After last week’s brief dip in the Slough of Despond, let us talk of other things / of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings. Yes, I am the Walrus (coo-coo-k’choo).1
I don’t have much to say about shoes. I once told a colleague, with possibly a little too much excitement, that I had purchased a pair of orange shoes. He looked at me askance. “Are you having a mid-life crisis?” he said.
I don’t have much to say about ships. My favourite maritime experience was probably the Cook Strait ferry from North to South Island of New Zealand, which sailed gently into a harbour that - like much of New Zealand - looked like a children’s book illustration. My second-favourite may have been the ferry from Dublin to Holyhead, trying to keep one step ahead of the snow that closed Heathrow Airport and was in the process of disrupting train travel across the U.K.
I have even less to say about sealing-wax. The last time I used any was for the great unproduced A Man for all Seasons, the best school play ruined by Covid. Everybody in that cast was good and some were very good indeed. We had one of those epiphanic moments when More understood that his character was not passive, but impassive; the whole play moved to another level as a result.
Of cabbages, I am reasonably fond. I like red cabbage even though it stains ruinously. Of kings I could say quite a lot but I might need to give it some thought. Canonized monarchs are interesting because of the necessity of sword and sceptre; how can kings who killed and ordered death be saints? Because saints exist in the real world as a prelude to eternity. Once again, I give you St Olav. I might also give you St Henry and St Louis. Of course, a certain amount of politicking influenced their canonization, but either you believe in the recognition of saints or you don’t.
None of which relates to today’s subject. I am currently reading Bad Therapy, which echoes all my fears about what a former colleague called ‘inciting mental illness’ in schools, but I’ll tell you more when I’ve finished. No, today’s subject is Townes Van Zandt, which is odd because one week ago I couldn’t have told you enough about him to fill a postcard (or not unless I wrote in VERY BIG MAJUSCULE, which is the fancy name for capital letters as opposed to minuscule, which is not spelled miniscule despite popular belief that it is or ought to be, using ‘popular’ in a somewhat loose sense).
I have an American friend who doesn’t look like but certainly resembles Townes Van Zandt, and who could sing the part, and if anyone has a spare few hundred thousand dollars I’ll write and produce the play for him. (If anyone has a few million, we could make a film). The last play I completed was finished in the upstairs of Costa in Inverness in the early Spring of 2017. (I handwrite plays and then edit, if necessary, as I type them onto computer. Goodness knows what A.I. will do to composition, but I will continue to handwrite). This play, about the emperor Elagabalus, was a quite excellent technical piece of work, written as it was in a variety of metrical forms; the lead spoke in iambic pentameter, but others used hexameters or even dactyls (DA da da) or anapests (a dactyl flying backwards, i.e. da da DA) - and, frankly, you try writing convincing speeches in anapests and see how much coffee you need.
Townes Van Zandt (1944-1997) was, in broad terms, a country-music singer-songwriter. Unusually for such a one, he was born into an upper-middle-class family - moreover, one not wracked by divorce, addiction or anything other, really, than the understandable desire for the family to flourish. It wasn’t even restrictive; sure, his parents wanted him to be a lawyer like his daddy, or maybe even a Texas politician like an ancestor, but they encouraged his love for music and for poetry. Nonetheless, Townes lived a country-music life: drink, drugs, marriages and a sense throughout his work that he was living on the edge; living liminally.
I would lay a dime to a dollar that most of you, dear readers, had never heard of him. Well, this form of evangelism is partly why I do what I do; but I knew him only through the Western Writers’ Top 100 on which ‘Pancho and Lefty’ is ranked #17. And it’s an odd song, very Western rather than Country, with rather oblique lyrics about a Mexican bandit and his confrere who is possibly his betrayer. Moreover, nobody noticed it on its first release in 1972; it took Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard (gods of country) to bring it to public acclaim in 1983.
Van Zandt suffered from manic depression and, as a young man, underwent insulin shock therapy (one of those ‘treatments’ they don’t do any more). Rejected from the Air Force after being diagnosed as “an acute manic-depressive who has made minimal adjustments to life,” when his father died he abandoned college and lived the rest of his life as a troubador, a poet with the sort of starving-garret existence that looks dandy on film and would be unbearable to most of us in real life. Addicted to (at various points) alcohol, drugs and God-knows-what, he spent a lot of the ‘70s living with neither heat nor plumbing in a trailer outside Nashville, occasionally emerging to play small gigs in bars and coffee houses, needing only his voice and his guitar.
Usual caveat here that I am no musician, but I think I recognize that Van Zandt’s music is richer and more complex than standard jukebox country; and his lyrics certainly are. This is not aural wallpaper, at least not until you’ve listened to it a couple of times, but nor is it supposedly profound but actually up-its-own-ass stoner nonsense. The ‘my man / my woman left me’ standard country trope is fine as far as it goes and can reach the sublime, but Van Zandt is melancholic, occasionally plaintive and generally sad (a word that needs to be rescued for its subtlety). Listen to ‘If I Needed You’, which I like partly because he uses the archaic ‘for to’; ‘Tecumseh Valley’, which maintains the general rule that songs with American place-names in the title are good; ‘St John the Gambler’, ‘To Live is to Fly’ and ‘For the Sake of the Song’:
“Why does she sing
Her sad songs for me, I'm not the one
To tenderly bring
Her soft sympathy, I've just begun
To see my way clear and it's plain
If I stop I will fall
I can lay down a tear for her pain
Just a tear and that's all
What does she want me to do?
She says that she knows
That moments are rare
I suppose that it's true
Then on she goes to say I don't care
Aw, she knows that I do
Maybe she just has to sing for the sake of the song
Who do I think that I am to decide that she's wrong?”
This is a musical genre, or sub-genre, that may be the heart of culture. It’s too rich for pop (and - big concession on my part - for musical theatre), but it’s not so abstract as to be caviar to the general. And, before I sound like one of those people who insists you listen to this newly-discovered indie group, it’s deeply human. Van Zandt knew love and he knew pain. There is a universality to country music, I contend, that lifts it above the stereotype.
Regarding stereotypes, I’ve never embraced the idea that God speaks especially to, still less through, the liminal.2 Graham Greene loved Browning’s line that “our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things” and ran the idea to destruction, ‘striking poses on the edge of damnation.’3 I always rather sympathised with the ninety-nine sheep - but, as I live and fail and try again, I have become more open to the belief that grace shines most gloriously through the cracks.4
Pushed to talk about his work, Van Zandt said that “What I do is between me and the Lord, to examine and possibly alter the state of grace in which I live, and thereby the state of grace of anybody who listens.”5 On the face of it, his life was hardly a state of grace; but those are the words of a poet with a sense of the divine, and I am certainly not going to make assertions about his relationship with the Lord.
His health racked by decades of substance abuse, Townes Van Zandt died on New Year’s Day 1997, aged 52 - which was, with a country-music congruity, the same age at which his father died.
C’mon now, how many other Substacks cite John Bunyan, Lewis Carroll and John Lennon in the opening paragraph? Like and subscribe!
I’m reminded here of a Radio Active joke: “I expect you met God through the drugs?” / “No, but I did meet a giant cocktail onion called Samantha.”
I paraphrase Orwell.
Is this why the resurrected Christ retains the wounds of the crucifixion? just a thought.
The Great, Late Townes Van Zandt: Texas Monthly March 1998 (archive.org)