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

10. White Freightliner Blues.

10  White Freightliner Blues T OWNES’ FRIEND CHITO RECALLS FIRST meeting Townes in Colorado in the early seventies: We’re sitting in this bar in downtown Aspen, and I’m drunker than shit, and Bob brings over this guy. And this guy has big old patches of hair missing out of his head, because he’d gotten a haircut from a bunch of cowboys. And they used sheep shears. I mean, if he was a real cowboy, that would have never happened. So Bob says, “Hey, Chito, this is Townes Van Zandt.” I was totally not impressed. But that’s how I met Townes. Townes wanted to be a cowboy in Montana and sing his songs around the campfire…. But he never was a cowboy, he didn’t know shit about horses, and he never fuckin’ went up more than a week into the mountains, ever, if that. Jesus Christ, do they have a liquor store up there? The only way I would go up in the mountains with him would be that we had 132  White Freightliner Blues 133 enough goddamn booze, and how long would that last? Think about it.1 For years, to maintain a sense of balance and perspective, and to escape—or at least quiet—some of his more pressing demons, Townes had sought and found comfort in the mountains of Colorado. Townes would base himself with one of a network of his Colorado friends, including Bob Myrick near Aspen, Chito near Boulder, and others in Crested Butte and elsewhere. “Generally ,” Mickey White says, “his records would be released in the fall, and he’d come down from the mountains and start touring to support the album.”2 Bob Myrick rode into the backcountry around Aspen with Townes a number of times, occasionally accompanied by one or another of Townes’ old girlfriends from his Colorado days. Myrick remembers the Maroon Bells region as one of Townes’ favorites. The two peaks of the Maroon Bells rising above the Maroon Creek valley are among the most famous sights in Colorado , and some of the trails around the Bells are notoriously challenging rides. A Park Service trail sign refers to “The Deadly Bells” and offers a warning against loose, unstable rock that “kills without warning.” The Bells earned this “deadly” reputation in 1965, when a series of accidents took the lives of eight hikers, and it was surely this reputation that attracted Townes as much as the scenic beauty of the region.3 That summer of 1973, Townes’ companion was the fifteenyear -old Cindy Sue Morgan, a far more accomplished horseback rider than Townes, but no match for his other proclivities. The two stayed with a friend of Townes’, then set up camp in the woods outside of Crested Butte. “We rode from Crested Butte to Aspen,” Cindy recalls. “If you drive it, it’s like a hundred and fifty miles around, but as the crow flies over the mountains, it’s just twenty-five miles. And it’s very beautiful country.”4 In Cindy’s expert estimation, Townes was a moderately skilled horseman. “He knew how to saddle up the horses and pack them. He got them all packed up good.” But Cindy soon  134 A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt understood what Townes was doing. “I was so young back then, I didn’t realize what an alcoholic I was dealing with,” she says. “It was kind of a godsend to get him up in the mountains, where there’s not a liquor store handy. He would have his vodka or whiskey or whatever he was drinking at the time, but he’d moderate himself pretty well, because he only had so much.” As Earl Willis recollects, the purpose of Townes’ trips to the mountains was to dry out from his heroin habit as well as from alcohol. Willis says, “His way of kicking the habit was to go cold turkey, which he did a number of times. He’d go out in the mountains to clean up his act. He had a half interest in a horse out in Colorado, and he’d go and load that horse up with supplies and ride out into the mountains. He’d come back straight, then turn around and go back to Houston and start all over.”5 The heavier his use was at a given time, the longer he...