Austin Listens 2

[bendovacasanova]

A few weeks into my Texas resettlement, ink19 called with a new assignment: "I've got something special for you to review." "Oh?" "The new Townes Van Zandt biography!" "Cool." "You know who that is, right?" "Nope." Instead of hanging up in a huff, my editor decided to right this cultural wrong and passed me the bio.

Getting to review To Live's to Fly was an exciting introduction not only to an underrated yet captivating songwriter but to many other talented figures in the cowboy state's musical heritage. Starting with the book's subject, let me just proselytize: hunt down the recordings of Townes Van Zandt and pin them to your chest like a bloody badge. When his biographer attested to the therapeutic effect of Van Zandt's lyrics for listeners grieving a death or other personal tragedy, hope of finding one of those rare musical truthsayers started to well up inside me. And after watching him perform his "Waiting Around to Die" on the truly awesome documentary Heartworn Highways about the '70s new country scene in Texas, anyone who has felt the pain of loss and loneliness should become an instant Van Zandt zealot (like the man weeping in the background (Uncle Seymour Washington, a local character and Van Zandt's neighbor in a character-ridden part of Austin that was eventually cleared for a highway):

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Van Zandt's friend and contemporary, Guy Clark, provides one of the most entertaining scenes in the biography (which he repeats for the documentary solely about Van Zandt Be Here to Love Me). Tormentor to city slicker biographers, Clark bedevils attempted interviews with open hostility, references to firearms in his household, and repeated visits to the shot glass. So I was surprised by the tenderness of his performances on Heartworn Highways, but granted he was thirty years younger and the body count of his friends much lower. Compared with the old man who now has murder in his eyes, Guy Clark was in fact downright handsome, as were Steve Earle (who more resembled a dark-haired Jesus than the wasted monster he became later on) and many others in their young buck days.