For the Sake of the Song
A new biography captures the self-destructive genius of Townes Van Zandt
by
Lacey Galbraith To Live’s to Fly: The Ballad of the Late, Great Townes Van zandt By John Kruth (Da Capo Press, 320 pp., $26) Aspiring musicians, songwriters and anyone involved with Nashville Star, please take heed of the following from Townes Van Zandt, writer of such classics as “Pancho and Lefty” and “If I Needed You”: “You have to get yourself a guitar or a piano; guitars are easier to carry. And then you have to blow off everything else. You have to blow off your family. You have to blow off comfort. You have to blow off money. You have to blow off security. You have to blow off your ego. You have to blow off everything except your guitar. You have to sleep with it. Learn how to tune it. And no matter how hungry you get, stick with it. You’ll be amazed at how many people turn away.”
Turn away they will—where’s the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll? Townes Van Zandt didn’t swear off excess—stories of his alcoholic binges and hell-raising have achieved apocryphal status—but he did respect his craft. As singer Joe Ely says in the recently published To Live’s to Fly: The Ballad of the Late, Great Townes Van Zandt by biographer John Kruth, “Townes didn’t seem to do anything for any reason except for the purpose of writing another song. He came on this earth to play music.”
Kruth is also the author of Bright Moments: The Life and Legacy of Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and in this biography of Van Zandt— who died New Year’s Day 1997—he portrays a man whose creative talent and giant heart were both his making and his undoing. In an interview with Kruth, Guy Clark describes Van Zandt’s songwriting as a continual question: “[H]ow close can you cut it to your own bone? Did you break your own heart? Did you scare the shit out of yourself? That’s what matters. Townes went for the passion, not a bunch of clever bullshit.”
To Live’s to Fly is an authorized biography, and Kruth had access to those who knew Van Zandt best, including his children, ex-wives and his many friends. In fact, it appears that Kruth may have sought out everyone Van Zandt ever knew during his 52 years on this earth, an indication of the profound effect Van Zandt had on others. Musician David Olney says, “No matter how long you talked with him, he left you with the feeling it was really real somehow and worth remembering in some detail. That was the most unique thing about his personality. He gave so many people the feeling of having been close to him.”
Kruth writes with a well-versed casualness, as if he and the reader were on familiar terms. On occasion, the distance closes further and Kruth becomes a character himself—either an attempt to raise the situational drama, or, as in the case of one interview with a curmudgeonly and tequila-drinking Guy Clark, a lesson in journalistic perseverance. But when Kruth deconstructs the songs recorded on Van Zandt’s many albums, including several released posthumously, it’s with the ear of a critic and fellow musician; he’s not merely an adoring fan.
Perspective is critical, for Van Zandt lived the advice he gave, a lifestyle easily romanticized. Born into a respected family with founding ties to Texas, Van Zandt, according to Kruth, “blew off all the comforts and opportunities of his upper-middle-class background, believing that real-life experience was infinitely more valuable than a paycheck or emotional stability. He was simply not the kind of writer to observe human nature safely through a keyhole. Life, in all its messy drama, fueled his songs, and he threw himself into the thick of it every chance he got.” For Van Zandt, this meant spending months on the road, consuming large amounts of hard liquor and clinically dying twice, before making it to the hospital after a heroin overdose. Reading To Live’s to Fly is like experiencing a 30-year bender by proxy.
Sharply intelligent, contradictory, and eerily spiritual, Van Zandt lived a life that’s romantic only from a distance. To idealize is to reduce Van Zandt to his addiction, and he was more than an alcoholic. Going beyond the colorful anecdote, Kruth shows that when someone’s writing lyrics as poetic and narrative as Van Zandt’s, a complicated personality comes with the territory. “Townes was morose in his lyrics, but he was not a morose person. He had a great sense of humor,” Van Zandt’s former producer, Cowboy Jack Clement, tells Kruth. Kruth paints Van Zandt’s career as a Sisyphean struggle to write and perform despite limited radio play and little recognition from mainstream audiences. Yet the list of musicians citing the talented Van Zandt as a major influence is long and telling: Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Nanci Griffith, the late Mickey Newbury, Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes, Margo and Michael Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies, and that’s just a start. “Townes was like some weird cosmic unit for humanity. We don’t know why he was here, other than to write songs,” Jeanene Van Zandt says of her ex-husband. “He was vital to our existence.”
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