Muddy Waters and Mozart: Remembering Townes Van Zandt in The Los Angeles Review of Books

In 1994, I interviewed Townes Van Zandt for Maybelle, the country music fanzine I co-edited. On the fifteenth anniversary of his death, Los Angeles Review of Books published my essay about the experience, Muddy Waters and Mozart: Remembering Townes Van Zandt. Check out the photos from Maybelle’s Fall 1994 issue. Someday I’ll write the story of a fanzine…

I’m happy to say this interview/essay was selected by LARB’s Senior Editor Julie Cline as one of her three favorite non-fiction pieces from their first year, and was picked up by Longform.org, Byliner, and 3quarksdaily, among other sites that curate longer pieces.

WHAT I REMEMBER MOST about the AP obituary that ran fifteen years ago tomorrow was its brevity — given that it was written for one of the most influential songwriters of our time — and a quote from Katie Belle, Townes Van Zandt’s five-year-old daughter who was with him: “Daddy’s having a fight with his heart.”

When he died at age 52 on New Year’s Day 1997, fans of the legendary Texas singer-songwriter were saddened but not surprised. He had, after all, named his 1972 albumThe Late Great Townes Van Zandt — possibly a joke about his perpetual obscurity, or possibly because he and everyone who knew him thought he would die young like Hank Williams (who also died on January 1st). As his friend Guy Clark said at the memorial, “I booked this gig thirty-something years ago.” Townes’s seemingly brief turn on this plane was characterized by staggeringly self-annihilating behavior — behavior that had in many ways defined that turn, and has often overshadowed the powerful and transcendent body of work he left behind.

Read the rest here.