Sunday Morning Coming Down

It’s been a long time since I posted any Townes Van Zandt – in fact I’ve just checked and it was over three years ago that he last featured, which I’m really surprised about.

So for reason other than that I love his music, lifted from his 1978 Flyin’ Shoes LP, here’s a long-overdue return:

Townes Van Zandt – Who Do You Love?

More soon.

Sunday Morning Coming Down

The silver lining about my friend Llŷr’s passing, the one good thing that has come from it, is that I got to meet up with, and renew many friendships which had fallen by the wayside in the 10+ years since I left Cardiff.

I suddenly find myself blessed with invitations to meet up for post-work beers from those that work in or around London, with camping holidays from those that live further afield, or with requests for suggestions for new music to listen to.

Since I last saw him, Martin – a very dear friend of Llŷr and mine – has grown a massive bushy beard that means that should he ever venture up to the big smoke, I can take him to Shoreditch and he’ll fit right in.

There’s many people that I rue having lost touch with since I moved away. Martin is very high on that list. We follow each other on Twitter, say hi on Facebook every now and then, the occasional text. But there’s nothing quite like seeing one of your old buddies in the flesh for the first time in a long time to remind you of what you’ve left behind.

In the wee small hours of the morning after the funeral, as we both sat, pissed, in the front bar of the hotel where the reception (not a wake) was held, Martin (and he won’t remember this) kept patting my knee and saying “You’re one of the good ones, you are.”

I can’t remember my heart ever swelling with pride as much as it did then.

Martin and I have a long history of being total R.E.M. loving nerds, so we have a good touchstone when that request comes in: can you recommend anything new for me to listen to?

I don’t really do “new”, as you all know, but here’s what my reply was:

“Steve Mason’s (formerly of The Beta Band) new album is pretty great, as are Ratboy, Twin Peaks, Traceyanne and Danny, Tony Molina, and Thundercat. Also I’ve been listening to a lot of Lee Hazelwood recently, but I’m going to assume you know him already (ditto the first, eponymously titled, Violent Femmes album). I’d also heartily recommend anything by Townes Van Zandt.”

Admittedly, Ratboy and Thundercat were curveballs, suggested purely to hint at a diversity in my musical taste I aspire to (I do like them, they’re just not the sort of thing I’d normally listen to, or recommend, hence me considering them to be worthy of mention, if that makes sense. Ok. I admit it, I was showing off).

But it is to Mr VZ that we turn to this morning, with this little beauty:

Townes Van Zandt – For The Sake Of The Song

More soon.

*****

Llŷr‘s younger sister Sian is running the London Marathon this year, raising funds for the Brain Tumour Charity. Thank you to all that have donated thus far; to everyone else, if you can spare a couple of quid I’d be really grateful if you could help them out.

Here’s the link:

https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-display/showROFundraiserPage?pageId=1001560

Thanks.

Sunday Morning Coming Down

Regular readers may remember that last year, prompted by a visit to my local multiplex to see T2: Trainspotting I vowed to go to the cinema more often, and signed up for one of those membership cards, where you pay a set amount every month (£17.70, in my case), and you get unlimited visits along with discounts on the massively over-priced munchies they sell in the foyer.

In December, I got an email from the cinema in question. The subject of the email was well intended: to show me how much money I’d saved by subscribing to the Unlimited scheme. Unfortunately, the email revealed that I had “saved” -£135.00. Yes, minus.

Probably because I only went five times all year. I think I may have just stumbled across the reason why I’m not a millionaire yet.

So, New Year’s Resolution time: to go to the cinema more frequently, and with Oscars season upon us, there’s arguably no better time to go.

At the time of writing, I’ve been twice, once to see that latest Star Wars movie (which I figured would be best seen on the big screen), and also to see Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

On arrival, I went to get myself some popcorn, but the tills were down, so there followed an awkward conversation with the girl serving behind the counter.

Her: What film are you going to see?

Me: The one with the odd name. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Her: (after staring at me for what seemed an eternity, like I’d just spoken in an impenetrable foreign language). Oh.

Me: Yeh. The reviews have been really good, and I really like the three main actors in it.

Her: Oh a lot of people have been coming out and saying how good that is.

Luckily, the tills pinged back into life before I had chance to challenge this. I don’t know about you, but when I’ve come out of the cinema having just seen a truly great film, I’ve never felt the urge to rush over to the popcorn stand and tell a disinterested teenager how wonderful the movie was.

Anyway, the three main actors in Three Billboards… are Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell and Woody Harrelson.

You’ll know McDormand from a lot of Coen Brothers movies, but primarily, I’d think, Fargo, but she’s been nominated for Best Supporting Actress three times before, for Mississippi Burning, Almost Famous, and North Country. She is reliably brilliant in every role I’ve seen her play. Rockwell you will recognise from Frost/Nixon, Duncan “Son of Bowie” Jones’ Moon, and he was Zaphod Beeblebrox in the movie version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Harrelson surely needs no introduction by now, but many of you will have first encountered him in 80s sitcom Cheers, and if not there then in Natural Born Killers, or maybe the Hunger Games franchise, or Zombieland (which if you haven’t seen, is just terrific), or more recently in War for the Planet of the Apes.

All three have received Oscar nominations, as has the movie, and I can tell you that all are fully justified (although I haven’t seen the other nominated movies…yet).

Here’s the basic premise: frustrated with the local police’s failure to bring her daughter’s murder to justice, Mildred Hayes (McDormand) takes matters into her own hands, by renting the titular Three Billboards and using them to bring the murder investigation back into the limelight. No spoilers, obviously, but needless to say doing so sets in motion a train of events which are at times shocking and at others blackly comic.

I can’t recommend this film enough, if I’m honest, it’s just great.

But why am I blethering on about movies on a Sunday morning when all you want to hear is some Country music? Well, because part way through the film, a song came on the soundtrack which I wasn’t familiar with, but the voice was unmistakable.

And here it is, the wonderful Townes Van Zandt from his 1987 At My Window album:

Townes Van Zandt – Buckskin Stallion Blues

More soon.

Sunday Morning Coming Down

It’s been a while since I posted anything by the late great Townes Van Zandt, so since I’m feeling a little delicate this morning (I seem to have left my voice in The Roundhouse), I’ll rectify that today with this from, erm, “The Late Great Townes Van Zandt” album:

Townes Van Zandt – Don’t Let The Sunshine Fool Ya’

More soon.

Sunday Morning Coming Down

In many ways, the story of Townes Van Zandt is your archetypal story of a country singer: critically acclaimed but commercially unappreciated during his own life-time, battling with the 3-D demons (drink, drugs, depression), of near misses and “What If…?”s.

Born in 1944, he was inspired by seeing Elvis Presley’s appearance on The Ed Sullivan show in 1956, and got his first guitar for Christmas the same year. Years later, he told an interviewer “I just thought that Elvis had all the money in the world, all the Cadillacs and all the girls, and all he did was play the guitar and sing. That made a big impression on me.”

An above average student, he won a place at the University of Colarado at Boulder in 1962, but a year later his parents had to stage an intervention due to his binge drinking and episodes of depression. He was diagnosed with manic depression and was given a three month course of Insulin Shock Therapy (a form of psychiatric treatment where patients are repeatedly injected with large doses of insulin in order to induce daily comas over several weeks) which wiped his long-term memory.

By 1968, he had moved to Nashville and won himself a record contract, and became a prolific recording artist, releasing six albums by 1973 – none of which were successful – but he did earn himself a  small and devoted fanbase, amongst which was one Bob Dylan. Dylan repeatedly asked Van Zandt to write with him. Van Zandt, though, didn’t care for Dylan’s fame and celebrity – he had forgotten why he admired Elvis, it seems – and repeatedly declined the invitations.

He had a prominent role in “Heartworn Highways”, a documentary looking at folk and country music singer-songwriters, which was filmed at the end of 1975/start of 1976. But his prominent role was filmed at his run-down trailer home and showed him drinking straight whiskey at noon (he was a full blown alcoholic/all round addict by now) and playing around with guns. The film didn’t get theatrically released until 1981.

His recording career was effectively over by then; he released nothing from 1979 until 1987.

Some brief chances of redemption arose in the late 1980s/early 1990s; he finally met Dylan, but instead of writing with him, he played some songs for him. And in 1990, he toured with and opened for The Cowboy Junkies, which exposed his music to a whole new generation of audience.

He married three times, and around 1993 he and his third wife, Jeanene, separated, but not before she persuaded him to  sign over the publishing rights of his entire back catalogue and recording royalties to her and their children. Townes’s only source of income after this was money received from concerts, and often he would visit Jeanene and the kids straight after the gig and empty his pockets out for them.

They divorced a year later, at which point all of his worldly possessions amounted to a car, a motorcycle and a 22 foot boat.

He had been fortunate to get to 1993 with his legacy intact though: he struggled with is addiction to alcohol and drugs throughout his adult life, often performing so drunk that he forgot the words to his songs. At one point, his heroin habit was so intense that he offered the publishing rights to all of the songs on each of his first four albums to Kevin Eggers, his manager, for $20.00. At various points, his friends saw him shoot up not just heroin, but also cocaine, vodka, and a rum and Coke. By 1982, he was drinking a pint of vodka a day.

Mid-December 1996, and the end was nigh. He fractured his hip following a fall down some concrete stairs, but refused medical treatment for several days before finally acquiescing, undergoing surgery several days later on December 31st. Doctors wanted to keep Van Zandt in hospital to recuperate and detoxify, but Jeanene – with whom he had stayed close – insisted that one of Townes’ previous rehab doctors had told her detoxing could kill him. Against the advice of the doctors, she discharged him from hospital the same day. They had not even got to her car when he started experience withdrawal symptoms: her solution was to give him a flask of vodka.

He died in the early hours of January 1st 1997, his death sparking a legal battle between his Jeanene and Eggers, after the latter released fourteen albums of both new and previously unreleased material by the singer, all without consent of his estate, and claimed 50% ownership of 80 of his songs.

Cheerful, eh?

But it’s not all bleak. Before his death, his songs had been covered by the likes of Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris and Merle Haggard. Steve Earle considered him his mentor and once pronounced him “the best songwriter in the whole world and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that”.

Since his death, he has been cited as an influence and an inspiration not just by Dylan, Earle, Nelson, Haggard and Harris, but by artists like Neil Young, Lyle Lovett, Nancy Griffiths, Devendra Banhart, Norah Jones, Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes), Caleb Followill (Kings of Leon), Laura Marling, Stuart A. Staples (Tindersticks), Evan Dando and Frank Turner.

Since he died, his songs have featured in films like “In Bruges”, “Crazy Heart”, “Cavalry”, “Leaves of Grass”, and “Seven Psychopaths” and in TV shows such as “Breaking Bad”, “Deadwood”, “Six Feet Under” and “True Detective”. In 2004 “Be Here To Love Me”, a film chronicling his life and musical career was released to critical acclaim – so he must have been doing something right.

Find out for yourself:

Townes Van Zandt – I’ll Be Here In The Morning

More soon.