Townes Van Zandt looks and sounds like everyone’s idea of the lonesome cowboy: he’s lanky and slow-moving, with a whispery Texas drawl and a leathery, careworn face. He ambles onto the stage, opens up his set with a mumbled comment and a joke or two–usually a tale that sounds as if it’s going to end tragically but winds down to a hilariously prosaic finish–then without another word picks up his guitar and starts to play.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Van Zandt moves through the world with his soul exposed like an open nerve. He’s been known to sing through his tears onstage; in conversation he can veer from laid-back affability to trembling vulnerability in the course of a sentence, and you never know which droll story or fond remembrance is going to trigger the transition. That courage to stare unblinking into the abyss of oblivion–his own, a fictitious hero’s, society’s–means Van Zandt brings an autobiographical immediacy to virtually everything he does. He says that many of his darkest fables seem to flow effortlessly from his pen (“I don’t know where some of ’em come from”). The dry, somewhat pinched quality of his voice gives even his most harrowing songs a conversational casualness; he seems to accept despair and the shattering of dreams as natural occurrences, as run-of-the-mill as a morning cup of coffee.
Van Zandt, whose relaxed folksiness is offset by an underlying intensity, commented several times during his recent show at the Beat Kitchen how comfortable he felt there; as if to prove it, he plunged unhesitatingly into some of his most complex and challenging material. “Dollar Bill Blues,” a chilling minor-key gambling ballad driven by a haunting sense of fatalism and tragedy (“My mother was a golden girl / I slit her throat just to get her pearls”), is the kind of thing many artists would use to close a set; Van Zandt opened with it.
In contrast to the offhanded ease with which he spins his tragic tales, Van Zandt imbues his love songs with a delicate sense of wonder, as if to suggest that comfort and sanctuary are miracles while despair is the human condition. He sings of his lady as “a treasure for the poor to find,” weaving imagery of fragile things–glass, rainbows, home–around melodies that are often almost childlike, plucked gently with music-box simplicity in the upper registers of his guitar.
The temptress whispers to him that he should abandon his family and his loved ones (“If you want to pay your father back / Just send him some misery”) and stay underground with her. Just as he’s ready to believe her, the singer thinks of the glow of human affection he’s left behind; tearing himself from her grasp, he claws his way back up “through the stinkin’, clingin’ loam” into the daytime world of life, light, and the possibility of redemption.
