What Could've Been

Ten Years After His Death, A Film Rekindles Appreciation For Townes Van Zandt

originally published January 17, 2007

When the Songwriters Tour 2007 blows into Atlanta's Tabernacle on Jan. 27 featuring Guy Clark, Joe Ely, Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt, it’s going to be missing one of its stalwart troubadours: Townes Van Zandt, who rambled with those hombres for some 25 years. A recent Rakefilms documentary and an accompanying CD, both titled Be Here to Love Me, have reaffirmed my estimation of what a fine songwriter Van Zandt was and how tragic it is that he disappeared from the national music scene at the relatively tender age of 52.

Townes Van Zandt performed regularly in Athens from the mid-1970s through the 1990s, often playing at the Last Resort back when it was a music venue. Throughout much of his career, Van Zandt toured incessantly, leading a life of dissipation as his way of coping with a restless spirit, nagging depression and perhaps a host of other demons.

Filmmaker Margaret Brown tries both to chronicle his messy life and to showcase his musical talent. She succeeds far better in the latter mission. Van Zandt was a prolific songwriter, and the 29 songs on the film soundtrack and the two-disc CD illustrate the diversity of his impressive creative output. His music is original and impossible to pigeonhole, a combo of folk, blues and country. I find his mournful “If I Needed You,” which Emmylou Harris took to the top of the country charts, more satisfying than his anthem “Pancho and Lefty,” which Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard made into a megahit.

Brown does try to help viewers understand her troubled subject. The film opens with Van Zandt’s statement of prophetic fatalism: “I don’t envision a very long life for myself - I think my life will run out before my work does. I’ve designed it that way.”

Interviews with Van Zandt’s friends and family don’t contribute much. Guy Clark comes off here as a complete horse’s ass, when he toasts a “buddy” who died of alcohol-related causes with a shot of whiskey. Others, such as Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker and Steve Earle, have high praise for Van Zandt’s talents (“a master class in poetic songwriting,” swoons Gilmore), but exhibit little empathy or compassion for Van Zandt’s long-term troubles with heroin and booze.

Van Zandt’s family members report that he began drinking heavily in high school and always did wild and crazy things - some involving guns. He got labeled a “manic-depressive,” so his parents took the extraordinary step of giving him shock therapy at a mental hospital in Galveston. His sister explains that Van Zandt was never the same after the “treatment,” that it burned his memory out and he could no longer remember his childhood.

None of Van Zandt’s three ex-wives offer a whit of insight into him. When his second wife is asked what it was like living with him, her response is a terse: “Bummer!” The only person who appears angry and truly caring is Van Zandt’s oldest son JT. He desperately wanted someone to help his father off the self-destructive course he was on.

While the feature-length documentary is worth watching for Van Zandt’s musical performances alone, it simply fails to capture the dark complexity of the man. Georgia writer Bill Hedgepath does a far better job of that in the CD liner notes: “He lived in that borderline netherworld between sanity and psychosis, mania and depression, reckless abandon and heartbreaking fragility, humor and sadness, yearning and hopelessness, neither here nor there, and always leaving for somewhere else - altogether not an usual geography for an American author of genius-level wattage to inhabit.”

Hedgepath nails him. It’s the uncertainties of all those borderlines that permeate Van Zandt’s songs and make them so arresting. His mournful voice and transparent loneliness tell us more about the anguish of his soul than his patrician style, easy-going manner or infectious smile.

For his part, in the film Van Zandt plays the rogue, albeit with a confessional streak. He openly talks about his craving for heroin and admits on camera, “I get psychotic when I drink alcohol.” Despite such self-awareness, he kept right on indulging himself, and, over the years, blithely blew off his family, money, security, even happiness.

Viewers will learn a little about Van Zandt’s songwriting. He says, “Songs had to be about something worth writing about.” Many of his songs are sad, he acknowledges in the film, but “some are hopeless. It just the way it goes.” They are raw, not slick. In his creative process, Van Zandt was a perfectionist and he worked on songs relentlessly until he got them the way he wanted. He would often call his Atlanta pal Hedgepath to try out new lyrics and tunes, seemingly as much for the re-connection as the consultation. A loner reaching out to refine his art.

It’s ironic that Van Zandt’s label Tomato Records thought of him as a “genius,” yet never released an 11th album he recorded (titled 7 Come 11) because the company figured it wouldn’t sell. Townes Van Zandt remained a rambling songwriter right up until the end. He roamed all over, but he kept coming back to the triangle of Texas (his hometown of Houston), Colorado and Tennessee. He died on Jan. 1, 1997 - the same day that Hank Williams died - in Nashville, reportedly with a vodka bottle in his hand.

Van Zandt was right that his music outlived him. Many still admire his work. A few years ago, some of his fellow performers put together a tribute CD called Poet on the Free Falls Entertainment label. It has become a scarce collectible, often going for 40 bucks on Ebay.

Watching Be Here to Love Me was unsettling. I felt anxious and frustrated in watching Van Zandt self-destruct, and outrage at the apparent passivity of family and friends who might have helped him deal with his addictions.

No effort at intervention is ever mentioned and such neglect is tantamount to supporting his decline. It may be unreasonable to expect others to have helped him come clean, but with such support, Van Zandt might still be alive today and still making music with his compadres.

John W. English