Don’t You Take It Too Bad
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back,” she remembers, “and Townes was kind of squatted down and … he just all of a sudden said, ‘What do you think about this?’; and he goes [singing] ‘No deal, you can’t sell that stuff to me’ … and he went on. He had written the whole song.… It was just amazing. And we just went, ‘God!’” On the Fass radio show, Townes also gave an early performance of a song he’d written a couple of weeks before: “You Are Not Needed Now.” While he did not mention it this night on the radio, he did mention consistently when he played the song later that he had written it “for Janis Joplin,” on the occasion of her untimely death earlier that month. Mickey White recalled the setting and the story of the song: [Townes and Joplin] had met years before in Houston. Of course, the song’s more about other things, but it was prompted by her death. “Allison laid an egg on me” is a cool story. Townes was just hounded to the ends of earth by groupies, right? “Whispering women, how sweet did they seem? Kneelin’ for me to command.” No truer words were ever spoken.… But there was this one girl, a college girl, Allison, and she took this little eggshell and cut out one side of it and put a little scene, like a winter scene or something like that, that she had hand-crafted with toothpicks and stuff like that, inside this eggshell, and she gave it to Townes as a gift. It was in Montgomery, West Virginia, doing one of those college gigs, and it was there he heard about Janis Joplin. I stayed in the same dorm, between the “blankets made of wool,” with the “trains going by every half an hour.” These tracks went right through the middle of town, and the little campus dorms were right next to them.
With Kevin Eggers based in New York City, and with Townes now reasonably well established in the New York folk scene, it was decided that the next album would be recorded there, at Century Sound Studios, with an experienced producer named Ron Frangipane producing as well as doing arrangements. Townes had been out playing regularly for months and had a