Townes Van Zandt - Michael Blowhard writes:
What could possibly be wrong with simply telling the Townes story, introducing Townes' people, and including a lot of performance footage? Just the facts -- and the music -- ma'am. God damn arty filmmakers, always trying to put themselves between me and the information I want ...
As it turned out, I experienced the annoyance I was anticipating only a couple of times, and then only fleetingly. I spent most of the movie feeling blissed-out, in a hurts-so-bad-it's-good kind of way. Is "Be Here to Love Me" the downbeat, elliptical, artily hard-to-categorize movie I was expecting? Sure. Does Margaret Brown leave big parts of the Townes story blurry and unaccounted for, just as I feared? Yup.
But, as it turned out, this was all fine by me. Enough of the information comes across; enough of the key people make substantial appearances; enough of Townes' music is heard. Margaret Brown didn't try to make the definitive Townes Van Zandt biography; she's leaving room for others to do that. What she made instead is a glancing and touching mood piece -- a movie that's half about Townes Van Zandt and half about how his music can make you feel.
This dreamy, half-story/half-mood approach makes sense given how powerfully Townes Van Zandt's music -- given, in fact, how powerfully the whole Townes Van Zandt thang -- can hit a person.
She and her talented cinematagrapher Lee Daniel (and her team of editors) use the usual combo of interviews, archival footage, and image-processing. But they also add free-associating editing riffs and dramatic recreations (or something like). A lot of "Be Here to Love Me" is just visual mood music set to voices. But the approach doesn't conflict with the Townes story. And the shadows, the stray views out smeary car windows, the lonely hotel rooms, and the beat-up mailboxes have their own sad, Townes-ish eloquence. Margaret Brown is a poet in her own right; she knows how to establish and sustain a powerful yet hard-to-label mood. Brown wants to get across the kind of artist Van Zandt was from inside the experience of listening to his music.
I wasn't surprised to learn in one interview that she had her collaborators watch Francis Girard's amazing little movie "32 Short Films About Glenn Gould," a film that tries to present the pianist Glenn Gould in Gould's own terms. It's interesting to note that Gould's life and music had the same kind of purity that Van Zandt's did; it was all about, and for, the music. Gould too died in his 50s. There are even fans who compare Townes to Mozart. That comparison may be, er, a little overdone. nice sentence but, I dunno, we just don't know hot to even see the size of the achievement of Mozart of of Shakespeare maybe and so maybe we just blow it out of all proportion, all comparison to an art we do recognize as ours. Still, I know what these fans are getting at. Like Mozart and like Glenn Gould, Van Zandt can seem like an alien, sent here for one reason and one reason only: to deliver beautiful music to , and to show us something of what beauty can be.

Where the facts go, Margaret Brown does sometimes leave you in the lurch. Did Townes screw over his producer at Tomato Records, or was it vice versa? yeah I wonder about kevin eggers. And what was it that went wrong for Townes in his personal life? oh well really was there a turn? wasn't it just high and low all along.? By the mid-'70s, Townes seemed to have left the music scene almost entirely. oh. Why this happened is the biggest puzzle in the film. He spent much of the '70s living in a trailer, then in a cabin, playing with his guns, watching "Happy Days," and doing drugs. It was during these years that he lost his chiseled, dark-eyebrowed, sexy-hippie-dreamboat looks and emerged corroded. still pretty I say.

Although he was a dark and handsome guy (in a prematurely-broken-down way) and an engagingly droll racounteur, when he gave himself over to his music he seemed to disappear physically. He was transparent -- an enchanter. He seemed to become his music.
His songs are formal and spare. He seemed to want to pare them down to some essence of feeling. Even his good-time stompers and his revival clap-alongs are set against a backdrop of bleakness. Yet, lonely as it always is, Townes' music is also shot through with a gentle (though not hopeful) radiance. Although he was a dark and handsome guy (in a prematurely-broken-down way) and an engagingly droll racounteur, when he gave himself over to his music he seemed to disappear physically. He was transparent -- an enchanter. He seemed to become his music.
The best country, blues, and folk artists take you to emotional places that are intoxicating yet dangerous to visit. oh. so there, why I. Townes' music seemed to be born in these regions, and to never leave it. His sad songs are really heart-rending; he makes the melancholy, the pitilessness, and the sweetness seem like the inescapable parts of life they really are.

...Steve Earle recalls a horrific visit. With Earle watching, Townes put three bullets in a gun, spun the chamber, put the gun to his head, and pulled the trigger three times. in the film: "3 times he did it, 3 times he got away with it. took me years to get over that. "]
-certainly one of history's more ferocious self-medicators.
As he aged, Townes never seemed to grow up. He seemed to go directly from being young to being old. ah.

But the central point about Townes -- the thing that makes him a legend as well as a kind of beacon for his fans -- is that it was all for the art. (I say this not in praise, by the way, simply to relate a fact.) He lived for his art, and he lived for his art so thoroughly that he seemed to live for nothing else whatsoever, except maybe the booze and the drugs. He lived as though he wanted his life and his art to merge; he seemed to be driven to embody his art. Townes plunged so heedlessly into this pursuit that he made everyone else look a little cowardly, a little self-protective. [or, playing my devil's advocate: a little responsible, a little of something besides 'self-indulgent'-as they say.]

OK, this is just gush and impressionism. Even so, I have a hunch about what Townes represents, to me as well as to many fans. I think that Townes and his music represent the Thing Itself, that "It" or "the divine" or whatever it is that artists go in search of and that the rest of us hope they'll come back able to pass along to us. rest of you. In other words, Townes is one of those artists whose work can make you think, "This is what it's all about." It's the real stuff, whatever the hell it is we mean by that. For people who love the arts, and who have constructed lives that make some room for the arts, this is it: the essence of why you've gone to the bother. All the showboating, the virtuosity, the arguments, and the fads -- none of it counts unless some of this is present. yes. What's remarkable about Townes' music is how often it seems to consist of nothing but this Thing Itself.

nothing but.

very good post. the writer 'mbh' though no is not a poet and shows not only in point of view but also little mis-rememberings: eg Townes differentiates 'feeling lonely' from 'feeling alone', mbh says loneliness from lonesomeness. and, mbh says that younger son remembers crying to sleep bc humiliated by dad - ?gosh I don't think so - maybe he thought it was will talking when it was still jt (followed by saying that in the morning townes wld be sitting on the bed w/ 'almost forced' tears in his eyes) could I be mistaken?

ast part of post & comments not pleasing to me, though perhaps useful to hear that view - the rest of them:
What are we more-cautious, more-sensible people to make of these talented, self-destructive artists? How to respect the real-life-practicality we all need to survive while maintaining the openness and receptivity -- and the imaginative/emotional engagement -- that an involvement with the arts requires? Is it possible to keep your head while losing it?
Townes Van Zandt didn't even try. Once he walked off the cliff he just kept right on falling. well that is exactly how it works, falling off a cliff.

good links:
On this page, you can look at some pix of Townes, and download and play a freebie Real Player file of a live performance of "2 Girls."
You can listen to four Townes songs at this page.
see that there's a book-biography of Townes being worked-on by John Kruth. Here's a lovely excerpt.
James Szalapski's 1982 film "Heartworn Highways" is a lovely documentary about the hippie-country movement -- about alt-country before there was such a thing as alt-country. The film includes early footage of Guy Clark, Townes, and many others. You can buy it here; for some reason the viewer reviews (many of them very eloquent) are all here. Szalapski gave Brown permission to use some outtakes from his film in hers.

In this interview, Margaret Brown talks about how proud Texans are of Townes Van Zandt. A number of them (including the filmmaker Richard Linklater) helped her finance her film and get it made.
Here's a sad story about legal squabbles over Van Zandt's musical estate. Needless to say, Townes didn't care about business or financial matters and left it to others to deal with them. Here's another story about the mess (this is the one I've seen, below.)

Here's a long, rambling, and very late-in-the-day interview with Townes and Steve Earle.