View from the Mountains: Music, Culture, and More

I’ve embarked on a summer reading program with the modestly ambitious title “A Book a Week,” and I’ve just finished week 1.  Our Man in Havana is one of Graham Greene’s “entertainments,” his descriptor for his less literary novels.  One of the entertainments, The Comedians, is among my favorite books, but it’s been so long since I read it I can’t say why.  Our Man in Havana is as dry, funny, and absurd as a full-time job, and is about a man, Wormold, who takes on a second job to pay for his teenage daughter’s horse, among other things.  He’s a vacuum salesman who becomes a spy.  He knows nothing about spying, so he makes up reports, including a hilarious bit where he sends in sketches of a secret weapon being built in the Cuban mountains that looks remarkably like a giant vacuum cleaner.  This book was written in 1958, before there really were secret weapons in the Cuban mountains, and Greene’s presience makes the book less funny but more poignant.  His powers of prophecy also make The Quiet American, a novel set in pre-war Viet Nam more than just an “entertainment.”

This book is a good for summer because it reminds me of the adventure and the drawbacks of foreign travel.  As an undergaduate and graduate student, I managed to get out of the country five times in seven years, but since then, all my travelling has been in the US.  Coincidentally, I haven’t been abroad since 9/11, and it’s time to go.  Only money and inertia (I am tempted to say torpor) stand in my way.  So I took a little trip to Cuba with Graham Greene, and like always, travelling abroad makes being home better.

For my first post of 2009, I wanted to let you in on a poorly guarded secret:

Nashville’s Lambchop.  My wife and I saw them last night for Valentine’s Day at the Grey Eagle in Asheville.  I have two of their records:  Nixon (2000) and What Another Man Spills (1998).  Both are lush, with horns, steel guitar, lots of guitars and piano and organ.  Both are slow, like eighty beats per minute slow and atmospheric.  It’s makeout music for rural hipsters.  And both feature the stylings of singer Kurt Wagner, who does a rich baritone or a Prince-on-Kiss falsetto, depending on the mood of the song.  Lambchop grew at one point to sixteen members or something, with all the horns, strings, guitars and organs, and though they are beloved by the British music press like Mojo, they are not well known here in the south.

Lambchop is one of those bands I love but don’t think really exists, like Belle and Sebastian or the Cocteau Twins (who really don’t exist).   That is, I never expected to actually see them, unless it was in a movie or in Nashville at a restaurant eating lunch.  So we went, expecting it to be good, curious about how much Lambchop Lambchop would bring, and hoping for the best.

Last night they were Kurt on guitar and vocals, Tony Crow on piano, a lead guitarist who played a tele through a Deluxe Reverb, a guy who added atmospherics on acoustic guitar and organ, and a monster rhtyhm section of bass  and drums.  It was bigger, faster, and groovier than I had imagined, and ranged from ambiently beautiful to a multitude of heavenly hosts playing electric guitars beautiful.  If you don’t know them, know them, and if you get the slimmest chance to see them, go.  They are the best Nashville band in existence, and I’m counting Old Crow and Gill and Dave.

MySpace.com/lambchopisaband

There aren’t too many guys left to believe in, and the list got a lot shorter Saturday when Paul Newman died.  I get hung up admiring famous people, particularly artists and musicians, because I have to overlook some great personality flaw or failed personal life.  As much as I love Dylan, I never hear anyone talk about what a great guy he is.  John Lennon spent the last ten years of his life sad and angry.  Marlon Brando, well, there you go.  But Paul Newman, there’s a good life.  He was married twice, but the second time for fifty years.  The food company he started gave over $200 million away to charity.  He lived in Connecticut, not Hollywood.  He loved cars, and raced Porsches.  He was on Nixon’s enemies list.

He also served as one of the coolest guys of the last 100 years, and I offer three pieces of evidence to prove that point.

1.  Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), which captures what is beautiful about the sixties for me better than any film except The Graduate.  Try to watch the scene where Katherine Ross sits on the handlebars of the bicycle Newman is riding while Hal David and Burt Bacharach’s “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” plays and not smile and feel like crying at the same time.

2.  Twilight (1998), a mystery in which Newman plays the detective and Gene Hackman, Susan Sarandon, and James Garner play the suspects.  He’s old, but he’s dead on cool, and the film features a number of Frank Lloyd Wright houses.

The obvious choice for number three would be Cool Hand Luke or The Hustler or maybe even Absence of Malice, a great eighties movie, but it’s an image I saw about fifteen years ago that marked the first time Paul Newman registered on my coolmeter.  I don’t know if it’s the socks or the kitchen or Joanne, but I thought, there’s a guy to believe in.

3.

            The Fender Stratocaster has three pickups (these amplify the sound of the strings) and a five-way switch (this lets the player choose the pickup or combination that sounds best).  If the player selects the switch position second from the bottom that engages the middle and bridge pickups and plays through a halfway decent amp set to sound clean, the player will hear a close approximation of the tone used by Mark Knopfler on the first couple Dire Straits records.  In my band, we’ve started calling that position the Knopfler.  For those of you old enough to watch TV or MTV in the 1980s, you remember Dire Straits.  They were the “Money for Nothing” band, and the “Walk of Life” band.  I was about ten, but I remember them.  I wasn’t a big fan.  I’m still not nuts about either of those songs, probably because, like you, I heard them dozens of times a week during the summers of 1985 and 1986. 

            Then about eight years ago, the music mags and actual musicians were raving about this new Mark Knopfler record Sailing to Philadelphia (2000), mostly, in my neighborhood, because Gillian Welch and David Rawlings were on it.  I bought it, listened to it, and thought it was fine, but nothing special.  Then about a year ago, my friend gave me a copy of the Knopfler – Emmylou Harris record, All the Roadrunning (2006), which I also listened to and filed.  Then I bought Kill to Get Crimson (2007), his latest solo album, and I couldn’t believe how good it was.  Every song on it is good, and some are extraordinary.  They’re like short stories, each with their own characters, plots, and settings, but there’s enough left out for the listener to fill in the space.  

            Mark Knopfler is the Little Richard of understatement.  Like Lucinda Williams, his singing sounds effortless, and spot on for every song.  He does not overdo.  Even more than Lucinda Williams, his songs sound like they arrived from the Muse fully formed: music, lyrics, changes, instrumentation all telling the same story and creating the same place.  There’s a touch of the down-and-out in many of his characters, from the gambler in “Everybody Pays to Play,”

About a month ago, I got my second Fender Stratocaster.  It’s a 1985 Candy Apple Red Rosewood Fretboard Made in Japan 1962 Reissue Strat.  I got my first strat about seven years ago when my father traded his best friend a set of tires for a guitar, sight unseen.  The guitar turned out to be a 1987 Pale Appliance Yellow Made in Japan Contemporary Strat.  The Contemporary Strat was made to appeal to players of heavy metal music, and was outfitted with several ecoutrements common to thrashers of that genre.  These mostly served to allow the player to fine tune the instrument and then lock that tuning down so tightly that no amount of aggression, juvenile pathos, or long hair could affect the righteous harmonics achieved when tapping leads and broadcasting them through volkswagon-sized solid state spikey-lettered amplifiers.

I sold that Strat and bought a Rhodes, which is an electric piano that sounds sort of like the one on You Are the Sunshine of My Life.  I thought, then, that I was done with Stratocasters.  They’re kind of the Ford truck of guitars, everyone has one, everyone’s is a little different, and they’re so common that you’re not sure you want to get one.  Maybe they’re the Camry of guitars now that gas is so high.  Clapton plays a strat because he saw Robbie Robertson of the band playing one.  Jimi Hendrix played a Strat upside down because was left handed.  Buddy Holly played a Strat, and Stevie Ray Vaughn, and on the day he went electric in 1965, Bob Dylan.

Leo Fender designed the Stratocaster to be the guitar of the future, an upgrade over his first guitar the Telecaster.  The Strat debuted in 1954 with three pickups, a tremolo bridge (allowing the guitar a “whammy bar”), and a sleek, contoured design.  Though the Strat was not an instant smash, it caught on, and has endured, evolved, been bastardized, metalized, customized, and, to many players, become a necessary feature of their sound.  When you think of an electric guitar, this is what you think of.  Strats from the fifties sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, from the sixties up to the tens of thousands of dollars, and if you want a new one, it costs a lot more to get one like the 1954 than the latest greatest version, itself not so different from the original design.  Few designs in history and even fewer from the last century have endured intact for over fifty years without a dramatic rethink.  In a world where everything changes, where version 2.0 is obsolete the day it hits the street, the Strat abides.

The ubiquitous nature of the Strat has discouraged several folks, like me, from wanting one.  Plus, the Telecaster is obviously the cooler guitar.  Then earlier this year, a significant event in my listening life happened:  I heard, as if for the first time, Mark Knopfler.  I had listened to him before, I owned Sailing to Philadelphia, and of course I remembered him in neon colors singing “Money for Nothing” everytime I turned on the TV the year I was ten.  Mark Knopfler’s excellent solo albums, about which I’ll write next time, led me to Dire Straits.  And Dire Straits led me to the video for “Sultan of Swing,” perhaps the best commercial for the Fender Stratocaster ever produced.

Check it out here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB3b1W6rEDw

Now I have a red Stratocaster because Mark Knopfler has one. Knopfler reportedly always wanted a red Strat because of this man, Hank Marvin, who reportedly had the very first Stratocaster in the United Kingdom.

So said one of the great spokepeople for my generation, the late Kurt Cobain, in the best song off their second big album (third if you count Bleach, which I don’t), In Utero. I thought of this phrase this week because I’ve been reading a book called The Fellowship by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman about Frank Lloyd Wright and his Taliesin Fellowship, the community of draftsmen and architects he created to carry out his work as he grew older and more popular. In a few weeks, I’m visiting Taliesin West — the studio/school Wright built in Arizona in 1937 as a vacation/winter home to complement the original Taliesin in Wisconsin — so I wanted to read up on it before I went. Last summer I visited and wrote about Fallingwater, the waterfall house in Pennsylvania, and read Franklin Toker’s excellent Fallingwater Rising, a biography of the house. Toker’s book has the reputation of being gossipy, at least by Fallingwater bookstore standards, but it’s nothing compared to The Fellowship. I’m fifty pages in, and so far Socrates, Louis Sullivan, Charles Ashbee (a friend of Wright’s), and Frank Lloyd Wright have all been outed. In addition, Wright has married Catherine Tobin, left her for Mamah Cheney, who was murdered, and hooked up with a rich older woman named Miriam Noel.

These reports all seem legitimate except Sullivan and Wright’s homosexuality, which is based on sentences like “Sullivan himself sketched male bodies in loving detail; his drawings of women, in contrast, were few and unflattering” (18), and Wright’s writing to Ashbee, “I would give much to feel you my brother still…Your friendship has been one of the lovely things of my life” (30). Not a terribly compelling case, but the real question I have is, “Who cares?” Does Socrates’ homosexuality matter? Does Wright’s heterosexuality — for which there is abundant, unequivocal proof — matter? The Fellowship pieces together shards of weak, or just plain odd evidence to show a homosexual influence in Wright’s work, but I’m not sure that exists. We know he liked women, and that gets one architectural-related sentence (the original Taliesin supposedly lays in its hillside setting the way Wright laid into Mamah Cheney). The homosexuality is titillating, sure, like peeking up Britney’s skirt, or reading Kurt Cobain’s diary, but I’m not sure it tells us anything about their work, except perhaps in Britney’s case.

I’m an obsessive fan of a few things: The Beatles, James Bond, Lost, Frank Lloyd Wright, 1970s Mercedes. I’ve read a dozen books about The Beatles because I love their music so much I want to know more about how it was made, what they were thinking at the time, how they got from “Please Please Me” to “Ticket to Ride” to “Hey Jude.” Maybe who they were sleeping with influenced their work, but I don’t think it did. Who they loved, or what they loved, maybe. If the Beatles were all gay, it doesn’t matter to me. I like them no more and no less. As a fan, I want information about the subject, but The Fellowship feels like it’s trying to show me what’s up Wright’s skirt, and if it can’t get the picture, to make up what’s up Wright’s skirt, and then draw conclusions from that made-up evidence. This same thing is going on in the Dylan movie I’m Not There. I’ll take Scorsese’s No Direction Home, which actually tells about Dylan’s music by showing us the music. I don’t care who Dylan was sleeping with unless it was Frank Lloyd Wright.

It’s getting harder not to be a voyeur of the artists and musicians whose work I love. I don’t want to be a voyeur, I just want to be a fan.

I’m not sure why I haven’t been writing, there’s been plenty going on. Here’s what I have not been writing about:

1. Attending the Appalachian Studies Association Annual Conference at Marshall University, where I heard Silas House speak on mountaintop removal, Appalachian accents, and taking pride in our mountain culture.

2. Seeing The Gourds (Austin’s favorite band) live at the Down Home. I saw them a few summers ago and was blown away. This last time was more like seeing a band you see a lot have a relaxed night. They sat down, played mostly acoustic instruments, and did a bunch of songs from bolsa de agua, which is my fave record of theirs, though I only have two.

3. Finishing this CD I’ve been working on. I got a song into the songwriting competition at Merlefest, so I’m trying to finish this CD I started about three years ago to take with me. 10 original songs, all acoustic instruments played by Ed Snodderly, Roy Andrade, Megan Gregory, and me. These guys are my dream old-time band, even though it’s not very old-timey.

4. Playing music with Clyde Edgerton, who’s written several funny novels and several funny songs, which are largely set in the South. My friend and colleague Lonny Finley and I backed up Clyde last night at the college where I teach. We did some of his originals, a John Prine, and a song I call “Late Last Night,” but some folks call “Downtown,” I guess.

5. Taking my classes on field trips. We’ve been to the Bristol Herald Courier, where the editor, Todd Foster gave a terrific candid interview; The Down Home in Johnson City, where Ed Snodderly played us some songs and talked about Appalachia and why he plays music; and the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, where Courtney Bledsoe and Catherine Bush told us about being professional writers. Courtney writes press and media packet information and Catherine writes and edits plays.

6. Receiving an envelope containing my friend Blaine’s shaved-off beard. About 12 years ago, he and I had an argument about hair. I told him he was his long hair, that he could not be without it. He said the same thing about my short hair. A short game of oneupmanship ensued, during which I dared him to have short hair for a year and he dared me to let mine grow for a year. Nothing came of that, but about 5 years later, I received an envelope filled with Blaine’s hair. He had climbed a mountain, a tall one, though I can’t remember which, and he’d cut off his hair when he got back as a challenge to me to climb a mountain of my own, metaphorically speaking, since I don’t climb real mountains unless they are in city parks. I kept that letter, though I largely ignored his challenge. Today I got another letter from him containing a ziploc bag with a beard he had recently cut off and this letter:

Brandon,

I shaved my beard and thought of when we used to bet each other. We should continue to challenge each other in some way, make each other stronger. How?

love,

Blaine

Blaine, I’ve got a few ideas.

PS. Somehow my comment bag is compromised and all my comments are folks trying to sell me watches. I’ve got a watch I’m very happy with, so I don’t need a watch. But if anyone would like to comment, please do, it would be good for morale.

My wife and I made it a year with no television when we first got married. I’d already gone the three months since my roommate, a great television watcher, had moved out. There was some moral snobbery involved. People would say, “Did you see the new commercial for thing X?” and I would reply, “We don’t have a TV,” sometimes with a grandfatherly smile, sometimes with a stern-aunty back and forth of the head. There were some economic issues. The TV we wanted, which had a 23-inch screen but the thickness of a paperback Great Gatsby, cost about a grand, which was the same as costing 10 grand to us, because there was no way we could afford it. We could have bought a cheaper TV, but we felt strongly about not having a room with a TV at the center because of the aesthetic issue. There was also the discipline issue. I have none, so if we had a TV, I would have watched it all the time. Since we did not have one, I never watched it. I listened to music or played music or read or looked at guitars on ebay.

Two years ago, caught up in the fervor of the after-Thanksgiving Friday sales and in a moment of somewhat impulsive buying, we bought the TV we’d wanted for a year for several hundred dollars less than it had been a year earlier. And we financed it no interest for six months! So now we have a sweet TV that sits on the mantle, is out of the way of everything else, and still allows us to watch movies and anything else we get on DVD because we still don’t have cable. Saying you have no cable is not nearly as hip as saying you have no TV, but there is still a little bit of moral superiority in not having any idea what is happening on American Idol or the Bachelor or the dancing shows, which all look terrible. I could see getting excited about a competition for architects, but American Idol inevitably produces songs like the one about that girl’s “Hazel Eyes.” What if at the end of American Idol, we had plans for a new Guggenheim? I’d get Direct TV.

I say all this because I’m totally addicted to Lost. My sister and her husband introduced my wife, my mom and me to it after season two, and it took about half the first season, but I’m hooked. Part of the fun of not having cable is that you have to go to other people’s homes to watch TV. This is the best way to watch TV because it gives you something to talk about with people in your life that you should talk to but don’t. The single most important activity of my college friends post-college was watching the X-Files. Our friendships now are largely based on one simple premise: on Sunday nights, we went to Burl’s to watch the X-Files. We did not miss it. We left parties (and usually returned), planned vacations, and organized weekend work around being on the couch for the X-Files. For one hour, we dedicated ourselves to glorious mindless fun with Mulder and Scully, Skinner, the Smoking Man, and whoever else was along for the ride. Even when the show went off the rails after season six, we still went, not because it even mattered what monsters Coy and Vance were fighting, but because that’s what we did, and we did it together.

Lost has given the half my family that lives in the same town the same bond. We started watching on DVD, which is by far the most pleasurable way to watch the show for several reasons: One, the episodes are 40-something minutes long, so there’s a minimal commitment. Two, if you get a dog of an episode (and you will) or a great cliffhanger (and you will), you just watch the next one. Three, the mythology stuff is ten times easier to keep up with because you see all the obscure characters often enough to remember who they are. I know that we’ll never recreate the magical experience of watching four or five episodes on a single weekend night with the family all together, but we still get together every Thursday there’s a new episode to eat and then eat dessert, and watch Lost.

As someone who is a medium-obsessed fan of Lost, I have several dozen things that I love about the show, I have several theories about what’s going on and what’s going to happen, and I also have my critiques of the show. This season has been a good one, the best since the second (which is pure genius, especially the first five episodes). The writers are running into a few of the same continuity problems and loose story threads that plagued the Star Wars films and the X-Files, but they’re at least keeping it moving this year, so I think the audience is willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. (If anyone wants to talk specifics, send me a message.) I’ve written on this blog before about poor storytelling in popular epics like the Matrix, and how beautiful the storytelling is in a series like Harry Potter. Lost falls somewhere in the middle. Their biggest fault is that they sacrifice reasonable character development and story for the sake of the shocking scene. I lay the credit and blame for the show to Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, the writers and Executive Producers. If they think of a shocking moment, they pull the trigger, often without reasoning through the causes and effects of the moment. Because of this, Lost is a show built on big moments, not character as they always tell us in their regular podcast. Season three was supposed to be character driven, and it didn’t work. They literally put three of the main characters in cages for six weeks, where I guess we were supposed to learn about them or grow in our knowledge of them, but it just made the show boring. Not many TV characters are so interesting that we want to be with them while they do time. This is why there are so few shows set in prisons. We want to watch characters do and go. Like Woody Allen says to the Greek Chorus member in Mighty Aphrodite, “This is why you’ll always be stuck in the Chorus, you don’t act.”

For all my complaints with the show, I still love it, and not just out of habit. Now that we watch one episode a week for 16 weeks a year instead of 4 a night twice a week, I’ve had to pace myself and realize that the DVD watching was not reality. TV reality is slow and regular, steady and comforting. I can already see a time ten years from now when Lost replaces Star Trek: The Next Generation or the X-Files as the show on daytime cable that is always on. Like an old friend that you don’t have anything to say to anymore, you watch a minute of the show with no excitement, no commitment. You say, “I remember this one, it’s that time when…” I know that our Thursday night dinner gatherings are numbered, literally, by the episodes left on Lost, and I think there are 41 left counting this week. That connection with friends, and with family, and with the millions of other folks watching that night and posting about it online and calling each other at lunch the next day is the best thing on TV.

I was trying to piece together when I had seen Townes live. I knew the era. I was in college, and I was hanging around with Cardiff Creasy, whose family had a house in the country where I basically lived my second year of college. Cardiff and I played music together, though we were both pretty bad. He had a great song called “Troublesome Hollow Skyline,” named after Troublesome Hollow Road, the address of this country house. I had a song, too, called “Mrs. Reservation,” which I found out later was a Leonard Cohen rip off, even though I didn’t know who Leonard Cohen was at the time. So I knew about when I had seen Townes, but I had a memory of a signed CD with a date. I checked my Live at the Old Quarter, but below his signature, Townes had only drawn a landscape: mountains and a cactus. Then I checked No Deeper Blue, which was his newest CD at the time. It was recorded in Dublin and came out on Sugar Hill in 1994. It’s quite good, and has some of his best last songs on it, like “Katie Belle Blue” and “Lover’s Lullaby,” as well as his version of Cowboy Junkies’ Lament, which actually isn’t as good as theirs. But right there, in Townes Van Zandt’s own hand, on the back page of the CD booklet, it says “Townes Van Zandt 4/7/95.”

I think Cardiff told me Townes was coming to Johnson City to play at the Down Home. The Down Home is a music club in Johnson City where everyone has played and sometimes still plays. Doc Watson plays there every year and Scott Miller and Webb Wilder have regular weekends there, too. I’ve seen The Gourds there, and Nanci Griffith and Lyle Lovett have played there, and every other roots hero, but probably none as legendary as Townes. Ed Snodderly, who runs the Down Home, told me that Townes and Guy Clark started playing there in the early nineties, sometimes together, sometimes separately. I’m pretty sure it was Cardiff who heard first that Townes was coming. I don’t remember that part, and I don’t remember buying advance tickets, but I do remember that we got to the Down Home about five o’clock. The doors open at six and shows are at nine. We were the first ones through the door, and for an hour or two, the only customers in the club. We sat right in the front, so we could reach out and put our hands on the stage. We had dinner and waited. The sound man set up one stool, one vocal mic, and I think one instrument mic, but he might have had a DI. By about eight-thirty, there were maybe twenty or twenty-five people in the club, which holds about a hundred and fifty.

Since we’d been there since five, we knew that Townes was not yet at the Down Home, since there are only two doors, the front door and the stage door, both of which you can see from the house. By nine, we were getting worried that maybe he wouldn’t show. We knew he was a little haunted. A few minutes after nine, Townes walked through the front door of the club carrying a guitar. He walked straight to the stage, sat his guitar case down, opened it, and took out his guitar. He had finger picks in the pocket of his shirt, which he put on after he sat down on the stool. He said, I’ll start with this song called “Two Girls.” I remember that because at the time, “Two Girls” was one of my faves. It’s especially good on “Live at the Old Quarter.” I didn’t know what I expected, but his voice sounded rough. He often dropped the end of phrases, but he was doing it a lot, like he was running out of breath by the end of lines. His playing was idiosyncratic, too, he didn’t miss chords but the rhythm was out there. The whole package, though, Townes Van Zandt on a stool with a guitar, looking rough, singing his songs, was surreal, like seeing the real Carter Family or something. I’d spent so much time with the Townes in my head, the Townes from 1973 at the Old Quarter that the real Townes took some getting used to.

I know he played “To Live is To Fly,” and I know he played “Dollar Bill Blues,” and he played this blues song that seems to go on for about thirty minutes, but it was probably more like six or seven. At the end of that one, he said, “That was part Lightnin’ Hopkins, part the devil, and part me.” He took a break, and during the break, he just sat on the edge of the stage, which about three feet from where we were sitting. I was scared to death, but Cardiff walked right over and sat down next to Townes and started up a conversation. I eventually joined in, and I told Townes I was a big fan of his song that the Cowboy Junkies did. He told us he’d been on tour with them in the United States, and he was supposed to go with them to Canada (the Cowboy Junkies are Canadian), but he couldn’t go to Canada because there was a warrant for his arrest. At this point, I was pretty sure he was putting us on, but he said that he wasn’t allowed into Canada because twenty years before, he and a buddy were in Canada, and they were drunk, and they crashed their car though the front wall of a bar. He said they didn’t know what to do next, so they went up to the bartender and ordered a drink and waited for the cops to come. After they were released on their own recognizance, they got the heck out of Canada, never to return. I’m not sure if Townes’ picture is up at all the Canadian border crossings or not, but that’s the story he told us.

At the end of the break, after we got our CDs signed and everyone had a few more beers, Cardiff asked Townes if that old road he was always singing about was worth traveling. I couldn’t believe he asked that. We were both in college and worked at a restaurant. I didn’t know hitting the road was in the plan, but Townes looked at him and said, “You won’t make much money, and it’s lonely, but yeah, it’s worth it.” I don’t remember what songs he played in the second set until the very end. Somebody called for “Cowboy Junkies Lament,” and Townes said he’s written it, but he never learned to play it. Then he said, “I’m going to do one more song,” and somebody in the crowd yelled, “You’re not leaving here until you sing ‘Fraulein’.” Townes said, “I’m going to do two more songs,” and he played “Fraulein,” and then went straight into “Tecumseh Valley.”

Townes played at the Down Home one more time after that before he died. It was in the summer, probably of 1996, and I was out of town and couldn’t go. I heard he played about three songs and then started drawing maps on the stage wall with his fingers, showing everybody where the store was and where Tennessee was. That’s when my friend Jessica and her brother Matt saw him. Less than a year later, she called on New Year’s Day to tell me he’d died. About a month after he died, I wrote an email to Jeanene Van Zandt, Townes’s widow, and told her I’d seen him and heard some of his stories. She wrote me back and said she was so happy I’d gotten to hang out with Townes. She said a lot of people thought of him as this dark poet, but not that many people knew how much fun he was.

When I finally did go out on the road about seven years later, I found out Townes was right. It is lonely, and there’s not much money in it, and yet, at least for a while, it was worth it.

It’s Elvis’ birthday this week, which reminds me that it’s January, which reminds me that it’s the anniversary of the death of Townes Van Zandt.  I had to look up the year — 1997, but I remember the phone call from my friend Jessica Walters, one of the three people that I knew at the time who ever saw Townes live.

If you don’t know, Townes is the godfather of Texas singer-songwriters.  The term “Texas singer-songwriters” actually is a category, mostly of folks with three names like Townes Van Zandt.  There’s also Jerry Jeff Walker, Robert Earl Keen, Willis Alan Ramsey, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Michael Martin Murphey.  I’d start with Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s Spinning Around the Sun if you need an entry point.  There are also Texas singer-songwriters with only two names, and they tend to be more popular:  Guy Clark, Butch Hancock, Lyle Lovett, Joe Ely, and yes, Steve Earle, though he lives in New York City now, which is a good place for him, and Nanci Griffith.  I’m leaving out a lot, I know, like Willie Nelson and Walter Hyatt, who was actually from South Carolina, but the group above is of a piece.  They sort of go together the way that New Order, the Happy Monday, and the Stone Roses do, or maybe Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and the Stone Temple Pilots.  They were all doing a similar thing, got discovered around the same time, and contined to ply their trades after the spotlight had moved elsewhere, in the Texas singer-songwriter case, the spotlight moved from Austin up to Athens, Georgia, so they stopped playing Lyle Lovett on country radio and started playing REM and the Indigo Girls on pop radio.  The era of the Texas singer-songwriter spotlight was the mid-eighties I guess, when you could hear Steve Earle on commercial radio.

Townes was neither the first Texas singer-songwriter, which I guess was either Bob Wills or Willie Nelson, nor was he the most famous, but he was the best.  He didn’t write radio songs or hits, though Merle Haggard and Willie had a hit with “Pancho and Lefty.”  He wrote poems that were set to finger picked guitar.  They are not unmusical, but they have simple repeating melodies and basic chords.  Some of them have choruses, and others just have verses.  I can’t think of a single bridge in any of his songs, though there may be some.

I think of Townes as the anti-craft songwriter.  His songs are all art, memory, and emotion.  I think because of this, he was the favorite of the Texas singer-songwriters.  Steve Earle has a famous quote about Townes being the best songwriter in the world, and he Steve says he’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in his cowboy boots and say so.  I don’t think Dylan would argue with that.  The downside to Townes, or maybe just the other side, was that he fought depression and substance abuse for years, and died New Year’s day, 1997 at age 52.

I saw Townes at the Down Home in Johnson City, Tennessee, in the fall of 1994.  I got into Townes because of a song he wrote called The Cowboy Junkies’ Lament, which is on my favorite Cowboy Junkies album, Black Eyed Man.  I was about 17 before I realized I didn’t have a favorite song, so I started thinking about what song I could listen to and never get tired of.  Townes’ Cowboy Junkies’ Lament kept coming to mind.  I never got tired of listening to it because I didn’t completely understand it.  It had a good measure of the mystery that is in a lot of his best songs.  There were these characters, and I knew I felt the same way they felt, but that’s all I knew about them.  I still love that song.

I got lucky when I went to buy a Townes album because I was in Ann Arbor, where there used to be a handful of great record stores, and I got the Tomato Records CD of Live at the Old Quarter.  This is a live show from Houston, recorded in July 1973 at a famous folk and blues club.  If you’re looking for the best Townes Van Zandt recording in existence, this is it.  Fortunately, it was rereleased as a double CD on the Charly label out of Germany in 1998.  His playing and singing is at its peak, he nails all the finger-picking parts (Texas singer-songwriters love fingerpicking guitar), and he’s funny, sober, and loose.  Because of this record, I thought all Townes’ recordings would sound great, but they don’t.  The early records are a little Nashville-y, though the songs are great, and the live recordings range from good to sad.

To be continued…