TCB

No Lonesome Tune

In his eventful, rambling, star-crossed life, Townes Van Zandt made some interesting fans. Guy Clark, Steve Earle, and Willie Nelson you know, but the Cowboy Junkies covered two songs on 1992's Black Eyed Man album, Mudhoney cut "Buckskin Stallion" with Jimmie Dale Gilmore for Sub Pop in 1994, and now ... And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead swear by Heartworn Highways. (First the Band, now Townes ... it's like Wilco in reverse.) "When we were on tour this year, we watched it for a couple of days nonstop," Trail keyboardist David Longoria says of James Szalapski's 1975 tour film starring Van Zandt, reissued on DVD in 2003. "It would be on all the time." The connections don't stop there: Margaret Brown, whose Townes doc Be Here to Love Me screens at the Alamo Downtown tonight (see "Screens"), personally asked Trail to play the afterparty at Antone's alongside Bill Callahan, Knife in the Water, Will Sexton, Kimmie Rhodes & Joe Gracey, and Townes' son J.T. Van Zandt. Gilmore, the tribute's emcee, has his own store of Townes memories, starting with the mid-Sixties day Lubbock acquaintance Joe Ely picked up Van Zandt hitchhiking. Van Zandt had only the clothes on his back and a knapsack full of copies of his first album, one of which he gave Ely, who in turn invited future Flatlanders mate Gilmore over for a listen. "That was when we started really hanging out together," Gilmore says. Despite their longtime friendship, Gilmore and Van Zandt only appeared onstage together once. They were on tour in Belfast, Ireland, when Gilmore broke into Townes' "White Freight Liner Blues," from 1988's Fair and Square. "He didn't sing a word of it, he just started howling," Gilmore says. "It was just such a typically weird Townes thing."