Townes Van Zandt

Something I share with a great many musicians and songwriters is a love for Townes Van Zandt's songs. Something I may share with fewer is a love for a 2001 record called Townes Van Zandt Live at McCabes, based on an intimate concert that took place in Santa Monica two years before Van Zandt's inevitable early death. I have recommended this CD to friends only to have them come back to me and say, "did I get the right record? that was pretty bad."

By certain objective measures of good-record-ness, I suppose I can see why people don't like Live at McCabes. In fact, I often hedge my bets by saying it's my favorite "bad record." Bad because Townes sometimes sounds so weary, you think he might be too tired or too drunk to play. Like maybe he won't make it all the way to the end of the show. His fingers kind of scrawl and scrape on the strings and his voice scratches and waivers past the notes like a man trying to aim a pistol with a hangover. He'll start off a song, then seem to lose the beat for a second or stop altogether to bark off a laugh, maybe tell something funny he just thought of. And the audience's laughter at these times often seems a little forced, almost nervous.

So there's a roughness to the whole thing that's more than the ordinary lack of polish for a live record. I guess it's this rawness that turns people away from it. Why I like this album so much better than any mere collection of Townes Van Zandt songs is, I suppose, as much of a personal matter as it is something intrinsic to the disk.

At some point, I became aware that Townes Van Zandt was "important" and "influential." The way you come to realize you should listen not only to Bob Dylan but to Woody Guthrie too, even if you suspect in the heart of your heart that listening to Woody Guthrie will make you want to put a rock through your radio. I had started to recognize Van Zandt's songs and name all over the place: My wife and I had learned his "Tecumseh Valley" off a Nanci Griffith record, and I'd heard various versions of a Steve Earle anecdote declaring that Townes Van Zandt was the best songwriter ever. Then there was Willie Nelson singing Townes's "Pancho and Lefty" and the Cowboy Junkies covering "To Live's to Fly" and all that kind of thing. I decided I needed to go to the horse's mouth, as it were, and get hold of some Townes Van Zandt albums to listen to.

When I take a mind to get to know about something, my first stop is usually the library, and our local DeKalb County Public has a pretty good CD collection for what it is. So I figured to check out all the Townes Van Zandt CDs I could find. But the thing about that CD collection is, it's made up of donated records, which is to say, chiefly stuff people bought and didn't like. It turned out, therefore, the only Townes Van Zandt album on the rack was this one, Live at McCabes. I checked it out and took it to work the next day to listen through headphones while sitting in my quasi-efficient, open-backed cubicle with its pilled side fabric, florescent lighting, and overhead storage like a Greyhound bus.

At first, I was kind of put off by those things I have described, the creakiness and the sort of wild playing and all that. But soon I was also getting pulled in by the sound in my headphones, the scraping chairs and throats clearing in the quiet parts. And the exposed rawness in the voice, creating a feeling almost of embarrassment, like sitting too close in somebody's living room when he's playing you a song and you don't know quite where to look. At one point, the singer jokes, "boy, if it gets any quieter in here, I'm going to preach a sermon." Another burst of nervous laughter. There's a sense in these moments that the audience is witnessing a kind of struggle, some profound wrestling match between the man sitting before them and something unseen. Or maybe I'm just describing my own reaction, because somewhere along the line I crossed over completely from my nondescript beige cubicle. Fell right through in my imagination into the fidgety, small-room audience witnessing this balancing act between revelation and self-destruction.

Toward the end of the record, there're a couple of light, jokey numbers with Kelly Joe Phelps sitting in on Dobro, and then a hushed, long, mostly spoken new song, "Marie." A dirge of a song, a homeless man's desperate resignation to his lover's death and his own impotence in the face of it. By the end of "Marie," I was surprised to discover I was weeping. Not misting over, you understand, but sitting at work, slacks and buttondown, expensive laptop and all, and crying like a beggar in the rain. I'm hoping to hell no one will try to talk to me because my eyes are full up and my throat is hot and tight, beyond speech. The shock of it brought me back to time and place, and I got up and went to wash my face and so forth. No harm done to my day job.

Since then I've listened to a lot of his records, and frankly very few of them are great beyond being good gatherings of exceptional songs. Live at the Old Quarter is very good, and if I remember correctly, I really like High, Low and In Between. Ultimately he's a songwriter who's songs are greater than any single collection of them or any single recording or performance of any particular one. There's a new release of Live at McCabes out that starts out with a different song ("The Hole" rather than "Pueblo Waltz") and swaps out a couple other tracks here and there. All-in-all, the new one feels a bit slicker, lacks a little bit of the rawness that I responded to on the initial release. On the other hand, this one is missing a studio demo that follows "Marie" and mars the end of the original. I don't know which record most closely resembles the actual 1995 concert; for me the performance took place inside my head ten years later in a bland office cubicle in Atlanta.