knew music, although I could only do the treble…. That was for the first five or six songs.”
The songs came quickly. “‘Waitin’ Around to Die’ had to be within the first two or three songs, maybe the second or third,”
Fran recalls. “It wasn’t the first one I heard. He might have written it first, but I think he didn’t sing it for a while, he kind of just held it.… ‘Turnstiled, Junkpiled’ was another early one.”
Fran was overjoyed by this creative outpouring, but she was taken aback by “Waitin’ Around to Die.” She asked Townes where such a song had come from. “He just said he didn’t know,” she says. “He would often just wake up in the middle of the night and write, and sometimes he described it like it would just tumble out of his brain and down his fingers.”
“My first serious song was ‘Waitin’ Around to Die,’” Townes said in 1977, a statement he repeated many times when performing the song. “I talked to this old man for a while,” he continued, “and he kinda put out these vibrations. I was sitting at Waitin’ for the Day
65
the bar of the Jester Lounge one afternoon drinking beer, thinking about him, and just wrote it down.”15
“Waitin’ Around to Die” is indeed a serious song for a young man with Townes’ early background to have written, but unlike many “serious” songs that young folk singers come up with, it bears the weight of its seriousness almost effortlessly. It takes its subject, a young man, through a life of misfortune, from a childhood marked by his father’s beating of his mother and the mother’s desertion, to an adolescence of deceit and abandon-ment at the hands of a woman, to imprisonment for robbing a man, always with the almost offhand refrain, “it’s easier than just waiting around to die.” Finally, after spending two years in prison, the young man is resigned to a life of destitution with his new “friend,” codeine, a drug of poverty and desperation, and he ends, “together we’re gonna wait around and die.”
This is a bleak vision indeed, but it is handled so deftly that there is no sense of it being maudlin. The simple three-chord progression in a minor key perfectly reflects the direct simplicity of the storytelling, Van Zandt’s delivery is entirely straightforward and unaffected, and the poetic sensibility shows an already well-honed maturity—the use of the place names in each verse: Tennessee, Tuscaloosa, Muskogee; the offhand vernacular: “she cleaned me out and hit it on the sly”; “we robbed a man and brother did we fly”; and the fine-tuned balance of the verses—so that all of these things add up to a stunning personal vision of something much deeper than mere folk music. “Waitin’ Around to Die” is the blues: starkly personal and universal at the same time. It’s the kind of song that instantly differentiated Townes Van Zandt from his contemporaries, and that often left audiences stunned, as Fran had been.
“He had lots of fun ones, too,” Fran says of those earliest songs. She recalls his various talking blues numbers as “just so comedic; and he always sang that New Orleans song for me. It just drove me crazy because I thought his music was so much better. Every time he sang it I would think, ‘oh, don’t sing that again.’ It was the ‘Three Shrimp’ song: ‘I saw three shrimp in 66
A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt the water … ’. That was from an Elvis Presley movie, Girls, Girls, Girls . If he played ‘Waitin’ Around to Die’ he would always play
‘The Shrimp Song’ afterwards.”
This juxtaposition of serious material and more light-hearted songs and banter was from the very beginning a hallmark of Van Zandt’s performances that lasted throughout his career. Indeed, the balance between dark and light, exalted and ordinary, sacred and profane, was from the beginning central to Townes’
writing as well as his performance.
A recording of one
The songs came quickly. “‘Waitin’ Around to Die’ had to be within the first two or three songs, maybe the second or third,”
Fran recalls. “It wasn’t the first one I heard. He might have written it first, but I think he didn’t sing it for a while, he kind of just held it.… ‘Turnstiled, Junkpiled’ was another early one.”
Fran was overjoyed by this creative outpouring, but she was taken aback by “Waitin’ Around to Die.” She asked Townes where such a song had come from. “He just said he didn’t know,” she says. “He would often just wake up in the middle of the night and write, and sometimes he described it like it would just tumble out of his brain and down his fingers.”
“My first serious song was ‘Waitin’ Around to Die,’” Townes said in 1977, a statement he repeated many times when performing the song. “I talked to this old man for a while,” he continued, “and he kinda put out these vibrations. I was sitting at Waitin’ for the Day
65
the bar of the Jester Lounge one afternoon drinking beer, thinking about him, and just wrote it down.”15
“Waitin’ Around to Die” is indeed a serious song for a young man with Townes’ early background to have written, but unlike many “serious” songs that young folk singers come up with, it bears the weight of its seriousness almost effortlessly. It takes its subject, a young man, through a life of misfortune, from a childhood marked by his father’s beating of his mother and the mother’s desertion, to an adolescence of deceit and abandon-ment at the hands of a woman, to imprisonment for robbing a man, always with the almost offhand refrain, “it’s easier than just waiting around to die.” Finally, after spending two years in prison, the young man is resigned to a life of destitution with his new “friend,” codeine, a drug of poverty and desperation, and he ends, “together we’re gonna wait around and die.”
This is a bleak vision indeed, but it is handled so deftly that there is no sense of it being maudlin. The simple three-chord progression in a minor key perfectly reflects the direct simplicity of the storytelling, Van Zandt’s delivery is entirely straightforward and unaffected, and the poetic sensibility shows an already well-honed maturity—the use of the place names in each verse: Tennessee, Tuscaloosa, Muskogee; the offhand vernacular: “she cleaned me out and hit it on the sly”; “we robbed a man and brother did we fly”; and the fine-tuned balance of the verses—so that all of these things add up to a stunning personal vision of something much deeper than mere folk music. “Waitin’ Around to Die” is the blues: starkly personal and universal at the same time. It’s the kind of song that instantly differentiated Townes Van Zandt from his contemporaries, and that often left audiences stunned, as Fran had been.
“He had lots of fun ones, too,” Fran says of those earliest songs. She recalls his various talking blues numbers as “just so comedic; and he always sang that New Orleans song for me. It just drove me crazy because I thought his music was so much better. Every time he sang it I would think, ‘oh, don’t sing that again.’ It was the ‘Three Shrimp’ song: ‘I saw three shrimp in 66
A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt the water … ’. That was from an Elvis Presley movie, Girls, Girls, Girls . If he played ‘Waitin’ Around to Die’ he would always play
‘The Shrimp Song’ afterwards.”
This juxtaposition of serious material and more light-hearted songs and banter was from the very beginning a hallmark of Van Zandt’s performances that lasted throughout his career. Indeed, the balance between dark and light, exalted and ordinary, sacred and profane, was from the beginning central to Townes’
writing as well as his performance.
A recording of one
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