Townes

Townes Van Zandt
12.5" x 8", oil on wood, 2012

To continue the thread (from last week) on familiar music a little note now on the Texan songwriter Townes Van Zandt. I've seen him perform a number of times and met him once on one of these occasions. We had a few (more) drinks after a concert in Columbus in the Fall of 1996. There were maybe five other people in the room while he talked a bit about some songs and strummed his guitar. He would never remember me as he was much more interested in the female I was with than with me reminiscing about a concert of his together with Guy Clark I saw in the Netherlands a few years earlier. It's a moot point anyway, Mr. Van Zandt died a few months later. The inclusion in the Top 100 of the song Waitin' Around to Die by Townes Van Zandt raises the numbers of repeats from last year to a meager five. A cover of the same song by the Be Good Tanyas is another one of these five. Waitin' Around to Die is also only one of five songs that feature in the list of 500 songs counted over 29 years as well. At number 160 it is Townes' second best in the all time greatest songs list. His song Nothin' resides at #10. Needless to say that I made quite a few paintings of him over the years. All together they could fill a whole wall. I probably could paint his portrait without looking at a photograph by now. Next time he's in I'll try to do just that, promise.