Let The Song Write Itself
Pancho, Lefty, and Townes Van Zandt
Hello and welcome to the first of what I hope will be a series of posts about great songs and how they came to be.
Since this is the first post, I hope you’ll forgive me for starting with an anecdote.
In 2004, a Townes Van Zandt documentary called “Be Here To Love Me” premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. It was an excellent documentary. The producers got unrestricted access, the storytelling was thorough and thoughtful and the tone was both reverent and revelatory. “Be Here To Love Me” was directed by Margaret Brown. If you don’t know who she is now, watch the Oscars over the next few years, because it’s only a matter of time.
Anyway.
Shortly after getting distribution, “Be Here To Love Me” had its Los Angeles premiere (if memory serves me) at the NuArt. There was an afterparty for the crew and team, which was produced by a friend of mine. My friend asked if I’d like to play a few numbers at the event, and, well, yeah, of course I would.
So, with all of youth’s confidence, I decided to do a few originals, and then close with “Pancho and Lefty”. Now, when I was growing up, far from Texas, Pancho and Lefty was still an outlaw country song. It hadn’t fully transcended the way it has now into a pop-culture phenomenon. But to me, it was already in the great American songbook. I could play that number in my sleep.
Still, when we took that stage, there was only one thought going through my head:
“Don’t mess it up.”
And that shouldn’t be a tall order. On paper, Pancho and Lefty is a simple song. It’s a four chord, four four, country ballad in plain D. It’s familiar and comfortable…but the progression is a little unique. Like I said, I can play it in my sleep, but once in a while, I’ll still miss a turn, because the changes don’t happen exactly when you would expect them in each part. There is some magic in the composition. I guess in songwriter terms, it shuffles around the 1,4,5,6 progressions that you would expect in a country ballad to underpin the tone of the various story beats. More simply, in real terms, it’s a god damn masterpiece.
The song also has an interesting structure. It’s double verse, chorus, verse, chorus, verse, extended chorus. And that structure, in service to the lyrical story, is the only way it could possibly work. The story builds like a great novel. And as color is added with each verse, that color bleeds into each chorus, giving each chorus a slightly different meaning and tone.
We’ll come back to the lyrics.
So we played “Pancho and Lefty” that night. And we didn’t mess it up. It went over fantastically well. And I realized something that’s stuck with me ever since:
Sometimes, a song is so well written, so perfect, you can’t possibly mess it up. No matter what you do. Sometimes, there is a piece of art that is so beloved, it will be embraced no matter what shape it shows up in.
Sort of like Townes Van Zandt.
Townes lived hard. He lived harder than he had to, and probably shorter than he had to. But I suppose if he had done it any differently, or been different chemically, we never would have heard any of his songs. That’s a topic for another post, but what’s important here is that when he wrote “Pancho and Lefty”, Townes was living hard. He was living on the road, my friend.
Sometime before the release of “The Late Great Townes Van Zandt” in 1972, Townes was holed up in what he described a “crummy hotel” (no Coke machine, no TV, no phone, empty swimming pool) about 50 miles north of Dallas. Probably somewhere near Denton. He was staying there for three days, commuting to a standing gig in Dallas, and otherwise killing time. As Townes would tell it, he was only stuck so far out of town because Billy Graham and Guru Maharaj Ji happened to be holding massive competing conferences in Dallas that week and there was, as they say, no room at the inn.
On the second day of his stay, Townes sat down in his dingy little room with his guitar and “Pancho and Lefty” floated in through the window. As great songs do.
In his oft quoted Austin Pickers interview from 1984, Townes said the following about writing “Pancho and Lefty”:
“I realize that I wrote it, but it’s hard to take credit for the writing, because it came from out of the blue. It came through me and it’s a real nice song.”
It came from out of the blue. I like that.
There is an old saying that all of my favorite writers, and all the best writers I know tend to adhere to:
“Don’t write the song, let the song write itself.”
Now on the surface, that quote might sound sort of shallow, but it is far from it. There is a prevalent theory in music and in art as a whole, and in most world religions….if you’re into that sort of thing…that states that humans are not creators, so much as vessels for creative works. Essentially, what this means is that every sound, every great song, every image, every string of words, and all great art already exists before we express it. Every beautiful thing that has been made has been floating in the ether forever, and humans, if we keep our antenna up and pay attention, are receivers that can attune to that ethereal magic and express it in the physical world. That is why we say things like: “that song came to me”.
Of course, everyone has their own process, but I agree with Townes.
And on to those lyrics. Townes Van Zandt was a self described poet. He was a storyteller. He had a way of both turning a phrase and spinning a yarn that was singular. A Townes lyric is instantly identifiable, but never quantifiable. Familiar but strange. Like going home after several decades or reconnecting with an old lover. You get it, but you don’t get it. And in the case of “Pancho and Lefty” even Townes didn’t get it. In that same Austin Pickers interview, he said:
“I think, I’ve finally found out what it’s about. I’ve always wondered what it’s about. I kinda always knew it wasn’t about Pancho Villa, and then somebody told me that Pancho Villa had a buddy whose name in Spanish meant ‘Lefty.’ That’s strange, huh?”
Later in the same interview, he told the anecdote that so many of us have heard.
“We got stopped by these two policeman. They said, ‘What do you do for a living?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m a songwriter,’ and they both kind of looked around like ‘pitiful, pitiful.’ And so on to that I added, ‘I wrote that song Pancho and Lefty. You ever heard that song Pancho and Lefty? I wrote that.’ And they looked back around, and they looked at each other and started grinning, and it turns out that their squad car, you know their partnership, it was two guys, it was an Anglo and a Hispanic guy, and it turns out, they’re called Pancho and Lefty… so I think maybe that’s what it’s about, those two guys. I hope I never see them again.”
I think maybe that’s what makes the lyrics in this song so great. The story is detailed and evocative, capturing universal emotions. It deals with immaturity, aging, friendship, betrayal, wealth, poverty, and all manners of danger. But at the same time, it is vague. There are blanks for the listener to fill in. And because of those blanks, we can make it about ourselves. And everybody did.
When “The Late Great Townes Van Zandt” was released, it went, as most of his records did until the mid-eighties, mostly unnoticed. It didn’t chart anywhere. It wasn’t getting heavy mainstream rotation. “Pancho and Lefty” wasn’t even a single.
But Emmylou Harris heard it. She recorded a beautiful version of the song for her album, “Luxury Liner” in 1977 and says of the tune: “I feel it’s my song”.
Pancho and Lefty was Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard’s song too. They had a number one hit with the track in 1983. You know that one.
There’s a great story there too.
As Willie tells it, on the night before their 1983 album was due, Willie felt that they didn’t have a hit single. As the story goes, Willie’s daughter played him Emmylou Harris’ version of the song and suggested a cover. Willie said something to the effect of: “I’m Pancho and Merle is Lefty”, and he recorded the song on the spot. He then woke up Merle Haggard, who had retired for the night after nearly a week without sleep, to record his vocals. Merle did his part in one take. The old one-take wonder. And they shipped the tape that night.
For his part, Haggard says doesn’t recall the recording the song at all, having been half asleep at the time. Remember how I said I could play that number in my sleep? So could Merle Haggard apparently.
In the aforementioned “Be Here to Love Me” documentary, Willie Nelson said he eventually asked Townes what the song was about and he replied simply: “I don’t know.” But I suppose it didn’t matter, because Willie instantly, deeply identified with the lyrics.
In the same documentary, Kris Kristofferson said that the first time he heard the first stanza of the song his only thought was: “That’s me.”
Maybe each of us is a Pancho, or a Lefty, or some composite of the two, at least at some point in our lives.
And that’s the thing. We think of great songs as “ours”. We relate to them. We cherish them, we gatekeep them, we karaoke them. But they’re not ours. If Pancho and Lefty belongs to anyone, it belongs to Townes Van Zandt. But I think Townes would say it belongs to the wind.
He’d say it more eloquently, but you get the idea.
