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Tribute To Townes
Monday, June 01, 2009
Steve Earle pays tribute to his mentor Townes Van Zandt by trying to capture the spirit of his songs.By Brian Wise.
From the time of his first album to his untimely death in 1997 Townes Van Zandt remained somewhat of a cult hero. Though his songs were recorded by Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson and the Cowboy Junkies he remained a ‘songwriter’s songwriter,’ sold few records and struggled with his demons of alcohol and depression. (It seems extraordinary now that he actually made it to Australia for a four-date tour back in September 1990).
For much of his later career, Townes was shadowed and idolised by Steve Earle, who effectively became his protégé and was alleged at one point to have said “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.”
Earle’s reverence for Van Zandt extended beyond performing and recording some of his idol’s songs: he even named his own son, Justin Townes Earle, after him. He also wrote ‘Fort Worth Blues’ in honour of him. Now he has recorded an album of fifteen of Van Zandt’s songs as homage to the man who had become his mentor.
But, as Earle explains, Townes is not merely an album of cover versions. He could have included ‘Tecumseh Valley’ or ‘If I Needed You’ if it was a collection of hits that never were. Earle says that he has tried to capture the spirit of Towne’s best performances of the songs – and Earle saw him often enough at his peak to know what they sounded like. Your reaction to the interpretations might depend on how much you are tied to Townes’ own originals but it is hard to deny that Earle has more right than just about anyone else to record an entire album of Van Zandt’s songs.
The album, Townes, produced by Earle and recorded between Greenwich Village (where he now lives) and Nashville also features a guest spot from Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine who Earle met on the political trail while promoting various causes. Allison Moorer, Earle’s wife also features on backing vocals for several songs.
With the album finally out and an extensive tour about to begin, Earle has been on the promotional trail. “I’m going to radio stations and record stores, the four or five record stores that are left in the United States,” he says from Seattle, Washington, when we catch up to talk about the Townes project.
“I’m glad that anybody cares enough that I can go out and do this.”
We all know how important Townes is to you – you named your son after him and he was a mentor. I wanted to ask you what are some of your fondest memories of Townes because he was indeed a complex character.
Calling him the night Justin was born, for one thing. I called him and I said ‘Hey, I’ve got a boy’ and he said ‘Congratulations, man, what did you name it?’ and I said, ‘Justin Townes Earle’ and there was dead silence on the other end. And he said, ‘Well, is that after anybody in my family?’ It’s one of the only times I have completely and totally caught off guard I think that night.
You first met him when you saw him and then he came to a gig of yours, didn’t he?
Yes, I met him in 1972, I think. I knew who he was because I was playing coffee houses in Texas and I was in San Antonio and I’d go to Austin. I’d go to Houston and I’d go to the Kerrville Folk Festival every year. I’d seen him play. I moved to Houston in ’71 just on my own – my parents finally figured out that if they brought me home any more I would just run away again when I was 16. It’s not that my parents did anything bad, I just always thought I was supposed to be some place other than where they were. It was a thing I was going through at the time.
Townes really spent more time in Houston than he did in Austin. Houston is sort of where we are all from: me, Guy [Clark], Townes. That’s where Lightnin’ Hopkins was from, that’s where ZZ Top was from. It was, in a lot of ways, a little darker kind of more interesting music city in Houston than Austin was. Austin was great and there were lots of places to play but Houston had this heritage of its own. It was the biggest city in Texas and big city things happened there comparatively, because Austin in those days was a hundred thousand people (it was a really small town comparatively). I heard that Jerry Jeff Walker was playing Castle Creek in Austin to celebrate his thirty-third birthday. So I hitchhiked to Austin and I overheard a girl talking about where the party [for Jerry Jeff] was going to be. I lied to this girl that I had met that night and told her that we were invited. That was the first time I was in the same room with Townes without a microphone between us because he showed up about two-thirty or three o’clock in the morning.
He probably didn’t hear me play that night. I played a little bit because guitars were going around the room and I played a couple of songs, probably didn’t make much of an impression on anybody. About ten or twelve days later I was playing the Old Quarter and Townes showed up and sat right in the front, literally with his boots on the table the whole time he stayed, and began heckling me between songs. He did not make a sound while I was actually singing but he kept asking me to play ‘The Wabash Cannonball.’ I had to admit that I didn’t know ‘The Wabash Cannonball.’ Then it was like, ‘You call yourself a folksinger and you don’t know ‘The Wabash Cannonball.’ So I played this song of his called ‘Mr Mudd and Mr Gold’, which is ion the record and has a lot of words, and it shut him up.
Then we actually had our first conversation that night on the roof of the Old Quarter.
In some circumstances, his heckling could have ended the relationship right there, couldn’t it?
Yeah, it could have but it was Townes and that’s what he did. In certain ways he did behave badly. I think his theory was, at least some of the time, that if he behaved really badly he would at least be able to evenly divide the people who put up with his behaviour with the people that really loved him and complete and total assholes. There was something in between that separated people into two categories.
He was important to all of us. We knew he was special. We let him get away with a lot of stuff because it was really obvious that you were in the presence of someone special. Guy was four years older than Townes and he looked up to him. Jerry Jeff Walker knew that he was witnessing something special when Townes first popped up in New York in 1968, the first time he came up there. Emmylou Harris saw him for the first time at Gerde’s Folk City and she has told that story several times.
That’s part of what this record is about. I tried to tap into a first-hand memory that I had of Townes at the height of his power as a performer, that not everybody saw.
There has a lot been written about him and sometimes the myth overtakes the reality but he was a great songwriter and that is the thing that we should primarily remember about him.
Well, there’s that and this is about [also] the time when he was a great performer – and most everybody missed it. The Old Quarter album is as close as you can get to anything recorded and he wasn’t that interested in the process of making records; he trusted other people to do that and didn’t become involved in shaping them into something, he just went and made a record. So his records are a little on the spotty side.
But you are right, people tend to talk in terms of his behaviour. There are a lot of people that talked about that stuff back then that were around but more people saw him in the ‘90s, the last ten years of his life – from the late ‘80s to ’97, when he died on New Year’s Day. More people saw him in that period than ever saw him in the ‘70s when he was really great. There were the nights when he was not in any kind of shape to play and even in his best form in those days he still wasn’t what I saw when I first met him.
I was trying to not imitate him but to the best of my ability recall those performances as I remember them.
There are probably a lot of things you share with Townes but one of them, I reckon, is that kind of single-minded vision that marks your career and I think probably marked his as well. You are dedicated to being a songwriter and that’s what he was despite all the other things that went on around him.
That’s what I totally learned from him. That was the thing that became obvious really quickly. I saw plenty of bizarre behaviour and I even tried to emulate that stuff at first but it became really apparent to me, within less than two years after I met him, what was important about what I was seeing. It suddenly dawned on me and I don’t know what was actually the moment but I know it was early, ‘Oh, this is someone who is making art. They are doing this though he’s not making any money.’ Before I met Townes I thought ‘This guy’s face is on record jackets, he must be rich.’ Then I met him and he wasn’t: he had a Martin D35 and a horse named Amigo that he stabled in Aspen, Colorado and every summer he would pick Amigo up and ride across the mountain to Crested Butte. That’s pretty goddam romantic, you have to admit, but it was all he had. He had a horse and he had a guitar. Fucking literally he did not live anywhere for eight years. It was really romantic but it was also really hard the way that he lived. It became obvious to me that, ‘Okay, if I want to right anything like this then I’ve got to commit to doing this no matter what, no matter if I make a dime or not.’ This is a commitment to a calling rather than a career.
I guess at times, as Townes found out – and you probably did too – that can be a painful process.
Yes, it can be very painful and I found that out early on. I did separate Townes’ worse behaviour from what he did. I did realise that the two things didn’t have anything to do with each other. I also have to admit, and I am not proud of this at all, that I had my own drug and alcohol problems and they ran totally different.
Townes was one of those people who was absolutely completely and totally allergic to drink and it didn’t take any amount of alcohol at all until he was……..the idea that Townes was some legendary drinker……he drank a lot and he consumed amounts of alcohol that would kill a lot of people but he was drunk immediately, by the time he got a swallow or two into his body. That’s the way he was and he was always that way. I can remember telling myself that I was okay because I didn’t behave the way that Townes did an the fact of the matter is that I was headed for real trouble. There’s a lot of survivor’s guilt in this record. I had the same disease that Townes had. I don’t know why it didn’t kill me.
I don’t know why more people know who I am and more people buy my records than Townes’ because I think he is a lot better songwriter than I am. I learned a lot and I did get sober and I did survive and I’ve got to deal with it and I’ve got to stay here and do what I’ve got to do and I’m very, very grateful to him. I knew that I’d taken a lot from him but I didn’t realise exactly how much I was Townes until I sat down and played these fifteen songs in a week or two.
I think you are now a year older than Townes was when he died.
I’m two years older.
In your case it is a great story of survival. I guess one of the things that you are hoping that a lot of people will rediscover him through you.
Absolutely. I’m hoping that more people will know about him and I’m hoping they’ll know something a little different about him – that the talk will be about the range of these songs. They are not all dark songs in minor keys. He was so good and he wasn’t afraid to stand in the darkness when it came to this kind of stuff – and a lot of people are. There’s a morbid curiosity about artists who are able to do that.
You can read the full interview in June Rhythms.
Townes is available now through Shock Records. Earle has just started a 33-date US tour (with two supports for Jackson Browne) and he promises he will be back out in Australia next March in time for Townes’ birthday.
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