Epiphany and What Came After: Remembering Townes Van Zandt

In which I provide no details about Townes Van Zandt or his 1977 album Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas, though I say everything that came to mind when I first tried to write about both.

The Texas singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt was born on 7 March 1944 and died on 1 January 1997. In the week of what would have been his eightieth birthday, I’m posting some texts inspired by his songs and performances. Townes quickly became one of my favourite musicians when I discovered his work in the late 1980s. These pieces amount to my first tentative explorations of a body of work I’ve been returning to for more than three decades.

This first post is how I might start a book about the album Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas were I to write one. It’s written in the first person plural because I’m remembering the friends I shared this time with. I should warn readers that there are no details here about the music on this album or about Townes Van Zandt. This is about what the album meant to some of us. It’s about what epiphanies and their after effects can feel like.

In those days the world opened by music was still new. Every week brought a life-changing discovery. Musicians who seemed to articulate what we’d been feeling and trying and failing to say arrived in our lives, their timely and timeless wisdom concentrated into the sides of records we would come to know in intimate ways.

Experience poured from the grooves and the covers, lyric sheets and labels, serving our senses with the thrill of instant recognition. These people knew us, it seemed, and we knew them.

We’d lived enough of life to know there was something out there we were searching for, that these storytellers might be the closest we’d come to finding it. But, even as we gained new pieces of the puzzle, we found the world growing larger, the road longer, the water deeper.

We were teased into finding out more, realising that the puzzle would never be complete but that we might commit to collecting those infinite pieces, investing in the fantasy that the bigger picture would one day be revealed to us. And these musicians—these writers and singers and pickers, these wise comedians and melancholy clowns—would be the ones to accompany us on that journey.

Years passed and new discoveries were made. But those first guides accompanied us still. Though we continued to learn new things and meet new guides and pass on some aspects of our knowledge and experience to others, we rarely encountered the kinds of epiphanies that had set us on the road in the first place.

Much of the puzzle seemed to be solved, with others contributing to its completion each day. It was a long time since we’d felt alone in our quest or felt that the discoveries were there just for us. We felt now that we weren’t original. We realised that we had to share the world and its treasures and the knowledge of those treasures and the exaltation and occasional debasement of those treasures.

We started telling stories about singers and songs, about how they put the matter of all our lives into their art, how time and experience could be written and read and sounded and heard. They taught us that we could lay our lives on the line or lay it down in lines, that sometimes we might do both, playing risk out in the hope of reward.

We felt nostalgic, but not in the way most people talked about it, dismissing nostalgia as passive regression or a melancholic refusal to live in the present. No, we felt nostalgic now because we’d felt nostalgic then and because we wanted to reclaim the feeling of intimacy that the nostalgic mode had always delivered to us.

Our nostalgia was a yearning for something we’d sensed in the past and the future but had never quite found in the present, except occasionally in those moments of communion that came with listening to music. It was imagination, the imagination of experience.

We’d been drawn to so many of those storytellers because of the ache of experience in their voices, because they’d written of life as we’d felt it but hadn’t lived it. And we’d realised that perhaps it was all artifice, that maybe they hadn’t lived it either, that what some liked to describe as authenticity was all a charade, a fabrication.

But it didn’t matter, because it was a beautiful fabrication, a fabulous lie, a tall story that only grew taller with the years and miles travelled, with the reinvention of the past and the seductive tease of the future. We were more than willing to believe it. Those lies would be part of our foundation.

Then what? What new discoveries awaited? Now that we’d been despoiled by the power of that singer, those songs, now that we in turn had despoiled them by exhausting their catalogues, what more did we want from them? What archaeological work could be done to unearth, by and for others like us, the more intimate, hidden folds of these bodies of work?

In the end, we’d realise, what mattered was the original contact, the works that had lit the spark in us, that had asked us to let them join us in the journey through the years. If we’d sucked out of them all the nourishment and wisdom there was to be had, could they still hold any value for us?

From those that could we built our canon. We housed them and recalled them and, in moments of intimacy, when opening our lives to others or our pasts to ourselves, we brought them out to be heard once more.