The first time I saw Townes van Zandt play at the Metropol in Berlin sometime in the early nineties together with Big Star..s Alex Shelton and a third act that was titled something like ..the World..s oldest Country band... I remember the stage hands carrying their drummer on to the set. That bloke was so old and frail he couldn..t make it himself. Damn, I hope I still play when I get to that age, but I doubt I live that long. Townes came on second after the world's oldest band. I remember him after palying a beautiful solo set venturing out to mingle with the crowd.He stood a long time at the door in his Hawaian shirt, chatting to whoever bothered to talk to him. I could punch myself for not having the guts to walk up to him and say hi. Then again, what could you possibly say that wouldn..t make you look like a complete idiot? ..Hi Townes, I really dig your shit... Yeah right.. What could he possibly answer to that? If only I had already written all those bloody songs I have now, maybe I could have handed him a Cd and asked him if he would have a listen and let me know what he thinks. Then again, someone said .."we live as we die alone".. and that..s just how it it is. You can look up to people and to some extent share their lament and loneliness but at the end of the day you just gotta stick to your guns and do the best you can with your own live, I suppose.
The second time I saw Townes play live in a small Youth Centre in my hometown Bielefeld in Germany. Cool little place, It must have been only a few years later. I don..t remember cause I was always stoned, but Townes was not in a good state. It must have been shortly before he passed away, definitely his last tour in Germany. He obviously went back to his bad ways. A friend of mind was working at the venue at the time and another friend..s brother was organising the show. (Apparently their was a big stink before the gig cause Townes had asked for some Whiskey before the gig and the tour manager refused to get him some, would you believe that?). Anyway, my friends had honestly asked me a couple of weeks prior to the gig whether I wanted to play support for Townes and I said ..yeah.., thinking of course they would ask me , like I was doing them a favour or something. You know, I was young and full of crap, probably still am... I don..t know why it didn..t happen in the end. Probably that is a good thing, cause I had planned on doing some Rolling Stones covers, it might have been a little embarrassing. Like I said, I hadn..t started writing my own songs in earnest, plus I was always high as a kite.. Well anyway, after the show I bought Townes latest album No deeper Blue after the show and went up to him and he signed it for me. Which reminds me that I left that CD with my dad in Malta when I left for Australia 6 years ago. I gotta ask him to send it to me. That..ll be nice on a wall somewhere in my place here in Melbourne. But anyway, Before he did sign it he looked up at me for a few seconds, straight in to my eyes. We both didn..t speak a single word, but his look was really surprised, like he was thinking, how on earth come you wanna buy my album.. He didn..t seem all that confident of a guy and I kind of liked that. At the same time I felt this vast divide between us like we were both from different planets or something. He really seemed to be loneliness personified at that moment and there was no  way I was even gonna try and cross that great divide, because you just couldn..t and that..s that.