A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt

9. Highway Kind

9  Highway Kind T HE NEW ALBUM, CALLED HIGH, Low and In Between, was released in the fall of 1971. It was a heady time in popular music, seeing the release of a seemingly endless slew of great records such as the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, Who’s Next, Rod Stewart’s Every Picture Tells a Story, Led Zepplin IV, Van Morrison’s Tupelo Honey, and the Allman Brothers Band’s Live at the Fillmore East. Still spinning on many turntables from the previous year were the swansongs of the Beatles (Let It Be) and Janis Joplin (Pearl). Recent work from singer–songwriters included Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love & Hate, John Prine’s first album, and Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush. All in all, a formidable field. High, Low and In Between explored a vein that ran through many of the prominent recordings of the day and that was the inevitable result of a generation coming of age. A seriousness of purpose had been coalescing among so-called “pop” artists and musicians that signaled the end of the innocence of the sixties. Significantly, many of these artists were reaching their thirtieth birthdays. Townes had turned twenty-seven that spring. By fall 111  112 A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt he must have felt that he was more than ready to close out this particularly hard year, and the new record reflected this. The arrangements are low-key, complementing the lyrics in an intelligent, understated way, and the Jim Molloy/Kevin Eggers production is nearly transparent, the best of any of Van Zandt’s recordings up to this point (and as good as nearly any that followed). In its quiet way, High, Low and In Between is one of Townes’ most artistically successful records. The opening cut, the knock-off gospel number “Two Hands” (“I got one heart/I’m gonna fill it up with Jesus”), sets a bright mood. “You Are Not Needed Now” certainly suggests something harder to penetrate, but the song has a gentle quality. Some of the songs that follow also have a light, welcoming mood. The wistful “Greensboro Woman” is Townes’ speech to a North Carolina girl about being faithful to his woman back in Texas. “Standin’” and “No Deal” are similarly straightforward and relatively light (“No Deal,” in fact, is hilarious). “When He Offers His Hand” is a somewhat better faux-gospel song than “Two Hands.” “Blue Ridge Mountains ” is an exuberant country–folk workout. But the album’s remaining songs leave a particularly strong impression and, examined as a batch produced over a short period, show Van Zandt at a high crest of his writing powers. Prominent among these is “Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold,” a sublime , tongue-twisting account of a cosmic five-card-stud poker game. “I have songs of every degree, from pure craftsmanship to inspiration,” Van Zandt told an interviewer.1 “Of all my songs, ‘Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold’ was closest to just coming out of the blue,” he said. Townes was in South Carolina during a small circuit tour, and late one night, as he sat in the kitchen with his guitar, the song suddenly came to him. “It felt like my right arm was going to drop off,” he claimed, from writing so quickly. After three and a half hours of writing, with crumpled pieces of yellow legal paper all around him on the kitchen floor, “it came to its own natural conclusion,” according to Townes. He reread the lyrics in the morning and changed only “a couple of things.” The album recording is tight and the performance is  Highway Kind 113 clean; the song stood out in Van Zandt’s repertoire throughout his career. The album’s title piece is one of Van Zandt’s most beautiful poems, touching on some of his familiar themes with a refined touch, focused but relaxed, with an effortlessness that belies the precision craftwork that he put into his best songs. “High, Low and In Between” develops the mythology of the traveling poet: “There is the highway/and the homemade lovin’ kind/The highway’s mine.” The poet philosophizes about his own condition ; he asks what he could leave behind after “flyin’ lightning fast and all alone”; his answer is humble but is also a perfect example of the poetry that will in fact be his legacy...