TOWNES | YOU’VE GOTTA MOVE– OR JUST YOU’RE WAITIN’ AROUND TO DIE

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“You know when Robert Johnson said ‘you gotta move’ — I figured that out. It’s like, you’re happily floating through nothing– you know, nothingness.  All of a sudden, a big giant fish, they way I picture it… grabs you and… puts you in a form, and slams you on the face of this veil of tears, and says– You’ve gotta move! “

–Townes Van Zandt

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From Waitin’ Around to Die–

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For the first 14-15 years of his life Townes Van Zandt was a happy, healthy, athletic young man from a prestigious background. As Guy Clark put it–

’He was being bred to be Governor of Texas– seriously, it was that kind of family.’

In his mid to late teens he started to develop a bi-polar disorder and was diagnosed ‘manic depressive with schizophrenic tendencies’. By the age of 19 he was thought to be a danger to himself, a suicide/OD waiting to happen, and his adoring parents took the hard decision to have their eldest son hospitalised and treated. They used the best doctors, the most advanced therapy in the leading facility in the country .

The combination of electricity and chemicals helped temporarily to alleviate Townes symptoms, possibly saved his life,but they also wiped out most of his childhood memory, and his subsequent attempts to settle down were constantly derailed by his depression and the addictions that accompanied it.

Five years, one album, a marriage and a little boy later, the blues having taken hold for good, Townes hit the road. He spent the next 30 years self medicating with drugs, firewater and a dark sense of humour, to somehow survive long enough to create a collection of the greatest contemporary folk songs America has produced.

‘How close can you cut it to your own bone? Did you break your own heart?  Did you scare the shit out of yourself? That’s what matters.  Townes went for the passion not a bunch of clever bullshit.  He sounded like himself.’

–Guy Clark

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‘Everything is not enough

Nothing is too much to bear

Where you been is good and gone

All you keep is the getting there.’

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‘Time shes a fast old train

Shes here then shes gone

And she won’t come again

Won’t you take my hand’

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‘When will she see

That to gain

Is only to lose

All that she offers me

Are her chains,

I got to refuse’

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‘Lay down your head poor boy

Feel how the ground does move

Hear how them drivers sing

What now my darling one

Go find a little fun

You are not needed now’

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‘My days they are the highway kind

They only come to leave

But the leavin’ I don’t mind

It’s the comin’ that I crave.

Pour the sun upon the ground

Stand to throw a shadow

Watch it grow into a night

And fill the spinnin sky’

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‘Ride the blue wind high and free

She’ll lead you down through misery

Leave you low come time to go

Alone and low as low can be’

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‘Tomorrow the mountains will be sleeping

Silently the blanket green and blue

And I shall hear the silence they are keeping

I’ll bring all their promises to you’

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‘Chained upon the face of time

Feelin’ full of foolish rhymne

There ain’t no dark till something shines

I’m bound to leave this dark behind’

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‘Goodbye to all my friends

It’s time to go again

Think of all the poetry

And the pickin’ down the line’

— Townes Van Zandt

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