Beyond the legend of Townes Van Zandt

Steve Earle gets to the real man

BY DAVID MENCONI, Staff writer
Raleigh News & Observer
http://www.newsobserver.com/
June 7, 2009

On the surface, at least, the legend of the late great Townes Van Zandt makes for a familiar cliche.

He was a tortured, under-appreciated genius whose darkly poetic music was inextricably linked to his self-destructive tendencies. A dozen years after he succumbed to years of self-abuse at age 52, Van Zandt is as well-known for his excesses as for "Pancho and Lefty," "To Live Is To Fly" or any of the other classic songs he left behind.


Steve Earle's latest album pays tribute to his mentor. - PHOTO BY TED BARRON

To the extent that it's possible, Steve Earle would like to set the record straight about Van Zandt. Few people, living or dead, would be better-qualified to do so.

Earle came of age four decades ago in Texas, very much in Van Zandt's shadow. He studied at the feet of the master and regularly covered his mentor's songs. That includes the 15 Van Zandt compositions on his new tribute record, "Townes" (New West Records), which will make up a sizable chunk of the set when Earle plays a sold-out Carrboro ArtsCenter on Wednesday.

Van Zandt was given to mysterious pronouncements like, "There aren't but two kinds of music: There's the blues ... and there's zip-a-dee-doo-dah." Earle has also been known to make an outrageous pronouncement or two (for example: "Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that"). And he spent a long dark period struggling with the same substance-issues that Van Zandt could never kick.

"We all over-romanticize things, including me," Earle says, calling from a tour stop in Portsmouth, N.H. "Townes was an alcoholic and also probably mentally ill -- and one of the best artists who ever lived. And those are three totally separate things. Now I survived the same disease, but Townes never even tried to get sober. I have no explanation for that, although it does kind of prove there's an indirect correlation between artistry and problems."

From heckler to hero

Earle and Van Zandt actually got off to a rough start. They met in Houston in 1972, when Earle was playing a show and Van Zandt was heckling him from the audience. Earle finally seized control of the situation by playing one of Van Zandt's own songs to shut him up, "Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold" (which Earle covers on "Townes" as a duet with his son, Justin Townes Earle).

Commercially, at least, Earle soon surpassed Van Zandt. Though never a huge seller, Earle has earned two gold records and he plays to consistently sold-out houses.

Earle traveled just as hard a road as Van Zandt, bottoming out in the early 1990s with a prison term for drug and firearms violations. But incarceration finally enabled Earle to kick his drug habit, and he has worked at a feverish pace since leaving prison in late 1994.

"Townes" is the ninth album Earle has released in 14 years. During that time, he has also acted (an acclaimed cameo role in "The Wire," plus his feature-film debut in Tim Blake Nelson's "Leaves of Grass" opposite Edward Norton), worked tirelessly on anti-death penalty causes and published a short-story collection. He is also just about finished writing a novel, "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive," in which the ghost of Hank Williams figures prominently.

There's no denying that Earle has come into his own since getting sober. It's hard not to wonder what Van Zandt might have accomplished had he been able to conquer his demons.


Steve Earle, left, with his mentor, Townes Van Zandt.

"Townes was the same as Vincent Van Gogh," Earle says. "Was he a little too sensitive, and did he use that as a tool? Yeah, you bet. But he also was like Vincent Van Gogh in that he shot himself in the foot every chance he got. It's mostly Townes' own fault that he's not better known. Other people were involved, but he chose to associate with them. He made a lot of bad decisions."

A daunting catalog

Given their relationship, a Van Zandt tribute album was a natural for Earle. And there were some songs that definitely had to be on it, most notably the bookends. "Pancho and Lefty," the rambling historical epic that is best-known as a 1983 hit for Willie Nelson, opens "Townes," and it closes with the elegiac "To Live Is To Fly."

"I recorded those two right away, at the very beginning," Earle says. "Sort of like you go and try to knock out the biggest guy in the yard on your first day in jail so you can keep your radio. I did those first on purpose, to get them out of the way. I didn't want to do the rest of the record with those two hanging over my head."

The day he began recording, Earle had a list of 28 Van Zandt songs on a legal pad. Eventually he winnowed those down to the 15 that made the final cut. The album has some intriguing re-arrangements -- especially "Lungs," which features turntable scratching and Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello. But most of Earle's renditions are pretty straightforward, filtered through his long-ago memories of Van Zandt in performance.

"Now I don't claim these versions are accurate, necessarily," Earle says. "But I was there and I did see Townes at the top of his game, which not everybody can say, and these versions are based on my recollections of how he played them. Those of us who saw Townes play in his prime, between about 1968 and 1975 -- that's what this record is based on. With recording, something was always lost in translation with Townes. He never could quite commit to recording the way he could to live performance."

david.menconi@newsobserver.com, blogs.newsobserver.com/beat or 919-829-4759


Steve Earle
Where: ArtsCenter, 300-G E. Main St., Carrboro
When: 8:30 p.m. Wednesday
Tickets: Sold out
Contact: 929-2787 or artscenterlive.org