The Story Behind The Song: How Townes Van Zandt created ‘Waiting Around To Die’
The kitchen is a mess. It doesn’t help that it’s housed in a cramped, creaking trailer in the middle of Austin, Texas. It feels rustic. Like if you’d stepped outside, you’d see miles of sweeping American heartland and not, you know, a bunch of other trailers hemmed in by one of the most populous cities in the US. Three people sit in the middle of it, captured by a movie camera. Two men and a woman. One of the men, a haunted-looking, implausibly handsome 31-year-old by the name of Townes Van Zandt, takes a drag of his cigarette and begins to play the guitar in his hand.
So begins one of the most stark, bleakly beautiful performances in country music history. Van Zandt tells a haunting yet depressingly common story. A tearaway child of a broken home filled with violence and doomed love finds in himself the desire not to be like his father. He sets out to do something with his life and finds himself the victim of predatory romance and dishonest, scheming friends.
After two years in the pen for a robbery committed out of desperation, he finds himself fully disillusioned with people and broken by one of the harshest hands God can deal a man. The only thing he knows he can trust is the blackout bliss of codeine. Hand in hand with his addiction of choice, he falls into the one kind of life that he swore never to live. One where he’s content simply to exist until he doesn’t, and spends his days ‘Waiting Around To Die’.
Country music has been causing people to well up for as long as there’s been country music to listen to. Oftentimes, it comes from music that’s overwrought sentimentality at best and outright manipulation at worst. At its peak, it’s catharsis. The kind of tears that are sad, but needed. The kind you smile through once the sobbing stops. The tears that Van Zandt’s companion is sobbing by the halfway point of ‘Waiting Around To Die’ are absolutely not those kind of tears.
What makes this song so powerful?
Van Zandt’s companion is Uncle Seymour Washington. He’s a local legend in the Austin country scene whose kitchen the whole performance takes place in, filmed for James Szalapski’s legendary documentary Heartworn Highways. Nothing about the segment is scripted or edited. In fact, the whole film looks less like a documentary released in cinemas and more like candid, Super 8 footage of a friend’s house party.
No, the tears that Washington is crying are those of a man seeing a snapshot of a life uncomfortably close to his. Washington becomes all of us in that moment. He hears the tale and, for whatever reason, he is left undone by it. Whether he lived it himself and survived, watched others live it and not, or recognised that he still has time left to live it himself.
However, he is only living out the feelings that everyone else is going through. Seemingly, everyone but Van Zandt. This is strange because, with the rawness of the lyrics and the matter-of-fact delivery, coupled with the authenticity that country music is known for, it sure feels like he’s telling his life story. The truth is a lot more complicated than that.
On the one hand, the story is a fiction. Van Zandt himself wasn’t born of a broken home, far from it, in fact. He was born John Townes Van Zandt into a family that wasn’t just wealthy, well-respected, and with connections to the very founding of Texas state itself. Actually, he was born into two wealthy, well-respected families with connections to the very founding of Texas state itself, the ‘Townes’ part of his name actually coming from his mother’s maiden name.
What made Van Zandt want to make music?
The part of the song that was autobiographical, though, was the tearaway part. Van Zandt was smart. Really, really, prodigy-level smart. Thus, his family of lawyers saw fit to aim him towards the family business, with the idea of possibly going into politics due to his looks and charisma being just as sharp as his intellect. Then two things happened. His father gave him a guitar for Christmas in 1956, and shortly after that, the young and impressionable Townes saw Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show.
From then on, all bets were off. The only thing that Townes Van Zandt wanted to be was a travelling musician. His family was not so unhappy about this as they were in denial about it. Van Zandt attended college at the behest of his parents. It became clear pretty soon afterwards, though, that his behaviour there was becoming a problem.
Like most creative types when they get their first flush of freedom away at uni, he spent his time in higher education writing poetry, listening to records and fighting serious bouts with depression. He would fight against his demons by picking up a binge drinking problem that would follow him for the rest of his life. He lasted all of a year before his parents shipped him back home and began a process that would change his life forever.
Van Zandt was diagnosed with a severe case of manic depression. On the upside, coming from a family as wealthy as his meant that he had access to the best psychiatric care of the day. On the downside, the day was the mid-1960s, and the best psychiatric care of the day was insulin shock therapy. Basically, Van Zandt was strapped down and pumped with enough insulin to induce a medical coma multiple times a day over the course of many months. By the time Van Zandt left the course, he had almost entirely lost his long-term memory.
Needless to say, Van Zandt’s attempts to get back on his feet were fruitless. He was accepted back into college but couldn’t make it and dropped out. He tried to join the army but was rejected due to his manic depression. In 1966, Van Zandt’s father, Harris, passed away at the tender age of 52. This was the last straw for Van Zandt, who cut himself off from his family and hit the road to pursue his passion for playing music.
Now, you might be thinking, “That’s a lot of detail to go into without even getting into what inspired the song!” Well, the truth is that it’s precisely the right amount of detail. By the time Van Zandt left home, he had begun playing live at local bars and coffee shops and put together a repertoire based around covers and novelty songs, all but made up on the spot.
Shortly before his death, his father recommended that he start writing some proper songs of his own. When Van Zandt left home, he began writing serious songs. The very first one that he came up with was ‘Waiting Around To Die’. You read that right. ‘Waiting Around To Die’ was the first serious song that Townes Van Zandt ever wrote.
How did Townes Van Zandt turn this pain into music?
That, to me, is what makes that song so eternally powerful. Powerful enough for a grown man like Washington to not tear up in an “aw, isn’t that nice” but to collapse into inconsolable sobs at how terrifyingly bleak the song is. One that might not have been lived beat for beat, but one whose emotional truth Van Zandt had lived dozens of times over, especially by the time that performance was recorded nearly a decade after the song was written.
It’s the high line that all songwriters walk when they go through that much pain. Townes Van Zandt transformed his pain into music that will live forever, but he also lost himself in it. Living a life of addiction, loss and heartbreak that ended in 1997 with a heart attack at 52. The very same age his father had been at his passing.
One wonders how much of the song he saw himself in. The way he talked about his music career could be truly haunting. If you asked him, the music was just his way of getting to do what he really wanted to do: sit around and get drunk. One can only hope that he truly knew just how much his music had affected people. That, for as long as he was active and well beyond that, people talked him up as arguably the greatest country songwriter ever.
However, addiction does horrible things to one’s mind. As the protagonist of ‘Waiting Around To Die’ loses all hope and surrenders to his darkest habits, he feels he can do nothing more. Perhaps that was the part that Van Zandt related to most. A solemn, haunting reminder that those who look to be beyond caring or saving are often those who need help most. No matter their state, one can always get help, no matter how helpless they feel.
