lone star: the incomparable music tvz left behind remains the benchmark by which nearly all modern day singer-songwriters of the folk and Americana persuasion are measured. When critics bemoan the beer and Lone Star flag waving obsession of too many a current quote-unquote Texas songwriter, Van Zandt’s is invariably the first name cited when they recall a time when the title signified a something altogether more special. His contemporaries like Guy Clark, Butch Hancock and Billy Joe Shaver are all given equal credit and respect, but they’ll be among the first to tell you that Van Zandt’s gift was singular. As Shaver himself puts it with conviction, “As far as I was concerned, he was the best songwriter that ever lived. And that’s it.”
Shaver, along with Clark, Hancock (with the Flatlanders), Steve Earle, Willie Nelson, Nanci Griffith, John Prine, Lucinda Williams and a host of other A-List songwriters take terms supporting that statement with their uniformly excellent performances of some of Van Zandt’s finest songs on the recently released Poet – A Tribute to Townes Van Zandt. Few, if any, all-star tribute albums have likely ever been such a labor of love for all involved; with the sole exception of newcomer Pat Haney (who holds his own a stark reading of “Waitin’ Round to Die”), every one of the artists on the album knew and loved Van Zandt first hand...

JT's album-closing version of “My Proud Mountains” on Poet: I think he had a real ambition to escape society. I really think that he would have loved to have lived unknown out on a ranch and had a happy family and all that sort of stuff up in the mountains somewhere. And he was able in that song to me to sum up the experience for anyone who longs to live in the mountains. And I spent a lot of time in Colorado too, doing those things. When he was still around, I went up there to become a fly fishing guide for a few seasons, and he was just enthralled with the idea that I was doing that. He was so super proud, and was telling all his friends on the road that I was guiding fly fishing. And he really just sprung out of character when he found out that I was starting to make wooden boats, and some of the things that perhaps he wanted to do with his life if it wasn't for the songwriting. So that song just became really personal between he and I and I just felt like it was the only song to do on the album.

If one of his songs was playing in a room, maybe after a show or at some kind of situation where he was being celebrated and present, he would demand – sometimes to a pretty freaky, violent level – that it be turned off. He would remove the sound of his music from any setting if he was there and trying to function as a normal person. It would be shocking to people, but if I heard a Townes song come on and Townes was around, it was basically a count-down to watch him run through a hallway and charge to the record player, maybe even destroying it to get it off of it.
-Why was that?
I really don’t know. But truthfully, his music, his songs zapped him into a place that he didn’t necessarily want to be in. I know. You didn’t have to get it or not, it just had to stop. You had to get that off.

His major goal was just to be viewed as a traveling blues guitar player.

He wasn't able to let anything roll off -- he just endured all the pain that he could imagine. It wasn't a choice of his, he just soaked in that sadness sometimes, intense sadness. But he could come reeling out of it and be really witty and humorous too.

I remember asking him things about politics and stuff as I entered my college time, and he'd say things like, 'T, once you've had the blues, none of that shit makes any fucking difference. Any world news whatsoever -- the price of gas, etc. -- you can keep all that.’ He would always say, 'It's a fucking bitch.' And you'd ask him, 'What?' And he'd like fake spit and say, 'It's a bitch man. It's a bitch.'

Because his choice of words were very simple, it was just kind of the way he talked, but to anyone who wasn't used to being around him, he could just box you in verbally. You had no way to answer the things he was saying, and he could prove and disprove himself right at the same time. jaime.
He was very intense – he could be an absolute gentleman, but to the people he loved, he could scorn you pretty hard.

He warned that his end was coming – 30 years before his death, he said that it could be 30 years from now, but he basically warned you all the time that he was skating on that edge. I think I missed a lot of it, but there were a couple of instances that convinced me that he might have a deeper connection that I was unable to understand, that he was really coming to us all from a level above having to go to work and come home and all that other shit we go through every day. He saw right through that to a deeper meaning. I’ve never seen someone more able to in the worst circumstances, in the worst stage of personal abuse, be able to convince someone trying to help that they also have no other choice except the choices he’d made.
... He could walk into an AA meeting and only say a few of words and have everyone rolling dice for a dollar a pop and drinking Vodka out of the bottle.

... we kept this little baby buzzard on the dash, and whenever Townes got like, “Rawrrrr!’, you could reach for this buzzard and make it walk back and forth across the dash, make its head kind of bob, and he would burst into the laughter of a six year old. That was like the hidden emergency button.

There were times we were left in awe of trying to figure out what Townes’ magic was under this totally unmanageable shell of a 45-50 year-old stubborn-ass traveling songwriter. It was almost like Roky Erickson, because I was around him a lot too. Both of them were a lot smarter than they were crazy, and their boredom and their level of intelligence led to pranking the rest of us.

Sometimes I get spells of the type of blues that he had. But after his death, I think I always thought that it would be a minimal ten years before I’d even consider it. Then I thought, maybe first I’ll give a shot at being happy. And if that doesn’t work out, then I’ll definitely be a songwriter. ok. ok, JT. I'm with you.