To really die you have to die three ways. Townes Van Zandt discovered this after overdosing on model airplane glue. He was declared DOA at the hospital where, to hear him tell it, he sat for an hour and a half while doctors debated just how dead he was. “There’s brain death, which I’ve suffered. There’s respiratory death, which I haven’t suffered yet. And there’s heart death, which I go through every two or three months,” he told filmmaker James Szalapski. “But I figure if you’re ever all three of those at once, that’s it. That’s the ballgame.”
Van Zandt died more than most because he lived more than most. He reasoned that to write great songs, he would have to experience everything that he could survive and a few things he couldn’t. As a freshman at the University of Colorado at Boulder, he tipped backward over the railing of a fourth-story balcony just to see how it felt to lose control. “I started leaning back really slow, and really paying attention,” he recalled to journalist William Hedgepeth. “I fell over backwards and landed four stories down flat on my back. I remember the impact and exactly what it felt like and all the people screaming.” This kind of thing makes for a good story but a turbulent life. Van Zandt kept his balance between chaos and calm for as long as he could, but he always knew which way he would fall.
Whatever fame Van Zandt achieved was very nearly accidental. He went along, in a limited way, with the machinations of the music industry, recording six remarkable albums in five years between 1968 and 1972. Almost despite himself, he was on the verge of a breakout success with his seventh record, to be called Seven Come Eleven. Recorded in the spring of 1974, it was meant to build on his considerable momentum and launch him onto the national stage. However, the album would not be released for nearly 20 years. By the time it hit shelves in 1993, now titled The Nashville Sessions, Van Zandt was a cult figure, a songwriter’s songwriter better known for other artists’ covers of his work. Rather than a career-defining album, Seven Come Eleven had become a footnote in a tragic story.
Van Zandt came from a reputable family. Townes Hall at the University of Texas is named after one side and Van Zandt County, outside of Dallas, after the other. His father was high up in the oil industry and his mother wanted Townes to be a lawyer or a politician or an oil man himself. Van Zandt mainly wanted to get drunk and hit the road. After the balcony stunt, Townes got a friend to forge a letter to the dean excusing him from the rest of the semester and hitchhiked to Oklahoma and back. Upon learning of this behavior, his parents flew up to Boulder, took him out of college, and put him in a psychiatric hospital in Galveston, where he received a combination of insulin coma therapy and electroshock therapy. At the time, this method was at the cutting edge for his diagnosis of “schizophrenic reaction.” A side effect of the three-month-long treatment was the erasure of his long-term memory. Afterward, he had to be reintroduced to his mother: She was the one with the long hair.
Townes tried to settle down for a while. In 1965, he married Fran Peterson and they moved into a nice apartment in Houston provided by his parents. He enrolled as a pre-law student at the university. But quickly enough, Van Zandt locked himself into a closet to write his first song, “Waitin’ Around to Die,” an ode to rambling, gambling, and crime that ends with a confession of love to codeine. It wasn’t the type of song that his new wife expected during their honeymoon phase. He started playing in local clubs and coffeehouses for $10 a night and was soon putting more effort into his music than his studies. In a last-ditch attempt at stability, Van Zandt tried to enlist in the military but failed the psychiatric evaluation. The doctor called Townes “a manic depressive that had made minimal adjustment to life” and advised him to “wander for a while and find himself.” Now under doctor’s orders, Van Zandt set off.
“There was one point when I realized, ‘Man, I could really do this,’ but it takes blowing everything off,” Van Zandt said. “It takes blowing your family off, money, security, happiness, friends. Blow it off. Get a guitar and go.” He told Fran to wait for him at home, to be a source of safety and sanity that he could return to between stretches on the road. Fran held down a job at Shell Oil and took care of their first child, J.T., while Townes spent weeks or months touring. Visits home became less frequent. “A couple of times that he came back to see J.T. or when he would just call me out of the blue, he would say ‘Sanity is further away,’” Fran remembers in Margaret Brown’s 2004 documentary Be Here to Love Me.
Van Zandt’s big break came from Mickey Newbury, a songwriter working for Nashville’s biggest music publisher, Acuff-Rose. Newbury had written songs for Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, and Joan Baez, among others, and had exactly the connections that Townes needed. Van Zandt had recorded a demo of “Tecumseh Valley,” a folk song about a miner’s daughter who turned to prostitution after the death of her father. Newbury’s production partner played him the tape and asked if they could do anything for this unknown singer. “Hell, I don’t know, but he sure deserves it,” Newbury said, and signed him to a management contract. Newbury introduced Townes to “Cowboy” Jack Clement, a Nashville producer of hits by Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, who promised to record and publish his first set of songs.
When it came to his career, Van Zandt was his own worst enemy. He didn’t care for contracts or royalties or the recording process itself—according to legend, he once offered his full publishing rights to the first person who could score him some drugs. A close second, though, was Kevin Eggers, a New York agent who was then scouting for talent for his new label, Poppy. He came recommended by a friend of Clement’s, Lamar Fike, who was a close confidant of Elvis. Townes’ camp sensed trouble early on. “I don’t have much good to say about him,” Cowboy Jack told biographer John Kruth, author of To Live’s to Fly. “I think he was bad news for Townes… worst thing that ever happened to him.” Newbury, too, said Van Zandt’s deal with Eggers was “the worst move he ever made in his life.” But Eggers was a fast talker and an inveterate self-promoter who wooed Van Zandt with his anti-establishment stance. Townes signed a contract with Poppy for his debut album, For the Sake of the Song, in 1968.
Clement didn’t know what to do with Van Zandt in the studio. Townes’ holy trinity comprised Hank Williams, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Bob Dylan, but he didn’t exactly fit the mold of a country, blues, or folk artist. Cowboy Jack forced the trendy Nashville sound onto For the Sake of the Song, adding organ, harpsichord, and backing vocals onto Van Zandt’s sparse compositions. In Clement’s hands, the somber “Waitin’ Around to Die” became a spaghetti western track. Any mention of prostitution was stripped from “Tecumseh Valley” in consideration of the conservative country audience. This latter decision caused a rift between Clement and Eggers that would never fully be resolved. Clement similarly overworked Townes’ second album, Our Mother the Mountain, before Eggers looked elsewhere for a producer.
The problems with Eggers started immediately. Nobody knows where the money from Van Zandt’s first big contract went. “I’m not really sure what happened, but that check for 80,000 dollars got torn up or disappeared,” Fran later said. “We could barely pay the hospital bill when J.T. was born.” Townes’ attitude toward money didn’t help. He would give fistfuls of it to strangers, or gamble it away, or spend it on drugs and alcohol. Poppy released a handful of Van Zandt’s albums, but Eggers’ accounting was never transparent. Still, Van Zandt stayed loyal. He knew that he would always earn more from touring than from selling records and didn’t care enough about royalties to chase them down.
During this era, Van Zandt’s tours often traced a boomerang: starting in Colorado, moving south to Houston, and then east to Nashville and back. Houston was a problem because that’s where Townes could score heroin. Soon, his summers in Colorado turned into retreats from his addiction. In 1970, Townes and Fran divorced as his behavior grew more erratic. The next year, he moved in with a dealer in Pasadena, an industrial section of Houston, where he had unlimited access to his drug of choice. Van Zandt started to sell off all of his possessions, including his record collection, and to avoid friends and family.
Fran convinced Townes to visit J.T. in the fall of 1971. He didn’t show. Sensing that something was wrong, she waited by the phone all day. Finally, the call that she was dreading came: Van Zandt had overdosed. He was in the hospital, calling out her name. When Fran arrived, she was told that Townes had died again, twice this time, in the ambulance. His condition was still critical, but she kept him conscious by talking to him throughout the night.
To celebrate his most recent recovery from death, Van Zandt jokingly named his sixth record The Late Great Townes Van Zandt. Eggers claimed that he was responsible for the title, meant to poke fun at Townes’ dead career. Really, though, he was as successful as he had ever been. The Late Great sold steadily and featured two songs, “If I Needed You” and “Pancho and Lefty,” that would come to define his career. Van Zandt had survived, even prospered, and was eager to continue his lucky streak. He looked forward to his seventh album with anticipation. “The next one will be a hit. The next one is likely to be a hit,” he predicted.
He had reason to be confident in the songs on Seven Come Eleven. Townes often claimed that he was only a vessel for lyrics that really originated elsewhere. They would come to him in flashes or in dreams. This may have been true sometimes, but was more likely a bit of modesty mixed with mythmaking: the humble poet, divinely inspired. However he arrived at his songs, Van Zandt was always meticulous. “It seems a lot of people in Nashville write by the phrase, or by the line. As opposed to writing by the word,” he told journalist Paul Zollo for the 2003 book, Songwriters on Songwriting. “A lot of my best songs are where every single word is where it’s supposed to be.” He was influenced by Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas but cited Robert Frost as his most important touchstone. As in Frost’s best poems, Van Zandt’s lyrics are profound in their simplicity.
Townes’ friend and fellow outlaw songwriter Guy Clark has called Seven Come Eleven’s strange ballad “Two Girls” a “yardstick” for any country song: “That’s how good it’s gotta be,” he told Kruth. Its lyrics begin with an unsettling description of clouds that “didn't look like cotton/They didn’t even look like clouds.” Van Zandt enters a dreamworld, encountering increasingly surreal figures. “Two lonesome dudes on an ugly horse” ask him where the action is; a woman called Jolly Jane “just lays around/And listens with her mouth.” The song ends with apocalyptic imagery:
It’s cold down on the bayouThey say it’s in your mindBut the moccasins are treadin’ ice**And leaving strange designs
“Two Girls” was written in Pasadena, at Van Zandt’s lowest point. The frozen bayou and its serpentine patterns are frightening enough, but even the song’s more prosaic elements point to his suffering: The ugly horse is heroin, and the lazy Jolly Jane a need that cannot be met. The seemingly upbeat chorus describing Townes’ two girls—“One’s in heaven and one’s below”—is about Leslie Jo Richards, a girlfriend who accompanied him to L.A. to record his fifth album, High, Low and In Between. They were in the studio when Van Zandt realized he had forgotten something. Richards volunteered to retrieve it and set out to hitchhike back to their condo. The driver who picked her up stabbed her more than 20 times before leaving her for dead. She made it to a nearby house to call for help before collapsing. Townes never forgave himself for her murder. While she was up in heaven, he was stuck down below with another girl who, he laments, “I do not know.”
Death and heroin haunt Seven Come Eleven. On “White Freight Liner Blues,” Townes is torn between love and hate for the drug. “White freight liner/Won’t you steal away my mind?” he pleads, before admitting that “it’s bad news from Houston/Half my friends are dying.” Rex “Wrecks” Bell, Van Zandt’s touring bassist, was one of those friends. “He would come get me and take me on the road to get me out of Houston,” Bell told songwriter Otis Gibbs. “Rex’s Blues” is dedicated to him, though he resented it. Bell points out that it could’ve been written for any number of people in their circle:
If I had a nickel I’d find a gameIf I won a dollar I’d make it rainIf it rained an ocean I’d drink it dry**And lay me down dissatisfied
“The song captures what we were all doing. It was foisted upon me to be the focus of how we were all living,” Bell says. The song tells of their shared impatience with mundane life and their strategies for escaping it: gambling for money, spending it on booze, drinking to forget that they were all waiting around to die.
