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[Stefan Stardumb]

Here's a cool dubble interview with Steve Earle and the late great Townes van Zandt that I found on the internet, taken a little over a year before Townes death. I know that probably only less than a handful of people here will care about this, but for those who care: Have fun reading it, it's great! I tell you, Townes owns!!!
Stefan

STEVE EARLE & TOWNES VAN ZANDT - RAGGED GLORY

BY BILL FLANNAGAN for MUSICIAN MAGAZINE - 1st August 1995

Earle was over at Townes' house shooting his mouth off and playing with Townes' guns. Townes, who speaks less often than a wooden Indian, got a little tired of the chatter and said, "See, Steve, you don't really understand guns. Let me explain. Townes picked up a pistol, put a bullet in the chamber, spun it around, put it to his head and pulled the trigger. Click. Earle jumped up yelling. "Townes! Cut it out! " Townes said, "See, you still don't understand guns." Put in a second bullet, spun the chamber, put it to his head again and CLICK. "That's it," Earle said, "I'm not gonna sit here and watch you shoot yourself," and got on his motorcycle and split. Townes got his peace and quiet. If he'd killed himself? He'd have got some peace and quiet either way.

Townes Van Zandt and Steve Earle are both great singer/songwriters who have, against absurd odds, gotten better and better as they have gone along. Van Zandt's latest album, No Deeper Blue, is a masterpiece, as good a record as you'll hear for a long time. Earle's new Train A Comin' is also superb, all the more remarkable because it followed a long dark period during which the songwriter was dropped by his label, hooked on hard drugs, and sentenced to prison. That these two shady characters could cap already brilliant careers with such work is a credit to their talents and a credit to the muse.

When Steve was told that Musician wanted to get him to sit down with Townes for an extensive double interview he said, "They must be gluttons for punishment." Earle and Van Zandt are both well-known handfuls, legendary troublemakers who might steal your car and run off with your girlfriend while you were setting up the tape recorder. Getting them to agree to be in the same place at the same time took months, and might not have ever happened at all but that (1) we picked a date the morning after Townes had a gig in Nashville, so he had to be home and (2) Steve has to stick close to town as a condition of his parole. He just got out of jail after a drug bust, which was the last straw after avoiding prison on such previous charges as beating up a cop.

As for Townes, well, don't even ask about Townes. He is one of the greatest songwriters alive, but in nearly thirty years of making superb records he has never been on a major label and is almost as notorious for his brushes with death and self-destruction as he is for having inspired Earle, Lyle Lovett, Rodney Crowell, a whole school of Texas songwriters. Earle has been widely quoted for his line, "Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that." When you hear the perfect blend of poetry, melody, and melancholy in Townes' best work, "To Live is to Fly," "Pancho and Lefty," "At My Window," "Katie Belle Blue," and "Tecumseh Valley" you could almost believe it, too.

According to legend--almost everything about these guys is legend and it's useless trying to get them to help sort out the truth--Townes was once brought to a hospital and pronounced dead. After he woke up he went out and titled his next record "The Late Great Townes Van Zandt." He has been in and out of rehab and hospitals like a gurney. Now 52, he can't get served at many bars in Nashville. Earle, 40, who grew up following Townes and his poetry and his wicked ways from Austin to Nashville to hell, has bounced up against every wall the music business tried to build around him. In the mid-8Os albums like Guitar Town and songs like "The Devil's Right Hand" made him country music's Next Big Thing. But his records got louder, his behavior more outrageous, and before too long Earle would walk into a Music City restaurant and see all the faces turn away from him. He mouthed off about it, too, picked fights, made enemies. It would be wrong--and Earle would not accept it--to romanticize him as a pure talent spurned by the hypocrites in power. Earle gave those suits plenty of good reason to hate him. But what never gets mentioned in the discussion of Earle's public transformation from rising star to fallen man is that his records kept getting better. Guitar Town was terrific, but the rock 'n' roll Copperhead Road was mightier and the maligned The Hard Way was one of the best, truest, rawest hard rock albums of the 80s. "There are those that break and bend," Earle hollered. "I'm the other kind."

When it was obvious that his time was up and MCA was going to drop him, Earle delivered an unrelenting live record called Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator that ended with a defiant cover of a song Townes Van Zandt also sings in concert, the Rolling Stones' Dead Flowers: "When you're sitting there in your silk upholstered chair, talking to some rich folks that you know, I hope you won't see me in my ragged company. You know I could never be alone." It was the perfect middle finger salute to the music industry.

After many false starts we met up in Nashville at the home of Townes' ex-wife and children. Jeanene Van Zandt had explained that if we let Townes get us out to his place, "He'll break out the roulette wheel and take all your money." The night before Townes had been in great spirits and great voice, playing a set at the Nashville Club at 12th and Porter. When he crawled into Jeanene's house the next day he could hardly walk, hardly talk, and was looking for a bottle. Jeanene gave him coffee instead. Earle, who has been avoiding Nashville for family life on a spread outside of town, roared in five minutes after we turned on the tape recorder, talking a mile a minute and trying to coax Townes into a fishing trip. As often happens to people who suddenly quit drink and drugs, Earle has put on weight. He looks like Sailin' Shoes-era Lowell George. But that's a small price for staying alive. These two misplaced Texans may cause a lot of trouble, but they're worth it. We're lucky to have them around.

[Stefan Stardumb]

MUSICIAN: For a young man who has the gift, there's something very romantic about the notion of a life on the road...

TOWNES: If you have the gift the romance comes later. You have to realize you have the gift. If your gift's to be a plumber or a carpenter or a truckdriver or a preacher you realize you've got the gift and all the rest comes with it. Once you dedicate yourself to that, the rest comes.

MUSICIAN: Have you ever tried to walk away from it?

TOWNES: Well, sometimes I get a little tired. I come back off the road and I say, "Boy, I'm not goin' back out again." Then my booking agent calls and says, "Somebody canceled in Minneapolis day after tomorrow. You want to go?" "You bet!" So it doesn't work like that. [Earle enters like a thunderstorm.]

EARLE: It never occurred to me anybody would try to resequence one of my records! Irving Azoff never tried to resequence one of my records! To me that's the antithesis of what that kind of label should be. They had a contractual right to do it, I totally overlooked it in the contract. I'd just gotten out of jail. It was the perfect record for me to make. I made this record more for me than anybody else. When I met Townes he told me I wasn't a folksinger because I didn't know "The Wabash Cannonball." I still don't know "The Wabash Cannonball"! Some of those songs are about as close as I get.

MUSICIAN: Think how good you'll be once you learn it. Your new album must be good, Steve--the maid stole it out of my hotel room this morning.

EARLE: I shot up my copy with a .50 calibre muzzle load cause I was so pissed off about the sequence. It was a pretty good shot, Townes! It was from here to there in the dark.

MUSICIAN: Elvis Presley needed a whole television.

EARLE: I've had a little bit more practice. But it was about doing an acoustic record. Some of these are songs I wrote when I was 19 years old. When I first got here to town. I threw away everything I had written in Texas when I got up to Nashville. About three of these were written the first year I was in town. Story songs come pretty easy to me. I played bass for Guy Clark when I first got to town. I knew Townes in Texas. First time I saw Townes was at Jerry Jeff Walker's birthday party in Austin and I crashed it. Townes showed up and Jerry Jeff had given him a jacket for his birthday which is shortly before Jerry Jeff and he lost it in a crap game in about ten minutes. Two weeks later I was playing the Old Quarter in Houston and Townes was sitting there. I got to Houston just in time to finish off a dying folk music scene. There was nobody left!

I left for Nashville in November of '74 when everybody told me it was going to be happening in Austin. "Stay here it's going to be a big music scene." I knew it wasn't true. It's too close to the border, the girls are too pretty and the dope's too cheap, weather's too good. You can't get nothin' done! I knew it was bullshit and I was too serious in those days. I came straight up here.

TOWNES: We were a whole group and then we all moved to Nashville. Guy Clark and Richard Dobson and myself and Skinny Dennis and a few other guys who were a bit older than Steve. Steve was the kid of that group. Like Ramblin' Jack was the kid of Woody Guthrie's group. It was curiously close to that situation. We all germinated here. We'd have a bottle of red wine, Skinny'd have his bass, Steve and myself, and Guy would have his guitar and a song he'd written last night.

EARLE: It was like going to school for me. Every night there was a party like that going on somewhere.

TOWNES: And you could hitchhike to Oklahoma City or Dallas and audition on a Wednesday and play on Friday for 20 bucks. That'd last you two weeks and you'd go to Denver.

[Stefan Stardumb]

MUSICIAN: Is there anyplace like that now?

TOWNES: No. You have to have an album. You have to have some sort of a name. I know where I'm gonna be playing for the next five months.

EARLE: I met Mickey Newbury at Guy's house. I was making my very first tape. Mickey won my goddamn jacket from me in a poker game one time in the middle of winter and I almost froze to death.

TOWNES: What happened?

EARLE: I kept drawing to a fuckin' inside straight! What do ya think happened? I learned how to play poker the hard way Jackets and hats...

TOWNES: We don't care about material stuff. We want to hear the guitar ring one note correctly and your voice ring the same note correctly with the proper meaning correctly for that instant. Travel 5000 miles all o over and lose jackets and end up looking like him or looking like me, but if you hit that note, it goes around the world and maybe--this is not bragging but it's hopeful, kind of prayerful--maybe somehow connect up with a baby in England or Ireland or Ethiopia and somehow make a shade of difference. Plus, it keeps us off the streets.

MUSICIAN: Both of you will put a line into a song that will be like a light
going on saying, "This is about me personally. " A step into autobiography.

TOWNES: Into your autobiography. Steve and I are songwriters. And that just comes to us. We don't put anything in. He would like nothing better than to forget his whole life! Me too! Whew! Let's start over fresh. We wrote those songs because they come down, some come inside, some come outside. We write 'em for the people that don't write songs. So if you find something autobiographical, that's coming from you! He wrote it and it struck a note in you. That's your biography comin' out. Steve ain't got no biography, I don't have no biography. We just travel around and act like idiots and try to write songs.

EARLE: You're not entirely wrong. The older I get the more things I have to write about, but when I was younger I made shit up left and right and I still do now because I can. There's things that are autobiographical in my songs that you probably would never associate with me in a million years. I've had a lot of people sit around and speculate about the bad things that have happened to me over the last few year but the truth of the matter is that no matter how bad they think it was the reality's worse and nobody knows it but me. I'm not gonna write about that now. All I can write about is how it looks to me from this end. I'm still here.

EARLE (continuing) : My influences started to be people I knew at a pretty early age. I was still real young, at the point where you flat emulate people. Back then I wanted to be Townes. The way I play guitar came from Townes more than probably anybody else. The way I wrote for years came from Guy more than anybody else, cause story songs are Guy's strong suit. I can write story songs standing on my head. All you've got to do to be able to write story songs is to talk as much as I do and play guitar and have a halfway decent memory. The stuff I'm prouder of is songs like "My Old Friend the Blues" and that's the stuff of mine that is more influenced Iyrically by what Townes does. Most of the time I try to write Iyrics that are conversational. It's like writing dialogue in a book. I say, "He wouldn't say that," either because of lack of education or the part of the country he's from. But most of the time I'll stick pretty close to people who talk like me, 'cause it's a lot less work. But I've never intentionally stuck an autobiographical phrase into a song. I don't really know what you're talking about.

MUSICIAN: Let me give you examples from other songwriters. In "Dancing In the Dark" Springsteen deliberately chose to say, "I get up in the evening " rather than "I get up in the morning" as a flag telling the listener than he was writing about himself not a character. I've talked to Dylan about this sort of stuff and, like you, he started off saying that his songs were not autobiographical. So I mentioned "Ballad in Plain D" and he said, "Oh yeah--that one. I must have been a real schmuck to write that." Songwriters hate to admit it, but they all do it.

TOWNES: I see what you mean. That's a beautiful song.

EARLE: When you talk about everybody we're talking about, you're talking about songwriting at a certain level. At such a high level, number one, it doesn't make any difference what's autobiographical. It's all autobiographical and none of it is.

TOWNES: Number one, it's killing us. It's killing us. He loves it, that's what he was born to do. That's what I was born to do. We're sending it out there and going through whatever we have to do. I've been fifteen thousand miles in the last three months. Steve's been wherever he's been. It's killing us. We can make 'em up. It's always going to have to come from the heart and the brain but sometimes it's going to come from the ceiling or the walls. They go out there and hopefully if the radio stations and the record people get 'em on the airwaves and in the stores people will hear them. If we can help one kid this big or one adult feel a shade lighter on this trail, this veil of tears, if they can hear a song of Steve's or one of mine and it makes them feel better.

MUSICIAN: Even a sad song gives people comfort, because they feel they're not alone.

EARLE: One of the worst things wrong with country radio now is that they've forgotten what hillbilly music was all about. You can't go to a jukebox anymore when you're bummed out! You don't want to hear somebody singing a bunch of happy shit. Sometimes you're bummed out and you're into it. They've gotten away from that. They want songs that are uptempo and positive. Life ain't always uptempo and positive. Mine hasn't been. Well, it's always been uptempo but it hasn't always been positive [laughter].

MUSICIAN: Townes, you make it sound like the songwriter is the sin-eater, taking others' burdens on himselfso they can tee free of them.

TOWNES: We're not sin-eaters. We don't have to eat it, we just do it on the natch. But there's blues-eaters. Some people suck up the blues so that others won't have 'em. Lightnin' Hopkins told me that. I think I'm a bit of one. And it's not painful. Steve's one of 'em for sure. Eric Clapton's one of 'em for sure. It's not painful or noticeable but I believe truck drivers and dentists and garbage guys and mandolin players can all write songs and all do. But a songwriter has a certain ability to know when a song comes and catch a song and write it down. It takes a certain amount of craftsmanship, you got to have your instrument and you have to realize when one is happening. But songs are all through the air like a rainbow. Man, I've seen little eskimo children dancing around in a circle making up a song, or old folks. There're songs everywhere. We just happen to have chosen that as a profession.

EARLE: The craftsmanship part you can learn, but there's a part that you're born with. I was in Mexico one time living in a town with a lot of painters and novelists. I was feeling sorry for myself one day talking to a buddy of mine and I said, "If I'd finished school I could write books," and he said that what I was doing was possibly a more viable form of literature in this day and age than books are. This really had a big effect, it kept me doing this when I was the closest I ever came to quitting. If I didn't read I couldn't write, I know that much. Townes made me read "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" and "War and Peace" cause he found out I hadn't read 'em. So I know he reads. But this is the kind of literature you can consume while you're driving your car. That's one advantage.

[Stefan Stardumb]

MUSICIAN: "Goodbye" is a fantastic song on your new record, Steve.

EARLE: I wrote it when I was locked up. I hadn't written anything in a long long time, a couple of years. The guitar thing in that, that whole fingerpicking style, is from Townes. I don't do it right, I use my thumb and finger.

TOWNES: I'll sue.

EARLE: Good luck! You and I could sue each other and create a black hole.

MUSICIAN: When you sing, "Was I off somewhere, was I just too high," you've made a choice to make that song seem very personal.

EARLE: It's not a choice, it's the way we write. There was one period when I went in every day to an office and wrote songs eight hours a day, 'cause I had a kid and I panicked. I wrote differently. I don't regret it. I threw more songs away but some of the stuff on this album is from that period. But the writers that I met when I tried to co-write with people, we're not coming from the same place. Some of 'em are the real deal but they made a choice somewhere along the line to do A, B and C to get their songs played. That's great for them. For me, the writers I was exposed to at an early age did it no matter what and did it the best they could do it. That's where lines like that probably come from. You don't edit those things. And it's not free. You pay for it. I've written songs that pissed my wife off. There are times when I catch myself saying, "Oh, I don't want to say this," not because it shouldn't be said but because I don't want to hurt anybody. And I probably do edit myself, but not enough to keep me out of trouble.

MUSICIAN: What do you owe the audience, what do you owe the song, and what do you owe to the people you might hurt?

EARLE: What do I owe the audience? I owe them something, they feed my kids. They legitimize me to myself every night, so I owe them something. I don't owe them everything. But I can sit here and say that and that doesn't have anything to do with what actually happens when I write or I go out and play in front of an audience. I can't help thinking that if I'm doing it right, I'm not thinking about it much when it's going on. I can sit here and analyze it as much as you can, but when I'm doing it, I'm just doing it.

MUSICIAN: Townes, let me ask you about a line in "A Song For..."

TOWNES: I already know the line: "There's no place left in this world for me to go / My arms, my legs are a trembling / Thoughts both clouded and blue as the sky / Not even worth the remembering / Now as I stumble and reel to my bed / All that I've done and all that I've said / Means nothing to me, I'd as soon as be dead and all this world be forgotten." Is that it?

MUSICIAN: Yeah. [Earle laughs hard] At what point do you say, Okay, I've done my best.

TOWNES: I don't think you can ever do your best. Doing your best is a process of trying to do your best. We're all critters, that's for sure. Steve and Jeanene and Will and Katie Belle. All you can do is try to do your best. If you ever do your best you'll explode.

EARLE: I hate when that happens.

TOWNES: If you start searching for songs, if you realize that's what you want to do--and there's a certain level of intelligence to it, your level of vibrations to it--once you decide to pursue that you start digging deeper into certain realms and you start traveling, you start throwing away your families and your money and everything else except your guitar and other people's feelings. You keep those in mind and cover as many miles as you can. You zero in on your playing. It's not like [fey voice] "Oh my! My heart shall never beat again!" It ain't like that, man, it's stone cold truth.

EARLE: Somebody asked me if I felt I had to create drama in my life to be able to write. No!

TOWNES: Hey, drama drops on us like teardrops. Boy, if I had any more drama in my life I'd drown!

EARLE: It just finds you. There is probably something you can do to avoid it but I didn't do it. My life didn't work out that way. "Doctor, it hurts when I do this!" "Don't do that."

TOWNES: I told the doctor about a week ago, "Doctor, nobody will talk to me!" He said, "Next! "

EARLE: My favorite joke of Townes' was when he played the coffee house at Texas A&M and the first thing out of his mouth he said, "I hear you guys want to be called Agro-Americans now," and nobody laughed. I'll betcha Lyle Lovett and Robert Keen were both in the audience.

MUSICIAN: You know, Townes, if somebody didn't know your "Buckskin Stallion " they wouldn't really be able to appreciate Lyle's "If I Had A Boat."

TOWNES & EARLE: Oh sure they would!

EARLE: I know Lyle is aware of "Buckskin Stallion" and it may very well have had a huge influence on his song, but that doesn't mean that if Buckskin Stallion" had never existed you wouldn't get that song.

TOWNES: It all intermingles. Steve's and mine intermingle with Guy's and Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry and Peter LaFarge.

MUSICIAN: Steve, your album The Hard Way didn't get the attention it deserved.

EARLE: The Hard Way is the one I feel the worst about. That record wasn't released, it escaped. But I'm real proud of it. It's a kind of a dark scary record. It's a little self-centered, that's the only thing I have trouble with. It's embarrassing how much I like to listen to my own records.

MUSICIAN: Well, the chorus of "The Other Kind" is so egotistical that it takes balls just to sing it--but the verses are overwhelmingly self-critical: "You got two of everything but you hang your head just as if you were down and out."

EARLE: See, that's why the chorus is the way it is. You do two things if you don't feel right about yourself: you either tell yourself how [] guess that's just the way I see things. I used to see a lot of people when I was touring. In the last three or four years I've seen me and my wife and kids and the cops and that's about it. One good thing about not playing for a few years is that my voice got a rest. We were the world's loudest hillbilly band. You lose the high end in your voice, even on nights when I wasn't actually hoarse.

TOWNES: You hear about the horse that walked into the bar? Asked for a drink and the bartender said, "Why the long face?"

[Stefan Stardumb]

MUSICIAN: Townes, I've got to ask you about your demon songs -- "The Hole," "The Snake Song," "The Spider." Some spooky stuff.

TOWNES: Well if you don't take 'em too serious they're okay. If you take 'em serious you may need professional help.

MUSICIAN: Some of us may need professional help.

TOWNES: Indeed.

MUSICIAN: You have an amazing line in one of the new songs: "My self going crazy the way that it does. Not the way that I do."

TOWNES: Well, its not amazing. It's a nice line and it makes sense. It's the correlation of the guitar and the feelings and the voice all together at once. And the message is carried to whoever needs to hear it. A lot of people don't need to hear it, some people do and might not even know. I believe there is one. I believe there is one universe. Yourself, myself, this house, the plants, the tape machine, the chips, the dip, the grapes, the kids, the dogs--it's all part of one. You can not believe in it, you can believe in it, you can not acknowledge it, you can acknowledge it. It doesn't make any difference, there's still one. And you're part of it and I'm part of it. It doesn't make much difference how you react to it. There's just one, that's obvious. And when people start chopping it up into individual... You cant go around hurting other people, that's obvious. If you're a Muslim worshipping Allah or if you're a Christian worshipping Christ, it makes no difference, man. It's one. There ain't two Gods. If that's what men have chosen to call the one: God. Ain't no way there can be two! That's silly!

MUSICIAN: And in "The Hole" all the false gods of men fail. Do you know The Last Temptation of Christ?

TOWNES: I read the book twice, saw the movie once. I read that book, put it down, and wrote my song "Nothing" right after the last page of that book, in upstate New York. I'm not carried away or perplexed by all that. It's not a thing I think about real hard or anything.

MUSICIAN: In that book Kazantzakis says that each man's life is a journey of carrying his own cross up his own Calvary, and the work he leaves behind is "the blood on the tracks."

TOWNES: The Indians say every animal you ever shoot, if you don't use every bone, every feather, every marrow and every flesh you have to carry it on your back to get into heaven.

MUSICIAN: "The Hole" says that when you've passed forgiveness, when you've passed the lastpoint at which you could be saved, there might still be salvation, as a gift.

TOWNES: "Then I whisper deep within, embrace the God of love / I lifted my face and through the tears I saw light fall from above / I hurled my self into the wall, I ripped and clawed my way / Through the stinking clinging loam back to the light of day / I crawled out into the wind again the sky upon my face / I heard the earth sigh patiently as she slid back into place / Now I'm back among the ones I love and I'm loved by them in turn / And it's only on the darkest night that that green-eyed memory burns / So walk my friends in the light of day, don't go sneakin' around no hole / There might be somethin' down there wants to gobble up your soul."

MUSICIAN: How can I ask you which strings you use after that I saw Jerzy Kosinski skulking around one of your shows once. Did you know him?

TOWNES: I met him the night before he committed suicide.

MUSICIAN: You had nothing to do with it, did you?

TOWNES: I've read a bunch of his stuff. Yeah, I met him a night or two before he smoked himself. [Townes goes into the kitchen, gets a plate of potato salad and goes off to eat it.]

MUSICIAN: How do you reconcile the selfishness demanded by your art with your responsibilities to your family?

EARLE: You don't reconcile it. One of the reasons that I write is partially to try to reconcile it, to try to understand it, try to explain it. When you really do turn inward as a writer, that's what you're doin'. But reconcile it? I can't say that everything that I've done has been worth it, in the sense that I sure wish I hadn't hurt people that I hurt. I scared a few perfectly good women to death. Y'know I've been married a few times. I got my wife and kids back now--Lou's my fourth wife and my sixth wife. Our divorce didn't work out.

MUSICIAN: When you write a song do you ever think, This is something of me that my kids will have after I'm gone "?

EARLE: I think that when I get a royalty check. I think about it in terms of the part of my publishing that I own. I can't help but think about it that way, that's how I've made my living all my adult life. Then again I've seen a dot of trust fund babies that were fucked up. But it means my kids can go to college if they want to. I think my stepdaughter likes my songs a lot. My oldest son who's thirteen is starting to play a lot now. I just gave him a chord book and turned him loose. It just knocks me out that he's starting to listen to Bob Dylan's early albums. He didn't listen to nothin' but hip-hop for three years, which is cool. I listened to nothin' but hip-hop for a couple of years because it was the only thing I could listen to that didn't make me feel like I should be making a record or writing songs.

MUSICIAN: Townes, I was just talking to Steve about what you leave for your kids in your work. "Katie Belle Blue" is something your daughter's going to have after you're gone.

TOWNES: She also has all the publishing and the Buick and this house and an acre of land. I signed all that over.

EARLE: I'm gonna bury myself in the backyard of my house and that way the kids can't sell it. [laughter]

TOWNES: I have a pickup truck, an '89 GMC with a new motor and a good undercarriage and a J200 Gibson. Everything else has been signed over. I keep the gig money and the family keeps the ASCAP, the publishing, and the recording money. It's all set up. We live lives that are not safe. There's danger everywhere. If you're in motion, if you're on the road there are all manners of danger. Steadily. Between taxes and liability insurance and this and that, we ain't out there playing for the money, man. Like I was saying earlier, we're out there for one guitar chord, one note, one beam of light in somebody's mind. We travel 600 miles a day to do it. It's not the money. I don't wear any jewelry or anything like that. I'm not exactly a slave to fashion.

MUSICIAN: I once asked Rodney Crowell what you two were really like. He praised you both greatly and he also said, "I'll tell you the difference. Steve likes the romance of danger but Steve doesn't actually want to die. He'd pull back. Townes might not care"

TOWNES: [quietly] . I'd say Steve and I are probably neck and neck.

MUSICIAN: You both sing "Dead Flowers."

TOWNES: I love that song.

EARLE: I learned the song from him, really. I've always been a Stones fan but their record sort of blew by me until I heard Townes sing it. You just started playing "Dead Flowers" when I started hanging out with you all. It was right around the time that The Late Great came out that I met you. It's a great song.

TOWNES: Some songs seem to be related. I've been thinking about this lately, Steve. I've been singing "Dead Flowers" at the end of "Tecumseh Valley" and it rolls right in. It's kind of like, "Hold it." I think if you had enough energy and enough vitamins and could force yourself to eat enough and didn't have to sleep, you could keep singing related songs until you dropped dead. Of course, you wouldn't have time to get paid.

EARLE: And it's all the stuff that happens in between the songs...

TOWNES: [laughs] Yeah, you'd miss all of that.

[Stefan Stardumb]

Look. I'm just posting something unimportant to get this topic on top again, cause not enough people have read it yet. I learned this trick from Laurent!







Townes is the man!!!

[Carbona_Sniffer]

thanks Laurent, and thanks stefan!