A Deeper Blue (29 page)

“It came together really quickly,” White recalls. “I was able to coordinate dates at McCabe’s and at the Great American Music Hall within a few days of one another. Once you book those core dates, you start filling things in, and that’s your profit. Pay your expenses with your main gigs. We were back to double guitars, which is where we started in the first place, and we had the Colonel, and not a lot of expenses to get us out there and back.

And right about that time, we ended up booking the Vancouver Folk Festival as well.”

Before the tour began, Townes returned briefly to the farm in Franklin to retrieve some of his belongings. Mickey accompanied Townes on the trip; as he recalls, “His mom had this white Ford Toronado, so we rode up to Tennessee in that and got Geraldine. The dog was still up there, holding down the farm, faithfully and loyally. He kind of put the last shit down on the farm, and we got the truck, the Colonel. And we had two CBs—that was really a hoot…. and we kind of convoyed back down to Texas.”

As the time came for Townes and Mickey to leave for Vancouver, which would be the first stop on the tour, Jeanene was increasingly upset at being left behind. Jeanene says Townes told her, “No slits on the road!” As she tells the story, to get back at Townes for this slight, she approached a “bag boy” at the local market. “I took him aside and I said, ‘Hey, how ‘bout you and Still Lookin’ For You

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me get together?’ And he went, ‘okay!’” She returned home to tell Townes that she had a date that night, and found him pack-ing up the truck to leave. When she told him about her “date,”

Townes went out to the truck and brought in a copy of
Our
Mother the Mountain
and flung it at her. “I said, ‘You have records?’” She put the record on to play as Townes left, “and I was sitting there bawling … I was crying … I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I still kept my date, but … all I did was talk about Townes the whole time I was there. Then I wanted him back, because I decided, okay, I’m keeping him.”

Townes and Mickey covered hundreds of miles together in the Colonel, going up to Vancouver then back down the west coast before returning to Texas. “I remember Townes had this little bitty tape recorder with one little auxiliary speaker on it,”

White says. “We had two tapes, Robert Johnson and Utah Phillips. We listened to Robert Johnson and Utah Phillips for days upon end.” The gigs were overwhelmingly successful, including a performance opening for Ramblin’ Jack Elliott at his fiftieth-birthday celebration at McCabe’s in Los Angeles. “Townes’ reputation for blowing gigs came from playing Houston and Austin.

If he played Gerde’s Folk City or the Great American, he would never even consider blowing a gig like that,” White points out.

Van Zandt and White headed into the desert from California.

“We had to go through up near Tahoe into Carson City and then across the desert to Salt Lake,” White says. “We stopped at Carson City, and Townes and I of course immediately hit the tables.” White lost all his money fairly quickly, but he assumed that Townes was “holding on to the payroll and had enough money to get us to the next gig.” White’s main concern was whiskey. “We were playing two nights later, so I figured there’d be whiskey money. So I tracked Townes down about two or three in the morning and said ‘Townes, man, loan me another hundred.’ And he says, ‘Man, I don’t have any money at all.’ He’d lost every single penny—the entire payroll—shooting craps.

Fortunately, we’d paid for the hotel room before we started gambling, so at least we had a place to sleep that night.”

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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
The next morning, the two broke musicians made a play.

Townes approached a man in the hotel elevator and asked him if he had the time. According to Mickey, “He said, ‘I don’t have a watch.’ I said, ‘Well, maybe you’d like to buy mine.’ I had a Timex on, and I sold it to him for ten bucks. So that bought us a pint of booze and five dollars’ worth of gas in the car, which is enough to go up the mountain to Tahoe. So we drive the Colonel forty miles or so up into the hills. At least it would be cool up there, and we could sleep in the car and be comfortable. When we pulled into Tahoe the next day, we didn’t have any money at all.”

Again, Townes had a plan. Seeing from the marquee that Christopher Cross was playing at Caesar’s, with the comedian Gary Muledeer opening, they walked into Caesar’s, and, according to White, “Townes picks up the house phone. ‘Uh, give me Christopher Cross’s room please.’ ‘One moment, sir.’ You see Townes kind of waiting. ‘Well, thank you very much. Could you try Gary Muledeer’s room?’ … there’s a little pause. ‘Hello? Is this Gary Muledeer? You might not know who I am. My name’s Townes Van Zandt. Yeah, that guy.’ Apparently, he made a connection. So they start talking back and forth, and Townes hangs up the phone, and he says, ‘Look, man, Gary Muledeer says if we can get backstage after his second show, he’ll loan us a couple of hundred bucks.’” Unfortunately, the attempt to get backstage at Caesar’s Tahoe was unsuccessful.

They had one option left. “I had this lucky buffalo nickel taped to the inside of my wallet.… I stuck our last nickel in the slot machine and pulled the handle. Lemon, bar, cherry, click. The ominous sound. I said, that’s it. So we headed out to the Colonel. It was our last nickel.” Townes was reduced to phoning Peggy Underwood and asking her to wire them some money. He and Mickey headed back down the mountain and stopped at Western Union, where they picked up the money and hit the road again.

That summer, as a new single, Emmylou Harris released a recording of her duet with Don Williams on “If I Needed You,”

the second of Townes’ songs she’d covered. The record quickly Still Lookin’ For You

187

registered at number three on the country charts, and Townes’

name was again before the public as a songwriter of note. One of the first things Townes did when he got the news about the hit record was to phone Fran. The song had been special to her since Townes started writing it on the occasion of J.T.’s birth, and she felt that Townes recalled that feeling in his late-night call to her years later.

Townes saw Fran and J.T. only infrequently after his move to Nashville. Fran recalls, “J.T. always had this great sense of loss.

Granny, as we called her—Townes’ mother—took J.T. a couple of times to go see him [in Franklin]. Once it was really good and once it wasn’t so good.” When Townes moved back to Texas, he was able to visit with J.T. more often, and he was more in touch with Fran, so a call from Townes was not a shock, but the timing was a surprise. As Fran recalls, “Townes called me in the middle of the night, like three o’clock in the morning. It was a Saturday night. I’ll never forget because I had just gotten home from my honeymoon with Ronnie.” Fran’s new husband answered the phone. “He gave me the phone and Townes said, ‘Babe, we’ve made it. We finally hit the big time. Now we can buy your dad that Cadillac!’ He was so sweet. We talked for a long time. He finally said, ‘Who was that guy? I hope he’s a nice guy.’ And I told him I’d just gotten married.”10

Interestingly, like Doc Watson’s earlier recording of the song, Harris’ version altered the lines in the third verse about Loop and Lil, Townes’ parakeets. Instead of the original “Loop and Lil agree/She’s a sight to see/And a treasure for the poor to find,”

Watson sang “Surely you will agree/She’s a pretty sight to see/

And a treasure indeed for a man to find.” The Emmylou Harris/

Don Williams version was “Who could ill agree/She’s a sight to see/And a treasure for the poor to find.” According to Harris, Don Williams was perplexed by the Loop and Lil reference and insisted it be changed.11

Townes appeared on Ralph Emory’s Nashville Network TV

show shortly after Emmylou’s record hit the charts, and, before playing the song, while sitting next to Bill Monroe, he once
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
again told the story of how “If I Needed You” was the only song he had ever written in his sleep. Bill Monroe seemed unim-pressed.12 Townes also told the story and performed the song—

as well as “Pancho and Lefty”—on his second appearance on
Austin City Limits
in 1982.

Townes was invited back to play the Vancouver Folk Festival in the summer of 1982, and he and Mickey decided to take Jeanene and Mickey’s new wife, Pat, along with them. According to White, “Pat was a drinker, too, as was Jeanene, so it got pretty wild, to say the least. But we had a pretty good time, and we played well.” After Vancouver, they went to Seattle, then played the Casper Inn, near Mendocino, then the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco and McCabe’s in L.A. Next, they headed back to Texas for a couple of gigs in El Paso. White says,

“In between those two gigs, we went over to Juarez one day …

and Townes spent—I mean literally—every penny that he had from the entire tour. It was one of those things where he was kind of getting at Jeanene.”

At a bar, Townes began tipping the waiters, bar staff, and wandering children extravagantly. “Soon, you could just tell that the word had gone out, because, here it is like one or two o’clock in the afternoon, and out of nowhere, the mariachi band shows up. Jeanene’s screaming at Townes at the top of her lungs, ‘We gotta get out of here, we gotta get out of here,’” White says. “So we end up getting a cab, and this horde of kids is following us.

And Townes has this big blue sombrero that’s about three feet wide, little stuffed dolls and pinatas and all this kind of stuff just hanging all over him. The kids are following behind, and whatever money he had left, he rolls down the window right as the cab is pulling out and says, ‘Here, take this home to your mama,’ and throws all the money out the window.”

This episode took place after lucrative paydays at major venues like the Great American Music Hall and McCabe’s, so

“hundreds and hundreds of dollars” were involved, according to Mickey. “Fortunately, we had a gig that night, so we made enough money to get home,” he says. “But, of course, Jeanene Still Lookin’ For You

189

was counting on paying her rent with that money when she got home…. She ended up hauling Townes out of there, but by that time, Townes knew that he had her going. And once she made herself vulnerable, in that sense, once she showed that the money was important, that was Townes’ leverage.”

By this time, there was a new development that Townes and Jeanene couldn’t ignore: Jeanene was pregnant, and she was determined to have the baby. At some point, Townes revealed to Jeanene that he was still a married man and that he didn’t know where his wife was. Townes acknowledged that he would have to get a divorce from Cindy sooner or later, and that, with a baby on the way, it would likely have to be sooner.

Townes was also deeply troubled by another family issue: his mother had been diagnosed with cancer, and the prognosis was grim. Townes visited her at her apartment in Houston that summer, where he also discussed with Bill and Donna plans for caring for their mother. He went back and forth between Austin and Houston to visit Dorothy numerous times over the course of the next few months, both before and after she was hospitalized, as she soon was, at the nearby University Medical Center.

According to Jeanene, Dorothy encouraged Townes to marry her. “He always talked about how she never took her [wedding]

ring off, and on her fucking death bed she took that ring off and handed it to him and said, ‘you know, I have never taken this ring off. I want you to go home and marry that girl.’13 He came home and I was taking a nap, and super pregnant, and he told me what had happened and handed me the ring. And I’m bawling because he was always so impressed that she never took her ring off; that was a big thing.”

According to Fran, when Townes came down to visit her and J.T., he mentioned Jeanene; “he said nothing was ever going to happen [with Jeanene] because his mom really didn’t like her.

You could tell even after the wedding.” Fran had remained very close to Townes’ mother, J.T.’s “granny”; “I got called in for all the family circle things,” Fran says. “I was there for J.T., plus I loved Granny. She was something in my life. I felt separate from
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
the family but I knew everybody much better than Jeanene because we did stuff with them. So it was kind of awkward. I think where Jeanene may get her story is that, being in a very Southern family, Granny was horrified that they weren’t married and she was pregnant. She said to Townes, ‘You’re going to do the right thing and honor that baby.’”

As they settled back in Austin, however, Townes and Jeanene returned to their familiar pattern of drinking and partying while Townes played the local bars and clubs. Finally, in August, Townes checked himself into the Starlite Recovery Center Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Program—at Kerrville, of all places—where he underwent rehab until early October. Townes recalled later that this was his longest period of sobriety, the three months from August to October, 1982.14 But soon he was drinking again.

Mickey and Pat also fell easily into an unhealthy pattern: “Pat and I had gone back to shooting drugs, like speed,” Mickey recalls. “And by that time, I was really peaking on my alcoholism and all that stuff. Man, I was nuts, cross-eyed nuts. It was a little much even for Townes. So he decided he was gonna use a different guitar player.” For roughly the remainder of the year, Townes worked with Elliot Rogers, who was half of a local two-person band called the Ramblers. White played lead guitar on a dozen or so gigs around Texas with Jimmie Dale Gilmore over the next months, while Rogers played local gigs with Townes.

“Elliot was a good player,” according to White, “but he couldn’t play with Townes like I could.”

In January of 1983, Willie Nelson released a recording of his duet with Merle Haggard of “Pancho and Lefty.” This event was to prove a major turning point in Townes’ career, although not in the way many people expected at the time. The song had come to Nelson through a fortuitous sequence of connections.