Townes Van Zandt – Rear View Mirror
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Posted On March 1, 1997
This reissue of a 1993 live album was never intended to memorialize Townes Van Zandt (in the saddest of posthumous ironies, its Sugar Hill sleeve includes a phone number to call for bookings), but it’ll do for now. Originally released by Sundown, a tiny Austin indie with limited distribution, the 17-song set finds Van Zandt in fine form — upbeat, gracious, apparently sober — and in good company, with fiddler Owen Cody and guitarist Danny Rowland adding a dimension of musical enhancement that never overwhelms the nuances of the material. As anyone who ever saw Van Zandt fall off a stool recognizes, there was no such thing as a typical Townes performance, but when he was good, no one working in the Texas troubadour tradition has ever been better.
While the hallmark of Van Zandt’s songwriting was his ability to render the most profound insights in the most plain-spoken language, the literary part of his artistry was but an element of the musical equation. His voice fit his melodies the way his melodies fit his meaning, each reinforcing the others. The result was a uniquely metaphysical brand of blues, a seamless synthesis of Lightnin’ Hopkins and Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie and Soren Kierkegaard. The laconic resignation in his voice was that of a man staring, unflinching, into the abyss, while his softer side found solace in tender mercies, those that helped but could not last. Listeners only familiar with this album’s higher-profile material in more popular renditions by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard (“Pancho & Lefty”), Don Williams and Emmylou Harris (“If I Needed You”) or Nanci Griffith and Arlo Guthrie (“Tecumseh Valley”) may have heard the tunes, heard the words, but they haven’t really heard the songs until they’ve heard Townes.
Predictably, the album finds Van Zandt providing his own best epitaph:
Everything is not enough
Nothing is too much to bear
Where you’ve been in good and gone
All you keep is the gettin’ there
We all got holes to fill
And them holes are all that’s real
Some fall on you like a storm
Sometimes you dig your own.
