Texas hasn’t gotten its due as a major piece in the complex puzzle of American art. We’re here to rectify that. Every three weeks, H. Drew Blackburn will conduct a thoroughly scientific analysis of the 254 integral (one for every county) books, movies, tv shows, albums, podcasts, songs, and magazine articles — you name it — that best exemplify the Texas spirit. These texts, products of immense talent, dig into the marrow of our being. When it’s all said and done and we’ve built The Texas Voyager collection, we’ll (figuratively) head to the Johnson Space Center in Houston and shoot it beyond the atmosphere, into the cosmos. A wise person once posed the question: “What if the aliens are hot?” Hold onto that hope — this is our chance to impress ‘em.
Who gets to be a tortured artist? And why are Americans obsessed with them?
The life and work of Townes Van Zandt — one of Texas’ most revered tragic men of artistic brilliance — begs the questions. At least to Margaret Brown, the director of the 2004 documentary on the country icon, “Be Here to Love Me,” and a forthcoming docuseries about Austin’s yogurt shop murders.
“I was just curious about this myth of the white male artist being a genius. Maybe just male artists being a genius,” Brown told The Barbed Wire. “People don’t talk about women in the same way. I came at it partly out of a curiosity about what makes that true? And is it true?”
In the coming year, Oscilloscope Films will re-release “Be Here to Love Me,” and Brown will interview new subjects. “We want to get some artists to do the commentary with us, and it’ll be interesting to see who pops up,” she said.
The questions at the center of the documentary seem as prescient as they were two decades ago, perhaps aided by 2025 Oscar-contender “A Complete Unknown” and Timothee Chalamet’s Bob Dylan, a fellow tortured artist and fan of Van Zandt. Or, better yet, Monica Barbaro’s Joan Baez, overshadowed by Dylan’s rebel rocker ego.
Challenging the contemporary notions of who owns the soul of country music and whether or not self-destruction is required for country star status is essential to uncovering its roots. It does not belong to bro-country, a genre that siphons everything good from rock n’ roll, pop, and hip-hop and spits out a soulless interpretation. In its purest form, country and western music is for the real misfits, the people at the margins. It was born out of the blues and folk music, where the pain of working-class men and women was woven into gold. It’s for people like Van Zandt, who, as Texas Monthly said, was born into comfort but preferred the company of the down-and-out.
The songwriter, born in 1944 in Fort Worth, spent most of his career toiling in obscurity until Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson covered his song “Pancho and Lefty” in 1983. Still, throughout his life, he didn’t sell many records or make a lot of money.
As mentioned in Brown’s documentary, he lived a nomadic lifestyle, rarely tethered to just one place for too long, and struggled with alcoholism, drug addiction, and mental health.
Van Zandt exemplifies the ways male artists, especially musicians, are valorized and romanticized for their personal struggles. Sure, there’s Sylvia Plath and Amy Winehouse, but we’re far more likely to see a woman’s demons or bad behavior as a nuisance than as fuel for their creativity. That’s because the ways we discuss artistic genius are deeply gendered.
By contrast, the idea of a tortured genius is fundamental to Van Zandt lore, as if his pain was not just part of the art, but elemental. Maybe even intentional.
Just like Brown, I was in college the first time I recall listening to Townes Van Zandt and particularly, “Waitin’ Around to Die.” A few things struck me immediately. First: this ballad, written in 1968 in a closet in Houston while his wife sat in the other room, has to be one of the earliest songs to mention codeine, just a few years after Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Cod’ine” in 1964. Second: this is some dark and haunting stuff, hypnotic and addictive.
“I remember just wanting to hear it over and over. Like, fall into the song. Embody the song,” Brown said. “It was like a trance song. You know how there’s some songs you play over and over? It was like that for me.”
Brown points out something revealing about the record — a bleak tale of resignation, abuse, addiction, and incarceration. “It’s kind of a song for a young person. I still love this song, but it doesn’t resonate with me in the same way,” she said. “He wrote that before sort of anything happened to him. It’s beautiful, one of his best. But it’s interesting that it was written before his life went on a crazy roller coaster.” In effect, “Waitin’ Around to Die” reads less as a reflection of hard living and more as a premonition or a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In the film, Van Zandt characterizes his music as not sad, but hopeless. Was Van Zandt knowingly playing into the idea of the tortured male genius? Brown seems to think so.
“He was a self-mythologizer. At the same time, I think that he was a raconteur. He knew that’s part of his mythos, but I also think the ring of the mythos at that time was small,” she said. “He was playing to nine people in a club some nights, but it only gathered steam as he died.”
Since Van Zandt’s death due to cardiac arrhythmia in 1997 after years of substance abuse, his legend has ballooned. He’s your favorite singer-songwriter’s favorite singer-songwriter — Dylan, Lucinda Williams, and Steve Earle have revered his pen. He’s adored by critics, and his songs are frequently covered by artists looking to put melancholy on display.
“Every year, more people seem to know about him,” Brown says. “He just keeps growing, somehow.”
Van Zandt, with his haunted songs and tragic arc, seemed to not only embody the myth of the tortured male genius but also invite it. Brown said her father was a country songwriter, and she sees how much they’re the antithesis of one another. “He stayed in Alabama for my mom, for family. Townes took the other path. He gave it all up—his family, his health—and dove into the abyss. I wondered: was that a choice? Was it addiction? Is that what it takes?”
Who’s to say what actually makes anyone great, but I do know we love tragedy, gazing down at the abyss, in awe.
