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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
back. The years of touring—and the years of heavy drinking—had for some time been manifested in Townes’ singing voice and performing style, but now the damage was becoming more starkly reflected in his deeply lined face and his increasingly frail, seemingly shrinking body as well—his “skin like iron” and “breath as hard as kerosene.”2 The toll Townes was paying was evident in his whole demeanor. Photographs from the nineties show a man who looks considerably older than his late forties or early fifties. The Townes Van Zandt who was performing Hank Williams’ “Lost Highway” regularly in the nineties sounded like he had lived the song in the deepest, most intimate way. At least once— at a show in Manchester, England, in 1994—Townes introduced “Lost Highway” by quietly saying “This has nothing to do with me,” but the audience sensed something different as they listened to his dry but passionate reading of the song. The spirit of Hank Williams was close by.3 Townes had grown into some of his older songs by this time; he was able to invest them with a new sense of truth. For example, his performances of “To Live’s to Fly” in the early to midnineties had a gravitas that earlier readings lacked. Similarly, later performances of “Waitin’ Around to Die” cut closer to the bone. Later performances of “Nothing” could be chilling, even terrifying. As the chances for good performances seemed to deteriorate with Townes’ condition, songs like these touched audiences all the more deeply, often to the point of inducing tears. Townes also became more and more prone to weeping on stage. Sometimes he would attempt to turn an emotional collapse into a joke. He would often play “Old Shep”—the chestnut about a boy who has to euthanize his faithful dog—as a dark comedy, mocking the song’s melodrama; then, part way through the song, he would actually break down crying; then he would turn around and laugh at his own emotionalism, which came finally as a relief to uncomfortable audiences as well as to Townes, who many people correctly sensed was struggling to get through his set. It got worse. Many performances from this period feature Townes talking considerably more than he plays—sometimes