Customer Reviews

To Live's to Fly: The Ballad of the Late, Great Townes Van Zandt

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Hang in there with this one. Kruth gets off to a shaky start, with one early chapter consisting entirely of an account of a drunken Guy Clark essentially telling the author to go to hell. But the narrative acquires power and tragic beauty as one of the most talented songwriters of all time slowly destroys himself with alcohol and drugs. The end of Van Zandt's life will look all too familiar to anyone who's ever watched an alcoholic ride the disease to the end of the line - the sheer horror of reaching the point where he can't continue to drink, and can't quit drinking, either. If you haven't already done so, you may want to steep yourself in Van Zandt's music before you read To Live's to Fly. Besides being required for anyone who gives a damn about the art of songwriting, I'm pretty sure this is a prerequisite to sticking out this tale to the bitter end.

Ummm.... I just read this book cover to cover on a plane from Atlanta to San Francisco. I should say, I am a long time Townes fan, I own it all. I had the pleasure of meeting Townes once, a wonderful experience.

I did not get the sense the author was even a fan of Townes music. Also, I don't think he understood the depth and beauty of Townes lyrics. Several major pieces in Townes canon were neglected, such as his masterpiece, the song "High, Low, & In Between", or the latter day piece "Cowboy Junkies Lament", the author talked about the song, but not the lyric itself. Several song lyrics were misquoted, or labeled wrong.

The part about Guy Clark.... it felt like the author was trying to gain credibility by letting the reader know how hard it was to gain Guy Clark's trust (Guy was a life long friend of Townes, and a brilliant songwriter). In fact, if seemed Guy decided to contribute next to nothing, other than that one scene, and I would bet money Guy did not like the way he was presented. In fact, Guy Clark's wife refused to speak to the author, and she spoke to Townes on the phone everyday.

Also, entire passages in the book were lifted from Townes in between song talking, him in his own words, yet they were not credited as such.

The book also dwelt on the liquor and drugs. The songs it spoke of were the obvious ones. I feel an artist like Townes deserves better than this.

The one redeeming factor is that the book filled in a lot of the details from the "Missing Years" 1975 to 1983, when Townes disappeared from sight. This was a real gem, this history that had been lacking for so long.

If you want to know about Townes find a copy of "Last Rights" or the UK Version called "Documentary". A radio interview with Townes telling stories, and him singing his songs in between.

The "Old Quarter" is good, but "Live at Union Chapel" is better, and "Live and Obscure" is breathtaking. The studio records never quite worked, Townes was best live.

This book is not the last word on Townes, not by a long shot.

The excitment I had when I got my hands on a copy of the new TVZ book matched the disappointment I suffered as I read through it. I did read the entire book - in part out of dumb dedication to my favorite songwriters & in part hoping that the book would improve. This book doesn't flow; it is a collage of events & quotes loosely organized by topic. Many of the quotes are identical to those printed in the 1970's issue limited edition songbook with this book failing to give credit to the primary source (perhaps appropriately so, but I have my doubts). The author's interpretations of certain songs are questionable in most cases and dead wrong in one specific case. Perhaps due to the author's clearly northwestern attitude towards Texas music or maybe because of his awkward writing style, several people of great significance in TVZ's life refused to provide interviews for this book. It is extremely telling that Susanna Clark refused as she was his best friend & closest confidant who knew him better than any of us. Though it is hard to recommend this book, it does aggregate a lot of quotes and anecdotes about Townes life in one place and that is helpful. The mediocre quality of writing, lack of primary research, and typical New York attitude do the memory of Townes a great disservice.

I wrote this out of a sense of duty to fans of music and readers of biographies. If you are a fan of Townes VanZandt, or if you like to read good writing, go put on an album, and read something other than this mess. Although I enjoy VanZandt's music I knew little of his life other than he was an alcoholic, so I was delighted to finally see a "biography"; what this is is a collection of anecdotes hung on the names of people who knew VanZandt. As a previous reviewer wrote, chronology is a joke, Guy Clark is given short shrift (the chapter on the author's meeting with Clark is jarringly incongruous to the rest of the text and may give insight into why this is so; they seem to have not hit it off well), and insight and understanding are nowhere in sight. It's got nothing to do with "New York attitude" or "Yankee journalist"; it's about lousy writing. This is a stinker, to be avoided. "Barely coherent as a writer" (says reviewer W.E. Black, who is spot on in his review); exactly so. This is the most poorly written biography I've ever read. One star because the subject is Townes VanZandt. Otherwise unreadable.

Take it or leave it, John Kruth's "To Live's to Fly" is, to this date, the definitive take on the turbulent life of Townes Van Zandt, the greatest songwriter who ever lived.
Kruth is no Chet Flippo, Charles Cross or Nick Tosches, and although he does approach Van Zandt with enthusiasm, a great deal of the book is given to his overly flowery critiques of some of Van Zandt's songs and his depictions of people, especially the curmudgeonly Guy Clark is amusing. Clark's take on Kruth "a little Yankee journalist" seems to be fitting of the author, as he does give a great deal of detail to the meetings he's arranged between he and the interviewees and approaches them with something of a distance (one can sense that his logic has been skewed from living in New York for too long!) This would be a better book if Kruth spent more time actually telling the story of Van Zandt's life and less time on his own travels in search of info on Townes.
Perhaps Kruth should have spent more time around Texas and learned more about Van Zandt's music and this would have come out a lot better; overall, it is a good take on the life of Van Zandt, but I think a better biography has yet to come out.

After waiting years for a biography of the great songwriter Townes Van Zandt, I read this book with eager anticipation, and I was sorely disappointed. Then I read it again, and I got angry. Townes Van Zandt deserves so much better than this. The author, a self-proclaimed (and seemingly proud of it) "yankee journalist," seems much more interested in himself than in his supposed subject. It's telling that some of the most important people in Van Zandt's life apparently refused to be interviewed for this book. A reader might think that Townes' third ex-wife, who is quoted extensively and who the author seems oddly deferential to, was present from nativity to crucifixion here and had a hand in everything. Whereas Guy Clark is touted as an important figure in Van Zandt's life, as he surely was, the author spends his time writing about his own meeting with Clark, with nothing that illuminates Clark's part in Townes' story. While he is barely coherent as a writer (did anyone edit this mess?), he is clearly much worse as a researcher. The book reads like a bad high-school term paper written the night before it was due. The author writes with a juvenile smugness about his own favorite music, which seems to be connected to Van Zandt's music only in his own head. He seems to have absolutely no understanding of or feeling for (or even interest in) Texas music. His "analyses" of Van Zandt's songs are laughably weak. He writes about how "I" did this, or "I" did that, nearly as much as he writes about Townes. There are occasional brief attempts at chronology (what a concept!), but they fall apart within a page or two every time, with the narrative jumping from one decade to another, one subject to another, almost at random. There is a lame, general bibliography included (like in a bad high-school term paper written the night before it was due!), but none of the many quotes in the text are specifically attributed, leaving nothing but massive confusion about who said what when, in what context, and no attempt to distinguish between the many fictional tall tales of Van Zandt's life and the facts. This is not a biography. We turn to a biography for facts, for insight, not for a subjective, jumbled mess that might give us a "feeling" for someone's life. I hope this yankee is a good mandolin player (he thinks he is, of course). A writer he's not. This book is a mess.

While other reviews have correctly pointed out the editing flaws in John Kruth's, To Live's To Fly, I found the book interesting and it inspired me to revisit many of Townes Van Zandt's recordings. I have read many biographies of musicians that were edited well but were superficial and focused more on tabloid issues. Kruth's has a deep appreciation for TVZ but also wrote about his flaws and well known addictions. Imperfect editing and some minor errors notwithstanding this book succeeds much more than it fails. It has significant information on the music, songs, performances, recordings and Townes personality. Kruth excelled at interviewing many people connected to TVZ from relatives, band members, producers, school friends and more.
Reading this book was a very emotional experience due to TVZ self destructive nature juxtaposed with his huge off the chart talents. I just wanted to reach through the pages of the book and stop him from burning out so soon, as silly as that sounds.

It would be very difficult, perhaps impossible for any biographer, to capture, dissect and explain the real Townes Van Zandt. He was down to earth, complicated, frequently reckless, intelligent, funny, sad, friendly, remote, a moving target; an enigma. A spiritual genius his talent and personality soars beyond any attempt at "the definitive biography".
I recommend this book and you will be thinking a lot about Town Van Zandt after you finish.

While I agree with the previous reviewers that the book is flawed, I find more interesting the phenomenon that Townes Van Zandt is still, ten years later, the center of a vortex. The fact that author John Kruth was stymied in his search for the ghost inside Townes' machine is, in fact, the answer we all sought when we bought the book. Townes worked on everyone who knew him like a customized koan, frustrating us in precisely the most infuriating and mindblowing personalized ways. All of us are the donut, and Townes is the energy at the center of it all. The joke's on us for trying to nail down anything about an evanescent creature, like trying to pick up a watermelon seed with wet fingers. I won't go into the stylistic and editing flaws of the book, but I will correct a factual one: in the photo section, a shot of Townes with Mickey White and Harold Eggers in 1982 misidentifies the man with them as "Merrick." It is Marek Gorecki, a concert host in central Pennsylvania. My final answer--I learned some stuff. I'd buy it again.

If author John Kruth had spent as much time actually writing this book as he did researching it, "To Live's To Fly" could have been an excellent story about one of the best folk musicians of his generation. Instead, it comes across as more of a slapdash effort quickly patched together to meet a publisher's deadline or beat a competing biography to press.

Judging by the other reviews here, most people seem to either love this work or hate it, so I know I am probably in the minority opinion when I say that there is much in Kruth's tale to recommend it even though his reach often exceeds his grasp in handling the material coherently.

For starters, the enthusiasts who say that there is a wealth of information about the little-known and less-understood Townes Van Zandt are correct to observe that the author has done his homework pretty well. Kruth has interviewed many of the people who were closest to Townes during his life (even if he could not secure an interview with Susanna Clark, the one individual who might accurately be called his soul-mate). He even goes to great, if tedious, lengths to devote a whole chapter to how much abuse he took from her drunken husband, Guy, just to get his participation in this project. Alas, it was to minimal effect inasmuch as Guy Clark had nothing significant to offer in terms of his memories of the man he describes as his best friend.

Elsewhere, however, Kruth does an admirable job in tracking down many of the most significant figures in Van Zandt's life. He talks to the controversial Kevin Eggers, who managed Townes, Eggers' brother Harold, fellow travelers Eric Andersen, Mickey Newbury, Steve Earle, Cowboy Jack Clement, Michael Timmins (of Cowboy Junkies fame), Griff Luneberg, Alan Lomax III, Jerry Jeff Walker, Van Zandt's son J.T., and his third wife Jeanene, as well as Dan Rather, Norah Jones, and others too numerous to mention here. He also clearly spent a lot of time reading Van Zandt's press clippings accummulated throughout the years, frequently citing obscure interviews that quote Townes at length and let him speak in his own words, which were always well chosen.

Sometimes all of these efforts pay off, such as when the reader learns of just how hard Van Zandt was hit by the murder of a passing girlfriend, Leslie Jo Richards; or the way he avoided arrest by two Texas cops by proving that he was the man behind the classic outlaw ballad "Pancho and Lefty;" the time he played Russian Roulette to chase off an annoying Earle; or even in the heartbreakingly poignant account of Townes's death on New Year's Day 1997 at the age of 52, at home, after a lifetime of hard living and alcohol and drug abuse.

More often, though, the facts blur and overlap and get lost in a garbled stew of events, images, names, places, and things that seem as confusing as they are pointless. Kruth has an ear for putting Van Zandt's career into the context of the time he lived and the direction pop culture (and subculture) was headed in the 1970s and 80s, but he fails to make his own subject come thoroughly alive in the process. He wastes seemingly endless paragraphs with his own amateur analysis of Van Zandt's lyrics and comparing alternative versions of his various songs on different record albums. As I believe other critics have noted, his prose arbitrarily switches back and forth between first-, second- and third-person tenses, and his quotes are badly set up and lack transitional text to distinguish between the voice of one source and that of another.

Perhaps worst of all are the simple, sloppy, factual, grammatical, and typographical errors that jump out all over this book. For instance, on page 78, Kruth quotes Newbury as saying "I knew Townes was makin' big a mistake" to choose one producer over another, instead of "... makin' a big mistake," which is what one must assume Newbury said. Then there is the scrap of lyric on page 171 where he refers to "the poetry and the pickin' down the line" as coming from "Rex's Blues," when even someone possessing only a passing acquaintance with Van Zandt's repertoire would know that is from the title track of the book, "To Live's To Fly." In a later chapter, after referring to Griff Luneberg at least five times on the previous page, he misspells his name as Lunberg on page 271. These are details, to be sure, but they are the sort of mistakes that appear all too frequently throughout the 326 pages of the hardcover edition (counting the bibliography, selected discography, and index). I mean, considering the amount of material Kruth gathered to produce this biography, would it have been too much trouble to take a bit more time and money to hire an editor and craft it into better shape?

As it is, "To Live's To Fly: The Ballad of the Late, Great Townes Van Zandt" compares unfavorably with other recent accounts of talented singer-songwriters, such as Crystal Zevon's "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon," which was also published earlier this year. That work may have been written in a cut-and-paste style that simply organized excerpts from Warren's journals and quotes from multiple interviews with his colleagues, friends, and lovers, but it still holds up far better as a storytelling device, in chronological order no less, and gives the reader a much more vivid sense of what kind of man he was and how he lived.

Townes Van Zandt deserves to be treated at least equally well. This book reminds me of Marc Eliot's "Death of A Rebel," the first biography of the brilliant but doomed Phil Ochs. It's not great, but it will do until the definitive work is published later. Read "To Live's To Fly" at your own risk. It has some good parts in it, but it's also deeply flawed, much like the anti-hero it portrays.

This is a worthwhile read for Townes fans although it won't leave you in the sunshine. The writing is very erratic, almost like each chapter is a magazine article with little connection. Even in chapters the subject changes abruptly with little or no transition.