Lonesome Blues.

For to ease your pain…

We’re almost there…

Cold as nuts today in the BX, but: baseball is near.

[Photo Credit: Wayne Miller via the amazing tumblr site, Lover of Beauty]

From the Texas Monthly archives here’s Michael Hall’s 1998 piece on Townes Van Zant:

Townes Van Zandt perched on a chair in the little nightclub in Berlin and sang for an hour and a half. It was October 1990. He was sober, which was a surprise; he was soulful and funny, which wasn’t. The adoring audience sat transfixed through his entire set: the precise playing, the weary singing, the apt covers like “Fraulein,” the country chestnut. The Germans loved him. They knew his lyrics by heart, though most of his jokes sailed over their heads.

Two and a half years later, Townes played at La Zona Rosa in Austin. He was so drunk he couldn’t finish a single song during the entire abbreviated set. Embarrassed fans started filing out after fifteen minutes as he fumbled with chords and slurred his words into gibberish. Some stuck it out to the end, feeling guilty for watching, but—well, you never knew what might happen when Townes Van Zandt was onstage. After the show, he collapsed.

Townes was a holy mess, his life a mix of the sublime and the horrific. By the time he died of a heart attack at 52 on New Year’s Day, 1997, the Fort Worth native had written a large batch of enduring songs and become the subject of colorful tales—many of them even true. They will be retold on March 28 when Austin City Limits airs “A Celebration of Townes Van Zandt,” during which Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith, Steve Earle, Guy Clark, and others reminisce about their friend and play his songs. At the taping of the show on December 7, Nelson and Harris did “Pancho and Lefty,” which he and Merle Haggard took to number one on the country charts in 1983. Harris and Earle sang “If I Needed You,” which she and Don Williams took to number three in 1981. Griffith sang “Tecumseh Valley” and Lovett “Flyin’ Shoes,” as each had been doing in concert for years. Griffith called Townes “one of our greatest native folk songwriters.”

And here is an exclusive: “Heavenly Houseboat Blues.”

Take me down, Little Susie, take me down.

[Photo Via: Lushlight]

American beauty…

[Photo Credit: Luis Andrei Muñoz]

Townes.

Check out this long appreciation of Townes Van Zant by Aretha Sills in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

TVZ: There’s so many good young people and old people, I can’t listen to it all. I end up listening to Muddy Waters and Mozart, Muddy Waters and Mozart. Hank Williams every so often, and Lightnin’ Hopkins. I mean, I listen quite a bit, but mostly I’m playing. Traveling and playing. And when I’m in a car, somebody gives you a tape, you listen to it. That’s one of the best places, but eventually it comes down to the hum of the wheels.

TVZ: But this land is covered with brilliant young and old musicians. What it takes is perseverance, and you have to be lazy. You have to be too lazy to work. When you start, at least, it helps not to have a family, because I started before I had a family. Young men come up to me and say, ‘I’d really like to do what you, how shall I go about it?’ I say, well you get a guitar or a piano (I prefer a guitar because it’s a lot easier to carry than a piano), then you’ve got to blow off security, money, your family, your loved ones, your home, blow it all off and stay with your guitar somewhere under a bridge and learn how to play it. That’s how it goes. That’s what I did. And that discourages a lot of them, ‘cause some of them are like, ‘I have two kids and I work in a gas station. I’m going to save my money and go to Nashville for a week.’ But that ain’t it. And girls, young ladies, occasionally ask me. I say, well first off, you’ve got to cut all your fingernails on your left hand off. And that stops most of them. But it ain’t easy. I mean, it’s not hard; it ain’t easy. It’s killing me, I know that. Something’s killing everybody. Just sometimes I get so tired that I can’t even sleep.

[Photo Credit: Al Clayton]