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

13. No Deeper Blue

13  No Deeper Blue T HE CALL OF THE ROAD did not cease for Townes after the birth of his second son; indeed, it grew stronger, just as it had around the time of the birth of his first son. Once again, Townes’ self-destructive behavior was alarming his friends and family, as he was made explicitly aware of through the intervention they attempted before his mother died. The hospital had proven too strict a regimen and he again convinced himself that the road would make him “free and clean,” as it had before. “Townes would go into rehab for other people, not for himself,” according to Mickey White. “Anybody who’s recovering can tell you, you can do that until the cows come home, but until you do it for yourself, you’re not going to be saved.” Townes did not want to go back out on the road by himself, so early in 1984, he decided to form a band. He got back together with Mickey White and called in two friends, the Waddell brothers, Leland and David, to play drums and bass guitar, respectively. To change things up, Townes and Mickey decided to add Boston native Donny Silverman on flute and saxophone. “Townes always had a plan, some kind of direction,” White says, 196  No Deeper Blue 197 “and the plan was, this time, to put together a band. We’d go out on the road and get tight, and then go into the studio and cut an album.”1 The band began rehearsing around Townes’ fortieth birthday. Mickey was “musical director” of the group, and there were often disagreements about arrangements, tempos, and other issues . White recalls, “I’d had experience with bands and producing records and all that kind of stuff … so I was kind of being bullheaded about that. Leland had his own ideas about how things were going to be; David had his; so a lot of the rehearsals would become these arguing matches. But in between, we did come up with some pretty good arrangements on those songs.” The group played in Austin, Dallas, and a few other spots in Texas. After a series of gigs at Anderson Fair and Hermann Park in Houston, it became clear that the full “blues band” approach was not working, and the Waddells were dropped. “A lot of it was because we drank too much, a lot of it was because we couldn’t agree on an approach to playing. It wasn’t Townes’ strong suit, playing with a band. It could have worked, in the long run, but only with a lot of compromising,” says Mickey White. White, Silverman, and Van Zandt continued to play as a trio, gradually expanding their territory outside of Texas. “We kind of really got good about July of 1984,” White says. “My last drink was July 31, 1984. I was really rededicated. I was really stable, and I wanted to really take care of some business and book some good tours, and get us back up into Gerde’s Folk City and places like that.” White—with some intervention by Harold Eggers2 —booked a tour of east coast clubs for the following spring. The first stop on this outing was an important one. The gig was in Nashville, at a club called Twelfth and Porter, on April 17, 1985. “This was kind of a ‘welcome back to Nashville’ gig,” White says. “Rodney [Crowell] and [his wife] Roseanne [Cash] were there, Guy and Susanna were there, and Neil Young was there.” Young was in Nashville recording and his attendance added a lustrous buzz to the already auspicious evening. Accord-  198 A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt ing to the writer Robert K. Oermann, the Twelfth and Porter show was billed as “the return of the lost sheep to the songwriting fold,” adding that Townes was “surely one of the lambs who has wandered astray. Indeed, he practically defines the personality of the ne’er do well tunesmith.”3 The sense of this being a momentous night was intensified because Harold Eggers had arranged for the show to be recorded for a possible live album. Apparently, among his ventures at the time, Eggers was trying to promote Willie Nelson’s daughter Susie as a singer, and he had the notion that he could somehow involve her in the current recording project with Townes and...