Troubled Texas troubadour pines for Colorado

 

 Van Zandt in 'Heartworn Highways' (1975)

My home is Colorado
With their proud mountains tall
Where the rivers like gypsies
Down her black canyons fall
I'm a long, long way from Denver
With a long way to go
So lend an ear to my singing
'Cause I'll be back no more

 

__ Townes Van Zandt  

 

 

  Album photo of Townes Van Zandt
 

 Saddened singer suffers for the sake of the song

 By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

 

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, his father was corporate lawyer in the petroleum industry and his family moved around following the business to Montana, Colorado and Texas. Much of John Townes Van Zandt's later life was spent touring various bars, music clubs, colleges, and folk venues and festivals, often lodging in motel rooms or the homes of friends. He suffered from drug addiction and alcoholism, and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

"He was a reckless drunk and a hopeless idealist, but he was also the best Texas songwriter of our time. Just ask Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith, and countless others who knew him well," wrote Michael Hall. in Texas Monthly, after Van Zandt's death on New Year's Day in 1997.

 

Rocky Mountain News File Photo

In 1958, the family moved to Boulder, Colorado. Van Zandt remembered his time in Colorado fondly and often visited it as an adult. He later referred to Colorado in "My Proud Mountains,""Colorado Girl," and "Snowin' on Raton." Townes was a good student and active in team sports. In grade school, he was found to have a high IQ, and his parents began grooming him to become a lawyer or senator. Fearing that his family would move again, he willingly decided to attend the Shattuck School in Faribault, Minnesota. He received a score of 1170 when he took the SAT in January 1962. His family soon moved to Houston, Texas. 

 In 1962, he enrolled at the University of Colorado Boulder, wrote poetry, and listened to records by Lightnin' Hopkins and Hank Williams. In the spring of his second year, his parents flew to Boulder to bring Townes back to Houston, worried about his binge drinking and episodes of depression. They admitted him to the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, where he was diagnosed with manic depression. He received three months of insulin shock therapy, which erased much of his long-term memory.

 

 

Townes Van Zandt - Pioneer Inn, Nederland, Colorado, 1972

 

"Townes Van Zandt, an influential songwriter whose dark and tragic country and folk ballads mirrored his own life, died on Wednesday at his home in Smyrna, Tex. He was 52," according the New York Times obit on January 3, 1997.

"The cause was apparently a heart attack, said Beverly Paul, a spokeswoman for Sugar Hill, the music label for which he recorded. Mr. Van Zandt broke his hip last week and had just returned home after undergoing surgery, she said.

"Mr. Van Zandt's powerfully written songs and spare, haunting delivery influenced many country, folk and rock performers, including Neil Young, Rosanne Cash, Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, the Cowboy Junkies and the grunge band Mudhoney. Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard topped the country charts in 1983 with a version of Mr. Van Zandt's song ''Pancho and Lefty.'' But Mr. Van Zandt never achieved mainstream success himself, in part because of his proclivity for living out his songs of drinking, gambling, rambling and depression.

''All that I've said/All that I've done/Means nothing to me,'' he sang on his most recent album, ''No Deeper Blue.'' ''I'd as soon be dead/All of this world be forgotten.''

"Mr. Van Zandt was born on March 7, 1944, in Fort Worth, into a wealthy oil family that had been prominent in Texas for four generations. Van Zandt County in West Texas was named for his forebears. He spent his childhood moving around the country with his family, and many of his teen-age years in a mental institution, diagnosed as a manic-depressive with schizophrenic tendencies.

"Influenced by the songs of Hank Williams, the guitar-playing of Lightnin' Hopkins and the lyrics of Bob Dylan, as well as by Elvis Presley's success, he moved to Houston in the early 1960's to try a career as a musician. Eventually he became so poor that he ate dog food and slept on concert stages. He tried to join the Air Force during the Vietnam War but was rejected because of his psychiatric history.

In 1968, Mr. Van Zandt moved to Nashville to record his first album, ''For the Sake of the Song,'' with the producer and songwriter Jack Clement, best known for his work with Johnny Cash. The album mixed humorous barroom songs with the tales of poverty, desperation and bleakness (''Waiting Round to Die,'' ''Tecumseh Valley'') that would make him, along with Guy Clark, a beacon to a generation of songwriters.

"He had since recorded nearly a dozen records and toured virtually nonstop, driven, his friends said, by inner demons that neither he nor they could account for. Sometimes his performances, like his last show in New York City, at the Bottom Line in 1995, movingly mixed minor-key tear-jerkers with a fatalistic sense of humor. Sometimes his shows were meandering, ending with him collapsing onstage.

At the time of his death, Mr. Van Zandt was working on a boxed set of his music. He had assembled a group of well-known musicians including Willie Nelson and Freddy Fender to record new versions of his songs.

Van Zandt was addicted to heroin and alcohol throughout his adult life. At times, he became drunk on stage and forgot the lyrics to his songs. At one point, his heroin habit was so intense that he offered Kevin Eggers the publishing rights to all of the songs on each of his first four albums for $20.At various points, his friends saw him shoot up not just heroin, but also cocaine, vodka, as well as a mixture of rum and Coke. On at least one occasion, he shot up heroin in the presence of his son J.T., who was only eight years old at the time, according to the Dallas Observer in 2002 in "The Way of the Gun – Living up to his famous father is a tall order for J.T. Van Zandt"

"Some of the best golden-era Colorado anthems came from the late Townes Van Zandt, whose spare, largely acoustic recordings have only recently built a sizable national following," writes Steven Rozen in his blog about the "Golden Age of Colorado songs."

"He was a Texas troubadour and Colorado devotee whose introspective, often-pining compositions like “If I Needed You” and “Waiting Round to Die” serve as the archetype for today’s Americana (or alternative-country) music.

"Earle — today a bard of contemporary Americana himself — released a tribute album called “Townes.” On it, Earle covers Van Zandt’s 1969 “Colorado Girl.” Van Zandt briefly attended the University of Colorado at Boulder in the 1960s, and during the 1970s he spent summers in the state, writing such other songs about it as “Snowin’ on Raton,” “Our Mother the Mountain” and “My Proud Mountains.”

“Townes used to say there are two kinds of music — blues and zip-a- dee-doo-dah, and a lot of songs written about Colorado tend to be zip-a-dee-doo-dah,” Earle says. “But Townes’ stuff is not that.”