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.
Pardon the horrible pun in the title.
First of all, more important than all the anecdotal stuff that will follow, this guy is responsible for arguably the most heartbreaking video on the whole of Youtube.
Everything about this is pretty much perfect.
I remember, at Crossing Border 2009, a folk/indie-centered music festival in The Hague, I was walking around a little forlorn, until I stumbled into Steve Earle's acoustic set. I knew very little about that man, nor did I ever hear any of his music, I think I only went in for a short little peak.
It was his Townes Van Zandt tribute tour. He did a lot of covers of the man, and told touching stories. For instance, on Townes's yearly journey across the mountains by horse:
He had a horse named Amigo, he kept in the Bronco Newcomb stable in Aspen, Colorado. Every summer he’d pick him up and he’d ride him across the mountain at Crested Butte. I was 17 years old when I met Townes. I thought that was the coolest thing that I’d ever heard of. Actually, I’m fifty-four and a half now, and I still think that’s the coolest thing.
But it gets even beter:
Several winters back, I made the trip backwards, from Crested Butte over to Aspen. Fifty-eight miles as the crow flies, but I ain’t no crow. It’s a hundred seventy-five, a hundred eighty by the highway. But we ran into a particularly tenacious little snowstorm, you know the kind. It took us eight and a half hours to make the ride. I couldn’t sleep so I wound up in the shotgun seat. Whilst the snow was blowing across the highway and the headlights looked like low flying ghosts, I swear to God I saw Townes and Amigo come over the mountain five times that night.
Their friendship was star-crossed. In Be Here to Love Me, Steve Earle tells of a time when he and Townes were hanging out at his place, and Townes picked up a revolver with exactly one round in it, pointed it at his head and pulled the trigger twice. Luckily he survived, but that's an incredible thing to do and have your best friend go through.
Finally, there is this song Steve wrote after Townes died in 1997. And I especially remember his own comments on the lyrics when he played this in The Hague. He'd said there were few of his own lines that he would call memorable or poetic, but the last lines of Fort Worth Blues, "Amsterdam was always good for grieving, and London never fails to leave me blue. Paris never was my kind of town, so I walked around with the Fort Worth Blues" he was really proud of, because Paris, on the contrary, was precisely his kind of town.
