“The narrative is smoothly written, a stark contrast to the peaks of outlandish behavior and the depths of despair the story chronicles.”<\/p>\n

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My Years with Townes Van Zandt: Music, Genius and Rage<\/em> is an intricately woven story of contradictions and paradox, a whirlwind sometimes beautiful, mostly dreadful; often illogical, but sadly predictable. The time Harold Eggers describes sharing with Townes Van Zandt defies mortal reason, a liability the writers surely anticipated because they felt it necessary to inoculate readers with a foreword, an introduction, and a prologue before sending them into the house of mirrors, then an afterword chaser like Van Zandt\u2019s bedtime vodka to settle them back down and chase off the conjured demons. And they\u2019re right: there\u2019s much that must be explained, declaimed, excused and most importantly, understood. \u201cHang on,\u201d the troubled duo warns us time and again, \u201cIt\u2019s gonna get worse.\u201d <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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For the reader, the narrative is smoothly written, a stark contrast to the peaks of outlandish behavior and the depths of despair the story chronicles. From the writing standpoint, that must stem from Eggers\u2019s calm, easy to read story-telling, and McCullough\u2019s even hand in the engine room crafting graceful prose no matter what ragged extremes play out on the page. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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As road manager and artist, Eggers and Van Zandt were matched flipsides of a black penny: Eggers was a mirror for Van Zandt, an image overlaid with the possibility of stability and forbearance in the rowdy musician\u2019s unrelenting gale of rage, tumult, and torment laced with unlikely fits of empathy, startlingly lucid lyricism, and wicked gallows humor. For Eggers, Van Zandt reflected his own lived horror of war and the specter of swift death and personified the inner demons Egger feared most in himself. Yet at the same time, Van Zandt represented the musical and poetic genius Egger admired most. In Eggers\u2019s quiet resolve, Van Zandt saw the wrath of a twisted past revealed\u2014his own a casualty of electroshock therapy\u2014plus a military excursion to the edge of combat death that was denied Van Zandt but from which Eggers had tenuously escaped — perhaps suggesting that he might, too. Heap on a pile of drug abuse by the pair of them and Van Zandt\u2019s epic alcoholic extremism, heroin addiction, and mental illness (bipolar disease, Eggers warns us), and it\u2019s a wonder the story lasts more than a couple chapters, much less a few decades.  <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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But endure it does. The musician\u2019s road is twisted, rutted, bumpy, and circuitous coast-to-coast and abroad. Tragic waypoints include emergency rooms, jails, smoky bars, flophouse hotels, all-night diners, back alleys and gutters. Perhaps most bizarre was the rolling tour of crying spawned by shared heroin, confession, sobbing remorse, and baleful tears from a stoned carload of musicians between gigs. With every road mile, Van Zandt embraced the ascetic life and courted death; Eggers mopped up, dried Van Zandt out, both literally and figuratively, and struggled to wake up himself \u201cun-stabbed and un-strangled.\u201d Along the way, a veritable who\u2019s who of country music passes in and out of Van Zandt\u2019s life, many taking with them his original, stunning, plangent, song creations that made them\u2014not him\u2014rich and famous. The sine wave of Van Zandt\u2019s death wish against Eggers\u2019s will to survive becomes deeper and more precipitous in the run up to Van Zandt\u2019s be-all, end-all, Geffen recording session, with predictable, cataclysmic results. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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This story is trouble: a gorgeous, lyrical disaster, an unlikely quixotic tragedy that ultimately stonewalls the logical question, \u201cWhy?\u201d But once the reader has lived the bumptious Van Zandt odyssey through Eggers\u2019s eyes, the answer emerges in the troubadour\u2019s ghostlike echo from the hereafter, \u201cWhy not?\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Why not, indeed.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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