Subject: I just listened to Live at The Old Quarter and it brought back memories From: "David Brown" Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:28:58 -0400 Everything is not enough And nothing is too much to bear (To Live's to Fly by Townes Van Zandt 1943-1996) David Brown A lot of guys coasting from fifty to oblivion cherish a song that defines who they once were or thought they were. My song is Pancho and Lefty. I have owned at one time or another six different versions of it. My favorite renditions are by the late Hoyt Axton, Emmy Lou Harris and by the poet who wrote it, Townes Van Zandt. He did not sing so much as recite a poem. I also own several of Townes' albums and CDs including a terrible one he recorded in Germany toward the end a career that brought him neither fame nor fortune. Each successive recording, spaced years apart, revealed a man tumbling down a staircase with no landing. His voice, never any great shakes, lost the ability to convey the meaning of his words. His fingers twisted and frozen with arthritis, no longer able to fret the neck of his guitar, screeched as they moved along the strings. The first time I heard Townes was in Dallas at El Centro Junior College where I had returned to school in an attempt to put two years of trouble with the government, the law, and my old man behind me. Townes nasal voice drifted through the open space of El Centro's lobby where he played the end of what was to become his signature song Pancho and Lefty. I don't think Emmy Lou Harris had covered it yet so it did not generate a great deal of interest. Still I stopped and listened. There was something about the lyrics, the desert's hot and Cleveland's cold/ the dust down south ended up in Lefty's mouth/ say a prayer for Lefty too that got to me. At this point in my life I was living on rage. I suppose I identified with both Pancho and Lefty as the betrayed and the betrayer. Redemption seemed out of the question. At age nineteen I carried in my mind the stigma of being a traitor to all the values that by word or force had been instilled in me. On the El Centro stage was a skinny guy with more nose than face wearing a slouch felt cowboy hat while singing to an audience that passed through the lobby to the street. Singing as if he believed what he had to say was important enough to justify the indifference he invoked. I heard Townes twice more in Dallas. Once he almost fell off stage while trying to do the Cotton Eyed Joe while downing a Lone Star and another time he sat on his stool for the whole performance and sang to his boots, not once looking up to see if anyone in the audience remained. A few years later while I was attending the University of Houston I had the opportunity to hear Townes again. Black type on yellow handbills posted around the campus announced that the Townes Van Zandt, the Texas songwriting poet, was making his first appearance since getting out. What he was getting out of was a stay at an asylum where he had been treated for schizophrenia and drug induced depression. Every time he set foot on stage it was to face down what one writer has described as the black dogs of despair and suicide. Townes refused to acquiesce and give himself over to either beast. It did not matter who was listening in the front seats it was the balcony he was playing to. It was there that his demons held box seats where they taunted him and demanded that he retire from the stage to the wings. He refused and found his mark under the stage lights. Perhaps his singing to a seemingly indifferent crowd was his way of saying bugger off. I will play these same songs until either I am free to sing new ones or until you clap and admit that I have survived despite your best attempts to silence me. When I entered the campus pub Townes was standing on a makeshift stage strumming his guitar and singing. His voice barely rose above the clacking of plastic disks on an air hockey table. The clinking of Lone Star beer bottles tipped into empty beer mugs added unnecessary percussion to his set. After pausing to take a swig out of a long neck warmed by the stage lights suspended a few inches above his head Townes told a lame joke. The gag was about a drunk teetering at the edge of a curb with his key pressed between his thumb and forefinger aimed at arm's length into vacant space. A cop stops and asks him what's wrong. The drunk says he has lost his car. The cop tells him that his car has probably been stolen and that he should zip up his pants. The drunk looks down at his open fly and wails, "Oh God they got my girl too." No one laughed. The joke lead into Townes saying Emmy Lou Harris recorded a song of his and that she did better with it than he had. His Texas drawl squeezed out of throat raw from too many cigarettes and wheezy from pinky nail scoops of cocaine eroding his nasal passage croaked Pancho was a bandit boy his horse was swift as polished steel he wore his gun outside his pants for all the honest world to feel. For a few seconds there was the uneasy hesitation in the audience associated with a vague recognition of something heard before in a different context like a song by Edith Piaf sung in English. Unfazed by the delayed applause that greeted the end of Pancho and Lefty Townes launched into another song. For two hours he played every song he had written up to that time and which would appear on every single album he put out during the next two decades. I was amazed at his dedication to his words and his insistence on sharing them with a world that for the most part ignored him as he moved like a shadow between periods of maintenance and suicidal depression. Word got around after his appearance at the University of Houston that Townes had again checked himself into rehab. This was to be a pattern that governed his existence for most of his life. Occasionally I would read that Townes had been released from some hospital or asylum and was touring or that he was married again and happy. It was impossible to verify these accounts as he embarked without notice on unplanned road trips to repeat his confessional tunes to consistently indifferent audiences across the Southwest. Eventually I think he ran out of people unwilling to listen to his songs and he started playing to a fresh crowd of beer deaf guzzlers in lumber towns and cannery villages on the west coast who exhibited the kind of sullen inattentiveness that allowed him to perform his premature requiem without the nuisance of applause to distract him. I settled down in Canada after falling for a woman I met while playing the part of a writer in the creative writing program at the University of British Columbia. A couple of years after we married we purchased a turntable, speakers, and a receiver. One evening when I returned from the Ottawa retail store where I worked as manager I heard the familiar voice of Townes Van Zandt in the corridor of my apartment building. When I opened the door Terry was sitting on the couch knitting and listening to an album called Flying Shoes. She had put Townes on I believe out of necessity. Our record collection consisted of a stack of misshapen albums of musicians like Dylan, The Beatles, Joe Cocker and others which had melted and curled up like dying ferns when I left the records in the car on a sweltering day. Flying Shoes was the only record to escape the melt down. Terry listened intently, remarking that the lyrics were very powerful and that Townes voice was haunting. The melancholy attachment Townes had for the lost and the abandoned seemed to strike a chord with Terry. Perhaps it was because she had recently undergone futile laser treatments and retinal surgery, a complication of diabetes, that Terry was drawn to Van Zandt's music. The glimmer of hope that Townes embraced despite the loss of something resonated with Terry. She was determined to regain enough sight to care for our newborn daughter and establish whatever independence she was able to. When we moved to Montreal, Townes’ albums went with us. Several years and career moves later I read in the entertainment section of the city's only English language daily that Lyle Lovett was in Montreal to do a concert. As I read to the bottom of the announcement I zoomed in on the small print that stated that Townes Van Zandt, the legendary Texas songwriter, would also be appearing. I did not go to the concert. The next morning the paper ran a review. The show was great. Lyle Lovett and His Very Large Band had the audience dancing in the aisles. Inserted somewhere in the review was a brief mention of Townes. The reviewer said Townes played as if he were playing for an empty room, which he might as well have been doing as no one the writer said paid attention to the immobile straw man on the stage. The reviewer was wrong. I knew that Townes was playing for his life.