Townes Van Zandt: For the sake of song

New documentary chronicles family life of Austin legend

By Zachary Warmbrodt
Daily Texan Staff

In the opening sequence of Margaret Brown’s documentary “Be Here To Love Me,” a recorded conversation with Townes Van Zandt plays behind images of a young boy surrounded by well-dressed, loving family, big yards and shiny new cars.

“I think my life will run out before my work does, you know,” Van Zandt says. “I’ve designed it that way.”

As a college student, Van Zandt would lock himself up in his apartment’s walk-in closet for days with wine and a guitar, picking away at Bob Dylan and Lightnin’ Joe Hopkins songs. The best medical advice that doctors could give his concerned parents was that he was manic depressive and required shock treatment. The Texas folk icon to-be likely lost the childhood images forever, according to family, after the treatment burned them away.

Brown’s film, which will premier in Austin at the Alamo Drafthouse Village Dec. 8, tries to show the motivation behind the late Van Zandt’s decision to “blow everything off” in pursuit of his hopeless yet happy fusion of blues and folk and the effect his wandering had on those he loved.

Brown, who calls Austin home despite currently working from New York City, interviewed friends, family and fans such as Kris Kristofferson, Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett to tell a story that was more inspiring than it was tragic.

Daily Texan: Why did you choose this project for your directorial debut?

Margaret Brown: I just was really drawn to his music and also just the stories of his life that I heard just being around Austin were so extreme, and I was just interested in the ideas of how much you live your art, and he seems like sort of a poster child for that idea. I think a lot of artists, whether they be musicians or painters or filmmakers or writers just everyone sort of has that question like how much of it is experience and how much of it is observed?

DT: How did the idea come to you?

MB: It came to me, well, it just seemed like I just really connected to the music, and my dad’s a songwriter, so I’ve been around that kind of music a lot of my life. And I was kind of more drawn growing up in Alabama to the sort of crappy punk rock bands that were just local, and I knew everyone who was there at the shows, and I just thought the singer-songwriter stuff, I just didn’t connect to it. It wasn’t till I was older that I really felt it. …

It took me going down to Austin and hearing a lot of stories about Townes and reading about him to figure out this was good story and no one had told it. It was a sort of archetypal story of a hero, or maybe an antihero, kind of going off and getting the Golden Fleece or something and you know forsaking everything. That’s him.

DT: Townes was a “migratory beast,” to use the words of Steve Earle. I remember in the film you hear Townes saying, “There’s one point I realized I could do this, but it takes blowing everything off” — family, security, everything — and go.

But you focus on each of his families. Why this instead of stories from the recording studio or the road?

MB: Well, because that’s like the ultimate blow off. You have kids with somebody and that’s, I mean, that’s the most extreme thing, to blow off the people closest to you. That was what it was about really.

DT: Guy Clark insisted that you drink with him, shot for shot, throughout your interview with him. How long was the interview? Did you face a similar reaction from others that you interviewed?

MB: That was the only [interviewee who drank with filmmakers]. To be fair to Guy, Townes was like his best friend, and I think he just felt like he wanted me to be in the same kind of space that he was in to do the interview. The interview lasted from 11 in the morning, and we stayed in his house till 4 or 5 the next morning. I don’t know if you’d call it an interview, but we were there.

DT: What were their moods?

MB: Everyone definitely remembered him fondly except for a few of the people who had to manage him or had to produce him. They were like, “Oh my god, it was so hard,” and they had more mixed remembrances. But everyone who was a friend, even though they were sad, it was always fond.…
I think he was a really gentle soul, and even though he was an alcoholic and sometimes that can sort of twist around how you treat people even if you don’t want to it’s a disease. ... I’m not trying to make an excuse for it, but I think when you’re an addict, you do things you don’t really want to do all of the time, so I think that people who are around addicts they kind of know that … It’s not easier to forgive, but there’s at least an understanding there.

DT: The movie is slow-paced and filled mostly with Townes own words and music. How did you choose the style for this film? You wanted the film to feel “handmade”?

MB: Well I knew I didn’t want it be a traditional biopic that goes the rise and fall and rise again, even though like in certain ways it does take on that semblance, but I knew that I didn’t’ want it to be really be chronological. I wanted it to be sort of more associative, and I wanted it to feel — I don’t know — kind of like a dream.

DT: Like a dream?

MB: I wanted to play a lot of his songs. There’s 25 songs in the film, and so I wanted there to be sort of a negative space in the film to enjoy the songs for what they were to and have images that kind of like advance the story in that you felt like you were learning more about Townes while you were listening to the songs.

DT: Did Townes have a fascination with death? You have an interview where he talks about different kinds of death and an interview with Steve Earle about Townes and an incident at his Tennessee cabin. Why?

MB: Totally. He definitely had a fascination with mortality. I think he was close to death so many times in a way it didn’t seem like he feared it all that much.

I think a lot of people thought toward the end of his life he could float off the Earth and be gone. There’s another quality to him like he was not connected to things here.

And in terms of the Steve Earle story, I mean, I put that in because it’s such an extreme. First of all I feel like it’s an incredibly selfish act to have someone witness what is essentially could be a suicide. I mean there were bullets in that gun and he knew it, so that’s just, that’s a really selfish act, but it’s also this sort of recklessness around death. ...So, I decided to include that story. It was a story that people had told a lot while describing Townes.

DT: Townes says near the beginning of the film, “I think my life will run out before my work does, you know. I’ve designed it that way.” What does that mean to you now?

MB: Well it’s a few different things to me. First of all, I wanted to start the movie with that, because it really gets your attention like, who would say this and does he really mean it? And, again, Townes, like Bob Dylan, he was very aware of the myth that he was weaving around himself, and he was a very aware that the lifestyle he was leading was “live fast die young.” It’s amazing he lived as long as he did. He said that when was 27 or 28. I think he thought he would die a year later …

But I mean, I could have that wrong. I didn’t know him. It’s weird in documentary there’s this whole notion of truth. I mean, documentary is as much fiction as any narrative in a way because you’re hearing someone else’s version of the story …When you’re doing it and you realize the power you have as a director, you pretty much shake things around. I feel like you have this obligation if not to represent truth, at least emotional truth.

page two | music | cinema | food | arts | listings