by Daniel V. Garcia
Daily Lobo
When singer/songwriter Townes Van Zandt was a young man, he sniffed airplane model glue to get high.
He once had his mouth hammered open after it was stuck shut when he fell asleep with three tubes of it in his mouth, resulting in the loss of his upper row of teeth.
This is also a man referred to as the best songwriter by songwriter Steve Earle.
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All this is according to the film "Be Here to Love Me," a retrospective highlighting Van Zandt's life. While posthumous documentaries like this typically feature a number of talking heads associated with the deceased while he or she was living, this film includes exceptional footage from the early '70s of Van Zandt before he became famous.
It follows him amid trailer parks and dirt yards where he drinks whiskey out of one hand and Coke out of the other, all while carrying a .22 rifle and hamming it up with his black neighbors.
The effect is surreal. Van Zandt as a bohemian cowboy was like looking at the '60s generation as is it really was, and not set in front of the summer of love backdrop collectively projected onto that time period. The effect comes to a head when Van Zandt sings a song in his living room about dying and being dragged to Tennessee while a black man his senior by 40 years weeps, only to be comforted by a 20-something hippie girl. Had the moment been dramatized it would have come across as insincere.
This type of in-the-moment living seems to have been the hallmark of Van Zandt's life. At one point, songwriter Guy Clark talks about realizing the only thing keeping Van Zandt alive was his music as he watched him lie unconscious on the ground.
Van Zandt himself describes his musical pursuits not in terms of fame or fortune but in terms of writing perfect songs. When he speaks about agonizing over every word, one can't help but believe him. After all, this was a man who leaned over a building and landed on his back from a four-story fall not because he was suicidal but because he was curious about what falling feels like.
Interviews with family members reveal more of the Van Zandt's history. His sister speaks about how his erratic behavior drove his mother to put him through electroshock treatments in a mental hospital, resulting in the obliteration of his childhood memories.
Van Zandt became famous later on and had his music covered by the likes of Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson. Had he not suffered a miserable existence for most of his life, he probably would not have been able to write the same kinds of songs.
It's clichÇ to say that suffering builds creativity, but who would have thought that watching the process unfold could be so beautiful?
