Townes Van Zandt - A Far Cry From Dead

by Jim Manion

The late Townes Van Zandt was an enigma to me until 1985.
Having heard a few of his tunes covered by others ("White
Freightliner Blues" from New Grass Revival was the first), and
having heard his name spoken with reverence by other Texan
artists, I still didn't have much of a clue about him until a
chance encounter in Austin.

Shortly after Christmas 1985, on a holiday trip to Austin,
a friend invited me to go with him to a birthday party for
songwriter Blaze Foley, the subject of Lucinda Williams' recent
"Drunken Angel" and an Austin legend in his own right. (Blaze
Foley was murdered in early 1989, blown away by a shotgun while
trying to defend a helpless old drunk.)

Blaze's party was held at the now leveled-and-gone Austin
Outhouse on South Congress, in the same area that is still home
to the Continental Club. The Austin Outhouse was more of a
shack than a building, all barnwood and smelling of stale beer,
but it was a popular hangout back then for South Austin's blue
collar workers, bikers, and assorted denizens. The Outhouse was
also the spiritual home base of some of Austin's greatest
performing songwriters, known and unknown. If I had a list of
who all was there that night I'm sure it would read like a
"who's who", but note-taking wasn't on my agenda. With Foley's
proclivity for drink, and large half-gallon bottles of booze on
each table, the night quickly turned into a loud and rowdy one
...until Townes Van Zandt took the small stage with his guitar.
During the twenty minutes or so Van Zandt was on stage,
the energy in the room totally shifted. A hushed focus fell on
the room, all eyes and ears on the gaunt and weathered Van
Zandt. He barely opened his eyes as he softly picked his
guitar, singing powerfully elegant tales from the wise and
poetic side of down-and-out. Goosebumps spread over my skin in
waves as the mesmerizing musical power of his potent aura
reached out and grabbed my soul.

Although I have no recall of what songs he played that
night, I have a vivid imprint of his presence, of a very earthy
man who was also not completely of this earth. A man who sang
in simple yet lucid language, who fearlessly reached into a
core of deep muse most artists only hit now and then, if ever.
To paraphrase a song by David Olney, Townes Van Zandt drank the
water from the deeper well.

My experience with seeing him that night fourteen years
ago in Austin has been with me ever since and because of it I
"get" his music in ways I surely wouldn't had I not been there.
And, it helps me immensely as I draw on those moments to help
convey the importance of Townes Van Zandt and his new
posthumous release on Arista/Austin, A Far Cry From Dead.
Eric Paul, producer of A Far Cry From Dead sums up
Townes Van Zandt's creative gifts succinctly, "Townes was a
song man. You have to remember that he was capable of sitting
in front of an audience, as large or small as it might have
been, with himself and a guitar delivering some of the most
stunning performances you would ever see. He's one of the
greatest songwriters of the last thirty or forty years. Nobody
uses lyrics like Townes Van Zandt, the man spoke in parables
and he was very deep. Even in his darkest songs there was a ray
of hope."

Long-time friend Jimmie Dale Gilmore puts it this way, "I
believe that Townes Van Zandt is one of the prime examples of
the roots/blues/folk hybrid that surfaced in the late '50s and
early '60s, bearing fruit as a medium for the invention of
something completely new. His songs were in that style, but
there's something so uniquely his voice in all of it, both in
terms of his performance and in the content. His songs were art
songs, crafted and composed and creatively beyond the matrix of
the music at the root of them. Like Dylan, he was a creative
artist forming a body of work that wasn't just interpretation.
"He took the music he grew up with and used it as a medium
to do something new with. It was very individual yet universal
at the same time, which is characteristic of great artists. I
think that Townes stands out way more than the attention that
was paid to him at the time. There was a devoted following, but
the mass audience never really got to find out about him,
except maybe knowing he was the guy that wrote 'Pancho and
Lefty'."

Jeanene Van Zandt, his widow who was together with Townes
since late 1980, is the executive producer of A Far Cry From
Dead and all around keeper of the flame. Asked about Townes'
effect on people she said, "It was amazing to watch the
audiences spellbound for hours and hours. He would just play
and play for two and three hours, grown men with tears running
down their cheeks, absolute pindrop silence the whole time, and
if anyone spoke everyone in the place gave them a dirty look."
The source of Townes Van Zandt's deepness is complex, but
in the liner notes of his 1978 release Flyin' Shoes
writer Lola Scobey nails it simply, "Townes carries the terror
and the sorrow of a deeply sensitive man who has looked into
the abyss and seen...the abyss."
In poor health in the last years of his life from the
complications of years of self-medicating his deep seated pain
and a ramblin',gamblin' lifestyle, Townes Van Zandt died of a
heart attack on January 1st, 1997. He died after unwisely but
enthusiastically pushing himself, while in very poor health,
through the first recording sessions for a project initiated by
Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth for their Ecstatic Peace imprint
with Geffen. Still in the Geffen vaults, these uncompleted
sessions will most likely never be released.
(An excellent account of Townes Van Zandt's last sessions
and his last days can be found in the Jan./Feb. 1999 issue of
No Depression in a piece entitled "A Gentleman and a
Shaman - The last days and sad death of Townes Van Zandt" by
Matt Hanks.)

He obviously pushed himself because he knew he was so
close to the grave, but he was also excited by the prospect of
recording with younger musicians who respected him, in this
case drummer Shelley and guitarist Tim Foljahn, a free-thinking
roots-based duo otherwise known as Two Dollar Guitar.
Jeanene Van Zandt explained Townes' enthusiasm for this
new attention from a younger generation, "He was really psyched
that "Kathleen" was a number one single on the British charts
for the band Tindersticks. Mudhoney and Jimmie Dale Gilmore
recorded "Buckskin Stallion", and The Walkabouts recorded
"Lungs". He was absolutely thrilled about that - he said,
'Darlin', I think I'm goin' grunge!' I said, 'What does that
mean?'. Townes said, 'Well, I think it means you can wear
anything you want and you don't have to bathe. I've been grunge
all along!' Then he started saying, 'I'm the mold that grunge
was grown in.'

"But seriously, to him this meant that his music would
definitely live forever. Another generation was coming to him.
Townes didn't care about hit records or anything, he told me he
made records for posterity. What he cared about was how many
learning institutions would be studying his work a hundred
years from now."

The story of A Far Cry From Dead is a fascinating
one, but first we have to go back to the beginning.....

Townes Van Zandt was born on March 7, 1944 into the upper
crust of Texas society. His great-great-great grandfather,
Isaac Van Zandt, was the ambassador to the United States from
the Republic of Texas. His great-grandfather was a founding
father of the city of Fort Worth, and his father was a wealthy
oil man. As a grade schooler Townes was recognized for his near
genius IQ and was being groomed for a career in law and
politics, attending military school in his early high school
years while his family had dreams of him becoming the governor
of Texas. This all unraveled quickly as Townes' high
intelligence and ultra-sensitivity got the best of him, leading
to a mental breakdown, diagnosed as manic-depression with
schizophrenic tendencies, the resulting hospitalization and
insulin shock therapy wiping out much of his past.
After this harrowing experience, with his deep wisdom
still in him albeit in a rawer form, Townes hit the road in the
early sixties with the vision of expressing his haunted and
deep thoughts through words and music. Inspired by the trinity
of Hank Williams, Bob Dylan and Lightnin' Hopkins, his musical
road took him through the heart and soul of this country
countless times, manifesting his role as the outsider
troubadour singing deep songs of inner struggle and timeless
illumination. Songs that spoke of the darkest depths of human
emotion, and the light at the end of the tunnel. Songs that
many times used geographic and topographic metaphors for
roadmaps to hidden places in the soul. All while sounding
distinctly American, as real as the grit on a Texas backroad.
Along the way, his path crossed some of the most profound
and expressive artists of our time, inspiring each one of them
to reach deeper and express themselves fearlessly. Steve Earle,
Guy Clark, Eric Anderson, Lucinda Williams, Joe Ely, Emmylou
Harris, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Nanci
Griffith, Butch Hancock, Gillian Welch, Richard Buckner, David
Olney, Lyle Lovett and countless others were affected by his
natural touch for songwriting and performing that was a
mainline to the soul. And everyone who crossed paths with
Townes had their lives changed, sometimes subtly, sometimes
in major ways.

One such encounter is nearly legendary, but is worth
repeating, told recently during my phone interview with Jimmie
Dale Gilmore. Gilmore explained, "Way early on when Joe Ely and
I were just acquaintances and mutual fans of each other in
Lubbock, Joe was out driving in this Volkswagon he had and he
picked up a hitch-hiker who was carrying a pack with some
clothes and a bunch of records in it. It was Townes, and he was
carrying copies of his record Our Mother The Mountain).
We had never heard of Townes and Joe called me up to tell me
about it.

"At the time, we were both moving away from bands to do
solo stuff, and Joe thought it was so funny that this guy was
hitch-hiking with his clothes and his records, and so I went
over to Joe's to hear it. It became one of my favorite records.
We were just enthralled by it. We became dedicated fans. We
didn't really copy Townes because we had already pretty much
each developed our own styles, but the record had this effect
of a confirmation that we were doing the right thing musically.
The spirit of it was so similar to our approach. He was going
for the heart from the very beginning.

"Also, from that afternoon on, that's when Joe Ely and I
started really hanging out together. Many, many years later I
got to tell this story to Townes, who just loved it, he was
very proud of it. It's like a storybook kind of thing, but in
this odd way he entered into and changed the direction of our
lives."

With the release of his first string of albums, Townes Van
Zandt entered into and changed the direction of many lives.
Eight albums were released between 1968 and 1978, including
1969's Our Mother the Mountain (Poppy/Tomato), considered
by many fans to be his finest early work, and the
quintessential live recording from 1973 Live at the Old
Quarter, Houston (Tomato). There is a nine year gap between
1978's Flyin' Shoes (Tomato) and 1987's At My
Window, the first in a string of releases for Sugar Hill.
It was during this period, in 1980, that Townes Van Zandt
met Jeanene, the major soulmate of his life. Introduced by a
mutual friend in Austin the day after John Lennon was killed,
Jeanene and Townes both looked at their meeting as proof of
reincarnation and celebrated the day of their first meeting as
their wedding anniversary. After a number of wild years on the
road and the birth of their two children, Katie Belle and Will,
the couple moved to the country outside of Nashville,
Tennessee.

As time went on, Jeanene became more and more involved
with Townes' business affairs. "I dealt with the lawyers, I
dealt with the labels, I dealt with the accountants, I did the
taxes, I produced demos and pitched his songs. Much of the time
it got very frustrating because he couldn't handle fame and
every time he got close to it he would sabotage it. His home
was on the stage, he was very comfortable there, but he didn't
want to be owned by anybody and worried that if he had a big
major record deal they would try to reshape him and try to put
a hat on him, make him walk the walk and talk the talk - but
Townes Van Zandt did what Townes Van Zandt wanted to do and
that was it! And if fame got close, every time it would get
close he would insult somebody, or somehow make sure he
squashed the deal."

Despite these frustrations, Jeanene Van Zandt had no
doubts about the special gift her man possessed. "He always
said, 'The air is full of songs and all you have to do is reach
up and grab one.' Sometimes he would say they'd float through a
window, or you just had to be sitting in the right chair, or
they would strike him in the top of his head and shoot out his
right arm and come out of his pen. There were very few he
actually sat and crafted. He was very secretive about them,
too. You weren't supposed to look at a song until it was
finished. I would usually be the first one he would play it for
- he'd ask me for a little feedback on tempo and things, but I
would never hear them until they were pretty much finished."
"Townes wanted to save the world with a song and he always
said, 'I want to write the perfect song, one that will save a
life. If I can't save the world, at least I want to save a
life.' And I would always have to remind him, 'Townes, you've
probably already done that, you've gotten so many letters from
people telling you just that!'. Townes was just so sensitive to
everything. He would say, I can't be happy as long as there's
one starving child in Africa, as long as there's anyone in
pain. Inside he was really a happy guy, but these bouts with
depression were just so debilitating. It would knock him down
so low he would say, 'I know it will pass, but God, it hurts so
bad.' Then he would snap out of it and he'd be a happy go lucky
guy."

More often than not, Townes chose to drown his pain with
alcohol. Jeanene struggled constantly with this. When he was in
the hospital and nearly died in 1994, according to Jeanene,
"they told me that if I ever try to dry him out, if he ever
gets real sick again, he'll die. At that point I realized I had
to stop trying to save him, I had to stop trying to get him to
stop drinking and all that. The doctorssaid he was one of the
"one-in-a-hundred", an incurable alcoholic. God knows he
tried."

The spiritual connection between Townes and Jeanene was
very deep, and she believes it still is. "I still feel his
presence every day. He predicted his own death. He told
hundreds of people that he would die of a heart attack at age
52, and that's exactly what he did." His shamanic nature was
not an act, and Jeanene feels that the powerful aura of Townes'
soul attracted spirits. She tells stories of things that would
happen around their home that sound like scenes from
Poltergiest.

" He basically believed all things were possible and he
saw angels and he saw demons. He saw these things. He did a gig
in Alaska once and I had flown my stepson J.T. up their to
surprise Townes and finish the tour with us. Townes was pretty
wasted at this gig and after his set Townes told JT, 'You know,
the only reason I didn't fall off my stool was because there
was a beautiful white angel standing behind me with her wings
wrapped around me holding me up. That's the only reason I
didn't fall over.' A bit later this shaman priestess from an
Alaskan tribe came up and told Townes, 'The only reason you
didn't fall off the stool was because there was a white angel
standing behind you with her wings wrapped around you'. Townes
said, 'I know."

The energy and spirit of Townes Van Zandt was a definite
factor in the production of A Far Cry From Dead,
according to both Jeanene Van Zandt and producer Eric Paul. The
album's genesis lies in recordings Townes made (mostly at his
neighbor Ron Garrett's home studio between 1989 and 1991.) It
was a relatively sober stretch of Townes' life, and he got in
the habit of recording in the morning, after coffee with just
his guitar and voice. Before his death, he passed the DAT tapes
on to Jeanene and said, "Here Babe, I think there's some good
stuff on here, hang on to these." Jeanene never actually
listened to them until Thanksgiving 1997 when she asked Eric
Paul to help her make copies for safekeeping as part of her
archiving project.

Jeanene was surprised by their quality, especially the
voice Townes was in for the recordings, and Eric Paul felt they
could definitely be used as basic tracks for a new release. At
the time, though, Jeanene was not in the financial or emotional
position to even think about taking the project on.
Time passed and Jeanene found herself lamenting that the
only remaining recordings were mostly live documents of Townes
on the downhill slide to his death. Then, "It was like Townes
hit me in the back of the head and said, 'Babe, you've got all
those recordings I gave you, you go make your record.' I
immediately called Eric Paul and told him to start booking
studio time and musicians. It was like Townes was telling me to
go fearlessly, don't worry about labels, don't worry about
money, just do it. So that's what I did."

"We were probably about halfway through the record and we
were already knowing it was a great record and a life-changing
event for all of us. But Eric was concerned about what label we
were going to pitch it to. I said I wasn't worried about it,
Townes would send me the right label. Well, that very day we
were going to lunch and Eric's cell phone rang. It was someone
from Arista records who told him that a memo had come across
her desk and that they were looking for Townes Van Zandt
recordings for their Arista Austin label. Essentially she said,
'We need The Man, we need Townes Van Zandt' and she knew Eric
Paul had worked with Townes previously. Eric hung up and said,
'Well, there's your label, that was Arista.', and I said, "Oh
good, let's go eat!'

"Everything has been like that with this project - every
door that I needed opened, opened. I didn't have to bang my
head up against doors, they were swinging open in front of me,
I didn't even have to break stride. The whole process was just
incredible, it just doesn't happen this way."

A Far Cry From Dead mostly revisits some of Townes'
strongest material from his early period, with the exception of
the haunting "Sanitarium Blues", a haunting tale of death and
dying which was the last song he ever wrote, and "Squash", a
humorous ditty about roadkill. But where most posthumous
overdub projects are sketchy propositions of the "what were
they thinking?" variety, A Far Cry From Dead has the feel
of a well made record by an artist very much alive.
Eric Paul explained the synchronistic process of the
project's completion. "I first worked with Townes at Willie
Nelson's Perdenales Studio in Austin in the late-'80s. It's so
fascinating to me that I ended up producing this record after
his death, it's almost like he knew. I look back on it now, on
our relationship, it was very special. For some reason, in the
time we spent together, he was able to convey a lot of feelings
that I remembered vividly when I was working on A Far Cry
From Dead. It was by no accident that I became involved in
this project, Jeanene knew that Townes and I had a musical
relationship and she trusted me.

"This whole thing was special from the beginning. The most
important thing was Jeanene Van Zandt's presence. I didn't have
the option of the usual sounding board of the artist by my
side. And, the relationship between myself and Jeanene during
the making of this record was not the typical relationship
between producer and executive producer. Unlike most executive
producers, she was present through the entire process. That was
important because it took the interplay between the two of us
to make this happen. It would have been a lonely road for me if
I hadn't had Jeanene there."

Jeanene Van Zandt agreed, "It was easy for me to help make
this record because Townes is such a big part of me. I was
like, 'Townes would like that, or, Townes wouldn't like that.'
If it was something I knew he would like, we would use it.
There was no one big ego in the room, no "suits" telling us
what to do. It was me and Eric and the musicians, and of course
he was there, Townes' presence was so strong in the
studio, everybody felt it."

Some of the musicians Eric Paul selected for the project
include Michael Spriggs (acoustic string instruments), Richard
Bennett (electric guitars), Larry Knechtel (keyboards), Bob Ray
(bass), Craig Cramf (drums), Kenny Malone (drums and
percussion), Charlie McCoy (harmonica and vibes), and Jim
Calvin (banjo). Some knew Townes better than others, but all
felt the special vibe of the project.

According to Eric Paul, "There was definitely a vibe in
the studio during the whole thing in that everyone knew that
this was something special happening. Every musician that was
there got into what they were doing on a sensitive level and a
very deep level. I believe that no matter what your religious
beliefs are, Townes' spirit was definitely there. It showed up
on tape."

Although a meticulous process, it was a labor of love for
Eric Paul. Starting with the raw guitar and vocal tracks which
were dubbed over to multi-track, Paul then brought in Michael
Spriggs to reinforce the guitar foundations of the songs. From
there, it was the slow process of adding each instrument and
getting it right. The result is a recording that is not out of
sync, uncoordinated or inappropriate. From screaming electric
guitars and driving drum beats to subtle percussion and
keyboard nuances, each song takes on an enhancement of its
original character. The end result is a complete album that has
a life of its own.

Another factor in the album's rich sound is that besides
the source material being from DAT and the final digital
mastering for CD reproduction, the rest of the project was done
entirely in the analog realm - analog multi-tracking to noise-
free tape, and analog mixing through a 30 year old API console
to analog tape. The sonics of the project stay true to the
album's title - not cold, not dead, very warm and very alive.
Longtime fans will recognize the songlist as holding some
of Townes Van Zandt's best - "Dollar Bill Blues", "Pancho and
Lefty", "Rex's Blues", "Tower Song", "For the Sake of the
Song", "Snake Mountain Blues" and more. The album's release
should garner Townes Van Zandt a whole new core of fans, along
with more airplay than he ever received while he was living.
Just like he predicted.

Eric Paul himself predicts, "I think his career is about
to take off on a large scale for the first time with this
record. I think this record is going to have a strong impact on
the music community in general, and worldwide. It's real music
in that its not sequenced, there's no click track - this feels
more pure despite the challenges of producing it after his
death. It comes down to the feel of his music, it's not the
modern pulse.

"I think it is totally amazing what is happening here with
a relatively unknown artist who had a profound effect on the
evolution of his craft but didn't become fully known until
after his death. I feel like what's happening with Townes is
that there are a huge amount of people just discovering his
music, and many more on the verge of that discovery."
And what a discovery. His old friend Jimmie Dale Gilmore
says it best about the deepness those on-the-verge fans are
about to experience, "In his songs, Townes is usually talking
metaphorically about consciousness and the primal, universal
battle of darkness and light. Townes was so articulate about
it, he was so passionately feeling that he spent a whole lot of
energy trying to escape the intensity of his feelings. That's
really clear to me, especially looking back on it.
"He had a lot of command of the language. He was a poet,
and there's kind of a tradition of that, the depressed
outsider. But he also had this incredible sense of humor, and
despite the heaviness, that was a real common bond among all of
us who knew him. He sidestepped his pain with humor. There was
a mixture of darkness, light and slapstick going on.
"Townes could make us feel his pain, laugh and feel
hopeful all at the same time."

We all got holes to fill
Them holes are all that's real
Some fall on you like a storm
Sometimes you dig your own
But choice is yours to make
And time is yours to take
Some dive into the sea
Some toil upon the stone
To live's to fly
Low and high
So shake the dust off of your wings
And the sleep out of your eyes

"To Live Is To Fly" - Townes Van Zandt

(This is the unedited version of an article published in the
July 16, 1999 issue of Totally Adult, a radio trade
magazine. Jim Manion can be reached at ionman@bluemarble.net )

Copyright 1999-2000 All names, images, music, and other items contained within are copyrighted material of the respective artists and/or their representative agents, unless otherwise specified (where known). All material presented is strictly intended to increase public exposure and awareness of the music of Townes Van Zandt and other Texas based/related musicians. If anyone has objections to the use of any of these, please contact Jeanene or Seth and said items will be removed.