticker, for a record. Townes said at the time that he really appreciated it, but he didn't think it was a very good idea because he'd seen Bob Dylan's bodyguards. Funny thing is, I toured with Bob Dylan and Townes didn't. Bob had only one bodyguard, and he wasn't that scary. I joined the Dylan tour in '88. And on the very first night, in New Jersey, three songs into the set, Dylan did 'Pancho & Lefty.'"
The lecture
Steve Earle frequently refers to Van Zandt as a great teacher but a bad role model. Like his hero, Earle abused drugs and alcohol as a young man and even went to jail in his 30s after becoming addicted to heroin. "There were times when I told myself I was OK, because I'm not as (messed) up as (Townes)," says Earle. "I'm ashamed of that."
In the early 1990s, Van Zandt became so worried about Earle that he gave him something of a temperance lecture — this at a time when Townes was increasingly notorious for collapsing onstage. Earle came home ripped one night to see Van Zandt's truck in his driveway. Townes was sitting in the living room, playing one of his guitars.
"You look (terrible)," said Townes.
"Yeah," said Earle.
"Your arms look (terrible)," said Townes, recognizing heroin tracks.
"Yeah, I know."
"You got clean needles?" said Townes.
"Yeah."
"Every day?"
"Yeah."
"OK," said Townes. "Let me play you this new song I wrote."
The song: "Marie," one of the saddest, most desperate songs Van Zandt ever wrote, famously covered by Willie Nelson, about a drifter and his doomed, pregnant wife. Earle plays a version on the "Townes" record. "My performance of 'Marie' is sort of my idea of the way Townes might have played it, if he'd written it 10 years earlier than he did."
Pencil and paper
Townes Van Zandt's songs play great on paper. They stand, strong, as unaccompanied poetry: "Being born is going blind/and buying down a thousand times/to echoes strung/on pure temptation." Quoting Robert Frost, Townes once observed that as long as a writer stayed true to meter and phonetics, true meaning would certainly follow.
"Paper was his medium," says Earle. "Townes definitely wrote in a notebook with a pencil, which is the way I learned to write. If you asked Townes who his biggest influences were, he would always say Lightning Hopkins and Robert Frost — and he wasn't kidding.
"That's another difference between Townes and Dylan ... Dylan was into the French poets and the beats. Townes was a throwback. He was into more conventional 19th-century style and early 20th-century lyric poets. That was his deal. I don't know why. But he just locked into that stuff. He was into Robert Frost; he was into Byron. He obviously paid attention in school a bit — a lot more than I did."
Legacy
Steve Earle was playing a show at the Old Quarter in Houston the night he met Townes Van Zandt for the first time in '72. Townes was one of maybe six people in the house. He was heckling Earle between songs, calling out for the kid to play "Wabash Cannonball."
Flustered, hurt and a little tipsy, Earle responded to Townes by ripping out a version of the Van Zandt masterpiece "Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold" — the story of a poker hand in which the cards come alive like characters in "Alice in Wonderland." Maybe, just maybe, it would shut him up. This was Townes Van Zandt, to the end: an exasperating confluence of genius and little boy, a big grin on his face, bottle of booze in hand.
"Townes is not a misunderstood genius. He was a genius, but he shot himself in the foot every chance he got. He became very good at it," says Earle. "I don't know why. I really don't want to get into it. But I think, you know, maybe he had some fear of succeeding. You know: Bob Dylan took a lot of air out of the room, when it came to songwriters. Everybody had a tough row to hoe, distinguishing themselves, once Bob invented our job.
"Townes was very protective of the part of him that was an artist. But I don't agree with everything he believed about how you preserve that. Some of that (the abuse, the outrageousness) was just (bogus) anyway. ... A lot of it was his fault. I was there. I saw it. I don't think he would have gotten rich, necessarily, had things been different. But I think a lot more people would have known who he was."
bbuchholz@statesman.com. 912-2967.
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