When Townes Van Zandt dug up Blaze Foley’s coffin
If dearly departed rock stars reside in that castle in the sky, then we can only lovingly hope that the tragic masses of folk’s forgotten wayfarers traverse up to a dive bar in the stars, where the whisky is always sour, the pearly gates are guarded by a burly bouncer whom they know by name, and the guitars are always slightly out of tune. Music and tragedy are never far apart; even David Bowie nearly never made it, but folk and tragedy, in particular, is a harmonious match made in matrimony hell.
A lyrical genius held in the absolute highest regard by all 22 of us who’ve heard of him. Blaze Foley stumbled along to the crossroads where country and folk meet, and rather than sell his soul for success when he got there, he staggered onwards to the liquor store. Though the ‘Drunken Angel’ of the Texas outlaw music scene failed to garner much success, it’s hard to see whether the legend he cut out for himself isn’t a more fitting legacy. He never did seem to care much for success anyway.
Dubbed ‘The Duct Tape Messiah’ for the patchwork strappings that held his boots together – boots which should, by rights, have been fitted with a mileometer – this urban cowboy’s legend is as mystical and convoluted as the serpentine path he wove through America.
His whole life seemed as perfectly disorderly yet characterfully crafted as his own music – whether that be the fact that when he wasn’t sofa surfing, his most permanent and stable residence was a treehouse or that he was shot and murdered when defending a friend over his son stealing his welfare cheques – the man’s life seemed predestined by some Texan prognostication.
Nobody saw the rambling path that lay ahead of Foley quite like the songsmith himself, capturing the truthful essence of it in the beautiful lyrics to ‘Clay Pigeons’: “I’m tired of runnin’ round looking for answers I already know / I could build me a castle of memories just to have somewhere to go / Count the nights and the days that it takes to get back in the saddle again / Feed the pigeons some clay, turn the nights into day / And start talkin’ again when I know what to say.”
He was even buried in a duct tape-covered coffin, and therein lies another mystic note in his legend. Throughout his life, he had always made it clear that should he perish before his friend Townes Van Zandt, then he wanted his guitar to go to him. When he did die before him, his last words were apparently “please don’t let me die” – and there is a hint that those words may have pertained to keeping the legacy of his music alive more so than in a bodily sense.
Thus, Van Zandt was determined to adhere to his friend’s wishes. So, when Foley’s possessions wound up in a pawn shop after he passed, Van Zandt told the clerk that the guitar had been left for him and he was there to collect it. However, the clerk insisted that without a pawn stub, that transaction was impossible. So, along with the rest of Foley’s friends, they searched every possession (which wasn’t much) that the late musician had left behind. The pawn slip was nowhere to be found.
So, they concluded that it must’ve been in the suit pocket that he was buried in. Luckily, Van Zandt came from a farming family, so he simply borrowed a backhoe and drove it to the grave site. They then dug up the country cadaver, went through his pockets and lo and behold they found the pawn ticket. As the tale goes in the Duct Tape Messiah documentary, Van Zandt went straight to the pawn shop with the freshly dug-up stub and collected Foley’s guitar that he kept in his possession until he, too, passed away.
