Townes Van Zandt

• 1. Introduction

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  Townes Van Zandt earned one of the boldest compliments in American songwriting from his friend Steve Earle. Earle said Van Zandt was "the best songwriter in the whole world and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that."

  Steve Earle was not alone in his devotion. Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Norah Jones and Billy Strings are among the many artists who have recorded or performed Van Zandt's songs. Meanwhile the man himself spent much of his life touring bars, colleges and festivals, lodging in motel rooms or in the homes of friends.

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• 2. Boyhood and Breakdown

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  John Townes Van Zandt was born on the 7th of March 1944 in Fort Worth, Texas, into a family with money and a long Texas pedigree. He was the great-great-great-grandson of Isaac Van Zandt, a prominent leader of the Republic of Texas. He was also the great-great-grandnephew of K. M. Van Zandt, a Confederate major who helped found Fort Worth.

  His father, Harris Williams Van Zandt, was a corporate lawyer whose career kept uprooting the family through the 1950s and 1960s. His mother was Dorothy Townes. Townes had two siblings, Donna, born in 1941, and Bill, born in 1949. In 1952 the family spent six months in Midland, Texas, before moving on to Billings, Montana.

  At Christmas in 1956, Harris gave his son a guitar, and Townes practiced it while wandering the countryside. Years later he told an interviewer that "seeing Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show was the starting point for me becoming a guitar player." He had assumed Elvis owned all the money, Cadillacs and girls in the world, for doing nothing but playing guitar and singing. "That made a big impression on me," he said.

  The family moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1958, and Townes remembered his years there fondly. He visited often as an adult and sang about the state in "My Proud Mountains", "Colorado Girl" and "Snowin' on Raton". He was a good student and active in team sports. A grade-school test showed a high IQ, and his parents began steering him toward a career as a lawyer or senator.

  Dreading another move, Townes chose to attend the Shattuck School in Faribault, Minnesota. He scored 1170 on the SAT in January 1962. His family soon relocated to Houston, Texas.

  In 1962 he enrolled at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he wrote poetry and listened to records by Lightnin' Hopkins and Hank Williams. In the spring of his second year, his parents flew out to Boulder and brought him back to Houston. They were worried about his binge drinking and bouts of depression.

  At the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, doctors diagnosed him with manic depression. He received three months of insulin shock therapy, a treatment now discredited. It erased much of his long-term memory. His mother later said that her "biggest regret in life was that she had allowed that treatment to occur."

  In 1965 he was accepted into the pre-law program at the University of Houston. Soon after, he tried to join the Air Force and was turned down. A doctor labelled him "an acute manic-depressive who has made minimal adjustments to life." Then his father died in January 1966 at the age of 52. Townes quit school and took to the road for the first time, inspired by his songwriting heroes. He would die at that same age.

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• 3. Houston to Nashville

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  In 1965 Van Zandt began playing regular shows at the Jester Lounge in Houston for $10 a night. When the Jester closed, he moved to the Sand Mountain Coffee House, where he performed often and occasionally lived. In these Houston clubs he met Lightnin' Hopkins, Guy Clark, Jerry Jeff Walker and Doc Watson.

  His early sets leaned on covers of songs by Hopkins, Bob Dylan and others, plus original novelty numbers such as "Fraternity Blues." In 1966 his father urged him to stop playing other people's songs and write his own.

  Around 1968, Van Zandt shared a home with Roky Erickson, the singer of the 13th Floor Elevators. Erickson suggested he audition as the band's new bassist, even though Van Zandt played guitar and had never touched a bass. When Tommy Hall learned this, he threw him out of the audition.

  Also in 1968, songwriter Mickey Newbury met Van Zandt in a Houston coffee shop and persuaded him to go to Nashville, Tennessee. There Newbury introduced him to "Cowboy" Jack Clement, who became his longtime producer.

  Muddy Waters, The Rolling Stones, Blind Willie McTell, Tchaikovsky and Jefferson Airplane all made Van Zandt's list of major influences, alongside Hopkins, Dylan and Williams.

  The years between 1968 and 1973 proved to be his most prolific. He released six albums: For the Sake of the Song, Our Mother the Mountain, Townes Van Zandt, Delta Momma Blues, High, Low and In Between, and The Late Great Townes Van Zandt. Songs written for them included "To Live Is to Fly", "Pancho and Lefty" and "If I Needed You". They lifted him to near-legend status among songwriters in America and Europe.

  In 1972 he recorded tracks for an album with the working title Seven Come Eleven. It stayed unreleased for years because of a dispute between his manager Kevin Eggers and producer Jack Clement. Eggers either could not or would not pay for the studio sessions, so Clement erased the master tapes. Before the erasure, Eggers sneaked into the studio and taped rough mixes onto a cassette. Songs from the doomed sessions later appeared on The Nashville Sessions, released in 1993.

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• 4. Cult Following

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  In 1975 the documentary Heartworn Highways put Van Zandt on screen beside Guy Clark, Steve Earle, Steve Young, Gamble Rogers, Charlie Daniels and David Allan Coe. His segment was shot at his run-down trailer home in Austin, Texas. The camera finds him drinking straight whiskey in the middle of the day, shooting and playing with guns, and performing "Waitin' Around to Die" and "Pancho and Lefty." He was the only person in the film who played directly to the camera. According to Steve Earle, he "stole that entire film." Also on screen were his soon-to-be second wife Cindy and a dog named Geraldine, a large, "keenly intelligent" half-wolf, half-husky.

  Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas came out in 1977. It captured Van Zandt alone at a 1973 concert before a small audience, with less elaborate production than many of his earlier records. Reviews were positive, and many listeners rank it among the best albums he ever made.

  In the mid-1970s Van Zandt split from his longtime manager Kevin Eggers and hired John Lomax III, grandson of the folk music historian John Lomax. Lomax started a fan club advertised only in small ads at the back of music magazines. Even so, he promptly began receiving hundreds of passionate letters from around the world. Some writers said the songs had helped steady them while they struggled with depression.

  In 1978 the singer fired Lomax and rehired Eggers, then signed with Eggers' new label, Tomato Records. He recorded Flyin' Shoes the following year, and did not release another album until At My Window in 1987. Despite critical acclaim, he stayed a cult figure, usually playing small venues, often to crowds of fewer than fifty people. In the 1990s he began moving toward larger venues and made a handful of television appearances.

  For much of the 1970s he lived outside Nashville in a tin-roofed shack with bare boards and no heat, plumbing or telephone. He came into town only occasionally to play shows. The next decade would carry his songs onto the radio in other voices.

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• 5. Covers and Encounters

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  In 1981 Emmylou Harris and Don Williams took "If I Needed You" to No. 3 on the country chart. Two years later, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard did even better with "Pancho and Lefty", sending it to No. 1. Van Zandt made a small cameo appearance in the video.

  Songs such as "Marie" and "The Hole" kept arriving in his later years, even as he recorded less often. His voice and singing style had changed, in part because of drug addiction and alcoholism.

  On the 21st of June 1986, Van Zandt and Bob Dylan met by chance outside a costume shop in the South Congress district of Austin. According to Susanna Clark, Van Zandt turned down repeated invitations to write songs with Dylan. Dylan was reportedly a "big fan" who claimed to own all of Van Zandt's records. Van Zandt admired Dylan's songs but did not care for his celebrity.

  Johnny Guess described a second meeting that Dylan arranged. The Drag in Austin was shut down because Dylan was in town. Van Zandt drove his motorhome into the cordoned-off area, and Dylan climbed aboard and asked to hear him play several songs.

  In May and June 1990, Van Zandt opened for the Cowboy Junkies on a two-month tour of the United States and Canada. The shows put him in front of a younger generation of fans. In return he wrote "Cowboy Junkies Lament", a song with a verse about each member of the band. By then he had been married three times.

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• 6. Marriages and Money

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  Van Zandt married Fran Peterson on the 26th of August 1965. Their son, John Townes "J.T." Van Zandt II, was born in Houston on the 11th of April 1969. The couple divorced on the 16th of January 1970.

  He began dating Cindy Morgan in 1974, and they married in 1978. Cindy was 15 and Van Zandt was 30 when they met, though she initially hid her age. They grew estranged for much of the early 1980s and divorced in Travis County, Texas on the 10th of February 1983. They had no children.

  Around the time of their separation in April 1993, Jeanene coaxed him into signing his publishing rights and recording royalties over to her and their children. His only income afterward came from concerts. Even then he often visited his ex-wife and handed over the money in his pockets. They divorced on the 2nd of May 1994 but stayed close, and Jeanene became an executor of his estate.

  After the divorce, his only possessions were a 1989 GMC truck with a camper shell, a 1984 Honda Shadow motorcycle and a 1983 Starwind 22-foot boat named Dorothy. He also kept sole ownership of his family inheritance of oil lease and mineral rights.

  Claudia Winterer of Darmstadt, Germany, met Van Zandt in November 1995 at one of his concerts in Hanau. Their relationship was long-distance. He told friends he planned to marry her, but they never became engaged. It was barely a year old when the winter of 1996 began.

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• 7. Addiction and Final Days

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  Van Zandt battled heroin and alcohol throughout his adult life. At times he got drunk on stage and forgot the words to his own songs. At one point his heroin habit was so intense that he offered Kevin Eggers the publishing rights to every song on his first four albums for $20. Friends saw him inject not only heroin but also cocaine, vodka and a mixture of rum and Coke. On at least one occasion he injected heroin in front of his son J.T., who was eight.

  In 1976 Harold Eggers, Kevin's brother, was hired as his tour manager and 24-hour caretaker, a partnership that lasted for the rest of the singer's life. Though Van Zandt was years older, Harold later called him his "first child." Nearly a dozen rehab stays dotted the 1970s and 1980s. Medical records show he believed his drinking had become a problem around 1973, and by 1982 he drank at least a pint of vodka daily.

  Doctors' notes from those years record, "He admits to hearing voices, mostly musical voices," and "Affect is blunted and mood is sad. Judgment and insight is impaired." He was prescribed the antidepressant Zoloft and the mood stabilizer lithium. His longest and last stretch of sobriety as an adult lasted about a year, across 1989 and 1990.

  In 1994 Van Zandt was admitted to a hospital to detox, and a doctor warned Jeanene that trying again could kill him. He grew increasingly frail through the mid-1990s. Friends said he seemed to have "withered."

  In early 1996, Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth contacted Van Zandt about recording an album for the band's Ecstatic Peace label, funded by Geffen. Van Zandt agreed, and sessions were set for Memphis in late December. On the 19th or the 20th of December he fell down the concrete stairs outside his home and badly injured his hip. He lay outside for an hour, then dragged himself indoors and called Jeanene. She sent their friends Royann and Jim Calvin to check on him. He told them he had hurt himself getting out of bed and refused treatment. He spent Christmas week on their couch, unable to get up even to use the bathroom.

  Determined to make the album, he arrived at the Memphis studio in a wheelchair pushed by Harold Eggers. Shelley canceled the sessions because of his erratic behavior and drunkenness. Van Zandt returned to Nashville and agreed to hospital care only after eight days had passed. On the 31st of December, X-rays showed an impacted fracture of the left femoral neck, and surgeons performed several corrective operations.

  Jeanene told the surgeon that a previous rehab doctor had warned her detox could kill him. The staff explained that detoxing a "late-term alcoholic" at home would be unwise and that he would fare better under hospital supervision. She did not heed them and checked him out. The physicians, expecting him to drink as soon as he left, refused to prescribe painkillers.

  By early the next morning, Van Zandt showed signs of delirium tremens. Jeanene hurried him to her car and gave him a flask of vodka to ward off the delirium. Back at home in Smyrna, Tennessee, she said, he became "lucid, in a real good mood, calling his friends on the phone." Jim Calvin shared a marijuana joint with him, and he was given about four Tylenol PM tablets.

  While Jeanene was on the phone with Susanna Clark, their son Will noticed that Townes had stopped breathing and "looked dead." Jeanene tried CPR, "screaming his name between breaths." Townes Van Zandt died in the early morning hours of the 1st of January 1997, at 52. His official cause of death was "natural" cardiac arrhythmia.

  Two services were held, one in Texas for family and another in a large Nashville church for friends and fans. Some of his ashes were placed under a headstone in the Van Zandt family plot at the Dido Cemetery in Dido, Texas, near Fort Worth, the city where he was born.

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• 8. Legacy

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  In the years right after Van Zandt's death, Kevin Eggers issued 14 albums of new and previously unreleased material without the consent of the estate. The estate was represented by Jeanene Van Zandt and his three children. Eggers claimed a 50% interest in eighty of the songs. After nearly ten years of legal battles, the court sided with the estate and barred Eggers from reproducing or distributing any of Van Zandt's songs.

  The proceedings revealed that Van Zandt's yearly income had climbed above $100,000 in the years before his death. Royalties from covers by Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett, Merle Haggard and Cowboy Junkies drove much of it. A separate out-of-court settlement in 2006 gave the Van Zandts conditional control of the mastered recordings held by Harold Eggers. Harold kept 50% ownership of seven albums and some royalties on the rest.

  Steve Earle's coffee-table boast was printed on a sticker on the packaging of At My Window, to Van Zandt's displeasure. The press kept repeating it, to the embarrassment of both men. In 2009 Earle told the New York Times, "Did I ever believe that Townes was better than Bob Dylan? No." Yet he ended the same article with, "As a songwriter, you won't find anybody better." Earle named his eldest son, the musician Justin Townes Earle, after Van Zandt. He wrote "Fort Worth Blues" as a tribute in the late 1990s and released Townes, an album of Van Zandt covers, in 2009.

  In 1994 the Israeli singer David Broza performed with Van Zandt at a Writers in the Round concert in Houston. When Van Zandt died, he left behind a shoe box of unreleased poems and lyrics, with a request that Broza set them to music. The result was the album Night Dawn: The Unpublished Poetry of Townes Van Zandt.

  In 2012 Van Zandt was inducted into the Texas Heritage Songwriters Hall of Fame. On the 18th of June 2015 he entered the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame, alongside Asleep at the Wheel, Loretta Lynn, Guy Clark and Flaco Jimenez. Gillian Welch inducted him with stories of how he had come to her early gigs in Nashville and bolstered her confidence in writing sad songs. His reach extended to heavy music too. In July 2012 Neurot Recordings released a three-way tribute split featuring Scott Kelly and Steve Von Till of Neurosis and doom metal veteran Scott "Wino" Weinrich.

  The Coen Brothers closed their 1998 film The Big Lebowski with Van Zandt's version of The Rolling Stones' "Dead Flowers", from his album Roadsongs. Since his death, his family has licensed his recordings to shows and films including Breaking Bad, True Detective, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, In Bruges and Hell or High Water. His "Buckskin Stallion Blues" appeared in the 2017 film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. In the 2018 film Blaze, Charlie Sexton played him.

  The 2004 documentary Be Here to Love Me earned a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Georgia Christgau of the Village Voice called it "sympathetic but frank." John Kruth published the biography To Live's to Fly in 2007, and critics gave it mixed reviews. In April 2008 the University of North Texas Press released Robert Earl Hardy's A Deeper Blue, which took more than eight years of research. Kirkus Reviews described it as a "poignant, clear and vivid portrait."

  Brian T. Atkinson's book I'll Be Here in the Morning: The Songwriting Legacy of Townes Van Zandt appeared on New Year's Day 2012, exactly fifteen years after Van Zandt's death. It gathers interviews with Guy Clark, Kris Kristofferson and Billy Joe Shaver, along with younger admirers such as Scott Avett and Jim James.

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