Steve Earle is not shy about letting the world know what he thinks of his favorite songwriter: “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.”
Hyperbole? Perhaps, but Van Zandt was a gifted writer whose troubled life didn't stop him from penning songs that have influenced generations of Texas songwriters as well as writers far beyond those borders. Even Bob Dylan, with Steve Earle's bootprints on his coffee table, has covered "Pancho and Lefty," one of Van Zandt's most enduring classics.
Immensely talented, immensely self-destructive, it seemed he drifted between writing songs because of his demons or in spite of them. He stood out as being especially out of control in the music circles of 1970's-era Austin, a time and place where out of control was considered normal.
Here's the story of how Van Zandt wrote the classic song "If I Needed You," as reported by John Nova Lomax in his story "Codeine Country," published in the May 5, 2005 issue of the Houston Press:
Van Zandt wrote "If I Needed You," his second-biggest hit, while under the influence. Van Zandt was staying at Guy and Susanna Clark's house near Nashville, and all three of them had the flu. A bottle of codeine was produced, which they drank, and then all three of them went to bed. In an excerpt from Rain on a Conga Drum, his upcoming biography of Van Zandt, author John Kruth picks up the tale:After years of abuse, his body finally gave up, and at 52, Townes Van Zandt died of a heart attack on New Year's Day, 1997. It seems darkly appropriate that it was the same day that his hero Hank Williams had died in 1953.
"Stumbling down the sidewalk of his subconscious, Van Zandt had a remarkable dream that night, 'in blazing Technicolor' as he later recalled it. He was a folksinger on stage, singing a strange and beautiful new song. The dream was so vivid that he sat right up in bed and wrote the lyrics down just as they had come to him only moments before. The melody rang in his head so clearly he knew he'd have no trouble remembering it the following morning. So he pulled the blankets over his head and fell back to sleep.
"The next morning Susanna and Guy sat around the kitchen table in a fog, sipping coffee. Eventually Townes sauntered in, disheveled, with his guitar. 'Hey, y'all, listen to this,' he said as the song just rolled off his tongue and fingers as if he'd been playing it for years. Of course they loved it. 'When did you write that?' they asked. 'Last night,' Townes replied. The bemused couple looked at him doubtfully and explained it wasn't possible as he'd gone to bed before them and in their tiny house they surely would've heard him working away in the middle of the night."
Van Zandt is gone, but his legacy lives on in the musicians he influenced, and continues to influence, every time one of them picks up an instrument and steps up to sing.
Just a deck of cards and a jug of wine
And a woman's lies makes a life like mine
Oh the day we met, I went astray
I started rolling down that lost highway
From Lost Highway
By Hank Williams
And a woman's lies makes a life like mine
Oh the day we met, I went astray
I started rolling down that lost highway
From Lost Highway
By Hank Williams
I love this song, and had no idea about its origins
ReplyDeleteI always wondered if the Tylenol PMs he took hastened his demise. I read he took 4 right before he died. That's instant liver damage there, and he probably did not have much liver to spare, bless his heart.