Townes Van Zandt’s Jokes
March 1, 2010 by Joe Kloc
BETWEEN PLAYING EVEN HIS SADDEST SONGS TOWNES VAN ZANDT ENJOYED TELLING A GOOD JOKE. THE QUESTION IS, WHY DID IT WORK SO WELL?
“There were these two drunks having this argument outside a bar,” Townes Van Zandt said towards the end of his 1973 set at the Old Quarter in Houston. “They’re arguing as to whether that object up in the sky was the sun or the moon. This other drunk stumbles out of the bar and one of ‘em walks over and says, ‘Buddy will you help us out? We are having an argument and we can’t decide who is right… Is that the sun or the moon?’ [The man replies:] ‘aw I don’t know man, I ain’t from this neighborhood.’”
When I listened to Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas1 for the first time last week, it wasn’t the music that surprised me. Townes’ set that night was like most of his sets: woeful songs about wandering, loneliness, drugs, booze, and heartbreak. What struck me was the jokes and anecdotes, like the two drunks arguing about the moon, that he told so casually throughout the somber performance. Immediately following the moon joke is “Tower Song”2: “The end is coming soon it’s plain / A warm bed just ain’t worth the pain / And I will go and you’ll remain / With the bitterness we tasted.” I’d call his jokes out of place among sad lyrics like these if it weren’t for the fact that, for some reason, they work quite well.
That I didn’t expect the man of seemingly bottomless despair to also be a teller of jokes is probably just indicative of how little I knew about him. It appears he was almost the stuff of legend in his ability to challenge the context of a situation. Townes came from a long line of powerful Texans who had made their money in oil. (Almost a century before he was born, Van Zandt County was named after his influential family.) Yet he chose to abandon everything and become an outlaw musician, committed to a lifestyle of poverty and loneliness—a decision that seemed puzzling to me considering how sensitive Townes appears to have been. A childhood friend of his told the following story, which can be found in A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt3 by Robert Early Hardy:
When Townes was five or six years old, his parents took him to a restaurant where there were live lobsters in a tank and he was told he could pick out his own lobster. “So he thought that he was picking out a pet to take home, and he went, ‘Oh, boy.’ He was thinking, ‘Oh, boy, I’ve got a new pet. I can’t wait. I can’t wait.’ And when they sat the plate in front of him…he was terribly upset. They were at a big round table with a lot of other people, and his father was sensitive enough to realize what had happened. He leaned over and said, ‘I know, Townes, I know. Just try to hang in there.’ And Townes would never forget it.
“Townes felt things more than the rest of us,” his sister once said. And his history is filled with stories illustrating his deep devotion to those around him. Take the story his first guitar: As a kid, Elvis had fascinated Townes. (“I just thought Elvis had all the money in the world, all the Cadillacs and all the girls, and all he did was play the guitar and sing. That made a big impression on me,” he later recalled.) After seeing Elvis on television, he begged his father for a guitar and his father agreed on the condition that the first song Townes learned would be the “Faulein,” a popular country song at the time. He proudly played the song for his father for the rest of his life.3
Yet this was also the man who reflected that there came a point in his life where he consciously decided to leave his family behind in order to become a musician. “To the people he loved,” his son J.T. told an interviewer for Lone Star Music4, “he could scorn you pretty hard.” This seems, then, to be the peculiar nature of Townes Van Zandt: He had more than most and he gave up more than most; he loved more than most and he hurt more than most; he opened a sad song with a bad joke. “It wasn’t a choice of his,” J.T. said of his father’s personality in the Lone Star interview, “he just soaked in that sadness sometimes, intense sadness. But he could come reeling out of it and be really witty and humorous too.”
Townes’ use of humor is as telling as anything about the ways he readily challenged the situations in which he found himself: Musician and friend Steve Earle once called him “the best songwriter in the whole world,” adding, “I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.” Townes, who was notoriously humble about his own songs, responded: “I’ve met Bob Dylan and his bodyguards, and I don’t think Steve could get anywhere near his coffee table.” Townes redirected Earle’s praise away from the matter at hand (in this case, whether or not he is a better songwriter than Bob Dylan) and added a third dimension to the discussion. It strikes me how successful he was at this. After reading his response to Earle one no longer cares who the better songwriter is and instead an entirely more enjoyable sentiment emerges.
Getting back to his performance at the Old Quarter, it seems that his jokes worked in the same way. They are not a response or reaction to the woeful songs that surround them, nor do they mean to suggest that the overall performance is any less serious. They simply elevate the album as a whole beyond sad songs. They serve to provide that more interesting, more difficult to pin down, third dimension to the singer of these songs—and, as a consequence, the songs themselves.
What drove Townes to play an almost trickster-esque role in whatever context he found himself is certainly beyond me to uncover. But the answer might to some extent be contained in comments his son made in the Lone Star interview: “[H]e always felt that he saw white angels or goblins. It was one of the two, and if they were goblins… shit was about to hit the fan.” Townes’ claims of visions are perhaps given more credence by a psychological evaluation he underwent in the 1960s. “While the overall pattern of this youth’s protocol is not floridly psychotic, he is moving in that direction,” the report read, “and his test protocols are reflective of a definitive schizophrenic potential and possible current underlying psychotic ideation.” 3
The last verse of “Tower Song” finishes: “A mother’s breast, a new born child / a poet’s tears, a drunken smile / I can’t help thinking all the while / Their meaning won’t be wasted.” No doubt the poet’s tears he was singing about were his, as was the drunken smile. The thing about Townes, as evinced in Live at the Old Quarter, was that he had them both at the same time. It starts to make sense, then, why it worked when he told jokes between his sad songs. He probably would have told them during the songs if he could have. The better question might be: To whom was he telling them, the goblins or the angels?
Notes:
1. Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas
2. “Tower Song”
3. A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
4. Lone Star Music Interview with J.T. Van Zandt
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