Eclectic Company: Townes Van Zandt: The Audio Files, Part 1

A few years ago, I was very happy to report in these pages [The Jam, May 20, 2010] on Steve Earle’s GRAMMY Award-winning tribute album Townes (released on the New West label), that gathered together some of the best of the late, great songwriter Townes Van Zandt’s words and music, because he's held a special place in my heart since I worked briefly for his record label in the late 1970s. At that time Townes was worse than broke and schussing down a wormhole of drugs and alcohol (which would eventually lead to his death, by heart attack, on January 1, 1997, age 52), and I was the Office Manager/Publicity Assistant at Tomato Records, charged with (among many other dodges) fending off artists’ requests for royalty statements and payments (as Townes did, regularly calling collect, with increasing desperation and frantic anger, from the first to the last day of my tenure at the label).

It was hard listening to his alternating requests and demands, but I could do little to alleviate Townes’ suffering, because Tomato was going under, in debt to everyone from the landlord to the stationery store. Owner Kevin Eggers spent much of his time ducking phone calls from artists and vendors, and trying, in his boy-wonder way (after all, he was reportedly still in his teens when he helped legendary impresario Sid Bernstein bring The Beatles to America, so he had hard evidence that he had walked on water) with unimpaired optimism to raise capital to meet payroll, and possibly, pay off some of the creditors. That didn’t work, unfortunately, and I’m sorry to say that Townes’ financial troubles continued beyond the grave, as his ex-wife/executrix sued Eggers and his ex-wife, and various Tomato-related entities on behalf of Townes’ estate for copyright infringement and back royalties, alleging many more years of non-payments.

But it’s possible (and I surely hope so) that the Van Zandt estate is reaping some financial rewards these days from the Steve Earle tribute record and from a new double album anthology of Townes’ own performances – Sunshine Boy: The Unheard Studio Sessions & Demos 1971 – 1972 – that’s just been released by Omnivore Recordings, whose delicious motto “create, devour, repeat” respects no musical genre boundaries but the owners’ own tastes. Which is absolutely the right home for this new Townes Van Zandt record that pulls spare and clean renderings of some of his most important material from the demos and session outtakes of two of his best records, The Late, Great Townes Van Zandt and High, Low and In Between (and, full disclosure, for which 1996 Acoustic Highway/EMI reissues of the original releases I wrote liner notes), alternating his deceptively simple original songs with effortless playful twists on covers of songs written by others.

As I have previously confessed, I loved the Willie Nelson/Merle Haggard version of “Pancho and Lefty” that topped the Billboard country chart in 1983 (and the music video that you can find on youtube, or late at night on one of the country music video stations), but I rediscovered Townes’ own phrasing in the Sunshine Boy alternate take, and now believe I love his recordings best. British author, playwright and journalist Colin Escott’s liner notes for Sunshine Boy reviews Townes’ bleak history and analyzes the heard-for-the-first-time recordings of many of these songs, so I won’t repeat him here. By now you’ve probably heard Emmylou Harris’ cover of “If I Needed You,” and maybe some of Townes’ other best works covered by dozens of lesser-known singers, but if you haven’t, there are loads of ways to hear them, not least of which is to get your hands on Sunshine Boy, and I urge you to give yourself a treat and do so.

When I read that Sunshine Boy was about to be released, I tracked down the Omnivore Recordings’ story, and then spoke with Cheryl Pawelski, one of its founders, to find out why the label had decided to release Townes’ music. Pawelski told me that she’d been thinking about doing something with the archived sessions for years, from way back when she was a producer of catalog projects at EMI/Capitol (which is also where she became a fan and supporter of the music of another of my faves, Richard Thompson, who was then a Capitol recording artist, and some of whose records have been reissued on Omnivore). So it was an organic progression from being downsized by the dying major labels to the formation of Omnivore with several friends who were also downsized industry veterans, in order to produce and sell records the company’s owners would want for their personal collections, and, without sacrificing quality, to release those projects in leaner, smarter ways, with lower overhead than the major labels had had, and with multiple income stream opportunities (placement of songs in film and television, niche marketing, etc.) in place, so that they could finance wildly divergent records, and find the audiences that share their musical tastes. Townes Van Zandt’s previously unheard demos and recording sessions fit the young label’s mission perfectly.

When we spoke, Pawelski was nursing the weird cold/flu that’s been making the rounds, exacerbated by the non-stop week of events leading up to the GRAMMY awards, but she gave me nearly two hours of her time, our conversation ranging widely over musical tastes we share, the Omnivore start up, her philosophy about analog, digital and other recording formats (which includes her belief that we are in for a re-emergence of vinyl records as a primary purchase choice among younger music fans, and which I discussed later with one of her colleagues, record producer, recording and live recordings engineer for WNYC, New York’s public radio station, Edward Haber, who’s co-produced a few Richard Thompson and Linda Thompson reissues with Pawelski, and who cordially disagrees about vinyl), and so many other topics of mutual interest that I’m going give her (and me) a little time to recover, and I will visit those issues and Pawelski's and Haber's comments upon you in the next issue of The Jam.

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