Traces of Townes: exploring Townes Van Zandt's Minnesota connections
by Luke Taylor
January 13, 2017
When Marshall Froker was a high-school junior at the Shattuck School in Faribault, Minn., he heard guitar music coming from a room in his dormitory. "It was fairly good for a junior," Froker recalls, "so I knocked on the door and went in and said, 'Hi, I heard you playing, and I'd like to listen for a while.' We sort of bonded over that."
And that is how Froker met and befriended the singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt.
Although reflections on the life and career of Van Zandt tend to focus largely — with good reason — on the singer's connections to Texas, Colorado and Tennessee, Van Zandt did spend some time in Minnesota. With January 2017 marking 20 years since the singer-songwriter's death, a search for Van Zandt's Minnesota connections unearthed some ties that run deep.
Van Zandt was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and his father was an oil-company executive who was transferred to a different city nearly every year. When Van Zandt was a teenager, the family had moved from Colorado to the Chicago area, and word soon came that Van Zandt's father would be transferred again, meaning another change in schools. "His parents wanted him to have two consecutive years in the same place," Froker explains, which is what led Van Zandt to attend the all-boys' Shattuck School — now the co-ed Shattuck-St. Mary's — in Faribault, from which Van Zandt and Froker graduated in 1962.
"People might not believe it, but Townes was this really pretty good athlete," Froker says by phone from Chicago. "He was coordinated and nimble and strong. He was muscular. When he played football, he was what we would now call a 'wide receiver,' then we called it 'end,' and he was really pretty good! And then he was a wrestler … he really liked his wrestling career, and he played baseball. But he was athletic and good at it."
When Shattuck was an all-boys' school, it had a military program. "We wore uniforms, the daily schedule was quite structured," Froker says, saying that Townes, while not overly rebellious, tended to push the envelope. "He wore the uniforms and everything, but in a Townes kind of way," Froker laughs. "You were supposed to have a glass shine — you literally had to be able to see yourself in your shoes — and he just wasn't going to do that. He just did it sort of half-assed."
Although there was a military thread running through the curriculum, Froker insists calling Shattuck a "military academy" is inaccurate. "It was modeled after English public schools — in America, we call them private schools," Froker explains. "The academics were actually quite good, and the teachers were called 'masters.' Some of the classes, especially senior year, were quite rigorous academically."
When musician Frankie Lee performed at Shattuck-St. Mary's at a Caravan du Nord gig last November, he sensed some of that English boarding-school vibe. "It looks like medieval gothic from the outside, and then you get inside and it looks like Harry Potter or something like that," Lee says. "It's all hand-carved, a lot of stained glass."
Lee cites Van Zandt as one of his major influences, and he says it was special to play at Van Zandt's alma mater. Lee dedicated his performance last November to the memory of Van Zandt, speaking about Van Zandt to the audience there and performing a cover of Van Zandt's "White Freightliner Blues."
By visiting Shattuck-St. Mary's, Lee was treading the same ground where Van Zandt played some of his earliest gigs — which were accompanied by Froker. "I'm embarrassed to say it — this was the late '50s, early '60s, mind you — and I was messing around with bongos, which was kind of a folkie, bohemian thing at the time," Froker explains. "Townes wanted some rhythm behind his singing, so we got together on that. We'd go off to places where we could play and not disturb people too much or get kicked out of the dorm."
The two played a small gig in front of some students and parents, including students from the then-separate, all-girls' St. Mary's School. Froker remembers Van Zandt played covers of Johnny Cash, Ray Charles and Gene Vincent tunes. "It was actually fairly good, but it may have sounded ridiculous to people to hear someone who sang Townes's repertoire and me sitting around the bongos!" Froker laughs. "I sort of cringe at the memory, but we weren't really all that bad, and of course Townes was already developing.
"Afterward, the ladies were quite interested in him, as you might imagine," Froker adds. "He was a good-looking guy, and he had something that attracted the ladies, just like moths to a flame."
But foremost among Froker's early memories of collaborating with Van Zandt was the latter's approach to music. "Townes would play riffs, and he would actually do a little bit of flamenco to limber up and to get more proficient at his playing," Froker says. "He seemed already looking ahead to a career at this. He was really dedicated to it."
Although he didn't know it at the time, Froker observed hints of Van Zandt's later work. "There was a tune called 'Wild in the Country,' which was an Elvis thing — Townes was doing a lot of Elvis then," Froker recalls. "There was a phrase in it that had some tricky little chromatic nuance to it, and he had a lot of trouble with it. He kept trying to nail it. And I said, 'So what's the problem?' and he said, 'Well, you know, it's hard to carry a tune.' You can sort of tell in his singing that he doesn't precisely hit a note, but I think that contributed to the authenticity of his work, that it was all about the lyrics and the emotional content less than the technical precision of the melody."
The authenticity of Van Zandt's work is what struck Frankie Lee. "When I was 19 years old, I got the Live at the Old Quarter record," Lee recalls, "and then I listened to that somewhat religiously for a few years, along with a handful of records that I just liked a lot — they were usually solo singer-songwriter, early Bob Dylan, Hank Williams and stuff, so I put Townes right in there with them. And it was kind of nice to know about him; this was pre-Internet, and it was like a little secret."
Wanting to get even closer to the music at its source, Lee decamped to Austin, Texas, for a few years. Lee had never been to Austin before, and he didn't know anyone there, but he immersed himself in all things Townes Van Zandt. "I ended up trying to follow a little bit in Townes's footsteps: drinking too much and writing sad songs and things like that," Lee recalls. "I ended up trying to write — I have about 100 songs that I recorded down in Austin that no one will ever hear — but I definitely was locked into his zone for a long time."
Believing he had taken in all that Austin had to offer, Lee was planning to leave the city, and then he met Van Zandt's son, J.T. "I don't want to speak for J.T. but I think he related to me," Lee says. "I lost my dad when I was really young to similar circumstances. J.T. kind of steered me away from the whole idea that it was a cool thing to do, to suffer like that. That that was one way to do it, but also not my way to do it."
J.T. Van Zandt became something of a mentor to Frankie Lee, teaching Lee about Townes's playing style while also encouraging Lee to find his own voice. "You can't go and move to Colorado or drink a bunch of alcohol or live in Texas, and I needed to figure that out," Lee says. "I thought you could put on the hat and the boots and the work shirt and go become this character — you're trying to figure out how to become these guys, how to write their songs, how to get inside their head."
More constructively, J.T. brought what Lee describes as "a tradesman's approach" to the craft of songwriting, deeply studying the elder Van Zandt's writing style. "I guess the biggest thing I took from Townes was the economy of words," Lee says. "Every word in his songs seemed to have a place. Dylan can get 13 verses in and you don't really know what he's talking about, but it just sounds really good and kind of paints pictures. And Hank is straight to the point … But Townes had that really cool balance. It was just very economical, almost like Robert Frost poetry, where you could pick it up and go really deep really quick, and then it drops you off at the end of the street and it's a little bit darker and there's a little bit more going on than when you first sat down."
Besides Live at the Old Quarter, another recording that fascinates Lee is a bootleg that was recorded at the University of Minnesota's Coffman Union on Nov. 9, 1973. It occasionally surfaces under the name Townes Van Zandt: Whole Coffeehouse. "There were probably only about 50 people in the house that night," Lee describes. "At the time, they were probably taking a chance in booking him. I don't know much more about it, other than the songs that he sang that night were pretty much his set that he played for about 10 years."
"If you listen to that and then the Old Quarter stuff, it's almost the same record," Lee continues. "It's just crazy to think that that guy was just blowing through town playing to 50 people — for five bucks, probably. He probably stayed on somebody's floor! And he had 'Pancho and Lefty' in his back pocket."
Around the same time, Froker was in the early years of what would become a 40-year journalism career in Chicago. Froker's high-school friend Van Zandt, meanwhile, would come to Chicago to play shows there, including at the storied venue The Earl of Old Town, where other top songwriters like John Prine and Steve Goodman got their starts. "I was stunned at how much Townes's guitar-playing had developed," Froker recalls of those early Chicago shows. "He was kind of serious and quiet between numbers when I was playing with him, and I was surprised to see how talkative he was, telling jokes and stuff as he tuned the guitar. It was just amazing how he had come along and how clearly dedicated he was to what he was doing musically."
Van Zandt and Froker remained in touch for the rest of Van Zandt's life. Froker followed Van Zandt's career and attended Van Zandt's gigs whenever Van Zandt was in Chicago. "I became, in a way, one of his biggest fans," Froker says. "Independently of our friendship, I became really, really a Townes Van Zandt fan. And I think that would have happened even if I had just seen him at a club for the first time. Our musical collaboration at school was tenuous and short, but we were friends outside of that."
While much has been said of Van Zandt's musical influences, Froker picks up what he thinks is a connection to a class he and Van Zandt had had at Shattuck. "There was a really, really good English class senior year, it surveyed a lot of literature," Froker says. "I swear — there's a song called 'Silver Ships of Andilar,' and I hear Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' in there."
Over the course of Van Zandt's career, Froker noticed something else. "This is kind of interesting and maybe kind of illuminates his self-destructive tendencies," Froker says, "but as he got less capable because of alcohol and drugs and so on, the places he'd play would get progressively seedier. He had a reputation for not even showing up or being pretty wasted if he did, although he could perform if he wasn't too far gone."
On Jan. 16, 1988, Van Zandt visited Minnesota to play on Good Evening, a program created during A Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor's hiatus in the late 1980s. The program was broadcast from and recorded at the World Theatre (now the Fitzgerald Theater) in St. Paul, and it also featured Guy Clark, Pat Donohue and local storyteller Kevin Kling. According to program notes from the MPR archives, host Noah Adams introduced Van Zandt by saying, "He was born in Fort Worth, then went to Midland, Texas; Billings, Montana; Boulder, Colorado; Chicago; Minnesota; back to Colorado, then Houston, and then he says he started traveling" before Van Zandt performed his song, "If I Needed You."
In April 1996, Clark and Van Zandt shared a double-bill at the Fine Line in Minneapolis. Among the audience that night was Mark Stockert, a Minneapolis-based music producer and the owner of Underwood Recording studio. Stockert noticed the audience at the Fine Line that night seemed to consist not of music fans per se, but rather songwriters and those interested in the craft of songwriting; for example, Stockert remembers seeing Gary Louris of the Jayhawks there, as well as Eric Luoma and Jimmy Peterson of the band Bellwether.
But it's what happened after Van Zandt's set that sticks with Stockert the most. Stockert was standing at the bar at the Fine Line, drinking a beer; he became aware of someone standing next to him, soon realizing it was Van Zandt. "I don't like that hero syndrome," Stockert says, "so I was like, 'Don't say a word,' and I didn't say anything to him."
Then Van Zandt gestured to follow him. At first, Stockert didn't imagine Van Zandt was motioning to him. "I actually looked behind me because I thought he was talking to somebody behind me!" Stockert laughs.
But Van Zandt made clear he was inviting Stockert to join him in an annex room at the back of the club. "We sat there at a booth for a few hours," Stockert recalls. "We shared lots of stories."
The Fine Line's servers brought drinks to the table; Stockert remembers Van Zandt was drinking vodka with a squeeze of lime. At one point, Stockert noticed that Van Zandt's hand was shaking. "I asked, 'How do you get up there and play guitar like that?' He was like, 'I don't know, man. When I get on stage, something takes over, and it just happens.' He was actually like, 'It's a very spiritual thing for me, it just takes over my body and I don't even know what's happening.'"
Although Stockert makes clear that he and Van Zandt "didn't become best friends that night," the two men bonded over stories and music. Stockert says they even passed a guitar back and forth for a while — raising the question: when Townes Van Zandt hands you a guitar, what do you play? "You freak out!" Stockert laughs. "You go, 'Nothing that I can play is worth you hearing.' But we played a bunch, actually. It's pretty crazy, man."
The next part of the story is the most profound for Stockert; he tells it respectfully, treating it with the care one would treat any treasured memento. "We were walking out of the Fine Line, and he grabs my hand — and this is what has always freaked me out — he's like, 'I'll see you again.' And then he died [less than a year later].
"When somebody like that tells you that they'll see you again and they die not long after that … because he had this kind of, I guess, spiritual connection to the world, it makes it really hard. I'll see you again."
Froker was at his job at the Chicago Tribune when news came over the wire that Van Zandt had died. "I was really dumbstruck by it," Froker recalls, "although you know, no one was surprised. … Townes resisted all efforts to tell him he was on this path to alcohol-fueled demise, and he just didn't' pay attention."
A week prior to the news, Froker had received a phone call from Van Zandt. "I was apparently one of the dozens of people who got phone calls from him the week before he died," Froker says. "I came back from Christmas vacation and there was a message on my voicemail, and Townes said to the effect that something was going to happen — I assumed it was musically — and I 'shouldn't believe what I hear.' Which I thought was something about his career that wasn't going well. He died a week later; I never had the chance to ask him what he meant, so it's a mystery."
Mysterious as Van Zandt the person was, his music remains. "I think people like that, their time isn't long, but they put down everything — it's all there in those songs," Frankie Lee says. "Townes's songs just kind of speak for themselves … he just left his legacy with songs."
Although Van Zandt himself did not enjoy what is commonly considered commercial success, his place among the pantheon of American songwriters is widely accepted.
"I was always just amazed that this guy — this guy that I had played bongos with, for chrissakes — had become this legend," Froker says. "I was just delighted! Just astounded at what he became. Townes really became — I keep not wanting to say 'a star' — but a critical piece of American music."
"Townes and Gram [Parsons], they're the best ever," Stockert says. "They never got as much publicity as all the big rock stars, but they're better than them all."
"There were a lot more relatable guys — the Guy Clarks of the world, " Lee observes, "but I think Townes just gave himself to it and channeled that, and it might have been his undoing in the end because I don't really know much else about him, other than his music, and to me, I got as close to him without knowing him as I possibly could.
"Townes is on the Mount Rushmore of songwriters to me," Lee says. "There's nobody better."
Resources
Shattuck-St. Mary's School, Faribault, Minn.
Frankie Lee - official site
University of Minnesota, Coffman Memorial Union
List of Townes Van Zandt concert appearances (fan site)