Features Disc of the day
Townes Van Zandt
The Late Great…
(Poppy Records, 1973)
Chronicle of a death foretold.
It was on my way home last night that I got pulled back into this album again. The iPod shuffle had just performed one of its eerie little segues, from the nightmare infanticide hoedown of The Violent Femmes' Country Death Song into Dan Deacon's weird multitracked ladyfolk screech, Wet Wings, and I was feeling a little unnerved, a silver shank of moon blinking at me through the Walthamstow high-rises, when I heard a familiar voice reel off those mythic, cryptic opening lines: "Of those that sailed / The silver ships / From Andilar / I am the last..."
Ever since I was a young kid, I've always loved story lyrics, songs like Gordon Lightfoot's The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald and those epic folk arrangements of Child ballads that sit you down and beguile you with their rambling labyrinthine tales of death, desertion and deceit, but Townes Van Zandt's Silver Ships Of Andilar is something else. It appears to concern the journey made by a group of sailors from the lush, green land of Andilar to a frozen landscape called Valinor, where "ice we drank and leather we chew" before "one by one did we die alone / Some by hunger some by steel." Oddly it ends with the dying narrator urging other young men to follow in his steps ("Arise young men / fine ships to build / and set them north to Valinor / neath standards proud as fire"). Some have wondered whether Van Zandt's Valinor is the same as the tropical land described in Tolkein's Middle Earth tales, but Van Zandt refers to it as a "lifeless plain", and I'm more inclined to think that this freezing, unsanctified landscape is no different from the destination of all of Van Zandt's heroes.
Although it would be another 25 years before Van Zandt's drinking and drugging finally laid him low, by 1973 the storm clouds had already started to gather and there was no returning to shore. Whether it was the "lover of women who can't hardly stand" from Rake, the codeine-supping outlaw of Waitin' Around To Die or the voice in Nothin' who holds that sorrow and solitude are "the precious things", after a certain point Townes had charted a certain course for the "unwholesome oceans" of Valinor; and the scary thing is that even when you hear his conscription call today there is a part of you that wants to follow.
Andrew Male
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 26/01/2010
Further Listening
Townes van Zandt – Delta Momma Blues (Tomato, 1971)
Guy Clark – Old No. 1 (RCA, 1975)
Hank Williams– Luke The Drifter (MGM, 1966)
Previous Disc of the day
-
-
Various Artists - Axe Attack Vol II
Metal Britannica inspires MOJO metal amnesty. Studded leather wristbands aloft!
2:32 PM GMT 12/03/2010
-
The Pop Group - Y
For connoisseurs of pop-as-rupture-in-the-space/time-continuum
6:00 AM GMT 11/03/2010
-
St Vitus Dance - Glypotheque
Belfast combo return unannounced, go sardonic pop-folk.
6:00 AM GMT 09/03/2010
-
-
end of body content back to top
Footer
Join us on:
© Copyright Bauer - all
rights reserved.
Reproduction of this
website, in whole or in
part, in any form or
medium without express
written permission from
Bauer is prohibited. All
use is subject to our
Terms of Use
|
|
Comments
Comment on this post
Comment on this post