Was Townes Van Zandt better than Dylan?

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/02/was_townes_van_zandt_better_th.html

His own life often seemed like the saddest ballad, but the late songwriter was the true voice of American country music

‘The best songwriter in the world’? Townes Van Zandt. Photograph: Corbis

By all accounts the life of Townes Van Zandt was high southern gothic made real. The briefest of biographies on this musician puts you in mind of the fractured lives imagined by Tennessee Williams. It’s a narrative rife with confounded expectations and hounding demons from which, by dint of talent and endurance, astonishing beauty was extracted.

From roots in Texan nobility to debilitating shock therapy and alcoholic decline, Van Zandt’s life seems a crisply complete ballad in the saddest tradition. For a musician who lives in the awesome shadow of Hank Williams, one might take Van Zandt’s history lightly. Any good country singer needs stories of whisky-soaked heartbreak. Why abandon a trusted script? But when you listen to Van Zandt’s strikingly uneven but incomparable recordings, the notion of any script goes out the window. “Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the world and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that,” said Steve Earle.

Certainly, the first fix of Van Zandt’s records can put the listener in mind of Dylan. The lyrics often waltz out loaded images and dream-sense connections in a manner that suggests an effort to out-Dylan the man himself. These early records were dated by their production, and Van Zandt could have easily been considered another pretender to Dylan’s throne at a time when there surely was no shortage of those. That was the first impression I had of the studio albums. Returning to his eponymous album and Our Mother the Mountain, however, this impression was shown to be false. The more these records are revisited, the more the strings, the flutes, the witty and sentimental lyrics and the twee sheen seem incidental to something distant and not forthcoming in the music. You develop a sense of these records as frustratingly incomplete and muddled pictures. There are devastating songs here but they are just out of reach.

However, Kathleen and Tecumseh Valley come closer to bursting through. Kathleen paints a leaden melancholy without collapsing into pity. Poetic imagery is grounded by plain speaking: “Maybe I’ll go insane. I have to kill this pain.” Rare also is the evocation of the usual unfortunate characters (gamblers, prostitutes) without any accompanying narcissism. Tecumseh Valley articulates the unravelling of someone else’s life with restraint and empathy. It’s enough to put you in mind of an old-time song like Roscoe Holcomb’s Combs Hotel Burned Down.

Having heard these dimensions in the music, you want to tear the flutes and strings away and hear what Townes Van Zandt is really about. This is exactly what happens on Live at the Old Quarter, a record justifiably considered his finest. This is where the songs you heard a whisper of bloom into all their unique and heady splendour. It is suddenly clear that Van Zandt’s music is so charged that it needs to be heard as a solo performance. This recorded show opens the entire landscape up in front of you. Songs that half suffocated in the studio now stretch out as part of a remarkable terrain. Taking it in you get an impression of someone balancing between dangerous extremes: there are songs of exultation and freedom – White Freight Liner Blues, To Live is to Fly – and songs of desolate sadness – For the Sake of the Song, Awaiting Around to Die. Van Zandt sounds as though he is rolling steadily between soaring mountains and sinking slums, taking it all in raw and unmediated.

Not all is sadness, however. Though not immediately discernible, there is also rich humour here that recalls Texas blues master Lightnin’ Hopkins. It was Hopkin’s bittersweet style that inspired Van Zandt to pursue music, and Lightnin’ numbers frequently crop up on the live recordings. If you follow Live at The Old Quarter with Road Songs and Abnormal, an unusual development can be heard. While his vocals and musicianship are increasingly frayed by relentless hard living, Van Zandt’s songs only grow in force. For example, it would be difficult to find a more unflinching portrayal of American poverty than Marie. While many singers are credited with the ability to become the characters they depict, few could do so with this sensitivity. The song is like an urban update of Hank William’s Pictures from Life’s Other Side with the doomed protagonist staring into your eyes as he unfolds his wretched story. The narrative ends with a freight train vanishing into the distance. As it does so, you are left wondering whether even Dylan could have evoked the spirit of the blues to such fearful effect.