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lemonade kid
Old Love
USA
9873 Posts |
 Posted - 28/02/2015 : 16:12:36
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SUNSHINE BOY
(Sunshine Sessions & Demos 1972-1972)
His music is revealed slowly, with every listen new details capture our attention , which contrasts with the first impression of apparent "simplicity" in his melodies
-thelakeband.blogspot.com
Townes rocking the blues...Who Do You Love
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cy5gYsw_4Qc
The embodiment of the tragic troubadour, Townes Van Zandt's prolific and sublime output reached what some would deem its apex with the release of two 1972 albums: High, Low and in Between and The Late Great Townes Van Zandt. Van Zandt's lonesome folk-blues songs were at their most passionate, desperate, and visceral at this point, and his painful path continued to escalate in difficulty as his masterworks were less than commercial successes and his heroin habit drained his spirit heavily. As time went on, the strength of his writing, especially in this prolific period, would elevate Van Zandt to levels of almost mythical American legend status, and his songs would be covered by bigger names in country and folk. Sunshine Boy collects rough studio mixes, alternate takes, and demo recordings from this golden 1971-1972 period, all previously unreleased.
The 28 tracks here offer an especially intimate window on the artist, with spare demos and stripped-down studio mixes spotlighting Van Zandt's weathered vocals and straightforward, often heartbreaking storytelling lyrics. The studio half of the collection features languid blues covers ("Who Do You Love"), bluegrass romps ("Blue Ridge Mountains"), and country-fried western rockers ("Two Hands," "Mr. Mudd & Mr. Gold"). An early alternate mix of Van Zandt's biggest single, "Pancho & Lefty," is heard here without its mariachi horns or string arrangements. Without these elements to date it, the crushingly sad ballad takes on a timeless feel, more direct than any era of singer/songwriter sounds it may have been created in. The 12 off-hand demos included here are what truly offer an intimate portrait of the singer in his prime. Van Zandt sounds especially candid, accompanied mostly by his own guitar and singing softly to himself between takes. Tracks like "Heavenly Houseboat Blues," the traditional "Old Paint," and a very laid-back take on the Stones' "Dead Flowers," are all as disarming as they are enjoyable.
The loose approach of these demos doesn't take away at all from their power. The space and simplicity just allow more room for Van Zandt's unique character to come through. Though all of the songs on Sunshine Boy found their way to official albums in more fleshed-out versions, these uncluttered takes offer a beautifully bare look at a young artist whose combination of astonishing gifts and troubled life would eventually make him an American folk hero.
Sunshine Boy...with a bit o' wah wah
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ltr3hJBR7Og&spfreload=10
Dead Flowers...Townes covered this so well, many times, this cover notwithstanding..with bit more ROCK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JO0LHlLC7Q&spfreload=10
And this brilliant take of his amazing Poncho & Lefty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SjwO17gsqU&spfreload=10
Many more here...enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/results?
search_query=Townes+van+zandt+sunshine&spfreload=10
Disc: 1
1. T For Texas
2. Who Do You Love
3. Sunshine Boy
4. Where I Lead Me
5. Blue Ridge Mountains
6. No Deal
7. Pancho & Lefty (Alternate 1972 Mix Without Strings And Horns)
8. To Live Is To Fly
9. You Are Not Needed Now
10. Don t Take It Too Bad
11. Sad Cinderella
12. Mr. Mudd & Mr. Gold
13. White Freight Liner Blues
14. Two Hands
15. Lungs
16. Dead Flowers
Disc: 2
1. Heavenly Houseboat Blues
2. Diamond Heel Blues
3. To Live Is To Fly
4. Tower Song
5. You Are Not Needed Now
6. Mr. Mudd & Mr. Gold
7. Highway Kind
8. Greensboro Woman
9. When He Offers His Hand
10. Dead Flowers
11. Old Paint
12. Standin
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"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music".
-Aldous Huxley
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Edited by - lemonade kid on 28/02/2015 19:11:01 |
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lemonade kid
Old Love
USA
9873 Posts |
Posted - 28/02/2015 : 16:14:28
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The 10 Best Townes Van Zandt Songs
©Timothy Bracy And Elizabeth Bracy / July 18, 2013--www.stereogum.com
Townes Van Zandt, the elegant Texas troubadour who authored some of the finest songs ever written over the course of his 52 troubled years, was always quick to make it known that he was very much in on the cruel joke of his destiny. During a checkered, if frequently brilliant, recording career Ñ often derailed by label concerns, production difficulties and TownesÕ own recalcitrance Ñ he produced a handful of outstanding albums possessing gallows humor titles like The Late Great Townes Van Zandt. Johnny Cash once famously bragged in song about shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die. Townes seemed committed to a similar experiment on his own physical being, drinking with such masochistic abandon and candid reportage that he made himself a veritable art project of personal desiccation Ñ he would carefully record the minutes as all of us watched him die a Kafkan death. As inarguably exceptional as the body of work that Van Zandt left behind, it can feel ferociously dedicated to the depths of human despair, to the point of inaccessibility. Even a devoted miserablist like Lou Reed will occasionally allow that, ÒAnyone who ever had a heart/ wouldnÕt turn around and break it.Ó Townes Van Zandt was the exception to the rule: He had a heart and smashed it into a million wretched slivers.
It is interesting to consider TownesÕ trajectory as compared with his rough contemporary Gram Parsons Ñ similarly a Southern child of privilege, gifted with extraordinary ability and cursed with a taste for excess. Both Parsons and Van Zandt shared a love for the great pioneers of early country and Õ50s honky-tonk, while never fitting in with the more conservative tendencies of Nashville. Both rendered remarkable takes on the tradition, which were bound to be ignored by a plurality of rock and country audiences alike. But in other ways they were as different as they were similar. ParsonsÕ work was sweeping and ebullient, panoramic in its capacity to convey effervescent joy, crushing tragedy and heart-rending nostalgia. By comparison, to borrow a phrase, Van ZandtÕs songs ran the emotional gamut from A to B. Even at its most irreverent, his vision was one of a capriciously nasty existence characterized by endless compromise and ceaseless yearning Ñ the Albert Camus to ParsonsÕ Marcel Proust. That is not to value the work of one titan over the other, but rather to illustrate the iron-skinned dissolution that rendered Van ZandtÕs work so difficult and indispensable.
That phrase Ñ ÒNow you wear your skin like ironÓ Ñ figures in Van ZandtÕs most famous song and only bona fide chart success ÒPancho And Lefty,Ó first released in 1972 and only a hit after a spit polished version rendered by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard bulled its way to the top of the Country charts eleven years later. Ostensibly an Old West yarn concerning two desert bandits with a brotherly bond fractured by betrayal, it is in the spirit of Robert AltmanÕs great McCabe And Mrs. Miller Ñ a demolition of frontier nostalgia that recasts the mythos of Western movie heroism as feckless, farcical and endlessly futile. As Lefty turns on his friend, leading to PanchoÕs demise and the still worse, guilt stricken living death of Lefty, Van Zandt canÕt help but twist the knife one turn further: ÒAll the Federales say/ they could have had them any day.Ó These heroic jokers werenÕt even all that good as outlaws.
ÒPancho And LeftyÓ was, of course, also a thinly veiled metaphor for the life Van Zandt had chosen as a traveling musician Ñ all the seeming romance and nobility gradually made null and senseless by dint of deprivation and drink, industry myopia and increasing audience indifference. As his career sputtered, Van ZandtÕs legend amongst fellow songwriters grew exponentially Ñ his close rapport with the great Guy Clark and mentorship of Steve Earle was part of the early story -but soon his talents were emphatically acknowledged by the heaviest of heavyweights Ñ Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and others. All of that and two bucks would have gotten him bus fare. Being an obscure figure admired by those far more influential and famous must have been a weird purgatory. Townes treated it as such.
In the final analysis we are left with a difficult figure Ñ a writer of transcendent beauty and skill who leaves us both enriched and depleted in complicated ways. To spend time with the music of Townes Van Zandt is to engage with our darkest suspicions about our own time on this earth, with the faintest hint of silver lining. Unfailingly, he told the truth of his life. That was okay enough, but the scary part is wondering: was he telling the real truth of our lives as well?
Anyway, hereÕs 10 of his best tunes.
10. ÒWaitinÕ Around To DieÓ (from For The Sake Of The Song, 1968)
The carefully finger picked, minor key lament ÒWaitinÕ ÔRound To DieÓ is a typically efficient summation of TownesÕ jet black worldview, replete with tales of romantic catastrophe, chemical excess, and perhaps most tellingly an unsparing recollection of domestic abuse more hurtfully candid then any this side of In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. There is no special drama or change in his voice while he relays the details: ÒOne time, friends I had a Ma/ even had a Pa/ He beat her with a belt once cause she cried.Ó Van Zandt sings these words like a man reading the 6 oÕclock news. In under three minutes of this harsh and strangely unsentimental masterpiece we come to understand why it is that the artist perceives his work as little more then a distraction from his inevitable demise.
9. ÒNo DealÓ (from High, Low And In Between, 1972)
The jocular folk ramble of ÒNo DealÓ finds Townes at his most light hearted, enumerating his reluctance to follow the supposed good intentions of medical doctors, auto salesmen and a would-be teenaged lover. Cheerfully debased and filled with great punchlines, it is the sort of rollicking shaggy dog tale that reminds us of the acid wit that was the mitigating flipside to Van ZandtÕs crushing misery. When in the last verse he promises to choose hell over heaven, if there might be more whiskey in the former, it is an act of comedic, spiritual subversion worthy of our most treasured heretics. No deathbed confessions for Townes.
8. ÒKathleenÓ (from Our Mother The Mounain, 1969)
The tense emotional apocalypse that is ÒKathleenÓ begins with the typically Townes-ian sentiment: ÒItÕs plain to see the sun wonÕt shine today/ But I ainÕt in the mood for sun anyway,Ó and circumstances only darken further from there. As the narrator wrestles with encroaching insanity, waves of pain and panic, and a seemingly malevolent natural world of roaring oceans, prophetic swallows and a menacing firmament, the only apparent respite is death or the titular Kathleen. As the song progresses, so too does the suspicion that these things are one in the same. This is Townes at his most harrowing Ñ a beautifully and genuinely frightening window into a fractious, tortured psyche.
7. ÒYou Are Not Needed NowÓ (from High, Low And In Between, 1972)
Sounding for all the world like a lost outtake from The Band, the gospel-tinged, piano-driven ÒYou Are Not Needed NowÓ belies its depressing title with a message of hope. ÒLay down your head awhile, you are not needed now,Ó Townes beautifully and effortlessly soothes Ð itÕs not your time to work, itÕs not your time to suffer, itÕs not your time to die. It is the rare Townes song that could be genuinely interpreted as optimistic Ð and itÕs a cautiously optimistic beauty.
6. ÒSnake Mountain BluesÓ (from Our Mother The Mounain, 1969)
Just when you thought that Mick Jagger couldnÕt be any more transgressive with ÒSome Girls,Ó here comes Townes, almost ten years earlier with sentiments like ÒLove of a blackskin woman, she wonÕt do you no wrong/ Yellow headed woman brings nothing but pain.Ó But while Mick and the StonesÕ problems seem to start and end with their womenÕs material and É other appetites, TownesÕ beguiling, dobro-assisted Tex-Mex shuffle seems steeped in more spiritual and existential concerns.
5. ÒNothin'Ó (from Delta Momma Blues, 1971)
Nasty, brutish and short, the spare, finger-picked, cruel-to-be-cruel kiss off ÒNothin'Ó is as immediate and powerful as a cannonball to the chest. What it lacks in charity it makes up for in its brevity, and it is devastating from its opening: ÒHey mama, when you leave, DonÕt leave a thing behind/ I donÕt want nothin'Ó to its final sentiments ÒSorrow and solitude, these are the precious things/ And the only words that are worth remembering.Ó
4. ÒPoncho & LeftyÓ (from High, Low And In Between, 1972)
Essentially the demolishing 3:40 antidote to every clichŽd ÒIÕm a cowboy/bad ass singer on the roadÓ song ever written, this crushing tale of two outlaw friends driven apart through betrayal and deprivation is made all the more sad for the fecklessness with which the characters are portrayed. Over one of his loveliest ever melodies, Townes introduces us the two would-be mythic title characters Ñ road warriors who live outside the law to maintain their freedom. A few well constructed verses later, Pancho is dead, Lefty is drinking himself to death in a Cleveland flop house, and the authorities, who simply paid one to turn on the other, were never all that concerned with them in the first place. Rarely has a song spelled out the true facts of AmericaÕs Old West mythology so plainly Ñ itÕs all such bull****.
3. ÒNo Place To FallÓ (from FlyinÕ Shoes, 1978)
The desperate lament ÒNo Place To FallÓ appears at first the libidinous appeal of a desperate man who is quick to admit that he ÒAinÕt much of a lover,Ó and is furthermore Òhere then IÕm gone/ and IÕm forever blue.Ó Or that is to say, not exactly a catch on Match.com. And yet as this gorgeous Neil Young-styled quasi waltz evolves, what is conveyed most is the sense of a deeply damaged soul in need of refuge Ñ any sort of refuge Ñ intellectual, spiritual, physical, or just a ****ing place to crash.
2. ÒFor The Sake Of The SongÓ (from For The Sake Of The Song, 1968)
The fetchingly lovely ÒFor the Sake of The SongÓ originally appeared on Van ZandtÕs debut album of the same name and was later recut for his self-titled third record. It is a thoughtful meditation on the nature of creativity, and perhaps a plea to the muse for a peace of mind that he would sadly never be afforded. ÒWhy does she sing her sad songs for me?Ó the first line goes, the narrator seeming resigned to his place as a both receptacle for and manufacturer of vast oceans of melancholy. As the unhurried five minutes and twenty two seconds unfold, Van Zandt sings of shame and bondage, sorrow and pride, and most of all a welter of pain both unwanted and undeserved. The best he can figure by way of consolation is that it is all for the sake of the song. And so it would go for the remainder of his life and career.
1. ÒTo Live Is To FlyÓ (from High, Low And In Between, 1972)
Van Zandt was known to his peers to possess a kind of effortless gift for songwriting Ñ one which seemed to flow freely through him despite his persistent attentions to self-immolation. ÒTo Live Is To FlyÓ is perhaps the greatest example of that effortlessness, a swift, breezy and beautifully bridgeless three minutes that floats by with seemingly impeccable grace and ease. It is also a song of wonderful philosophical and spiritual clarity Ñ an instance of near Zen calm amidst the feverish storm of the singerÕs life. Lyrics like ÒEverything is not enough/ and nothingÕs too much to bearÓ come across here less as bitter and yearning, and rather like a sympathetic acknowledgment of our collective human predicament. In the end, TowneÕs advises ÒIt donÕt pay to think too much on things you leave behind.Ó He was right of course- sage advice only too difficult for him, and all of us, to follow.
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"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music".
-Aldous Huxley |
Edited by - lemonade kid on 28/02/2015 16:16:04 |
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TOWNES-Sunshine Boy demos 71-72 & 10 BEST
