Townes Van Zandt’s indelible live album is a preservation of songs full of gratefulness and resignation, just as we should remember him.
will be revisiting albums that came out before the magazine was founded in July 2002 and assessing its current cultural relevance. This week, we’re looking at Townes Van Zandt’s indelible live album full of songs of gratefulness and resignation, a preservation of the songwriter just as we should remember him.acted like a secret password.
Van Zandt’s residency at the Old Quarter features him alone on stage with only a guitar and a saddlebag of what would become several of his signature songs. It’s a far cry from the painful overproduction that plagued many of the artist’s earliest studio recordings. For instance, the original title-track cut of “For the Sake of the Song” from 1968’s debut echoes like Van Zandt singing into a tin can at the bottom of the Grand Canyon during a howling wind.
Not many live albums owe much to the actual venue and audience featured on the recording. That’s not the case at all with. Credit Earl Willis, the album’s producer and engineer, for a deft hand that preserves the feel of Van Zandt captivating a famously fickle audience across five sweltering, sold-out nights in Houston with a broken air conditioner.
“I’ve never heard it that quiet in here before,” Van Zandt notes after opening with “Pancho & Lefty.” At the time, Van Zandt only had a cult following as a performer and a half-dozen hard-to-find records. This was still nearly half a decade before Emmylou Harris would cover “Pancho & Lefty” and a full 10 years prior to Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard sending his most famous song to the top of the country charts with a bullet.
It’s difficult not to think of Townes Van Zandt as a tragic figure. From the manic depression and cruel shock treatments that wiped out much of his long-term memory, to the demons of addiction that haunted him throughout adulthood, his life played out much like a sad country song.
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