By Kimberly Chun

kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER

The late, great Townes Van Zandt – as he dubbed himself with typical oracular foresight and bright, black humor was many, if not all, things to the respectful musicians and aficionados who considered themselves the keepers of his cult. He was a privileged son, rambling man, and wayward father. A hard-partyer and storyteller. And a romantically destructive, charismatic, and extremely gifted singer-songwriter – one of the finest, if not the best, of his time and place. Those roles, images, and notions tumble together and spill out like multisided die in Margaret Brown's prismatic documentary, Be Here to Love Me: A Film about Townes Van Zandt.

Shot by longtime Bay Area filmmaker Bill Daniel's cinematographer brother Lee, Brown's first, "vinyl, not CD" film definitely justifies the love country and folk fans feel for the Ft. Worth, Texas-born singer-songwriter, who was born into establishment affluence (his great-grandfather drafted the state constitution) and a deal of pain (as revealed in the doc, a youthful Van Zandt underwent shock treatment, which erased his childhood memories). Be Here to Love Me includes 25 songs, invaluable and unseen footage from family archives, Texas TV performances, and outtakes from James Szalapski's documentary of '70s resurgent country, Heartworn Highways, gracefully blending the old with new, evocative shots of dashboards and dreamcatchers.

Be Here to Love Me is, of course, a film about music, but it revolves just as much around heart-torn, headcase family dynamics – the wary love, the quiet betrayals, and the hard choice between taking a creative path or being there to love those so-called loved ones. Be Here to Love Me is more than simply a 1969 Van Zandt song title or a plea from a needy performer – it could just as easily be the fundamental wish of Van Zandt's eldest son, J.T., who appears in the film, or Brown herself, the daughter of songwriter Milton Brown, who wrote "Every Which Way but Loose" and songs for Smokey Robinson and Loretta Lynn.

Brown decided to make the film after hearing Van Zandt's self-titled third album and early heartbreaker of a song, "Waiting Around to Die." "I'd heard the stories about him, and it dawned on me – this is such a dramatic story, the archetype of the young artist, when I was wondering, do I have to do it myself? This was a way of doing that, without falling out of a fourth-story window," she said on the phone from Austin, Texas, referring to an early Van Zandt escapade.

One of the most moving moments in Be Here comes when J.T. recalls an encounter with his father that went horribly awry.

"I went to spend some time with him in Nashville, when I was roughly a fourth grader or so; he scared me to death, his lifestyle and his mood swings, and, like, the demon in his eyes," said the 36-year-old J.T., a cabinet maker and occasional singer-songwriter, calling from Austin. He's a methodical, unexpectedly eloquent storyteller, with not a little of his father's laid-back humor and startling honesty. "I really didn't get it. All I had to reference were his songs. Up to that point I played his record constantly if he wasn't around, and just stared at the pictures on the album sleeves. I really had developed him in my mind as a certain type of guy. I didn't expect to play catch, but it was going to be fun just watching him string his instrument.

"And at some point I became the object of a lot of ... fury."

J.T. eventually became something of a caretaker to the songwriter – who died on New Year's Day 1997, ending a life of songwriting and substance abuse with "big shots of vodka at 4 a.m. to keep him from shaking," explains his son, who, at 12, drove his father to shows. "It would definitely be the case if he didn't have a drink in a couple days that he would die from detox. He was about as dependent on alcohol physically as you can get."

The good times were just too good, the film hints, scoring wonderful interviews with the salty dog of Van Zandt's crony songwriter Guy Clark, who literally salts and licks his knuckle before chasing it with his morning shot. The songs, however, are still standing and continue to be covered live by artists like Willie Nelson, who bagged a number-one country hit with Van Zandt's "Pancho and Lefty."

Despite the chaos, J.T. cherishes "neat memories of dim-lit rooms, real dusty, cigarette smoke, and just a lot of really intimate and fragile and kind of vulnerable yet hairy, husky, and stinky men. Really the closest way you can describe it is it was the kinda crowd that you knew when you were younger never had gone anywhere or done anything. These guys were twice as wild and reckless in abandonment as those people, except they really had something going."

Brown got a few of those hairy, stinky men on camera, in addition to Nelson and Harris, though in the final edit she had to mercilessly snip testimonials by younger artists like Devendra Banhart and ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, who worshipped the music but never knew the songwriter. The G word, genius, also had to go.

"His music should convince you," she said. "Every time anyone said, 'He's a genius,' we would just cut it."

She does regret not capturing the late Bay Area songwriter Mickey Newbury on camera about his role in introducing Van Zandt to Kevin Eggers, who signed the artist to his Poppy label, and shying away from asking for interviews with stars like Bob Dylan, though she did get a now-music-doc-obligatory interview with a Sonic Youth member: Steve Shelley, who recorded Van Zandt before he passed.

And strangely the artist and child came into play once again when she contemplated approaching SY while swimming in the pool at Austin's rock 'n' roll hotel, the San Jose.

"This 12-year-old kid started doing cannonballs with the pool, and I thought, that woman and her mom are really familiar," she recalled. "I thought, god, why doesn't her mother take her away? It was Kim Gordon and her daughter, Coco. And I thought, I really need to ask her to do an interview – why am I in a bikini?"

SFBG

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