In 1993, Doug Easley and Davis McCain got a phone call from a young German guy, Peter Schneider, who wanted to record some Memphis groups as the heart of a compilation called Love Is My Only Crime and then organize a European tour around the record. Easley-McCain Recording was by then a hub for bands that wanted a fringier Memphis experience than Ardent offered (Ardent is where Big Star recorded). Easley-McCain maintained vintage gear and offered the analog tape option when digital was all the rage, but also it was about the atmosphere. It had a large, high-ceilinged recording room that housed good ghosts who made the work easygoing. If anyone checked the clock, it was to see if liquor stores were still open or if it was time for Al Green’s Bible class.
The call from Germany confirmed the studio’s growing reputation. They handled the recording and Peter and I coordinated the tour. We settled on a five-group bill, four from Memphis and Peter’s personal pick of Townes Van Zandt. Townes is the Cormac McCarthy of songwriters; he deals in stories of powerful desperation and desolation, along with the occasional commercial hit, like “Pancho and Lefty.” I traveled as the American road manager and became the show’s emcee.
Davis McCain, left, and Doug Easley, with neighbors Eric and Chris Meyers. (Courtesy of Trey Harrison)
None of us had experienced Townes before. I met him in the hotel lobby that June morning in 1993, Zurich, Switzerland. He was the first one down, shaved, dressed, and ready to load out—a professional. He sat in a high-backed chair, staid and quiet, looking like an album cover. The next afternoon, after loading into the venue, I went to retrieve an item from the bus and found Townes standing in the aisle, one hand on his open suitcase and the other holding a quart of cheap vodka bottom side up. The next two weeks blurred into one of the most fun parties I’ve ever been to.
When off the road, Townes lived in Nashville, two hundred miles from us (and a world apart). Over the two-week tour, bonds formed, and once stateside, he visited our wild bunch, sometimes to record, sometimes for the dance parties. Every visit was one for the books—which is why it must have been so hard to be him. (The most fun I ever had doing laundry was with Townes. We were dancing to “Kung Fu Fighting” in a German bar before eleven A.M. It gave a new meaning to “rinse cycle.”)
Days before he died, he’d been recording at Easley-McCain. His road manager doled out vodka shots at a prescribed pace. You could hear the alcohol flow through him—the rush in his slur and in his giggle—then hear it diminish and fade. He’d fallen just before the sessions and was being pushed in a wheelchair. The situation deteriorated, the songs weren’t flowing, and producer Steve Shelley (drummer from Sonic Youth) terminated the sessions early. Townes was taken back to Nashville, and a doctor there determined he’d broken his hip and had not tended it for a week. He was a wisp of a man before surgery, but he likely would have survived had he not mixed some over-the-counter medicines with his prescriptions. The Memphis crew attended his funeral.
In Germany, after a few days with Townes and his remote, sage demeanor, his ethereality, I began wondering if, rather than a human being, he was some kind of revenant. I grabbed my camera and snapped a few shots of him, knowing if he was a ghost, his image wouldn’t appear on film. That night, I lost my camera.
Mojo, March 1997
At Townes Van Zandt’s funeral, his longtime friend and fellow songwriter Guy Clark stepped to the microphone and, adjusting a guitar around his neck, said, “I guess I booked this gig thirty-some years ago.”
Townes was a man of glorious self-destruction, full of life and talent and scared of both. He’d been drinking cheap vodka for more of his fifty-two years than he hadn’t, and when he died on New Year’s Day of a heart attack following hip surgery, two days after his final recording session, he was as skinny and frail as Hank Williams exactly forty-four years earlier. Like the federales in Townes’s song “Pancho and Lefty,” made famous by Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, and Emmylou Harris, among others, death only let Townes “live so long / out of kindness I suppose.”
To be around Townes was to laugh and have fun; to hear Townes’s songs was to face desperation and dark beauty. He told hilarious stories—about his former shock therapist, about botching record deals, about talking his way out of trouble—and he sang piercing songs. From “Lungs”:
Breath I’ll take and breath I’ll give
And pray the day’s not poison
Stand among the ones that live
In lonely indecision.
In the song “Marie,” one of his saddest, a rambler settles down with a woman for whom he can’t provide; she dies in the cold, pregnant with his child. Other titles: “Waiting Around to Die,” “Nothin’,” “For the Sake of the Song.”
“Living on the road, my friend,” is how “Pancho and Lefty” opens, and it became a credo of sorts for Townes. He toured constantly and extensively, throughout America and Europe, laying himself bare with just an acoustic guitar and his voice, plagued by stage fright but comfortable spinning yarns backstage with strangers. When he hit his full stride, Townes was going slow enough to make music of the space between the notes.
Townes liked to tell jokes. One, fitting, was: An Irishman in the countryside caught a leprechaun and was granted three wishes. He said, “I’d like a glass of Guinness that never ends.” Ping, a full pint appeared. Glug glug, and when he set it down, it was full again. “Well,” said the leprechaun, impatient, “What else?” The farmer said, “Wow, I’ll have two more of those.” (Courtesy of Ebet Roberts)
“He said that every song had to work as a poem on paper first,” songwriter Susanna Clark remembers. “That was a Townes rule.” (When she’d tell her friend that he drank too much, Townes would say, “Hey babe, there’s sober people in India.”)
The personality with which he invested his songs had widespread influence. In 1968, Joe Ely was driving outside dry Lubbock, Texas, to get beer. He saw a hitchhiker with a guitar and knew the guy was lost. Joe drove Townes to the proper highway, and Townes reached into his duffel bag and gave Joe a copy of his brand-new debut album. “The bag had no clothes in it,” Ely remembers, “nothing but copies of this album.” At rehearsal that night, Ely played it for his bandmates in the Flatlanders, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, and Texas music hit a twist in the road.
Others who have recorded his songs include Nanci Griffith, Don Williams, and Steve Earle.
Wealth held no attraction for Townes Van Zandt. He preferred the company of laborers—miners, fisherman, and others who gathered in groups and exchanged stories, lore, and gambling debts. I think he wanted to perceive his own work—songwriting and playing—as a form of manual labor, but it came too natural for him. Sometimes songs wrote themselves, Townes merely the vessel, and profiting from that made him feel guilty when others had to swing a sledgehammer so they could afford Hamburger Helper. Other times, Townes handicapped himself with drink, crippling his skills to even the playing field. At all times, there was more to Townes Van Zandt than we’ll ever know, and I’m sure he had his own explanation for the need to kill himself drinking. As Guy Clark’s statement implies, being his friend meant accepting that he would die trying.
Townes was a wise and funny man from whom a person could learn a lot about a lot. His self-destruction was a part of him, such that all his happiness was shaded by some sadness, and all the jubilation he created around him was tempered by some pity.