A Deeper Blue by Robert Earl Hardy Read Free Book Online

that. It was the early sixties, and there was some R&B floating around. And there was a Johnny Cash album freshly out called Ride This Train , and Townes covered a few things from that. There was a song he did called
    “Train I Ride,” I think, and he did some Elvis and some Gene Vincent things.…22
    In between songs he didn’t want to talk much, he just would sort of look down at his guitar and try to work through the changes. He’d sit there for awhile and there’d just be this silence, and then he’d say, “okay, let’s do this one,” and he’d try something else…. One time, I actually performed with Townes at some minor social function involving the St. Mary’s Hall girls. It was our junior year, and I remember he did “Train I Ride,” he did “I Got A Woman,” and he did some other things. He was a big hit with the ladies, as you can imagine.
    Townes would often discuss music with his friends, and Sharpe recalls one occasion when he became involved in a conversation about folk music. “There was a little bit of folk music around, like the Kingston Trio and the Lamplighters and Peter, Paul & Mary, and someone asked, ‘Do you play any folk music?’
    And Townes didn’t answer directly, but he got into how there just wasn’t any good cowboy music around anymore, not exactly putting down the folk music that was out there, but quite impassioned about how good that old stuff was, and he mentioned Hank Williams and some others…. Joan Baez was just getting started, and I think he might have been conscious of her, and I think he liked her.” Dylan was around as well, but
    “not in general circulation” yet at Shattuck, he recalls.
    Sharpe recalls that while Van Zandt never got into serious trouble at Shattuck, “he was well known as a rebel. Townes didn’t care, he learned certainly enough, he was smart enough for that, but he didn’t pay any attention to the basic rule of a police state, which is, you obey the little rules, you shine your shoes, look nice, turn out well, hit all your appointments on time, and then 30
    A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt you can break the big rules. Well, Townes was a scofflaw at every point. So consequently he was not too highly regarded by those in power. Townes was just a law unto himself,” Sharpe says. “The time that we lived together, we were juniors, and they didn’t really bear down on you hard until your senior year. But Townes was his own counterculture when I lived with him, certainly. He did lots of drinking, which didn’t bother me too much. Then he got into glue sniffing and so forth in his senior year. But always, Townes was a hedonist, first, last, and always….”
    Sharpe recalls the rebellious Van Zandt forming a clandestine group called The Syndicate. “I think it was mostly a figment of Townes’ imagination,” says Sharpe. “But I was a member, nomi-nally. There was a group called the Crack Squad there…. It was a precision drill team kind of deal. They were the crème de la crème of Shattuck society. Well, Van Zandt, ever with the feel for the counterculture, developed The Syndicate, which was his version of the underworld. Who knows how many people were in it….” According to Bill Van Zandt, The Syndicate “would play music, very loud, right next to the Crack Squad practices and try to mess them up. And at the school there was a tradition about the Crack Squad, where new boys couldn’t even refer to them.
    You had to pretend they didn’t exist…. And Townes went out of his way to try to violate that rule whenever he could.”
    “I would sum up Townes’ attitude like this,” says Marshall Froker. “He was the guy who stood there in formation in his military hat … and he managed to wear it at just the right jaunty angle so as not to cross the line.” Musburger remembers Van Zandt committing various minor infractions, many stemming from the rather repressive social structure the young cadets labored under,