Though Townes Van Zandt has been lauded as one of America’s greatest songwriters, to many people, even those who knew him well, he remains something of an enigma. Having made his debut in the late ‘60s, he hit the height of his success in the mid to late ‘70s, penning songs that would win him the admiration and affection of numerous like-minded alt-country contemporaries. Yet, while Van Zandt continued to release albums practically until the time of his death on New Years Day, 1997, his last years found him in a black hole of addiction and despair, hastening the tragic halt to a remarkable career. Be Here To Love Me, an expansive new documentary by filmmaker Margaret Brown, traces his sad but brilliant trajectory, integrating rarely seen concert clips, television performances and intimate home movies with touching interviews by friends and family. Some of the disclosures are startling – a clearly drunken Guy Clark states his suspicion that Van Zandt had designs on his wife Susanna (an assertion she vehemently denies), while Steve Earle recounts the time Van Zandt pointed a gun at his head and pulled the trigger three times while he looked on in outrage and horror. In truth, Van Zandt seemed to tempt his own mortality. He dubbed one of his early albums The Late Great Townes Van Zandt and recalls how he once sniffed so much airplane glue, he actually cemented his mouth shut and then had to knock his own teeth out to get it open. Ravaged from drugs and drink, there are points where he literally looks like a corpse waiting for his own demise; the description given one of the namesakes of his biggest hit, “Pancho and Lefty,� could also have been tagged on him as well (“… he wore his skin like iron,� his breath “as hard as kerosene�). Most telling perhaps was the response given an interviewer who asks why all his songs seem so sad. “They’re not all sad,� Townes replies ironically. “Many are hopeless.� Like Townes himself turned out to be.
