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99 MINUTES | BRATTLE: DECEMBER 9-14 The life of the late Texas troubadour Townes Van Zandt — author of the Willie Nelson hit "Pancho & Lefty" and, along with Guy Clark, Joe Ely, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, part of the Lone Star State’s golden circle of tunesmiths — was sad and complicated. That shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone familiar with his songs. As filmmaker Margaret Brown’s biography — carefully woven from interviews, archival performances, and visuals of the open road — attests, Van Zandt wrote so capably about lost souls because he was one himself. A mischievous youth with a taste for LSD, he was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy in his teens and suffered a permanent loss of childhood memories. Nonetheless, when he emerged in the ’60s and Ely and Gilmore first heard his music, "it made us rethink what a song is about," Ely explains in the first of the film’s many testimonials from friends, family, and admirers who include Emmylou Harris and Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley. Watching Van Zandt perform his songs is astonishing. His slow, perfectly timed and intonated strumming is natural as breathing, and his voice rings with clarity and warmth. But beneath the mastery there was a storm of emotional conflict that consumed him and, as the film’s final passages show, eventually eroded his music. His heart stopped in 1987, when he was just 52, after his wife removed him from a Memphis hospital where he was suffering from the DTs following hip surgery. Brown’s tribute shows not only the rich legacy he left behind in his art but the pain and loss he bequeathed those who loved him.
BY TED DROZDOWSKI
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